Surrender at 20
| Surrender at 20 | |
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| URL | https://www.surrenderat20.net/ |
| Status | Endangered |
| Archiving status | Saved! (excluding Disqus comments) |
| Archiving type | ArchiveBot |
| IRC channel | #archiveteam-bs (on hackint) |
Surrender at 20 (also referred to as S@20, a play on "surrendering at 20 [minutes]" which was later officially reduced to 15) is a community-run news website focusing on Riot Games' League of Legends, which started in February 2011. It also features teardowns of updates to its Public Beta Environment or PBE. S@20 is run by moobeat alongside others, including Aznbeat, Uli (behind the SkinSpotlights YouTube channel), woops, and FrostyNinja, plus other contributors who have since moved on to other projects/ventures. The site's funding model is a mix of both on-site advertising and user donations (including the use of Patreon), and utilizes Google's Blogger platform as its host/CMS.
Possible permanent hiatus/shutdown
S@20's activities came to a very sudden halt on November 14th, 2022. At about mid-day the same day, moobeat posted the following to his Twitter account:
not very on brand but life sucks major shit right now. my marriage, my life, and certainly the website/livelihood feel like they've fallen apart beyond repair in last year. not sure who i am, what to do, where to go.... or even why.
sorry i couldnt be better n shit. love yall[1]
While these remarks were cause for a bit of concern from followers, 11 days later Aznbeat posted a comment of her own in response to people noticing the site screeched to a halt, effectively saying that she was terribly burned out and alleging that moobeat has also lost interest in maintaining the site:
yo guys. expect a full explanation? sometime from moo, but here's mine
I have been running the site since 2015~ after moo had a long hospital stay. I had no interest in league, nor will I. I did it because that's how we paid our bills. I started a full time job (career?) a year ago, while also still trying to keep it going.
I am and have been fully mentally exhausted with this site. league is dumb, community is dumb, social media is dumb. I'm over it.
moo has the power to work on it if he wants, but he doesn't want to either. unless by some miracle he ever decides to take some responsibility for it, then don't expect any more coverage from us.
I'm 33, and I have put off years of my life for this thing I hate. not doing it anymore lol. peace out[2]
This has led to great concern about the overall longevity of Surrender at 20 as its domain is currently scheduled to expire relatively soon on July 13, 2023, and there are no immediately clear answers as to who, if anybody, would be able to commit to continue running the site. Alternative sites that also provided PBE coverage such as News of Legends and Reign of Gaming have also long since ceased running. Unless a new competitor or teardown specialist from another game were to take up PBE coverage, this situation leaves the LoL community with a break in service continuity for aspects other than new champions and their skins (which would still be provided by SkinSpotlights, albeit only in video form as opposed to S@20's images).
Archival
Owing to the grave concerns about the site's long-term future, S@20 was put through ArchiveBot on November 29th and with the exception of Disqus comments on posts (due to Disqus' heavy reliance on Javascript), the site has been saved and will continue to be viewable through the Wayback Machine in the event that the domain is not auto-renewed in 2023.
