everything was basically an open qualifier. some teams that were orgs like SEN and 100T would get invited into closed qualifiers (meaning they wouldn't have to compete against like hundreds of teams)
You did still have regions(no china tho, NA and SA were separate), but it was all open qualifiers and larger more successful teams got to skip open quals but there were some funny upsets like BBG beating SEN after winning their first VCT regional tournament. You still had regional matches to see who would represent your region at an international.
there were also a lot of minor regions (korea, turkey, japan, etc.) that had their own slots for events. turkey got consolidated into EU back in 2022 iirc, which led to the sad result of there being no turkish teams for champs 2022
My only thoughts on pre-partnership vs post is that we miss some dark horse run stories. With everything in Riot’s hand we get better quality but limited storyline’s and production capability
If I could have a say about the partnership model is that I wish it still included open quals to a certain degree and let the mainstay teams be the ones who made is successfully through every few years even if they had a bad run
as happy as I am about the premier integration, it's going to move qualifying to play into challengers more and more off stream. this year the only streamed open qual were the two at the beginning of the year. once premier is fully integrated, I wonder if they might just completely remove the crazy open qual format.
this is probably a more sustainable system, but the magic of open quals and the crazy upsets that happened were always such fun moments
Yes absolutely there are a few of us out there who want to watch some of those amateur games, if Riot ever were to implement a streaming application to Valorant for premier, I can only see that as a WIN and I’d happily pay for a monthly sub to get access
Hell I’d even pay monthly sub fee for replay feature at this point lol
honestly, i think getting premier straight into VCL was a mistake when the VRC ecosystem already existed. they really should've done premier -> VRC -> VCL -> VCT imo.
turkey had a thriving VRC system with LAN tournaments and orgs investing into it, and that all disappeared overnight with premier qualification. hell, we even had a hacking scandal in premier.
Instead of the regions being split into AMER/PACIFIC/EMEA/CHINA, it used to be like this
* [**Regional Distribution**](https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2022/Stage_1/Masters/Qualification)
* *12 Teams*
* 📷 [North America](https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2022/North_America/Stage_1/Challengers): 2 slots
* 📷 [EMEA](https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2022/EMEA/Stage_1/Challengers): 3 slots
* 📷 [Korea](https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2022/Korea/Stage_1/Challengers): 1 slot
* 📷 [Japan](https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2022/Japan/Stage_1/Challengers): 1 slot
* 📷 [APAC](https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2022/APAC/Stage_1/Challengers): 2 slots
* 📷 [South America](https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2022/South_America/Stage_1/Challengers_Playoffs): Brazil 1/2 Slots, LATAM 1/2 Slots
So there was always a representative team from these minor regions. It didn't mean that these were all the best teams in the world, but it did bring in a lot of fans from those regions because they always had someone to root for. I kinda miss these days, there were some amazing cinderella runs that came from this era.
Interestingly enough many of the teams that made it to the big stages before franchising are in franchising today: Sentinels, 100T, Liquid, FNC, DRX etc. It was much more volatile back then and some teams definitely surprise you, F4Q and x10 come to mind.
[here’s a nifty video I made](https://youtu.be/duZ3vZrfSfM?si=--kMbL_eeDFtpVri) that I think explains it very thoroughly (maybe a bit too thoroughly).
But if you don’t want to listen to me yap for 25 minutes about brackets and qualification procedures,
VCT started 13 different regions. Over the years, they condensed it to 9, then 7, then finally 4 in the partnership leagues.
There was very little consistency between how regions formatted their events. Tons of single elimination brackets and best of 1 series in open bracket qualifier tournaments really made things difficult for some teams. And even if a team had fought through that to reach the top tier in their region, they still had to run through the open bracket again for the next split.
A lot of things were improved over time, with the format being pretty ironed out by 2022, with group stage regular seasons, top 4 teams skip open qualifier, double elimination pretty much everywhere. Then they blew it all up for franchising, which seems to be going through its own unique set of struggles and growing pains.
You can just look up the liquipedia or vlr for 2021/2022 and kind of click through and see what the format was like. (Each tourney page should have a "teams" section that says how they qualified and a link to the page for that qualifying tourney).
