Chris “Riot Commish” Greeley here—I’m the Commissioner of the LCS. With the LCS and LEC Spring Split on the horizon, we wanted to take the opportunity to talk about Fantasy LCS/LEC and its short and long-term future.

For the last two years, we’ve kept Fantasy running but we haven’t had the opportunity to commit meaningful resources to improve the experience for you. Fantasy hasn’t been prioritized and there was never really a plan for its future or development other than to create one and get it out to fans. We’ve been basically keeping the lights on, and the team maintaining the site has had to use lots of duct tape and band-aids to keep things rolling along. You deserve better.

I know that people will ask why we have neglected Fantasy for so long. I don’t have a good answer for you. It was built on an old platform that isn’t very flexible (as anyone who waited seven weeks for the FOX/CG game to process in Summer Split will tell you), and we just never prioritized it.

Until now.

Fantasy is taking its next step. But in order to do this, we need to shut the existing Fantasy experience down for Spring Split. We understand that means that we’re leaving Fantasy fans without a home, and we’re sorry for that. The Fantasy experience we’re providing right now is not at all where we want it to be, and rather than divert additional resources to just keeping it stable, we want to focus those resources on building out the future of Fantasy. Even in its current form, Fantasy requires a team to launch the site for the season and a group to maintain the site week over week. We want these people working hard on the future, and they can’t do that if they’re spending all of their available time for Fantasy keeping the old site working. People may also ask why we don’t just hire more people (small indie game studio meme incoming) so that we can run Fantasy and create a new experience. Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street gave the best answer on that, so I’ll just link to that.

After months of looking at what Fantasy can become, and countless conversations both internally and with potential third-party partners, we are committed to delivering a new Fantasy experience that LCS and LEC fans find engaging and fun. Keep an eye on lolesports.com around mid-Spring Split, when we expect to have more news to share about the future of Fantasy.

Chris “Riot Commish” Greeley is the Commissioner of the LCS and has run League Operations for MSI, Worlds and All-Stars. He is a recovering lawyer from New York City who can’t write a rulebook in less than 50 pages. He channeled years of raiding on his Resto Druid into life in the bottom lane dropping wards and shooting glitterlances. You can find him on Twitter and Reddit as @IAmGrza.