Challenger League is Siege’s tier 2, the place where upcoming talent works on their craft in the hopes of being picked up as a diamond in the rough and brought to the global stage. That being said, it sure doesn’t feel like it. For all the talk of T2 being a way to “nurture our path to pro and providing opportunities for players to play in different levels of competition” the 2nd highest level of play in competitive Rainbow Six feels like an afterthought. Beyond the obvious removal of relegations that is addressed in that same press statement, which yes, I think isn’t as good for orgs as people make it out to be. CL is odd in a number of ways that don’t match the importance of the T2 scene according to what Ubisoft says, and it’s actual functional importance to the overall comp ecosystem.
For instance, despite being an officially run tournament, Challenger League vods are never consistently uploaded to the Rainbow Six Esports Match Vods channel. Only the North American vods are uploaded, and only up to Playday 7. Playdays 8 and 9 were played on October 8th and 9th respectively. As of writing, it’s October 26th, 3-4 days after the Challenger League Playoffs, the most recent matches in T2 and 2 weeks after those playdays. I can start watching the Youtube vod of NAL matches within an hour of the match. Want to know how I know? Because I’ve watched the 360p version of a match right as it gets uploaded, the optimization isn’t even done before people can watch. If Tier 2 is really so important to Ubisoft, you’d think they’d have the vods uploaded in a timely manner, some of Stage 2’s NACL vods took literal months to be uploaded. This can damage the players as T1 teams may not go through the hassle of digging through 2 months of NACL matches in the Twitch video player to actually watch a prospect. It’s enough of a hassle for someone wholly overinvested in the scene like myself, forget a pro with 3 scrims tonight.
The topic of vods doesn’t end there. For the first 2 Stages of NACL, one match was played off stream with no cast. Fair play. I don’t know the resources that NACL production has access to so maybe it’s the best they could do to even get a vod uploaded. The quality of this vod varied from moment to moment. Sometimes the observer would follow the action blow for blow and you’d see a top down view of everything going on. Others, they would stare at the roof for a whole minute as the round devolved into a 3v2 post plant. Almost as if this observer was tasked with other responsibilities or didn’t actually care about the quality of this vod. However that raises the question: Why?
Edit: I have received confirmation through reliable sources that the observer was someone operating the main CL livestream while observing also observing the match.
T2 is important. It is the funnel for talent of every role to go pro, not just players and orgs. Outside of FACEIT, who runs all Tier 1 events in Siege, no other big name tournament organizer runs events in Siege. They used to, but not anymore. Given that, the onus falls on Ubisoft/FACEIT to give this product that they themselves run the proper resources to flourish. No one else will give these teams, orgs, casters, observers, and more the screen time to be seen. Dreamhack can’t or won’t run tournaments. OGA Pit had a good thing going but have stopped running Siege events. SCS is an amazing, exciting to see grassroots tournament but they literally have no budget. They can’t run CL and pay day rates to the casters and other talent. There are no other T2 prestige tournaments for talent to show off their talent. Do you think OXG is watching SFCL vods to see if Marmalade is a good pickup? Will another org like Disrupt Gaming or MnM come up through T2 and become a staple of T1 play? Unlikely. There simply isn’t enough value to invest in T2 Siege. LG gambled and got the rules changed on them halfway through the game. I’m sure they’re happy about that.
These vods, while a minor talking point unto themselves, imply a larger problem that either Ubisoft didn’t allocate enough resources to Challenger League or they actively chose to have one match a week recorded without casting from a top down view only. Both answers are wholly unsatisfying if Tier 2 is supposed to be a well paved path to pro. It isn’t just a path for players after all, the casters, analysts, observers, and production team all cut their teeth in the hopes of getting to the big leagues. They deserve to be given the resources to thrive and improve. If not, let those other TOs back in and do the job, since there is a clear disconnect between the way Ubisoft treats T2 and how they talk about it.
This is only for North American Challenger League too, LATAM, APAC, and EU CL vods are lost unless you know where to look. In that sense, we’re lucky to get this much.