Brief History of how the North American Challenger Scene Grew
The Challenger scene of North America has been growing ever since the start of season 3. The first few challenger events like the Do It ourselves cup and long standing tournaments like National ESL - Pro Series exposed a few but did not really break viewers interest. Although great community inspiration only under 1,000 people watched the scene during that time until a new tournament came around. Mobafire a long standing community resource site of League of Legends partnered with some great content creators to create the Mobafire Challenger Series. Led by the direction of @solosideLoL it created a weekly league having constant content of Challenger NA teams fighting for a grand prize. Although it was a non-riot sponsored tournament, the series promoted competition for more teams, brought in viewers, and gave more exposure to the challenger scene. The players of well known teams also helped raise awareness not only to viewers in NA but also gave other nations an outlet to watch competitive games while there were no competitions going on. At this time the challenger scene in EU had a longer foothold and has stayed consistent in its content when it was up, but the NA scene had many story lines of teams to keep the viewer interested while keeping them tuned in each day. While most tournaments before this were only once in a month occurrence, Mobafire saw the outlet to keep viewers interested. The weekly best of one season format, similar to the way NA/EU League of Legends Championship Series, was a familiar way to entice viewers to keep teams fresh but also keep the content new. Also at this time there was additional challenger content GGLA Arena weekend cups plus NESL Pro Series, which had moved the Challenger tournaments into a bigger lime light.
It was announced before season 3 world championship that the challenger scene would be getting a Coke-Zero/Riot sponsored league coming up for season 4. This created a rift with many organizers to question whether they could continue on as it seemed that this league would be helping and unfortunately disbanding some of the work done by others. Due to the lack of enticement for challenger teams to stay with them, especially with sponsors like Coke-Zero. This news caused plus sponsorship situations unfortunately caused the Mobafire Challenger Series to disband, but this did not break others from trying. The once GGLA Arena led by @Morbuzaan now had added a few sponsors and help found the North American Challenger League (aka NACL / Salt League) and new tournament ALCS (Amateur League Championship Sereies) led by @10ktournaments to some what fill the rest of the days schedule for the week.
Overall these all the events have kept the NA Challenger scene a float plus ESL still producing the Pro Series content have kept it super busy with all the challenger scene action. The addition to let LCS relegation teams play in these tournaments have helped the NA Challenger tournament scene grow even more so in viewership of popular well known teams. The scene is growing but how much of it will be community driven content? Its a question we may have to answer but maybe another time.
Enough of the history talk, the real question at hand though is the moment every Challenger team wants to partake in. NA challenger teams have been fighting to get to the spot of a LCS team, and have been playing in the @Wellplayed Season 4 Spring Qualifiers, now only 6 teams remain to try and challenge the last 3 spots.
vVv, The Walking Zed, Quantic, Cognitive, CompLexity and To Be Determined.
All the teams are relatively great in there own way, but what really makes them who they are, and what are there chances in the end where they will have to face the likes of Curse Gaming, Team Coast, "Velocity Esports" (Rumors still being that it's the hybrid of Evil Geniuses plus Innox/Pobelter). These are the questions i'll be trying to muse about this week as we lead into group stage games where on December 6, 7, 8 they will be fighting for there lives to get top 3 and then get a chance to be drafted to face a LCS Relegated team. Follow along, comment on who you think will make it through and keep up with previews coming all this week for each challenger team!
It's the most wonderful time of the season for League of Legends, and season 4 has not even started yet!
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