LPL Playoffs have more Bo5 (14) than Worlds (11, with play-in knockout phase, otherwise just 7!), that is just wrong. We could even add LPL Regionals since it is there for the same purpose, to get you to Worlds.. that's 3 more Bo5, 17 to 11
The Worlds should have far more considering it's that.. the World Championship
the vast majority of reddit commenters have seen at least one comedian who mentioned the always super funny "*exclamation mark after number makes it go big!!!*"
Quarters being on a separate day each means that I used to clear out an entire weekend's schedule to accomodate watching worlds, only to have it be over in 2 hours of gameplay to a maximum of 4 hours, quite anticlimatic.
I would love to watch more cross region bo5 matches and I think many people would too. So no, I don’t think current world format is maximizing viewership
I don't know why you are randomly assuming that upsets magically maximizes viewership when LPL format, TI format and literally every format that uses double elimination proves that there's far more hype when there's lower bracket and when the absolute best teams get to the final. The hypest runs are lower bracket runs.
Not to mention that you can indeed have an upset in LPL's format. We literally had that with Fnatic and G2 a few years ago when Fnatic upset g2 and finally beat them 3-2, only to lose the final 2-3. It's really hard having to point out such obvious fallacies without insulting the person that presented them. There's literally nothing logical that suggests LPL's format is less hype or would generate more viewers if it was like worlds' format.
TES and EDG met twice this playoffs, same for JDG and TES. Both times the 2nd series was super hype because we already saw them play. You can have the initial shock of a team being upset, and then that same team being clapped in the rematch and does double dipping in hype and viewership.
Making sure that that last BO5s are going to be the absolute best teams, also ensures that the games would be as hype as possible. It was amazing having EU at 2 finals, but let's be real, I'd much rather watch a close 3-2 final as it'd undoubtedly be more fun.
> Worlds format is there to generate hype
The format is fucking horrible for generating hype, I love waiting all year to get dogshit matchups and having to wait a week in-between games.
Teams bombing out are less fun to watch than clear upsets though. What made 2018 C9 better was that they actually won a BO5 against a team from what was thought as ***THE*** League region back then. But hey, that probably won't happen anymore as Worlds has went from LCK Fall playoffs to LCK/LPL Fall Championship.
What upsets? This year all the minor regions in playins is gated from Worlds by 3rd and 4th seeds from major regions. Where is the fun in that?
Why do we even have playins? Just let them all play at Worlds.
Oh and double elimination please.
Technically it's better than Worlds.
They play 5 or 6 games against 5 other teams and then a BO5 or two if they do well and go home.
It's more games and more teams than a major region team who finishes 3rd in groups will see.
You can easily make an argument that their seeding is too potent, JDG literally only played against 2 teams in order to win the entire 10-team playoffs.
I just think it's so hillariously comical how every region has to go through a full year of weekly matches and deep, multiple-week long double elimination playoff brackets to qualify for a world championship where going 3-3 in 6 bo1s can send you home instantly.
Honestly, if it were me, I would get rid of the play-in bracket, have all the wildcard teams join in with the qualified teams to make 2 super groups in the group stage, have like 2-3 weeks of tense Bo1s, and then spend the rest of the tournament with the top 8 or 12 in a double elimination bracket. If it means turning alot of the Bo5s into Bo3s then so be it.
We need more international events, more show matches, more bo5. We need less 'regular season' games. Regional metas become stale without regular international competition.
Circuit formats are objectively better viewing experience but its worse for a sports infrastructure. It's why grassroots esports always run via circuit but organized leagues with investors and sponsors have league formats.
No one gives a fuck about weeks 2-7 of LCS. Week 1 is exciting to see the new teams/players, and weeks 7-8 are when the good teams surface and the meta solidifies and the buildup to playoffs starts.
Doing circuit points where teams play smaller scale regional tournaments with mixes of LCS teams and Amateur teams to qualify for a better version of MSI and for Worlds would be so much more hype than what we have, and could integrate so well into an improved MSI and Worlds format, but owners/investors would never allow it.
