FlyQuest president explains why LoL team is streaming scrims

FlyQuest is breaking the mold by publicly streaming its League of Legends scrims against other professional esports teams, lowering the barrier to entry for upcoming players. 

In an announcement featuring Christopher “PapaSmithy” Smith, FlyQuest’s president and chief gaming officer said that starting this week, the LTA North squad will stream one scrim on Tuesday every week on their Twitch channel at 1:45 pm CT.

“Here’s the deal. We’ll have fully-streamed scrims spectated with player comms, video, and VOD reviews. We want to give you guys that full behind-the-scenes experience,” PapaSmithy said in the video, adding that the organization will push the players to stream their POV in the matches on their Twitch channels.

PapaSmithy referred to bringing the fandom to the “rest of 95 percent of the fans” who came to know about FlyQuest from the epic five-match series between Gen.G and FlyQuest in Worlds 2024, when the North American team almost pushed the Korean powerhouse out of the tournament. According to the Esports Charts, over 3.5 million fans across the globe watched the series.

The unfiltered look at players such as Bwipo, Inspired, Quad, Massu, and Busio should help fans feel more connected to FlyQuest.

Historically, scrims between professional esports teams have always been conducted behind closed doors. Most teams prefer to keep their strategies and results secret until they appear on the big stage. Many teams also use scrims to experiment with different team comps.

PapaSmithy is aware of the consequences of streaming scrims. “There are certainly comparative trade-offs with streaming scrims, but the worse case of giving our opponents the ammunition to improve and challenge us on stage ensures our practice will be categorically be better,” he said.

Another reason FlyQuest is opting to stream scrims publicly is to “demystify” the process for many tier-two, Collegiate, and amateur esports teams. This will help them refine their approaches and, hopefully, decrease the barrier to entry into American esports. 

The first scrims took place on Feb. 4. FlyQuest locked horns against Cloud9, and the live streams peaked at over 50,000 viewers. If you can’t watch the live streams, you can always tune into the FlyQuest YouTube channel for the VODs.