Affinity: “Working with ESL Impact has been the best part of my career”

Leyna “Affinity” McQuillin is a familiar face to many in the UK scene. A staple of the stage at EPIC.LAN since 2023, she has hosted and commented on a variety of tournaments across Tier 2.

Known also for her work with ESL Impact Afinity is a champion of the women’s circuit and is sad to see the death of the flagship women’s event. That being said, she’s cautiously optimistic that the scene will bounce back, with tournaments taking Impact’s place, as well as knowing the scene has survived worse.

Affinity is also the mastermind behind the fantastic UKI awards that took place in April this year. Celebrating players and talent across the UK and Ireland, and giving those who have gone above and beyond the flowers they rightfully deserve.

Sitting down with UKCSGO, Affinity talks about how she got started in hosting and commentating. She discusses the state of the women’s scene after ESL Impact’ss demise and as well as looking to the potential future of the UKI awards.

Your first couple of events were women’s IESF qualifiers. How did you get involved with that to begin with?

So it was a group of us that had been covering ESL Premiership community casts. We were just reached out to, and it was me, SeveralSheep and CptJamesForce, and maybe VXLT was there. We’d done some ESL Prem, and we were just reached out to on a whim. It was one of my first ever paid gigs. They were like, “Hey, do you wanna cover this?” and we said absolutely.

It was my first real dip into the pond of women’s CS. I’ll level with you, the quality of the Counter-Strike was not great, but it was from a very under-represented region, so I was just excited that it had a scene in the first place. So I kind of accidentally fell into that because of ESL Prem.

After working IESF, your next work was at EPIC.LAN, what was it like coming to work at a UK LAN event?

The timeline of events of me working in esports is a bit weird. My first ever esports event was in VALORANT. It was Into Winter’s Den, which was Women in Esports and Into the Breach. I was hosting their events, which were in December 2022, and then I did my first EPIC.LAN in February 2023.

I reached out kind of on a whim. I sent a dm to the EPIC.LAN Twitter, which said, “Hey, I’m really interested in hosting. Do you have an open spot?” The person at the time who was head of the production team and bringing people on was somebody who had worked on the Into The Winters Den event. So EPIC.LAN said they’ve got a spot.

I’d never attended an EPIC.LAN, before I knew a very limited amount about EPIC.LAN coming into it. I was just reeling at the opportunity. I’ve never done EPIC.LAN as a commentator, I’ve only ever done it as a host, because hosting was my first ever passion in esports, and it’s where my passion lies. Unfortunately, there’s just not much work for it. I now come to EPIC.LAN three times a year, I love the stage team, I find the role much more enjoyable than casting here, for example.

Between EPIC 39 and 40, you started working with the flagship women’s circuit ESL Impact. You must have felt quite proud to be working the biggest women’s tournament so early on in your career.

I was very much thrown in the deep end of a very cold pool. But it was arguably the best thing that’s happened in my career, both personally and professionally. I’d casted a single best of three at EPIC 39, the Wolverhampton event, with EmenJay. What had happened was we casted really well, afterwards he sent me a message on Twitter saying “Hi, we worked really well together, would you like to do more work?” I said that I’d love to, and he then said he’d put us forward for ESL Impact. Which may have been in part to further his own career, which, in fairness, in this industry, you gotta do what you gotta do. But it was also an event I think he actually cared about as well.

I was just elated to be working on something that was A. ESL and B. The women’s scene.

It was a scene that I had been following for a while, but hadn’t really engaged with. I hopped onto that in Season 4, doing North America, and it was really stressful. It was a big jump up from the level of production I was used to. Suddenly, I had really detailed runs of shows to go through. Producers I had a lot of communication with. There was so much pre-show, and it was so intricate and step-by-step. It was a really big step up, and it was really cool to be a part of.

The moment I started casting the women’s scene, I fell in love with it. I’ve never looked back. It’s been a huge point of pride to be involved in that. Especially as the talent pool has narrowed a lot, being one of the people they have stayed with and being one of their regulars. It’s genuinely such a family over there, and the community is amazing. Working with ESL Impact has been the best part of my career, I’d say.

Since 2023, you’ve worked on many events, both commentating and hosting. Where do you see yourself taking your career in the near future?

The future of CS2 is looking a little unstable at the moment, which is always a worry. It seems there’s more and more cutbacks coming through. For the Tier 2 limbo, which is already really over-saturated, it can be quite uncomfortable and a scary thought with the future being so uncertain. I’m getting a lot more VALORANT work coming my way.

I’ve cast both CS2 and VALORANT my entire career, but I’ve always leaned towards CS2; but recently, it’s been more VALORANT. In the Tier 2 scene, there are too many casters and not enough games at the moment. So I’m thinking of moving a little bit more permanently towards VALORANT. I’ve had a VALORANT duo for a couple of months now, and I really enjoy working on the events. I enjoy the community. I’m just a little bit less involved over there at this point.

