The experience of an turkish Ex-LCS import

I'm Turkish guy and I'll have a word on this. It is going to be a looong post but I will explain how gaming and e-sports works in Turkey from the ground up. Read, and you will learn alot about the mentality.

Personally, I didn't play this game competitively (tried, but I'm not good enough) but I created a Mobafire clone for the Turkish scene back in 2012, when Riot Turkey offices were recently opened and I had countless of phone calls with them trying to organize something together. I used to organize tournaments on my platform, make streams on Twitch and stuff like this, so I was a bit involved with those stuff.

First of all, my words doesn't target Riot Games, but just some people working under Riot Turkey office.

Let's start from the start and explain how gaming works in Turkey. Pre 90's and early 2000's, people who were lucky to have a DSL connection started to play MMORPG games, especially Ultima Online. After a while, DSL connections become more and more common, and public net cafes popped up under every apartment like crazy. Most of the Turkish people are considered very poor, so families couldn't afford a computer and a DSL connection. (Nowadays they can, but long ago it was very expensive due to economical crisis.)

Computers and internet were magical so young people had to access them. They found a solution by saving their daily allowance (e.g their mother gives them some liras so they can eat at school) and use it on cyber cafes, so they could play games, or use a computer. More people started going to cyber cafes because their friends are going. Since more people started going cyber cafes, everyone who wants to make an investment created a cyber cafe.

This went like this until 2005 or 2006. During this time, a MMORPG called Knight Online flooded the Turkish market. It was extremely popular. Do you think League of Legends is popular in Turkey nowadays? This game was much, much more popular. Foreigners were constantly making jokes about how this game is the international sport of Turkey. Cafes were open 7/24, they had extreme amounts of income.

The company behind Knight Online realized this situation and tried his best to monetize this situation. Partnerships with cyber cafes, check. Translation of the website into Turkish language, check. Turkish game masters, check. Microtransactions, check. Premium access for more experience points and one-click logging into the servers, check. They never cared about creating a quality game, but take as much money from the young people whom are interested in this game.

Red flag 1: Riot Turkey office is being ran by the guy who worked on monetizing/publishing this game into Turkey. We, the actual community of this game pre season 2, knew Riot was going to mess everything.

Fast forward a bit. The game called Knight Online slowly faded away (still a very big market, though. Even some private servers has around 15.000+ active players.) and replaced with the game... guess what? League of Legends.

Why? Because, the guy Riot Games hired knew how to monetize a game on Turkish market. He knew how big was the cyber cafe culture in Turkey.

So they started by transfering every Turkish account into Turkey server. Even myself, who played this game only with my foreign friends on EU server (it wasn't seperated back then IIRC) was transfered to Turkey server without a word. We had to create countless of petitions, try to contact Riot Games so we could get our accounts back to EU server. Our accounts stayed on Turkey server for more than 2 months and I had to create a level 1 account on EU server just to continue playing with my friends.

Then, they tried to target cyber cafes, create partnerships with them so they would advertise LoL, make discounts on LoL players, publish some fan arts and things like this. Creating partnerships also included doing tournaments, because the word called esports is important. Meanwhile, Riot created cyber cafe based tournaments, then City based tournaments, then region based. Congratulations, you won the city based tournament. Here is your 3K RP! Staff members from Riot Turkey would constantly visit cyber cafes, take pictures with players, give them RP cards.

Riot Turkey eventually got bigger and bigger, to the point where they could host bigger tournaments. Rewards for the winners were extremely high for the Turkish scene. For the first time in Turkish gaming history, there were events with prizes over $5K. Not only that, sponsors would constantly provide mobile phones for the winners, laptops, gaming equipment, stuff like this. Esports suddenly skyrocketed. A lightbulb appeared on cybercafe owners. More onto this soon...

This is how corruption started in the scene. In the first global tournament, some teams magically got themself a tournament accounts, where every rune and champion is enabled. Others? They had to play with their own runes, and only with the champions they bought. Wait, there is more. You have a team member who signed up with the country as Germany 2 years ago? Oh boy. Nope, we cannot transfer his account to Turkey server. He has to play with level 1 smurf.

As expected, those teams won the tournament, and won an extremely high prizes. They're also flooded with sponsor equipments and alike, so creating a Gaming House wasn't hard.

Red flag 2: Captain of this team soon hired by Riot Turkey.

Would cyber cafe owners stop? Nope. They saw the demand for gaming equipment. Headphones! Mouses! Shiny keyboards! Only a minority of gamers used this in the past, but there was a huge demand for those equipments by the young LoL players. "I'll get that mouse, and become the next Faker. I will quit my school and become the best gamer around."

Similarly, those cyber cafe owners started investing on e-commerce sites and they popped like crazy. Hey, we sell Razer stuff! Hey, we have ASUS gaming laptops! Hey, we got the best Steelseries headphones!

Then those cyber cafe investors and players met. "Hey you, young kid! Here is a contract. Stream under our name, we will provide you with all the equipments... but you need to work like a slave!" The approx. age of the LoL community is very low. Players who can't take logical actions are often end up accepting those because they will be the next Faker, right?

Red flag 3: Contracts were legally written, so once someone signed it, there was no going back. Turkish people always heard about players who signed a contact to become an ADC for "Cybercafe X Esports", only to give all their income and sponsorship winnings to the cybercafe owner. Loads of players were used like a trash by those investors, and their families usually had to hire a lawyer to get rid of this, usually by paying ridicilous amounts of money.

Oh, while we talk about the sponsorship winnings, let's also mention that the winner of tournaments were always the same two teams, whom had close connections with Riot Turkey. All the sponsorship equipments like smartphones and laptops were being sold on public forums. Why? So they could earn more. Then? They could hire better players and win the next tournaments. Butterfly effect.

If you look at the Turkish scene, you will always see same teams winning same tournaments over and over and over and over again. You will always see most teams are closely tiered to a cyber cafe, or an e-commerce site brand. You will always see that e-sports managers are usually uneducated cyber cafe owners whom uses young kids as their income.

Blackmarket. Did I even mention it? Do you know how big the elo boosting market is, or selling accounts? Cyber cafe owners tell young kids to play LoL all day long for free... but they want them to boost elo for another player.

A cybercafe owner I personally know (he was a steward before) created his first cyber cafe during early 2000's with just few computers. Knight Online blackmarket gave him a cyber cafe with 100 computers and a huge office. League of Legends blackmarket gave him a million dollar worth of investments, a popular e-commerce brand specialized for selling gaming equipments, a Mercedes CLA 2014 (that thing has like 200% TAX here in Turkey so consider how expensive it is), and some real estates.

There is no professionalism here, never was. Young kids whom tries to be the next Faker will be used like a trash can and thrown away by people like that cybercafe owners.

I don't follow Turkish scene anymore, but I'm sure there are some serious corruption going on behind the scenes, especially on big tournaments. Heck, when I tried to organize a tournament on my platform (basic mobafire clone) literally every team offered me money so I could put them in easy groups. This is just how stuff works in Turkey.

Seriously, how do you expect those trash teams who lose with a funny score like 3/30 in wildcards to win every single Turkish tournament? How do they afford getting players from EU, and even from Korea? The whole post from the OP explains how.

/r/leagueoflegends Thread