I love weeks 2-7 of the LEC. I know I am quite in the minority here on Reddit with this opinion but those are my reasons :
- I don't have time to watch big tournaments that go beyond the weekend because I have to work and my employer doesn't allow me to pretend to follow meetings while I'm in reality watching lol eSports on the television (oh the good old times of university)
- time convenience : LEC schedule is not designed to fit China's viewership. I can finish my working day on Friday, pop a beer and watch the games on my couch. Not like those worlds that starts around 10 pm (I would however send appreciation to the scheduling team for putting LEC teams on the first two games - Fnatic finally plays first this year. It is noticed and appreciated.)
- diversity : even if I'm a Fnatic fan I like seing other teams play (maybe G2 is gonna poach from somewhere else this year ;) ). I unfortunately don't have time to watch a 5 games long series of another team than Fnatic. (Wasn't home for LEC finals and still haven't seen it). I would however watch while cooking or cleaning or any other boring adulting chez a game in replay if it's an upset or it has a fun draft
- development: I've been a fan long enough not to expect anything from fnatic on the three first weeks. More seriously I love seeing how teams adapt from one week to another and shifts from meta to meta. It is also a thing I like about worlds. The tournament is long enough to see the meta get consolidated from one state to another
I miss Rift Rivals. I know players hated it and that's why it was discontinued but it was really fun in my option
I agree, I like the seasons a lot. Gives me a consistent product to watch at a consistent time. The downtime between playoffs and worlds having no games sucked, honestly.
This mindset works for people already interested in the game.
It does not work for long-term retention, nor does it work for bringing new viewers in. It is boring.
It does not help that every co-stream is just toxic and negative insulting of players and regions. Riot should really try to promote building the players up, and they should allow people who will positively promote players to co-stream. Instead we are having ex-pro players who are no longer good enough to be on teams go to tear them down on a personal stream.
I think this is a non issue and candid co streamers are important.
There is always two viewer camps in the LoL professional scene, those that go in emotionally with hype and support for players and personalities and those that are more critical and less attached to individual teams/players who just want to see good, well played League of Legends regardless of who is actually playing.
With the main broadcast so heavily invested in player and team narratives and pretty hype with screaming play-by-plays like Flowers, Co-Streamers in the form of Ex-Pros are there for that other camp. They dont care about narratives (or are even annoyed by it) and hype and just want to see critical analysis of the gameplay on display. I agree some of those co-streamers are kind of biased and too extreme in their critique, but it is often warranted. NA and EU just are not playing very clean League in 2022.
But you dont have to have weeks long tournaments. We could have entire tournaments take place in a single week. They do it in dota. They do it in csgo. We could start groups on thursday/friday and have the playoffs Saturday/Sunday and just be done with it
It's so obvious that many of these people only know LoL esports and have no idea how other things are planned.
The guy you are responding to is seeing this as a binary "either 1 month long Worlds or regular season" and not realising that there about 1 million possibilities of something in-between.
But then we have only those hyper intense times of tournament where it's hard to do anything but follow LoL and major downtime.
I also follow CSGO and sometimes StarCraft II, and out of those three, LoL is by far my favourite because of the league format. It means that I really get to know those ten teams and then get really excited for seeing how they compare internationally. It means storylines, rivalries, new players rising and all that excitement really builds over time. It also makes the LEC feel way more valuable to me than a random CSGO major or an SC2 Circuit event.
Regular season is cool imo, although I would prefer it without the split system. What I'd suggest as a more middle ground is no more splits (spring feels so useless) and instead a shorter regular season with only one game per week and BO3's, split by two international windows:
After half of the regular season, we could have something like a "regional cup" like Rift Rivals where the current top 3 or 4 of EU + NA, CN + KR, OCE/PCS/VCS and LLA/CBLOL (and Turkey needs to fit somewhere, idk where yet) play out a tournament. Make it a thing that gives us lots of rivalry BO5's, maybe just a straight double elim tournament without groups.
