Interview with Kaiprioska from Freaks 4U Gaming on the NLC and League of Legends esports in Northern Europe: ‘This region has so much potential and we’re in it for the long haul’

Last summer, Freaks 4U Gaming was appointed tournament organiser of the Northern League of Legends Championship (NLC), the Northern European ERL (European Regional League) region covering the UK, Ireland and Nordics.

While the revised ‘multi-division league ecosystem’ ruffled some feathers in the scene, it’s clear that the broadcast production for the first season has been top-notch. Esports News UK submitted an interview request with Freaks 4U last year to get to know them better, and due to some F4U changes and our own slowness, we are publishing this later than we would’ve liked. However, we felt a lot of these answers are still relevant today, and would be a good read. We caught up with NLC product manager William ‘Kaiprioska’ Roche on the NLC and F4U’s plans.

Congrats for joining Freaks 4U Gaming. Please tell us about your role, what it entails and what you’d like to achieve in this role. 

Thanks, my name is William Roche, but most people online know me as Kaiprioska. I’m the new product manager for the NLC, leading our team and efforts at Freaks to elevate the NLC competitive landscape, with the goal of creating the most rewarding esports experience for esports organisations, fans and talents.

We are in it for the long haul, since the region has so much potential just like its ERL counterparts, we hope to bring excellence and consistency to the ecosystem and create an environment everyone will thrive in. 

There’s been a lot of changes made to the NLC since you came in as organiser, including the scrapping of the UKLC and Telia Masters, and removal of third-party grassroots leagues like the UKEL and Leagues.gg. What was the thinking behind the changes and the different divisions you’ve introduced? 

We have been running League of Legends Prime League, formerly known as Premier Tour, for the DACH region, since 2018, and it has been incredibly successful. We took our tried-and-true experiences with the Prime League and applied it to the NLC.

We felt like this system has paid dividends in creating value for the ecosystem in the DACH region, specifically creating more opportunities for players to enter the competitive scene as the system caters to teams and players of all skill levels.

This enables aspiring and amateur players a fair chance to start from the grassroot level all the way to to the pinnacle of European esports – a good example would be Dajor’s meteoric rise from Division 3/4 in the Prime League to LEC within a year. 

Please tell us about Freaks 4U Gaming in general – what have you worked on in the past and what should UK/Nordics League fans know about you? 

Most of the community probably recognises us as a tournament organiser or broadcast producer, Freaks 4U Gaming is in fact a full-service agency specialising in esports and gaming, with a unique positioning within the industry as part agency, part production house and part community.

We offer creative services such as social media and community management, design, and multimedia content creation, we also have broadcast and event production capabilities. Additionally, we operate our own proprietary community platforms including 99Damage (the largest German-language CSGO community), Summoner’s Inn (a top LoL German-language community), Agent’s Range (a dedicated Valorant community in the DACH region) and 1pv (a top French-language platform focusing on CSGO and Valorant).

We have managed operations and broadcast productions of  some of the largest esports events in Europe, such as Prime League in DACH, Valorant Champions Tour EMEA and Twitch Rivals. We have extensive experiences in planning and realising global and regional events and activation, we very much look forward to replicating our successes to the NLC and its community.

How are you approaching the 2022 NLC broadcasts? 

We want to offer a version of the NLC that’s on par with our fans expectations, a professional, polished and passionate experience with the aim of enhancing our ecosystem over time, that will foster future talent and empower them to become a part of the competitive LoL scene.

“We can understand the apprehension and trepidation fans felt ahead of the first season. I’ve personally come up in the industry through the same eyes of wishing that our region would match up to our passionate expectations. Living up to those expectations and exceeding them is something that we endeavour to achieve.”

William ‘Kaiprioska’ Roche, NLC

As part of Riot’s recent announcement, all ERLs will host their own pro-am tournaments from 2022 onwards. Can you tell us anything more about these tournaments for the UK/Ireland/Nordics region? 

Yes, that’s correct, we’ll be hosting one of these ourselves at the NLC. Unfortunately I can’t give a lot of information on it so far, apart from saying it will be a separate format to the Spring and Summer splits and it will include at least the highest two divisions. 

The NLC was announced as an Accredited ERL for 2022, meaning it will have offline events. Where will these offline events take place, do you plan to hold any events in the UK?  

