Call Your Shot, What Do You Think? Introducing Team Siren

Part amateur team, part professional team, part crusader for equality in eSports, Team Siren has announced their entrance to the Fields of Justice with a much talked about promotional video. The self-styled "first all-female League of Legends team" is hoping to compete at the professional level, all while providing a good example for young women who might feel marginalized in the eSports world. The team is made up of Little Jenny, ilysuiteheart, Christina, Solvanas and Yoonie who are mostly all Diamond caliber players.

The team already has a gaming house, a rigorous schedule, and a clear goal, which puts them at a major advantage over other amateur teams hoping to make the jump to the pro level. They'll have to put this advantage to good use, as their first step towards legitimacy is climbing the Ranked 5s ladder. As of this being written, the team sits in Gold Division I and will have to move up through Platinum and Diamond to reach the Challenger Division, in which they can prove themselves capable of tussling with the pros. The gaming house and ladies' salary is all presumably paid for by daily streaming, which features prominently on the team's website and jumped by an order of magnitude after the publication of their hype video.

Despite the team's good intentions and positive message, reactions from the League of Legends community have been mixed. While most praise the team for attempting to establish a prominent female role in the community, some question its legitimacy and wonder if it's nothing more than a publicity stunt. Of course, some of the reaction has been outright sexist and while this is deplorable, it shouldn't be a surprise coming from a mostly anonymous internet community and perhaps only serves to emphasize the need for glass ceilings to be broken in the LoL scene. More rational detractors point to online gaming being a test of skill where gender doesn't even need to be disclosed. While more investigative detractors might point to the team's co-owners being the founder and main analyst of the online marketing firm VGMarket as evidence of the team hoping to cash in on a clever marketing scheme.

Still, giving young female gamers a role model to look up to that is their own gender can't be anything but a good thing for the development of women in the gaming community. Do the potential positives for female gamers outweigh any doubts about the authenticity of their intentions? Can the attention received based on the novelty of a female team coexist with the message of female empowerment?

Perhaps the most intriguing response to the formation of this team has come from already established professional League of Legends players. The criticism among pro and semi-pro players seems to be centered on the team's overall skill level not being realistically in line with their hype video. TSM Xpecial said in a recent vlog that:

"The only people that I can see pull that video off is a top team like maybe TSM or maybe CLG or maybe Curse or top performing teams. Those are the teams that can pull off a serious “I can beat you” or “I can outsmart you” or “I can outbait you” or [expletive deleted] like that.

Those are the players that can pull that off. Not players that have no experience in that kind of scene. It was just really bad. It honestly didn’t matter that they were girls. Take any gold level team that has players from Platinum or Diamond and that haven’t played in any tournament. Make them do a video like that and it would be equally embarrassing"

Diamond I player, and former WoW pro, Hafu was also critical of the move, pointing to gender being used to garner attention as a negative:

"I agree with (TSM manager) Leena. I think it's a step back for girls who actually want to be competitive. The fact of the matter is, they have a gaming house / get paid only because they are female. In my opinion, I think they would send a stronger message to other girl gamers if they didn't state that they planned on playing competitively."

Love them or hate them, Team Siren has gotten people talking about gender roles in eSports. I'm asking you to Call Your Shot and let me know what you think of this situation. Putting their motivations aside, is the formation of Team Siren a negative or a positive for the eSports scene? Does the backlash against an all-female team only highlight the need for such a discussion? Or is the backlash centered mostly on their hype video being unwarranted due to their current ranking and skill level? Would female gamers be better off breaking into the professional scene by integrating into an existing professional team rather than segregating themselves into an all-female squad?

As always, I'll be rounding up the most thought-provoking comments left here, or tweeted to me @Mitch_Tilk, and including them in the next segment.