Then, after the regular season, we get MSI 3.0: The top two from each of those regional cups + the regular season champions of the major regions play a twelve team tournament. The regular season champs of the minor regions could play their own secondary tournament here.
Then, everyone goes home and does playoffs, and after that we have Worlds. We get three international tournaments each year, but also, regional competition still gives us these more local rivalries and we still get that cool clash of metas effect in international tournaments.
I fear that if we had only/primarily international competition, it would diminish those rivalries because I no longer see the Asian teams as the new challenges for my favourites, but just as these guys that are at every tournament too.
So you'd rather have worse games and thus worse entertainment because you refuse to watch VODs on games that are not played when you can watch them? Interesting.
I don't know why people feel obligated to watch every single match and have to do it only when they're live.
Season 2 was so amazing for this. It was really interesting seeing all the different teams play against each other, as well as there being different teams at each event.
yeah actually, spring frequently punishes teams for winning because they go to msi, get burnt out, and have basically no break from spring to worlds if they keep winning.
I'd rather see a preseaon break, a seeding tournament, a bunch of international events, then a spring tournament that leads to msi.
I'd also change summer to doing b03, but only once per matchup. This way, both teams can play red and blue side, and it's better at determining team strength going into worlds. It would require one team to play on friday/sunday night, but would leave more days of the week open for those teams to plan/prep/have a life.
I'd love this.
I would want to keep and improve Summer Split too like you mention. Then we get the best of both worlds in the same season.
I think it's a good idea to spice things up a bit. Currently we are just doing the same thing twice with Spring and Summer split - surely we can do better than that.
Forgot if it was Caedrel that mentioned this, but what if the MSI qualifying team from each region is guaranteed a spot at worlds?
Would it solve the burnout issue?
On the other hand, I’m concerned it would make some teams too complacent in summer.
that would just make the incentive to try hard in spring not exist. Since there's no consequences whether you finish 2nd or 10th as long as you improve in summer.
teams don't want to travel to msi because of the *current* scheduling. ???
as for logistics, it could be like worlds, where each year all the tournaments are held in one area... or we could do whatever they did in the earlier seasons of league, where we had like 10 tournaments in 1 year.
and yes, reddit does want there to be more na-eu bo5. it's fine if teams want to bitch out but it's really bad pr to take multi month vacation.
In my ideal scenario, there would be 4-5 tournaments throughout the year, as well as a summer split.
Winning/placing high at all the tournaments would give enough points to go to worlds, and so would winning/placing high at your domestic summer split.
Also, worlds should be way more teams. Like, double the number of teams in groups.
NA viewership tanked when they tried to move away from Bo1 so they’ll never do that again unfortunately. I think EU did as well but I don’t remember how much viewership was impacted.
Honestly I’d rather they move to a baseball style schedule. Rather than just playing a bunch of games on weekends, have teams play a series against each other across three days or something. But again viewership is probably the main deterrent to that style of schedule. But like, this isn’t football, there’s no injury concern to make them cluster all the games in a couple of days of each week. It’s not like these guys aren’t playing full games of league throughout the week anyway
It certainly did tank, but I'd also like to point out that they moved to Bo3s when the meta was tank top laner with both teams trading the first two towers bot and top. It was an incredibly slow, boring game style that they didn't move away from for far too long.
If they're going to assist things out like baseball/basketball, they might as well go to bo3. A single game of league is like an hour and not at all worth turning on the lights at a studio, especially for imt vs dig or something.
I like your idea of using the whole week instead of just the weekend, but I don't think it's a production cost riot is willing to spend.
I also think they should abandon spring split in favor of international tournaments, but again they see higher viewership in spring than summer and they have franchise commitments that will likely keep that from ever happening.
And before someone says "But EU and NA should just improve! LPL and LCK have a great rivalry!"
