League of Legends esports players voted ‘overwhelmingly’ for a walkout

theverge.com:

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Players in the North American League of Legends esports league have voted to walk out in protest of Riot Games’ decision to no longer require franchises to field an amateur team. Since Riot’s announcement, many franchises have already dropped their amateur teams for the summer season, cutting off an important development pipeline for players who want to compete in the main League Championship Series (LCS). The vote, held by the LCSPA, which represents North American League of Legends esports players, passed “overwhelmingly,” according to an early Monday tweet.

It’s unclear exactly when the walkout will take place, but assuming the two sides don’t come to some sort of agreement, it seems likely it will happen at the start of the summer season (also called the “summer split”) on June 1st. “We are not announcing the official date or duration at this time in order to make planning and pursuing scab labor a more difficult task,” LCSPA executive director Phil Aram said in an email to The Verge after we first published this article.

Riot Games leadership and the LCSPA will be meeting on Tuesday afternoon, according to Aram.

Tensions over the issue have been brewing for some time. On May 12th, Riot Games announced that franchises had asked it to drop the mandate requiring them to field teams in the amateur league, the North American Challengers League (NACL), and that it would be dropping that mandate. In a statement that same day, players pushed for some kind of structured amateur competition, noting that “over 50 percent of current LCS pros came up through the