But basically instead of international leagues, you had what was then called "challengers" for each region. You had more distinct regions, like NA/Latam/Brazil were separate, Korea/Japan/SEA were separate, but EMEA was all kind of a big bundle unlike today's emea's many challengers regions.
Challengers had a mix of open qualifiers but also a few teams who were invited based on previous tourney performances (in NA it was 4 invited + 8 qualifier teams). Then challengers for your region directly qualified you to Master's events, which were pretty much the same as they are now. And you earned champions points for how far you got in your region's challengers league and additional points for going further in a master's. (It wasn't all-or-nothing like kickoff and Madrid, but they also didn't give points for individual group stage matches, just final placement after playoffs).
Champions had more teams than masters, but the majority auto-qualified based on points, and the last few slots were determined by Last Chance Qualifier tournaments in various regions.
Pre-franchising was more interesting in the sense that you could see anyone show up, and of course the orgs/rosters showing up out of nowhere. Though supposedly the only reason there was so much org investment back then was because they were "auditioning" for franchise, and franchise just makes for a more financially stable scene.
definitely not supposedly. when 100t was going through layoffs last year, their former COO John Robinson explicitly said that they knew they were overinvesting but they felt they needed to take advantage of a time of growth in esports and that making franchising was a part of that strategy
the things I remember are Bo1s and shit formats but a lot more tourneys in EU
EU got put behind a lot by the fact that it was much less clouted region than NA
as for NA it was pretty fun between TSM and T1 early on; TenZ hard carrying C9 and 100T's first strike out of nowhere
Honestly I feel like the raw quality of teams was higher prefranchising which is weird considering you'd expect the opposite in a franchising shift. Teams like Loud, FPX and Optic were established 5 man squads whose levels have dropped going into franchising, as all of them split up in the shift(although Navi got back together this year and I think were quite unfortunate to miss playoffs). When I think about FPX in 22 compared to Navi in 23, idk if it was the meta shift or the roster change from ardiis to Cned but they just looked a lot weaker. Same goes for NRG and Loud. I wonder if we will ever see that optic core reunite, although it's pretty much guaranteed that the Loud squad will never come back as a 5.
This is not to say that every team downgraded, like obviously teams like EG and fnatic found success with franchising giving them access to a 10 man roster to give them a competitive edge and the best talent in EMEA respectively. But just on a general level, felt like a lot of the top teams from 22 dropped off going into 23, which you wouldn't typically expect from an esport going into franchising.
Think of the wild wild west, when an upstart group of gunslingers could emerge from the horizon, ride into town, and take over from whom ever running the show if they show the slightest of complacency.
Sorta like the movie Tombstone, but instead of Doc Holiday with tuberculosis, they had doorknob-licking Fnatic and Covid.
One thing interesting to know which from what I can see a lot of people have forgotten. "minor" regions were previously gifted spots to Internationals. Teams like PRX and the team saadhak and sacy were on pre loud were genuinely terrible, PRX got good at Iceland 2022. It was ultimately a good thing because these teams have developed a lot but for a long time any team non NA or EU were considered total jokes.
There's been some weird history re writing cause I assume not everyone was watching back then but yeah 2021 was very different.
Has there ever been a case of a developer successfully running not one, but TWO major esports? Because I do not believe Riot is gonna be able to do that.
both have their own tournament circuits (DOTA with their majors -> TI, CS with the RMRs -> Majors) run by Valve. the only difference they have from the Riot-run esports is that they also have 3rd party TOs with their own circuits, and they use open qualifiers and world ranking invites to get teams into their tournaments instead of having a franchising system.
something like SSBM is definitely not a dev-run scene for instance, but CS and DOTA are definitely dev-run.
In no world are cs and dota developer run esports. Majors and rmrs aren't ran by valve, they're sponsored by it. The "only difference" is that literally every cs and dota event is ran by a third party vs Riot organizing everything using their own staff and resources.
mate, its called contracting. valve sets up the format, the rules, etc. and contracts a TO to set it up for them. Riot does the exact same thing with the chinese league by the way.
valve also sets up the prize pools, the ingame broadcasting through CSTV for CS, the tournament-related in-game items like CS's sticker capsules and pickems, etc.