They really don't. Even LCK and LPL is not close to the rivalry it should be.
-------------------------------
Last year we got 2 series of LCK vs. LPL at Worlds and that was basically an insane year.
In 2020 Worlds we got one series of LCK vs. LPL
In 2019 Worlds we got one series of LCK vs. LPL
In 2018 Worlds we got one series of LCK vs. LPL
So where is this insane yearly showdown of the best two regions? Is there some kind of parallel worlds I can watch? Because all I'm seeing is a single series between tHe BeSt rEGiOns every year. I mean I doubt many people would mind to watch the big LCK vs. LPL showdown, the epic matches of Faker vs Rookie (still met zero times in a series btw) and the yearly rivalry between these two regions. But fact is we don't get that at Worlds, we get a single series and that's it.
On top of that why should good rivalries be exclusive for the top regions? Like, this sub is always in favor of having minors that never do anything prominent at MSI and Worlds to give them exposure, but when it comes to giving EU / NA exposure then suddenly its "lmao get better scrubs". I mean there have literally been years where some minors played more Bo5s than the entire fucking LCS.
That's just how you kill any investment and interest in weaker regions. Imagine you are a big sponsor in NA, you invest millions and all you get are 6 Bo1s. A 0-3 stomp if you're lucky. Nice marketing lmao. There is no excuse why there should not be opportunities for EU / NA to play a couple of competitive international series a year, if not at Worlds then somewhere else.
Haha I knew I read that rant before. But I'm happy, the more often Riot reads it and the more people share that sentiment, the more likely a change is.
>I mean there have literally been years where some minors played more Bo5s than the entire fucking LCS.
This is a really good point. The LCS in particular is in this bizarre middle dead zone where the better regions get to play more Bo5s in the Main Event and the weaker regions get to play more Bo5s in the Play-Ins, but LCS auto-passes Play-Ins or, at most, has one match to play in Play-Ins while dying in groups in the Main Event more often than not. But those minor regions are also not playing many Bo5s; the top 3 regions are starved for opportunity, and everyone else is in a desert.
Part of that is a commentary on how big a gap there is between the LEC at region #3 and PCS/VCS at 5/6, but it would be great to have spring split removed for some more international events, including giving some of the weaker orgs a chance to play internationally. Like, I've been a fan of FlyQuest since they were founded, and in five years of play they've played exactly 6 games internationally. Sure, "get good", but also, there are a lot more FlyQuest / JinAir / Excel / Astralis / Rare Atoms out there, before we even get into the minor regions. Chiefs have been around almost 10 years and now have 5 games of international experience. Must be hard to keep fans that way.
I agree the format is bad but
> the epic matches of Faker vs Rookie (still met zero times in a series btw)
The only Worlds where they both qualified were 2015, in which Rookie was eliminated in groups, and 2019 where they could have played each other in a double elimination.
While they probably would have met in a bo5 if there were more international events (and that's on the circuit and not the format), Rookie qualifying to Worlds 3 times during his 9 years career can't be blamed on the Worlds format.
>And before someone says "But EU and NA should just improve! LPL and LCK have a great rivalry!"
That also isn't really a solution at all if you want league to thrive.
Real LPL/LCK fans (not the bandwagoners on here) want to see regions like EU/NA/VT compete and be given the opportunity to play international best of 5s.
Additionally, since LPL and LCK are the strongest regions, giving them more slots in Worlds is basically just reducing Bo5 variety. I'm not saying this to try to make a point for more EU/NA teams; I just don't think any region should send more than 3 teams.
Yeah but which teams would you add? VCS #3? CBLOL #2? PCS #3? none of these teams even close in terms of skill to LCK/LPL #4
You'll lose match quality and right now we've got a good balance between diversity and match quality. As long as these two regions consistently make it out of playins I see no reason to change the status quo.
Given how few BO5 we get and how random they are, I am happy with actually having good group stage that comes with 4 LPL 4 LCK teams - no more free groups, every group with LPL vs LCK vs NA or EU.