I will still cover the women’s CS scene. I don’t think there’s anything that could stop me from wanting to cover that, but that will all be off my own back on my own channel. I’ve grown to love the women’s scene, and no matter where I stray in esports, the women’s CS scene will have my heart.

With ESL Impact confirmed to be cancelled, that’s obviously going to hit the women’s CS scene quite hard. Is the women’s scene going the way of UK CS, as it now lacks that high-profile tournament that can help elevate players?

I think it’s definitely going to take us a lot of steps back, but I don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all. You’ve seen it on Twitter, too, people who have been involved with the scene from the start. I think it was BDog who said, “We’ve had setbacks like this before and we’ve always bounced back.” I think that will continue to be the case. ESL impact was really great because it gave teams like Imperial Valkyries the opportunity to play in the IEM Katowice play-ins and PGL Cluj-Napoca. It’s given the opportunity to NIP Impact to play in CCT, it’s given so many teams a lot more opportunities coz it’s a big VRS boost. The prize money also helps in enticing organisations.

With everything going pear-shaped recently, a lot more people have stepped up. There were always plans for more tournaments, but people have really amped up and tried to get these tournaments out sooner and of better quality to fill the ESL impact gap. So Elite FE have been running their tournaments, which is great, Female Pro League have stepped up, and they’ve got a LAN as well. Which means there should be some semblance of LAN for the women’s scene, which is important.

More tournaments are cropping up, and more tournaments are coming to fill the gap. It’s going to be difficult on the VRS points; it’s definitely going to make it harder to reach a wider audience with the big centre piece going, but the satellite tournaments are growing. It’s not the end, but it makes it more difficult to take that final step, which is, of course, integration. Nobody wants the scenes to remain separate forever. So it makes that integration a little bit harder.

You mentioned VALORANT earlier and how they have a more sustainable system with their Game Changers and their off-season variant. Do you see a world where players and talent like yourself jump ship to a game that has that safety net that the women’s CS scene doesn’t have?

I think that for a lot of people who relied on the women’s scene for the main source of income, it is definitely a point of interest. As I said, Tier 2’s not looking great at the moment, which, for the people that were involved in the women’s scene, they’ve now got a Tier 2 that’s unstable and a women’s scene that’s lost a large portion of funding.

It’s definitely going to be weighing on people’s minds about what their futures look like. For some people, it’s going to be taking a step away from freelancing and actually looking for work elsewhere. For some people, it’s going to be jumping games. For some people, they’re going to be lucky enough to continue having CS2 as their main source of income.

I think there are definitely a lot of people who’ve taken a look at the situation recently and have to seriously think about what comes next. Which hurts to say because so many of them are friends of mine, and they are some of the most passionate and amazing people you will meet in this industry. There’s just been a lot of reevaluating, and there are a lot of paths for people to take, but it has certainly made the road a lot harder to walk.

Moving on from ESL Impact and to the UK and Ireland awards you put on this year, talk to me about that and how it came about.

It was an idea that I’d had for a while. I’d seen the HLTV awards, and I know that loads of other countries had similar things. I saw so many people talking about how they were envious that they couldn’t go to the HLTV awards, and they wished there was something like that they could attend. It got to my final year project for university, and I chose to do an event-led research project.

I was sitting there, and I had the idea in my head of what I wanted to do. I wanted to do a red-carpet awards ceremony. I wanted to see what I could do with it. So it came about as a final year project piece. I had the idea, and I had no idea how I was going to even start tackling it. I think it went pretty well, but I was a one-woman army doing everything. It was incredibly stressful.

Do you have plans to make it a recurring thing?

I would love to, but there are a couple of factors involved in it. The venue that I got was absolutely amazing for the event, but it was also part of the University of Staffordshire’s facilities. I have now graduated, which makes it a bit more difficult. So potentially, I could convince one of the younger years to work with me and rent out the room for the event, or I could find a different venue.

One of the options I’m looking at is, I might approach EPIC.LAN and ask if I could do it as a stage segment here, which makes it more accessible for people. There’s more likely to be people there to collect their awards and give speeches. It will mean there are more people available and resources at hand to be able to make it better, in a way that I solo couldn’t do.

What did you learn from doing the UKI awards, and what kind of adjustments would you make if you were to do it again?

The big one is taking on a team of people. All the things that didn’t go well could have all been avoided by having more manpower available. The ceremony was quite short because I didn’t have time to compile a fragmove for all of these players. There was a lot where it just would have been smoother with a big team. I learnt that there is an interest in the grassroots. Even if the UK scene is struggling to breach international waters, the community at home is strong and wants to celebrate itself. There will always be a want and a need for these kinds of events. If you can get the right people together, you can put something really cool together.

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