League of Legends: LEC Returns March 20th, Will be Online Only
| Tags: League of Legends
| Author David Hollingsworth
The LEC will return on March 20th with all games played remotely.
Last week the LEC was canceled — just minutes before the show was due to air after a member of the crew was suspected of coming into contact with the virus. A week later, however, the LEC will return. This time 100% remotely.
In the past week, the LEC has had no staff members test positive for the COVID-19 virus; however, all staff will be working from home as a precaution. After speaking with teams, the LEC has decided to move the league online only for the remaining five weeks of the Spring Split. With teams playing from their respective training centers and LEC staff operating the show remotely.
LEC announce remote games
“One of the main challenges of online play is how to preserve competitive integrity.” The LEC said in a statement. “To help with this, all teams will be competing from their facilities in Berlin, with the exception of Origen who will play from their training center in Copenhagen. Latency to our LEC tournament servers will be reasonably low and roughly equal between teams, offering a level playing field for the League.”
As for referees and game integrity, the LEC continued; “In accordance with local and governmental guidelines and to further help mitigate any health risks we have decided not to send a referee to each team facility.” Instead the LEC say they'll be “…implementing a variety of measures…” designed to protect the integrity of the competition “…to the extent possible…” while the event is being played remotely.
According to the statement this includes; additional cameras monitoring the rooms where players are competing, fully monitoring voice communications and screen recording. Plus remote control ability, “on top of other measures currently being considered.”
Another issue comes from game pauses. The LEC is exploring options of resuming games at a later time in the event a game cannot continue due to external causes such as ISP issues etc.
The LEC will kick off at the usual Friday time of 18:00 CET.
David has written for games media outlets for the last ten years. With his first major esports role being with Esports News UK covering mostly UK League of Legends. David is also a member of the British Esports Association and is an advisor to them on World of Warcraft Esports. More recently David has worked for Esports Insider and Red Bull as an esports journalist.
David later became Editor at ESTNN and now leads the current team.