Hi, so, first off, all your points are super valid, and I hope I can address them in a satisfactory way. I think the best way to do that is to tell you a little more about both our background, and the backstory to League One itself.

I'll start with myself. As I mentioned in the OP, I've been in a senior admin position for a number of higher profile challenger events. If you're not familiar with NACL (which I was the commissioner for in Season 1), we broke 50k concurrent viewers a couple times, and reached over 500k unique viewers in December '13 alone. I also designed and ran the ggLA Challenger Arena series, which was less popular, but I think we broke 40k concurrent viewers in our last tournament. I've done other events also, but I don't think it's necessary to type out my whole resume. I've also worked extensively in the team management side of things, having been with COGnitive's first roster (Zamphira, Ziploc, nothinghere, etc.), the team that played as XDG in Challenger Playoffs last summer, Storm, et al. Essentially, I've been doing things in Challenger since around the time the LCS was formed. Wazabi is largely made up of people I've worked with on my past events.

Cubes is an amazing graphics designer who recently graduated with a degree in Graphics Design from whatever college he went to (I forget). He's worked with me on just about every event I've ever done, and I strongly believe his design work is some of the best in eSports at any level. We've had some less-than-great experiences working for people in the past, and have been wanting to start up our own thing for a good while now. As people in this thread have pointed out, there are people in eSports who either try to take advantage of others, or have good intentions but are unable to follow through on their promises. Integrity is a guiding principle in my life, and that shows through my work both in the competitive integrity of my events, and the personal integrity of my business (and other) dealings. My driving ambition in eSports is not to make money (except maybe enough to pay my bills), but simply to do cool things. I love competition of all sorts (I referee Middle and High School sports also), and all I really want is to be involved in creating and administering really cool events. This leads me into the origin of League One.

This past December, I started working with Storm (mancloud, babyeator, doomtrobo, xpecake, lourlo). They were a great team with, in my opinion, a lot of potential. Unfortunately, we didn't qualify for NACS, and the team promptly split up. That sucked, but it was completely understandable. The reality is (was) simply that you're a team and you don't make CS, there's really nothing to do until the next CS qualifiers. It made more sense for the players to make themselves free agents and hope to get picked up by either LCS or CS teams.

Now, to me, that reality was unfortunate at best, unacceptable at worst. For competitive teams, actually competing is essential to improving. Scrims are great, and practice is important, of course, but if you as a team don't ever get any experience in a competitive environment, you'll struggle against teams who are more comfortable there. This has been shown time and time again. The solution, to me, was simple: Provide those teams who didn't make NACS with a venue to showcase and hone their competitive talents. I put out some feelers among challenger teams, and got a very positive response, even with the possibility of not having a prize pool. My thought was I'd use my experience and skillset to organize the league, and even without having any financial backing (I'm poor) I could probably get some people together to broadcast maybe a few games a week for the teams' sake. I was considering putting up a couple hundred bucks for the prize pool, if decided I could afford it.

Then, I was put in touch with Adam from D!ngIt. He took an immediate interest to what I was working on doing, and wanted to be involved. I'll say right now, the funding D!ngIt has provided has been completely game-changing as far as how this event is going to run, and I am extremely grateful for their involvement. I completely understand the concerns put forth by you and others in this thread about using a new, unknown streaming platform. D!ngIt is brand new, they're still in beta, and definitely not a name that's known by many people at all. I can't say how impressed I am, though, at their eagerness to get involved in this event. I didn't spend any time or effort trying to convince them that this would be a profitable event, or a 'smart investment.' Indeed, I projected extremely conservatively in regards to viewer numbers, profitability, etc. Their platform isn't perfect, but D!ngIt has shown that they want to be involved in events for the sake of the event, and I respect that immensely.

As far as websites, we'll be putting ones up for both Wazabi and League One soonTM. Because of how quickly this event changed from "Oh, I'll put this together for the teams to play in and maybe we'll do some production" to "Hey, we have a multi-thousand dollar prize pool and will be streaming 16 hours a week!" some things had to be sidelined for later. Proper web presence is absolutely important, and I 100% agree with you that it's something we should have already. However, I think the event itself, and the production of the broadcast is higher priority, and that's where I've been investing our immediate resources.

This post ended up being considerably longer than I was expecting, but I wanted to thoroughly address your (and others') concerns as best as I can. I really appreciate your criticisms and comments, and I'd be happy to talk more with you or anyone else regarding Wazabi, League One, or even just eSports in general.