In a bit of sad news today, higher ups from the Electronic Sports League made a couple of changes to the gaming lineup for the 2011-2012 season of the Intel Extreme Masters tournament.

While saddening, the reasons why they replaced free-to-play browser FPS Quake Live with League Of Legends are pretty self explanatory: in the most simplest of explanations, the event organizers say that the game was getting a bit stale. But confusing enough, there was a massive public outcry because the game was such a popular choice for e-sport competitions such as IEM. It’s no sad fact that overall, Quake Live didn’t pull as much numbers as it used to back when it was announced and released in August of 2010, and that might have had a contributing factor to it’s removal in the IEM. Joining League Of Legends for this years IEM tournaments are staple e-sport games Counter-Strike 1.6 and StarCraft II.

League Of Legends is not as bad a game as most people will think, it being a variation of the popular mod Defense Of The Ancients (which itself runs off of Warcraft III and it’s expansion The Frozen Throne). But many wonder why the real reason Quake Live was pulled from the event, as it had decent numbers of players playing it during the tournaments. Whatever the case may be, we all know that pro-gamers will continue to play with these new changes, if only to win the $635,000 USD seasonal prize money offered by the IEM. Hopefully those who regularly play Quake Live can be good at the other games offered in the competition.

More info [Here].