I was excited like most people supporting esports teams when Riot announced LCS pass as a way to contribute to teams and Pro view as a more detailed view of pro games (albeit, this imo should be free but they are sharing revenue with teams so i wasnt super against it). https://imgur.com/a/03CBzcP
Pro view: A welcome addition
As mentioned, i was feeling bad paying for a viewing experience that in other games would come free initially but pro view grew on me 2-3 games into the split. I typically watch BB and Bjerg with enemy jungler as the third screen till the laning phase is over and then switch to broadcast + splitpushers in baron times. Obviously, the biggest plus point is seeing the pros type in all chat and meme about!, really makes you feel connected. There are so many other points which are helpful, like understanding trades or internalize why a pro made a specific decision better or how much vision did they have while making a specific play or how spazzy they are with screen locking and switching. Overall, it feels pretty good. As for the price point, 15$ for over 10-14 hours of pro gameplay (if you are following a single team) over three months seems pretty ok. I would prefer it to be free so many people can get in on this and add a sort of donation version where people pay a bit, but im not a product manager and know the nuances of monetizing a digital product. Simply put right now, i dont feel bad for paying for it.
Improvements: Im sure they can make a lot of tuning to make optimizations to make it run on even potato computers smoothly. The biggest improvement for me personally would be to be able to see the different screens in different monitors because right now i cant create another window in a different monitor, it makes the first one go blank. So have to watch the 4 odd screens in a cramped single monitor, if there was a way to see it in multiple monitors, it would be cool.
LCS Pass: Never buying again
I ll just dive right in, mission tracker's way of recording if you seen the match or not is incredibly garbage. I am sure we have all faced this in the missions and have even submitted tickets to riot support to get the rewards you PAID for. Let's start with the missions recording whether you have watched or not, based on riot's own recommendation - you just need to watch approximately 15 mins from the game start of your team to get the rewards. While this sounds simple, i dont know what spaghetti code they have written, it doesnt record it most times. It usually works the very first time and then it just stops at "watch missions completed (1/3)". This is the point where you are frustrated with yourself as to why you cant even get the emote of your team you paid for and locked behind some ridiculous "progression" system which doesnt even work properly. Then you go looking online and see people experiencing the same things, try every possible solution ranging from disabling you ad block to watching the game on IE with safe mode on. Then you submit a ticket, Here is mine:https://imgur.com/a/R2vgP13 . I was getting pretty frustrated with Riot support suggesting you to do the same 15 things over and over [like https://imgur.com/a/FZYxiKO ] before they manually change the tracker. I watch every tsm game live and have watched the vods several times and indicating so on 3 separate occasions to get some icons/chroma/emote for which i actually paid for is simply ridiculous. I would definitely not be purchasing this again and rather buy something from TSM store directly to support them.
Improvements: Figure out a way to correctly record the way watch missions record that you have watched correctly or do the simple normal thing - scrap the useless progression system and directly give the icons/chomra/emote at the time of purchase, this is the simplest. People who are watching and supporting LCS teams are at some levels playing the game and you dont have to force them play the game and you dont have to force them to watch with some missions.
I had initially posted this in r/TeamSolomid, was told people here in the main sub would like to see it as well, so posting here. i actually dont know how to cross post.