We’re one of the five accredited ERLs for 2022 alongside the LVP, LFL, Prime League and Ultraliga. While we’re planning on having at least one offline event in 2022, we are also following COVID status and regulations very closely.

Our plan is to hold events across Northern Europe in due course, however the UK is a place that is certainly on our shortlist of potential locations for 2022.

The UK/Nordics league doesn’t quite have the viewership of other popular ERLs like LFL and the Superliga. Why do you think this is, and what do you think can be done to elevate the interest and viewership around the NLC? 

There are a multitude of reasons why the NLC has fallen short of expectations [in the past]. As we have witnessed with other leagues, consistency in every aspect of building an esports ecosystem is critical.

NLC has changed hands between several league operators over the years, which isn’t conducive to building something that requires time.

With different tournament organisers there are different visions, resources and capacity, while we understand everyone comes with the best intentions, but being a tournament organiser ourselves we understand the complexity and long-term commitment to realise what you sought out to accomplish.  

Given our track record of running Prime League and other leagues, we will rely on our experiences and expertise to first build a solid framework and foundation for the NLC ecosystem. We will also focus on broadcast and content production to create storytelling for the league, teams and players.

Freaks does have ambitious plans for the NLC and we are careful with goal-setting as they will take some time to roll out. We intend to offer transparency and encourage open dialogue with what we do in this process, and hope that we will win the trust of the community and reward our fans with an ERL that’s truly representative of the passion and talent of the region.  

You made a change so that the top six Summer 2021 NLC teams stayed in division 1, with all others having to requalify through the calibration phase. Resolve seemed particularly hard done by here. Do you have any message to them or the community as to the reasoning here, why was it the top six teams for example?  

The top six teams were chosen due to the league having to be reduced down from 12 to 10 teams according to the new accreditation rules,while additionally wanting to keep some legacy teams as well as allowing new blood to enter into the 1st Division.

We can certainly sympathise with Resolve on this issue, the founder Ilias is a dear friend of mine who has done incredible things for UK esports. 

It’s a shame the calibration phase wasn’t streamed. Will future qualification stages be streamed in 2022 and beyond?  

The calibration phase for Division 1 & 2 was a one- time deal, future calibration phases will only be for lower divisions and while we don’t have plans to stream them at this moment, it’s something we may consider resources permitting.

That being said, we openly invite teams to co-stream their own games for future lower league calibration phases as a way for the teams to be able to help grow their respective brands within our ecosystem.  

Singularity chose to field a student-only team in NLC Division 1, which some in the scene criticised and others welcomed. What did you think about this? 

We were delighted to have Singularity back into the NLC for the 2022 season, while it was not met with most positive responses from the community, we were incredibly excited about this bold move by them.

Partnering up with Roehampton University as a long-term partnership to help grow the ecosystem for the future within our region was very much welcome news in our eyes.

A lot of UK-based teams chose to no longer participate in the NLC for 2022 – what are your thoughts on that?

In standardising the structure of Accredited ERLs, the system underneath the first division has changed from the fractured national league setups that the region had previously seen to the new integrated NLC system, where all nations compete under the same pyramid. 

We are excited to build and grow the NLC with those of shared vision and elevate the League of Legends competitive scene in Northern Europe together.

While we understand and respect teams who have chosen not to move forward with us at this moment in time, we also welcome the possibility to further discuss with and assess these teams – or any other aspiring esports organisations – in joining us in the future.  

Good luck and we look forward to watching more NLC LoL action in 2022. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I’d like to take a quick second to address anyone who may be reading this. I’d like to say that we can understand the apprehension and trepidation that passionate fans felt ahead of the first season considering the prolonged period of instability in our region.

I’ve personally come up in the industry through the same eyes of wishing that our region would match up to our passionate expectations. Both living up to those expectations and exceeding them is something that we endeavour to achieve here at Freaks 4U Gaming. While it’s not something realistically that will happen overnight, have a little faith and we’ll aim to reward you handsomely for it.  

You can follow Kaiprioska, Freaks 4U Gaming and NLC on Twitter here. The Division 1 playoffs semi-final takes place tonight from 5pm GMT between Bifrost and Dusty at twitch.tv/nlclol, and the grand finals with X7 will run on March 30th 2022.

Dom Sacco

Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.

As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.