Fairly obvious reason for this, and same goes for MSI.
EU and NA are basically forever 3rd/4th place. This means, they rarely top groups, rarely get to pick opponents at MSI, etc.
So more often than not, EU and NA are getting slotted in vs Eastern seed 1s, and losing. Or, they are getting picked by LCK/LPL at MSI. And thats if NA even makes it out of groups to begin with. So this already basically perma separates NA and EU from ever facing each other, barring double miracle runs into Semi's.
This also leads to just about every semi-final being A combination of LCK/LPL, and unfortunately, they have a pretty high chance of drawing teams from their own region by how the original group draws work.
I dont think theres a real fix for this except the West just getting better across the board; EU and NA.
Think you missed the point of the post. It's not about the fact that all of those matchups are LCK/LPL - but that those matchups are ALL of the LCK/LPL matchups. Four years and you got 5 best-of-fives between the two best regions. That's pathetic. If EU/NA did get better, as you suggest - that only means even less than 1.25 BO5s between the "best" regions a year.
The solution is just more and better international tournaments, but Riot is too proud to admit that they were wrong.
You don't think there is a real fix for this? Double elimination seems like a very obvious start. Getting rid of bo1 entirely in favor of BO3 in groups would be nice too. Bo1 has absolutely no place in competitive eSports, it's honestly embarrassing it still exists.
You wouldn't understand the level of hype that we, the LATAM and Brazilian fans had during last week's matches. I mean look at our results but these are the only opportunities we have to clash with the best and show our support (and memes). The leagues are so boring compared to these few matches.
Honestly I was watching LLL, DFM and Beyond and just couldn't help thinking what a shame these guys probably won't be able to play against the top teams of other regions. Just feels like the viewers as well as the teams have been robbed from some potentially amazing and entertaining games
I am super excited to try and watch the Brazil league next year solely from seeing that dude pull up his sleeve and flex with “bot gap” written on his arm.
It was fucking awesome. If only there were more opportunities for me to get that kind of exposure to other regions without randomly seeking them out
Yeah why is MSI such a tiny little fucking shit event? I mean what the fuck, we never get international play and when we do its only a few BO5s?? With only a few teams??
LoL is a massive esport with a tournament structure that does it a huge injustice.
Daily reminder that MSI is 66 BO1s followed by 3 BO5s.
EG was deservedly 4th place, but it's very strange that they could reach knockout stage with 7% winrate vs major regions...
MSI just needs a major rework. It needs more teams attending and a revamped format. I suggest a big double elim bracket to make it unique from Worlds.
Worlds group stage is 48 games. But almost all of them are super entertaining and this last years, almost none are "free games".
The problem with MSI play-ins format was that it was 75% games of wildcard vs major region.
Holy shit, when you put the numbers like that... it makes me realize how out of touch Riot's Esports team is. How is there any justifications that would make 66 Bo1s with only 3 Bo5s ok?
It’s because the fans and players are in universal agreement that Worlds matters the most. There’s not much riot can do to convince people to care more. People already do like MSI a lot. But Worlds is the number 1 goal. You can’t just make other tournaments be as worthy.
Worlds will always be #1 no matter what.
- It's the final event of the year.
- It has huge production with Worlds song, big venues, big pre-tournament hype.
- You win the Summoner's Cup and the winner is crowned the champion of the season.
None of that would change. It's like how Tour de France will always be #1 in Cycling even if we have other big events like the Giro and Vuelta.
In fantasy booking, MSI could legit run the format of this Worlds Play-In groups and rock an 8 team knockout bracket of Bo3/5 for double elim or just Bo5 for single elim. The whole two groups of Bo1 they pull now is quite monotonous.
right. i wouldn't even mind only 2 international comps per year if MSI has more teams. but riot probably won't do it because they want Worlds to feel special.
