One of League of Legends’ iconic players and personalities is finally hanging up his mouse.
Mitch “Krepo” Voorspoels, most recently filling the support role for European side Elements, announced he’s retiring as a professional player yesterday in a lengthy Facebook post detailing his relationship with the game.
“League of Legends is the best thing that ever happened to me,” Voorspoels wrote. “I’ve had a pretty awesome career looking back.”
Voorspoels joined Elements midway through the League Championship Series (LCS) season after taking a break from competition, joining the struggling 4-6 team with the hopes that his leadership could turn their season around. But they went 3-5 with Voorspoels in the lineup, leading to the Belgian player’s third straight seventh-place finish in the LCS.
According to Elements, the team wanted Voorspoels to stay with the team one more season. But the player knew it was time quit.
Voorspoels says that he’s been having less and less fun in League of Legends. “I’ve always said the moment playing this game stops being fun and feels like a grind, I’ll retire,” he explains. “And I think that moment has finally come.”
The support has a long history in League of Legends. He was one of the core members of the Counter Logic Gaming Europe lineup that took the scene by storm in 2012, winning Dreamhack Summer in June and following it up with an amazing feat, a second-place finish in Korea’s Champions league. The team placed in the top four at the Season 2 World Championship, one of the top squads in the game.
The following year the squad competed in the first two splits of the League Championship Series under the Evil Geniuses banner, but a third- and fourth-place finish saw the team split. Voorspoels and two of his teammates, Stephen “Snoopeh” Ellis and Peter “Yellowpete” Wuppen, moved to America to compete in the American version of the league, inheriting the roster spot of Velocity esports and winning a relegation series to stay in the league.
Through 2014, though, Evil Geniuses never saw success. The team was relegated after placing seventh in each of two LCS splits. While they managed to stay in the league, the results weren’t enough for Voorspoels, who left the team in Oct., happy to escape an “incredibly unhealthy and at times depressing in-house environment.”
It looked like that may be the end of Voorspoels playing days, his likable personable and in-game knowledge making him a shoe-in for a spot on Riot Games’ analysis desk.
But when Elements, led by his former Counter Logic Gaming mid laner Henrik “Froggen” Hansen was in trouble, Voorspoels answered the call, taking over shot calling duties and hoping to fix a squad that seemed to lack an identity in-game. But it was only enough to win Voorspoels his third straight seventh place finish in the LCS, this time narrowly staving off relegation.
“I’ve always wanted to be recognized as a great player. I think I truly can be (or could’ve been), or perhaps even am, in some ways,” he said. “This year I somehow wanted to prove it to myself and the community.”
The support player is a popular staple of the analyst desk on many Riot broadcasts, and hopes to continue that as a possible career path past competition.
“It’s pretty daunting to realize that I’ll never play a competitive League of Legends match ever again, but I just have to look at it positively, starting another chapter in the story that’s my life.”
Photo via Riot Games/Flickr
