Just... just a hell of a thing.

http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/13035450/league-legends-prodigy-faker-carries-country-shoulders

That is the article.

At this moment it's the top image on the site. I knew they were talking about their new esports coverage, but I never thought this would be the result.

No clue the staying power, but as someone who follows both sports and video games it came as a bit of a shock.

Shit-storm incoming..

Can we skip the part where people have a stick up their ass about the word "sport" and just acknowledge that this is pretty damn cool? It's fine if you don't like League. I don't like Baseball, but I don't care if people cover it however they want.

I read it earlier, it's quite good. Profile of a top player who seeks to regain his former glory.

Korean professional gaming is so damn brutal.

Yep, wasn't sure if this was normal since I happened to visit ESPN.com for the first time earlier.

When did Espn look so good? The last time I used to browse the site regularly was when Hunter S. Thompson used to write on Page 2. Smart of them to go the human route, like how Free To Play did it - you can write an article about just the stats of Lebron, and no one will complain, but just the stats of LoL isn't enough.

LoL being a "sport/esport" doesn't seem that weird for me. What's weird is when Tom Clancy Ghost Recon Phantoms calls their small community tournament "Summer Games" and insist on calling their community "sports fans."

This isn't quite of a shock as you might think. The choosing of the latest Madden cover polls are extensively covered on the front cover of ESPN each year. The realm between sports and video games has been lessening with each year. You also have to think about it like this, in the US the only major sport really being aired regularly would be baseball. You do have things like tennis and golf tournaments which hog up a majority of air space but those only happen a few weeks each month. This makes alternative competitive activities like poker and moba competition that more prevalent during the summer time. I mean for the longest time I remember during those lazy summer days in high school I could regularly turn on ESPN and be watching a dog competition or footage from the And 1 mix tape tour where ATL's finest Hot Sauce would literally be double dribble with each crossover.

Well ESPN saw fit to televise things Like Poker in the past so I say

I imagine this is going to go about as well as when they had Dota on ESPN 3 or whatever it is they had.

Still cool though.

Faker is a pretty good player. Dude stomped soloq when he was in NA for worlds. His mechanics are sick. Glad ESPN is giving a little respect to league, more people watch it than many sporting events

As someone who've only seen the daily dota stuff and watched a bit of the international tourney do you remember what the numbers were like on average for viewers?

Weird. And crazy how well researched and written the article was. I guess I'm okay with this. I feel like it'll cross the line for me though if they start showing highlights on SportsCenter.

Very cool. I live in a smaller town in Pennsylvania, and this is starting to look like the future I wanted. Where "sports bars" aren't always filled with people watching football, basketball, or any other physical sport. It's almost always recaps and such, and e-sports is a lot more capable of saturation throughout the day for a full channel than physical sports are (taking in cost of production into consideration). It'll be really cool if this stuff starts seeding it's way into mainstream culture.

That's a cool article. I don't care enough about LoL or anything to read all of it, but props to them for giving it so much time.

That header image is really cool too, I think.

@i_stay_puft: during season 3 worlds, the one faker one in fact, we had upwards of 32million world wide. I think Season 4 had a drop to 27, but the format was different.

ESPN has Poker...might as well add MOBAs at that point

My favorite part about ESPN covering esports is the comments. People losing their minds and yelling about how "ITS NOT A SPORT AHHHHH". Its similar to when ESPN covered this past Wrestlemania. Oh it amuses me so.

Really enjoyed that article, as someone with now LoL/MOBA experience. Looks really slick too. Looking forward to future stuff from them.

Nice article. Faker is god.

This is a really detailed and nice article. As someone that follows league (including the korean leagues), it was great that it seemed as if the writer knew what they were talking about and completely ignored the debate of is it a sport or not.

To give context to the article about the korean exodus, back in late 2014 the korean teams were extremely dominant (Faker's team did not even make it into the top 3 in korea). After the world championships, the chinese teams imported about 20 of the korean regions top players using large salaries generated by Chinese streaming services trying to get the best players to stream on their services (Dade, another superstar player had over 1 million concurrent viewers, most on twitch is about 30,000). Faker, being the best player was assumed to be offered alot of money to leave to china. Right now, it seems as if the chinese have matched the strength of korean teams (SKT finished second in the last major tournament after a rough schedule of back to back tournaments in different countries). Some korean talent has also been imported by EU and NA region to strengthen their talent aswell.

The article pretty much explains most of his strengths. One thing that strikes out to me is that he seems to make the best decision in the smallest of time frames. This is the clip referred in the article.

ESPN televised the Heroes of the Storm tournament a couple months ago, i remember being really confused when i saw HoTS was on TV at a bar i normally go to.

I don't like LoL but it's almost worth it just to see people losing their shit over the placement of this news.

It was a pretty good article, but the best one I've read so far was the Cloud 9 story published by Playboy published last year.
Gotta love the outcry though, people losing their shit over this is hilarious.