Doublelift hits out at “clown show” LCS following production complaints

Daniel Cleary
Doublelift in Team Liquid jersey with LCS logo

League of Legends star Yiliang ‘Doublelift’ Peng has hit out at the LCS, doubling up on backlash from fans over the broadcast quality and production.

The League of Legends Championship Series, or ‘LCS’, is the premier North American franchised league for Riot’s popular MOBA title. However, following the start of the 2020 summer split, viewers claimed to notice a drop in production quality.

While the LCS broadcast crew is still yet to return to their studio, due to the ongoing health crisis, they attempted to make some improvements for the second half of the season, although it did not go down too well.

Screenshot of analyst desk from LCS broadcast
The new LCS analyst desk changes have not gone down well with viewers.

For Week 1 of the action, Riot introduced a new in-game overlay for the broadcast and added a studio backdrop for their webcams, to replicate the look of their original analyst desk.

Unfortunately, many viewers and League personalities were unhappy with the changes and called for them to revert back to the simpler graphics that were used in the 2020 Spring split instead.

Among those who voiced their frustration was TSM star Doublelift, who pointed out some of the issues with the latest changes, following his win over Immortals on June 19.

The popular Marksman player vented in a series of tweets and claimed that the LCS production team had made “every wrong decision” in terms of the broadcast, resulting in the regular season matches becoming “worse to watch.”

He added that the consistent mistakes with the in-game overlay, highlighting the wrong replay or item builds, along with some of their featured segments were not a good look for the broadcast, calling it a “clown show” in its current state.

He also explained that Ovilee May, who was seemingly left out of the talent lineup for the 2020 season, had a much better understanding of how to improve the league’s broadcast.

“Ovilee has 10x better understanding of what’s funny/entertaining than the boomer running LCS which is prob why she’s not on broadcast this split,” he explained.

Other League personalities such as popular streamer IWillDominate also commented on some of the broadcast’s flaws, highlighting that the in-game overlay was showing the LCS Academy logo for the match between CLG and Golden Guardians.

However, following the backlash in Week 1, the LCS released a statement on June 18, revealing that they will be implementing some more changes to improve the quality of the livestream going forward.

They announced that they would be addressing some of the major issues with plans to “scale back” some of the changes made to Friday Night League as well as improving the clarity on the in-game HUD to make it more appealing.