Update (October 15th 2022): The League of Legends tournament at Epic.LAN 37 will sadly no longer be taking place due to a lack of sign-ups.
Original article (August 24th 2022):
Epic.LAN will once again host a League of Legends esports tournament at its upcoming Epic37 event.
It’ll be the first time Epic.LAN has held a full 5v5 League of Legends esports competition in seven years.
There have been some 1v1 and 2v2 League of Legends fun tournaments at Epic.LAN held in recent years, but not a full team offering like it has in CSGO, Valorant and others.
Epic.LAN did host 5v5 League tournaments from 2013 to 2015, but stopped them when support from the community dwindled. But now they’re coming back.
A £1,250 to £1,750 prize pool has been set for League of Legends at Epic37, based on a maximum of 16 teams.
The event will take place at Kettering Conference Centre between Thursday October 27th and Sunday October 30th 2022.
Epic.LAN is also part of the Valorant Beacon grassroots esports series and the pathway to Rainbow Six Siege’s UKIN.
We caught up with Epic.LAN managing director Jon Winkle to find out more about the return to LoL.
Five minutes with Epic.LAN MD Jon Winkle on League of Legends’ return: ‘If the community supports it, there’s no reason why it won’t be a regular fixture’
ENUK: Great to see League of Legends coming back to Epic.LAN. Why bring it back – and why now?
Jon Winkle, Epic.LAN: We wanted to introduce some new titles to Epic.LAN a few years ago, but Covid got in the way and set everything back.
We regularly look at what titles have strong UK scenes, and sometimes we have to let titles go as the community shrinks, so after dropping a couple of titles pre-pandemic we started to ask what people would like to see. League of Legends was consistently the most requested tournament and we were keen to make sure the next title was not another FPS.
What can League fans who might not have been to Epic.LAN before expect from your events? What kind of format, prize pool and atmosphere?
It is a traditional BYOC (bring your own computer) LAN party, it’s four days of playing games with people who you may have previously only met online. And for those who want to, we have some competitive tournaments for people to enter. They are very much run as entry-level tournaments to give people their first LAN experience before going on to the bigger stages.
The prize pools are tiered so the more people that enter, the more the prize pool increases, especially when we introduce a new title that may not yet be sponsored. It’s difficult to know where the League numbers will land for the next event so we’ve set a £1,250 to £1,750 prize pool for now, based on a maximum of 16 teams. Our hope is for a minimum of eight in a groups to double elimination format.
When was League first added to Epic.LAN and when was it removed? Why was it removed?
We ran League back from Epic11 in July 2013 with LowLandLions as the winners and Team Infused in second place. It ran through to Epic15 in 2015 where support had started to fall off unfortunately.
Have you spoken to Riot about this, will we see any other kind of integration from them for League at your upcoming event(s)?
Of course, obviously with some awareness of recent changes to amateur leagues in the UK around licences, we wanted to be sure that it was okay to run the event in the first instance and then see how we can work together in the future.
We also have regular dialogue with Riot since we introduced Valorant, so there was already an open door for those conversations. Epic37 will very much be us trying to prove that the interest is there – and then hopefully we can build on that at future events.
Is League just at the next Epic.LAN or generally all of them now going forward?
That’s a question for the League community. When we introduce a new tournament we try to run with it for a minimum of 12 months to really give time for the scene to develop, but ultimately we need a number of teams to make it work, not just for space at the event, but so the players have an enjoyable tournament format too.
If the community supports it, there’s no reason it wont be a regular fixture.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
If you haven’t been to a traditional LAN event, give it a try. Epic.LAN has been part of the history of so many players, crew and talent in the UK since we launched, so who knows where you will end up by taking part in one of our events?
Thanks Jon and good luck with Epic37.
You can find out more about Epic37 and get tickets here
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.