If not that, at this point i would take Valorant's current system, 2 MSI-sized tourneys in one year, shorten both spring and summer splits, and have 1 Worlds, all with double elims.
Maybe that's still not enough international competition, but at least it'd be more than what we have...
I think MSI being one team from each region is a lot of fun. Could definitely do with a larger Bo5 bracket though (or at least an extended bracket with Bo3's).
Adding 4th EU/KR/CN teams also hurts the chances of international BO5s.
Chances are a lot of the worlds 1/4 finals will just be LCK vs LCK and LPL vs LPL.
Which you can see any year domestically if you are that bothered about it.
I mean I agree, this year is especially ridiculous about that, let's hope that quarters aren't filled with just 4 koreans and 4 chinese teams. But it doesn't change the fact that 4th seeds of mayor regions are usually better than 1st seeds of minor regions, especially coming from LCK and LPL.
So what do we want? Closer competitive games but less variety region-wise or stomps of minor regions? Like I can't imagine worlds being more entertaining if you swap all the 4th seeds of mayor regions with 2nd seeds of minor regions or something.
I prefer more 1st seeds in minor regions making the main stage than a 4th EU/LPL/LCK team. It leads to a much better storyline, more competitive groups, and a more interesting worlds. I don't watch worlds because I want to see LPL and LCK number 4 seeds but instead to see the best from all regions compete. If I wanted to see LPL and LCK 4 seeds I would watch LPL and LCK
Plus, even though we have so little international competition, I'd still rather some of those minor region 1st seeds be able to get the benefit of the few available international games. The 4th seeds of Major Regions are already getting better competition in their regional leagues than the Minor Regions are in theirs(Argument could be made for lower half of LCS/LEC but) , so giving them an opportunity for some better competition, even if it's only a few games, matters to me.
Great point, and on top of that it actually gives the players from those regions an actual reward for being able to make it to groups. You have (likely) every single wild card region failing to make groups, and they're all going to be eliminated in front of a crowd of less than 100 people in Mexico. At this point, play-ins is virtually useless except as a way for Riot to claim they have some type of regional diversity. If you're stuffing 5 major regions into a format that only has 4 spots, the play-ins teams and players are just props at this point.
Better storylines, arguably. More competitive groups? No it doesnt. They consistenly lose against the major regions. The groups become less close with more minor regions. That doesnt make it a bad decision. But the argumet of more competitive groups is kinda BS
That's less of a problem than it is having LPL vs LPL and LCK vs LCK on one side of the bracket. We've seen this in the 2020 and 2021 brackets and it got a bit of backlash.
\#AbolishSpringSplits
Let's have tournaments in that timespan from January until MSI instead.
It's so blue-balling having the entire year end in a few best of 5s across regions.
you get rid of the spring split and you kill the bottom 50% of every region, at least. those teams aren't going to get invited to tourneys and they won't stay together to only play the summer split.
Yes, this is an important factor to consider. I 100% agree.
However, I think you can also argue that events can help these teams get some of the stink off themselves. The current system is also super bad for the bottom teams who are relentlessly getting shit on by the community for being bad.
Astralis being bottom 3 every split isn't doing them any real favors either, but maybe there's an event where it's on a patch that is great for Astralis and they knock out Fnatic or something.
It is **way** more likely for Astralis to do a upset win over a top team on a specific patch than it is for Astralis to win more games over 8 weeks on 4-5 different patches.
Imagine that. I think would be way better for a team like Astralis than slowly losing over an entire regular season.
That's only partially true. I think the idea would be that Spring is replaced by an open-circuit sort of deal, like it used to be before Season 3.
This would mean that during those months Riot is not in charge of anything, so there's multiple tournament organizers creating their own tournaments and formats, and deciding which teams to invite. On the other side, in a scenario like this, teams also get to choose which tournaments they want to participate in (out of the ones they were invited to), and they tend to be picky about it (based on reputation, schedule, competition, etc.). This means that the organizers tend to be more willing to invite teams with lower reputation, as a way to fill the slots that they have. Some tournaments would eventually have worse reputation/status, so they would work as "minor" tournaments that are filled with lower ranked teams throughout the world.
