The free-to-play fantasy action-RPG League of Legends recently completed its first "season" of competitive play. Developer Riot Games hosted the tournament where the European team Fnatic won over teams from all over the world and received $50,000 for its efforts. But that amount of money may be nothing compared to what Riot Games has planned for Season Two. Today the developer announced that the second official season of League of Legends will feature a whopping $5 million in its total prize pool. Riot Games claims the amount is "the largest prize pool in eSports."
According to the announcement, the prize money will be used for local, national and international League of Legends tournaments. In addition, regional tournaments here in North America will be live streamed weekly for people who which to watch the matches online. Season Two is scheduled to begin sometime this fall. So far there's no specific breakdown of how the prize pool will be distributed.
Earlier this month, it was announced that League of Legends will add a new gameplay mode, Dominion. It brings a capture-and-hold gameplay design to the game and is designed to offer faster matches, around 20 minutes, than the normal League of Legends match. Dominion will be used on a new League of Legends map, the Crystal Scar. Both the new gameplay mode and the new map will be shown this week at Gamescom in Germany and again at PAX Prime in Seattle later in August. There's no word on when the gamplay mode will be made available for the rest of League of Legend's players.
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