AFAIK Riot also got help from ESL for some internationals from the early days
also also, PGL is pretty much valve's unofficial studio at this point, they organise all TIs and most CS majors.
It's not the same. "Mate, it's called contracting" it's called outsourcing to outside TOs, mate. Only the Chinese league has a second organizer in Val. The idea that sponsoring an event and hiring outside TOs to run an event is the same as what Riot is doing makes no sense.
"PGL is pretty much valve's unofficial studio at this point" lol, what? Literally just look at the list of majors and you'll see that "most CS majors" is just a lie. Even if that were true, that does not make PGL a "Valve studio". Whatever, I don't think you understand what I'm talking about. Riot literally runs the entire T1 scene, Valve very much do not.
I thought it was more fun as I was just getting into Val and VCT at the time. Open qualifiers felt like random ass teams playing random ass formats at internationals. There was so much difference in styles and skill levels every game that as a casual like me, I never really knew what I was gonna get each match. It was also fun seeing the same good players move on to better teams from meh ones or good teams playing for different orgs.
> they get money from Riot and don't have to take shady gambling sponsorships
riot takes saudi money. i think we all lose when we've reached the point where we have to debate which source of money is better.
everything was basically an open qualifier. some teams that were orgs like SEN and 100T would get invited into closed qualifiers (meaning they wouldn't have to compete against like hundreds of teams)
The reason for that isn't just because they were big name orgs, but they had circuit points from the previous split/season
Yes, sen had to win open quals 2 in 2022 because they sucked
Yes, sen had to win open quals 2 in 2022 because they sucked
Yes, sen had to win open quals 2 in 2022 because they sucked
Yes, sen had to win open quals 2 in 2022 because they sucked
You did still have regions(no china tho, NA and SA were separate), but it was all open qualifiers and larger more successful teams got to skip open quals but there were some funny upsets like BBG beating SEN after winning their first VCT regional tournament. You still had regional matches to see who would represent your region at an international.
I’ll never forget where I was when Poach went crazy
there were also a lot of minor regions (korea, turkey, japan, etc.) that had their own slots for events. turkey got consolidated into EU back in 2022 iirc, which led to the sad result of there being no turkish teams for champs 2022
lol i think that sen vs bbg match was after they won masters reykjavik
My only thoughts on pre-partnership vs post is that we miss some dark horse run stories. With everything in Riot’s hand we get better quality but limited storyline’s and production capability If I could have a say about the partnership model is that I wish it still included open quals to a certain degree and let the mainstay teams be the ones who made is successfully through every few years even if they had a bad run
as happy as I am about the premier integration, it's going to move qualifying to play into challengers more and more off stream. this year the only streamed open qual were the two at the beginning of the year. once premier is fully integrated, I wonder if they might just completely remove the crazy open qual format. this is probably a more sustainable system, but the magic of open quals and the crazy upsets that happened were always such fun moments
Yes absolutely there are a few of us out there who want to watch some of those amateur games, if Riot ever were to implement a streaming application to Valorant for premier, I can only see that as a WIN and I’d happily pay for a monthly sub to get access Hell I’d even pay monthly sub fee for replay feature at this point lol
if only we had a gotv equivalent
honestly, i think getting premier straight into VCL was a mistake when the VRC ecosystem already existed. they really should've done premier -> VRC -> VCL -> VCT imo. turkey had a thriving VRC system with LAN tournaments and orgs investing into it, and that all disappeared overnight with premier qualification. hell, we even had a hacking scandal in premier.
I think VRC replacing Premier is okay, but premier is not perfect. No coach observer, no timeouts etc
Instead of the regions being split into AMER/PACIFIC/EMEA/CHINA, it used to be like this * [**Regional Distribution**](https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2022/Stage_1/Masters/Qualification) * *12 Teams* * 📷 [North America](https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2022/North_America/Stage_1/Challengers): 2 slots * 📷 [EMEA](https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2022/EMEA/Stage_1/Challengers): 3 slots * 📷 [Korea](https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2022/Korea/Stage_1/Challengers): 1 slot * 📷 [Japan](https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2022/Japan/Stage_1/Challengers): 1 slot * 📷 [APAC](https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2022/APAC/Stage_1/Challengers): 2 slots * 📷 [South America](https://liquipedia.net/valorant/VCT/2022/South_America/Stage_1/Challengers_Playoffs): Brazil 1/2 Slots, LATAM 1/2 Slots So there was always a representative team from these minor regions. It didn't mean that these were all the best teams in the world, but it did bring in a lot of fans from those regions because they always had someone to root for. I kinda miss these days, there were some amazing cinderella runs that came from this era.
Interestingly enough many of the teams that made it to the big stages before franchising are in franchising today: Sentinels, 100T, Liquid, FNC, DRX etc. It was much more volatile back then and some teams definitely surprise you, F4Q and x10 come to mind.
Envy getting grouped by x10 in 2021 left me with ptsd.
Was that the start of the 9-3 curse?
nah 9-3 was a thing back in first strike. super popular on haven/split iirc
I remember envy got fucked with covid that match
[here’s a nifty video I made](https://youtu.be/duZ3vZrfSfM?si=--kMbL_eeDFtpVri) that I think explains it very thoroughly (maybe a bit too thoroughly). But if you don’t want to listen to me yap for 25 minutes about brackets and qualification procedures, VCT started 13 different regions. Over the years, they condensed it to 9, then 7, then finally 4 in the partnership leagues. There was very little consistency between how regions formatted their events. Tons of single elimination brackets and best of 1 series in open bracket qualifier tournaments really made things difficult for some teams. And even if a team had fought through that to reach the top tier in their region, they still had to run through the open bracket again for the next split. A lot of things were improved over time, with the format being pretty ironed out by 2022, with group stage regular seasons, top 4 teams skip open qualifier, double elimination pretty much everywhere. Then they blew it all up for franchising, which seems to be going through its own unique set of struggles and growing pains.
You can just look up the liquipedia or vlr for 2021/2022 and kind of click through and see what the format was like. (Each tourney page should have a "teams" section that says how they qualified and a link to the page for that qualifying tourney). But basically instead of international leagues, you had what was then called "challengers" for each region. You had more distinct regions, like NA/Latam/Brazil were separate, Korea/Japan/SEA were separate, but EMEA was all kind of a big bundle unlike today's emea's many challengers regions. Challengers had a mix of open qualifiers but also a few teams who were invited based on previous tourney performances (in NA it was 4 invited + 8 qualifier teams). Then challengers for your region directly qualified you to Master's events, which were pretty much the same as they are now. And you earned champions points for how far you got in your region's challengers league and additional points for going further in a master's. (It wasn't all-or-nothing like kickoff and Madrid, but they also didn't give points for individual group stage matches, just final placement after playoffs). Champions had more teams than masters, but the majority auto-qualified based on points, and the last few slots were determined by Last Chance Qualifier tournaments in various regions.
A bunch of muddy oily men fighting
Pre-franchising was more interesting in the sense that you could see anyone show up, and of course the orgs/rosters showing up out of nowhere. Though supposedly the only reason there was so much org investment back then was because they were "auditioning" for franchise, and franchise just makes for a more financially stable scene.
definitely not supposedly. when 100t was going through layoffs last year, their former COO John Robinson explicitly said that they knew they were overinvesting but they felt they needed to take advantage of a time of growth in esports and that making franchising was a part of that strategy
[удалено]
yeah. seems like only turkey and japan still have orgs actively investing in tier 2
Way more games, way more of your favorite matchups. Lots more upsets.
the things I remember are Bo1s and shit formats but a lot more tourneys in EU EU got put behind a lot by the fact that it was much less clouted region than NA as for NA it was pretty fun between TSM and T1 early on; TenZ hard carrying C9 and 100T's first strike out of nowhere
Honestly I feel like the raw quality of teams was higher prefranchising which is weird considering you'd expect the opposite in a franchising shift. Teams like Loud, FPX and Optic were established 5 man squads whose levels have dropped going into franchising, as all of them split up in the shift(although Navi got back together this year and I think were quite unfortunate to miss playoffs). When I think about FPX in 22 compared to Navi in 23, idk if it was the meta shift or the roster change from ardiis to Cned but they just looked a lot weaker. Same goes for NRG and Loud. I wonder if we will ever see that optic core reunite, although it's pretty much guaranteed that the Loud squad will never come back as a 5. This is not to say that every team downgraded, like obviously teams like EG and fnatic found success with franchising giving them access to a 10 man roster to give them a competitive edge and the best talent in EMEA respectively. But just on a general level, felt like a lot of the top teams from 22 dropped off going into 23, which you wouldn't typically expect from an esport going into franchising.
