The Worlds 2019, the World Championships in League of Legends, are taking place in Europe this year. The first 2 weeks will be held in Berlin. However, the top teams from LoL are complaining about the German capital. The network and provider Vodafone are “just terrible.”
Why must the LoL elite go to Berlin? The LoL Worlds are a big deal. Only a total of 24 teams qualify for the event. Of those, the weaker 12 teams must go through a preliminary selection.
The action takes place in the first 2 weeks in Berlin. In the “Play-In” and the group phase, 16 of the 24 teams will be eliminated.
16 out of 24 teams will not survive Berlin
This is how the LoL Worlds work:
- The Play-In Round 1 takes place at the LEC studio in Berlin from October 2 to 5 – here the 12 “weaker” teams compete in 4 groups: the 4 teams that perform the worst will be eliminated. The teams that must qualify include Clutch Gaming from North America, Splyce from Europe, and Unicorns of Love from Russia.
- In the second round on October 7 and 8, the 8 surviving teams will compete against each other – again, 4 teams will be eliminated.
- In Round 3, the group phase begins at the “Verti Music Hall” in Berlin. It lasts from October 12 to 20. Here, the 4 surviving teams will compete alongside 12 directly qualified teams for 8 spots – now 8 more teams will be eliminated. The star teams will enter the tournament during the group phase, such as SK Telecom T1 (Korea), G2 Esports (Europe), Team Liquid (USA), or Invictus Gaming (China, World Champion 2018).
This is how it continues: The remaining 8 teams will compete against each other in a knockout system. There will be 5 match days, spread from October 25 to November 10 in Madrid and Paris.
But the final is still far away. For some of the best LoL teams in the world, it means: They are already stuck in Berlin to prepare for the start on October 2.
Teams complain about Berlin and Vodafone
This is how the teams react: The site Dotesports has compiled some tweets from the coaches of the top teams.
Hadrin “Duke” Forestier, a coach of the Splyce team, says:
“Day 5 and we still have no internet. I don’t know if we’ll survive until the start. Jokes aside: I don’t understand how one of the largest esports leagues in the world can still remain in fucking Berlin. We’ve already lost two full weeks of training in this split because the internet was down.”
According to Duke, in the 3 years he has been coaching, the internet in Berlin has always been terrible. He is used to better conditions from France.
Also, a player from Schalke 04 says: They as a team would have no internet half the time.
Duke responds: He can’t wait until the teams from Korea and Asia come and realize that they cannot hold training matches here.
The coach of the Misfits, Moose, asks if they have connection issues with Vodafone. They are “fucking awful,” just terrible.
Also, a coach from Fnatic says that the lousy internet has already affected their training sessions.
The team manager of Schalke, Nicolas Farnir, adds that he has already contacted the provider 10 times in the last 4 months. That is the biggest problem in Berlin. The Schalke manager says: Almost every team has problems with the provider Vodafone. The problem has been known for months, but they cannot solve it.
For those wondering: Schalke’s gaming house is not located in Gelsenkirchen but actually in Berlin. Schalke acquired the eSports team “Elements” in 2015 and they were based in the capital.
Few esports players understand why the internet in Berlin is so bad
What is the problem? As Dotesports reports, the Berlin Chamber of Commerce stated that it is a structural problem. The copper lines are incapable of transmitting more than 250 megabits per second.
At Dotesports, they seem to wonder why Germany and Berlin, as important technology locations, lag so much behind when it comes to the internet.
We Germans are no longer surprised by that:
