Your Korean Baseball Organization champs are the NC Dinos — so named because Guild Wars publisher NCSoft established and owns the team. Today the Dinos celebrated their 4-2 Korean Series triumph over the Doosan Bears as only their team could — with an enormous prop sword from NCSoft’s Lineage MMO franchise.
According to Sung Min Kim, an American sports writer formerly of The Athletic and currently in the front office of the KBO’s Lotte Giants, that there is the Execution Sword (집행검). It’s basically the game’s most powerful item.
The NCSoft, the parent company of the NC Dinos, is well-known for their mobile games, including the acclaimed “Lineage” series. One of the biggest items in the game is the big sword (집행검) and it is brought to life in the ceremony. #KBO https://t.co/4v033TpjTx
— Sung Min Kim (@sung_minkim) November 24, 2020
Lineage debuted in 1998, and was followed by Lineage 2 in 2003. It was NCSoft’s first game, first big hit, and longest-running game, so it makes sense the team’s ownership would celebrate with an artifact from that world. It puts the ordinary old KBO League trophy to shame, too. Peep its total weakness:
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The KBO League caught on with baseball fans in this hemisphere, mainly through ESPN, during Major League Baseball’s COVID-imposed shutdown over the spring. North Carolina’s minor league Durham Bulls, sidelined entirely by the virus, adopted the NC Dinos as a rooting interest (for the team’s first two initials, naturally).
The NC Dinos are the KBO League’s second-newest team, chartered shortly after the cities of Changwon, Masan, and Jinhae merged into a municipality large enough to host such a franchise. The Dinos joined the KBO League in 2013, and this is their first championship.
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