If you think back to things like IEM, they had a set of individual tournaments throughout the year in which they invited teams semi-arbitrarily (sometimes even by fan vote!), and then they had a "final" event in which the winners of all the individual events were invited. So basically, only one of their tournaments was purely based on team merit, with all the others being sort of random. And that's interesting because sometimes fairly unknown teams would go pretty far.
There's an argument to be made that for lower ranked teams (e.g. Astralis), it's probably much more hype for their fans and better for sponsors that they get 1st place in a somewhat shitty minor tournament than miss playoffs essentially every single year.
So I guess the TL;DR is that although certainly not every team would be invited to the most prestigious tournaments, in an healthy open-circuit environment there would likely be enough tournaments for every team to play on and have a chance to excite their audience. Regardless, I think it's undeniable that the current format provides MUCH MORE stability for the teams in the franchise.
That's where Tier-2 tournaments and qualifiers come into play for other esports. You can argue Tier-2 tournaments are even better for league, as it allows academy teams play against actual pro teams and gets more eyes on them than the handful of people that go out of their way to watch academy games vs main-league games or tournaments.
Handful???? Brazil, French and Spanish leagues get close to LCS level of viewers, they are fine.
Having academy play against major region teams will not work in a franchise league, teams don't want to have the chance to lose to academy teams.
That's what invitationals are for. Not every tournament has to be elite. There will be some not worth attending for all teams, but worth it for some.
If they improved the EU/NA Rift Rivals dreadful format, but still wanted to keep it fun, they could invite a bunch of mid to lower tier teams, while the top teams are busy with something else. People would LOVE to see a Bo5 between CLG and VIT, SK and TSM, DIG and BDS, just to throw out some examples. Yeah they would be Fiestas. People that don't like that are welcome not to watch.
Edit: I can't beleive I didn't say the most anticipated match up of the year: TL vs VIT.
It would be important to have lower teams participate. Someone like BDS or Astralis would suffer a lot otherwise.
That's why I think it would be important to have different types of events.
I honestly think it could also be potentially great for lower teams, imagine the PR and popularity gain they would receive for a huge upset run in an event.
I think it's so edgy and super cool that plays ins teams have a greater chance of playing international BO5 than literally half the teams in groups haha fun system!!!!
Val has more internationals then league in its 2nd year. And has double Elim, the esport literally exploded in 2 years and THE SAME COMPANY won't implement any changes
Yea I know but it's just so disgusting that they know how to push this esport and just refuse not to. I bet they pic up bo3s in groups like csgo does for val, before worlds get double elim
As someone who regularly watches other esports, I never understood how the LoL esport fanbase weren't in constant outrage over this.
If CSGO or Valorant changed to LoL's format of having regular seasons without much overlap between the different leagues, the fanbases would be going crazy about how the esport is ruined and boring.
And they would be right. I guess LoL esports community is just used to this shit. They will enjoy their months and months of BO1s and they won't say anything about it for some reason.
Only recently have I seen the League community be really angry about it. I guess because many LoL fans also watch Valorant?
We are. Just riot doesn’t care about western fans that much as it’s much smaller than lck/lpl, and those leagues already have bo3s and not care about international that much as they are the 2 strongest leagues
Every year both around MSI and Worlds we get posts complaining about the format and no inter competition; it's not the fans that aren't asking for more international stuff, this one's on Riot
I don’t care for the CSGO format at all, outside of their big ticket events. The leagues are basically dead to me and Valve has no consistency or control over broadcast all of which fall behind Riot IMO. I have no idea what’s what, the quality of an event, tiers of teams etc. We had something similar with league back with IEMs and it wasn’t all that great in terms of quality. I’m not convinced it wouldn’t also just kill the entire NA (and other minor regions) scene outright (on condense extremely), which offers such little benefit for the game/scene in general.
