devtrackers.gg
We know the LCS is struggling, and trying new things. Maybe things could be better in a different timeline, maybe not, but I'm here to lay out my case for why the LCS should have been based in NYC and not LA. I know they probably just picked LA because that's where the company is, but they shouldn't have.
1 Amount of people
47% of the United States and 61% of Canada live in the EST time zone. Plus another 33% in the Central time zone. So being in LA, LCS is at times that cater to the vast minority of North America. Remember champions queue? I always wanted to watch it, but it didn't even start until after I went to bed. And that quantity of people isn't just for viewers. To be a pro player, you need to move to California as it is. It would be much easier to be based where people actually live, than to have to move across the country, so it would make a pro career more accessible for more players.
2 The city difference
LA has a population of 3.85 million as the second largest city in America. This is dwarfed by NYC's population of 8.47 million. That's more potential players and crowd members. New York is more easily accessible for most of the country, and you don't need a car, which makes for larger and better events. The no car thing makes it better for players as well, since they can actually go places on their own (I'm assuming imports don't come over and immediately buy cars. Maybe they do, but in New York, they wouldn't have to).
3 The regional difference
There is no regional connection for any LCS franchise, since they're all based in the same place. They have to be based in the same place, since there isn't really another city that close to LA. I guess you could spread out to San Diego, San Francisco, and Las Vegas (maybe Phoenix?), but that's about it, and it wouldn't be easy. Meanwhile, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington are all on the same train line. It takes a few hours to get between these cities. And that's not even counting all the other short flight cities around on the east coast. If we count those, here are the major cities within a 3 ish hour flight of NYC: Miami, Orlando, Chicago, Atlanta, Toronto, Boston, Nashville, Washington, Montreal, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Detroit, Charlotte, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Jacksonville, Memphis, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and I'm done naming cities but there are a whole lot more (also a lot of these flights cost like, 150 bucks or less round trip). For LA the cities are: Las Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Phoenix, Portland, San Diego, San Antonio, Salt Lake City. You could spread events around, and teams could have regional territories.
Hell, even if they all wanted to stay in NYC alone, they could split up the boroughs and neighborhoods to have some kind of regional connection. I know CLG tried to be the New York team a bit, but I mean, you play in California and come here once every six years.
4 Proximity to EU
Everyone always wants more NA-EU matches, right? Shame there is currently a 9 hour time difference, and it takes 14 hours to fly between Berlin and LA, with no direct flights. Meanwhile, New York to most of Europe has plenty of (very affordable) direct flights that take 9 hours, and there is a 6 hour time difference. I personally have flown out to Europe for a long weekend several times, it's totally reasonable to do, and a 6 hour shift doesn't give horrible jetlag. Or they could just meet in the middle! It's a 5 hour 40 minute flight from NYC to Reykjavik. That's shorter than flying from NYC to LA! We could have NA vs EU all the time. We could have one big league together if we wanted, if they weren't based out of LA.
5 Ping
I don't want to say the best thing is to just punt the west coast, but punting the west coast might be the easiest solution. Early days of league, the servers were on the west coast. This gave 20% ish percent of the population great ping, and 80% ish horrible ping. Now they're in Chicago, so nobody gets horrible ping, but everybody but people in the Central time zone get bad ping. If the servers were on the east coast, that's great ping for 50% ish of the population, okay for 30% ish, and horrible for 20% ish. This isolates 20% of the country from having good ping, but makes it better for pros and the vast majority of the country. We can't have two servers, because the west coast just doesn't have enough players.
There is a reason every sports league is based in New York, and most games and events happen in EST. I believe LCS would be much better off if it were near where the people are, and nearer to EU.
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