Riot Games has announced a new inititiative called Esports Watch Rewards, which is designed to "integrate watching esports with playing League of Legends - and reward passionate fans."
This program will come into effect with the World Championship that starts next month, with more on the horizon after that. When matches are live during the competition, you'll see missions pop up in the client and on the site that provide loot rewards when you watch games, with a few opportunities a few to earn Worlds Tokens to unlock items like emotes, borders, and more in the Worlds Loot Shop, of course including exclusive items too.
You'll see these missions as of September 30 and they'll continue until November 10, with players needing to be logged into watch.lolesports.com/rewards before viewing the embedded streams from Twitch and YouTube. In the future Riot wants to expand to other platforms, but while they're gathering feedback they want to keep it here.
Once you log in you can see available missions and progress towards them, and there are weekly missions too, rewarding you for playing champions featured in the last week's matches. You'll earn credits by watching 10 minutes or more of any single World Championship live game or replay, and the Reward Hub lets you track progress without having to log into the client.
"I'll hammer this point pretty hard because rewards is an important space to us: this is just the beginning," the announcement reads. "We wanted to deliver our first take on a system for Worlds as an opportunity to drive some hype for the event and learn a lot about what players like and don't like. We'll take this into heavy consideration as we expand and keep building for the future. Later on we hope to add several more mission trees, exclusive rewards, and support for viewers who are watching outside of LoLEsports.com. We want to keep innovating on how we deliver these missions, how they look and feel, and the rewards you get once completed. As always we're looking for ways on how we can improve this new feature, please leave your feedback and ideas on reddit, social, and the forums."
Will you be getting involved with these missions?