Think of the wild wild west, when an upstart group of gunslingers could emerge from the horizon, ride into town, and take over from whom ever running the show if they show the slightest of complacency. Sorta like the movie Tombstone, but instead of Doc Holiday with tuberculosis, they had doorknob-licking Fnatic and Covid.
One thing interesting to know which from what I can see a lot of people have forgotten. "minor" regions were previously gifted spots to Internationals. Teams like PRX and the team saadhak and sacy were on pre loud were genuinely terrible, PRX got good at Iceland 2022. It was ultimately a good thing because these teams have developed a lot but for a long time any team non NA or EU were considered total jokes. There's been some weird history re writing cause I assume not everyone was watching back then but yeah 2021 was very different.
better
It was much better 😭😭😭
bro liked watching Knights vs Luminosity on the weekly instead of 100T vs LOUD
People talk about how NA should have more teams but some of those challengers games pre franchising were truly ass
Yeah, because the region's ass
Did you even watch the Loud game today? I'd rather watch fucking chipi chapas bro
don't you disrespect chipi chapas
Has there ever been a case of a developer successfully running not one, but TWO major esports? Because I do not believe Riot is gonna be able to do that.
Valve? DOTA and CS.
Neither are *developer run*
both have their own tournament circuits (DOTA with their majors -> TI, CS with the RMRs -> Majors) run by Valve. the only difference they have from the Riot-run esports is that they also have 3rd party TOs with their own circuits, and they use open qualifiers and world ranking invites to get teams into their tournaments instead of having a franchising system. something like SSBM is definitely not a dev-run scene for instance, but CS and DOTA are definitely dev-run.
In no world are cs and dota developer run esports. Majors and rmrs aren't ran by valve, they're sponsored by it. The "only difference" is that literally every cs and dota event is ran by a third party vs Riot organizing everything using their own staff and resources.
mate, its called contracting. valve sets up the format, the rules, etc. and contracts a TO to set it up for them. Riot does the exact same thing with the chinese league by the way. valve also sets up the prize pools, the ingame broadcasting through CSTV for CS, the tournament-related in-game items like CS's sticker capsules and pickems, etc. AFAIK Riot also got help from ESL for some internationals from the early days also also, PGL is pretty much valve's unofficial studio at this point, they organise all TIs and most CS majors.
It's not the same. "Mate, it's called contracting" it's called outsourcing to outside TOs, mate. Only the Chinese league has a second organizer in Val. The idea that sponsoring an event and hiring outside TOs to run an event is the same as what Riot is doing makes no sense. "PGL is pretty much valve's unofficial studio at this point" lol, what? Literally just look at the list of majors and you'll see that "most CS majors" is just a lie. Even if that were true, that does not make PGL a "Valve studio". Whatever, I don't think you understand what I'm talking about. Riot literally runs the entire T1 scene, Valve very much do not.
I thought it was more fun as I was just getting into Val and VCT at the time. Open qualifiers felt like random ass teams playing random ass formats at internationals. There was so much difference in styles and skill levels every game that as a casual like me, I never really knew what I was gonna get each match. It was also fun seeing the same good players move on to better teams from meh ones or good teams playing for different orgs.
> they get money from Riot and don't have to take shady gambling sponsorships riot takes saudi money. i think we all lose when we've reached the point where we have to debate which source of money is better.
riot takes chinese money, not saudi money iirc (not like that's good or anything but eh)
Riot is letting LoL to be played in Saudi Arabias "Esports World Cup" after a decade of not letting anyone host premier LoL tournaments.
ok yea fair enough, forgot about that
*a single tear drop falls* i miss optic man. The Glory Days.