We’re super excited today to start the conversation about something we’ve been working on for the better part of this year: Esports Watch Rewards. Over the past months we made a lot of improvements to the watch.lolesports.com experience including a Global Schedule, Global VoDs, and Global Live Stats. Our next big step is to integrate watching esports with playing League of Legends –  and reward passionate fans.

We’ve always aspired to go this direction, and during this years World Championship we are taking the first small steps on that journey (and it is a journey, so expect a lot more after Worlds). Starting in October when Worlds matches are live, you’ll begin to see missions pop up in your client and on Lolesports.com that will reward you with loot when you watch World Championship games. There will be a few opportunities each week to earn Worlds Tokens that unlock emotes, icons, chromas, borders and more in the Worlds Loot Shop. Watch Rewards will offer some extra exclusive goodies like rare icons and some secret surprises that superfans watching A LOT of Worlds could uncover.

How Does it Work?

Watch Missions will start appearing on September 30th and will be available through November 10th. To start, players will need to login on watch.lolesports.com/rewards and view games on the site using the embedded streams from Twitch and Youtube. In the future we want to expand support for other platforms, but we feel that this is a great place to start while we gather feedback from all of you. We know that fans prefer lots of different watch experiences, and so do we – we’ll look to increase the breadth of our support in the future.

After logging in, you can see your available missions and earn progress toward them for each game you watch. There will be several missions that reward you for watching World Championship games as well as weekly missions that reward you for playing champions featured in the previous week’s matches. You’ll earn credit after watching 10 minutes or more of any single World Championship live game or VoD. Our mobile friendly Reward Hub will allow you to track real-time progress on missions you have earned and are up next without having to log into the game client.

To start, we will unfortunately not be able to grant rewards for rebroadcasts. Fans watching from regions covered by GDPR will need to opt-in to earning rewards after logging in so we can keep track of who is watching.

What Will the Future Hold?

I’ll hammer this point pretty hard because rewards is an important space to us: this is just the beginning.  We wanted to deliver our first take on a system for Worlds as an opportunity to drive some hype for the event and learn a lot about what players like and don’t like.  We’ll take this into heavy consideration as we expand and keep building for the future. Later on we hope to add several more mission trees, exclusive rewards, and support for viewers who are watching outside of LoLEsports.com. We want to keep innovating on how we deliver these missions, how they look and feel, and the rewards you get once completed. As always we’re looking for ways on how we can improve this new feature, please leave your feedback and ideas on reddit, social, and the forums.