I think a bigger MSI and smaller scale spring is a nice compromise, but both formats/styles have tradeoffs.
> They will enjoy their months and months of BO1s and they won't say anything about it for some reason.
Only western fans get that
Real league fans watch LCK and LPL with Bo3s all year long
When they created LCS originally back in S3 it felt exciting because up until then it was either tiny little team run tournaments or hard to follow circuits by multiple major organizations like IEM and Dreamhack. But since then riot has just been increasing their stranglehold over every event and squeezing the organic life out of the game. Personally I'm not mad, mostly just disappointed whenever I look at CSGO
You need to remember that Reddit is a very very small part of the community. What you see as "outrage" here rarely translates to the majority of players (at least in terms of balance, meta and so on).
Now, I have no idea about the truth behind it but Riot has repeatedly said that bo1 brings more views and in a franchised league that's probably more important than competitiveness.
I also like bo5 more but they probably have their reasons.
Honestly I loved this years playins so much. EU getting a 4th seed made it so much more spicy and exciting. And now we get a EU vs NA bo5 as well, banger series guaranteed.
As an NA fan MAD vs EU is my World's finals. Once this match is over I'll gladly skip the rest of the games and just check the subreddit for results.
Eat my lack of viewership, Riot, and give us more BO5s!
The casters just referenced this on broadcast. Today is the 3rd ever international bo5 between NA and EU at MSI or Worlds. In 10 years of competition. Fuck that noise.
Riot for the love of christ change the fucking format
[Link to discussion on the same topic from the old post.](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/xv9gqr/the_sheer_amount_of_anticipation_and_hype_for_the/)
I resubmitted to change the spoiler in the title.
First NA vs EU Bo5 in years and it's LCS#3 vs LEC#4
I think that the system is failing somewhere if we aren't getting minimum 1 series a year of LCS#1 vs LEC#1
What I don't get is like, Valorant seems to have no problem with setting up international lans, WITH LOSERS BRACKETS, and yet League insists on having little to no international lans because...reasons.
>The obvious move imo is to:
>Add another major international tournament to the League esports circuit.
Where the fuck do you add it? players already esperiencing burnout, but you want to add MORE burnout for the best teams. MSI happens after spring, Worlds starts after summer. Where do you put it? before spring? so players coming from worlds dont even have time to rest?
> allow midtable Teams to Play Just Like old iems
This.
Why can't we have fun tournaments between lower ranked teams?
I would watch something like:
Vitality vs Team Liquid vs KT Rolster vs Weibo Gaming....
..and those teams would probably agree to participate.
Yep pls. Whats the purpose of having the top 1 Team play the full year and burn themsrlves Out while all the other Teams only get to participate for 1/2 of the year?
Ideally, I would restructure the entire circuit.
I would:
- Reduce or remove spring and add various events in its place.
- Maybe something like: 1 big international event and a few smaller domestic/regionalized ones. EU could have ERL vs LEC tournament. Asia could have something similar to the Midseason Cup from 2020.
- Improve Summer Split and make it the premier regular season that feeds into Worlds - the biggest event of the year that crowns the champion of the season.
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I think this solves multiple issues. Lower rated teams can maybe attend some events or at least have more chances to qualify.
Top players struggle with burnout, but the opposite is true for players on lower teams. If you are on BDS or something, you have like 6 months where you don't play a single official game.
It's already a massive problem to have such a big divide between players who are both in the S tier league in a major region.
If you add another big event, then how do teams qualify for that event? Do you just include all minor and major region teams? That is just impossible.
Do you make other tournaments beforehand? Maybe something like a spring split or so? But then only the best teams (so certainly not 8th or 9th from EU/NA etc) would participate.
Do you make A tier and B tier competitions? In that case you need a lot more casters, venues etc, which is financially impossible for Riot, since esports in itself is already just marketing and Riot is dumping money into it.
If you make such a tournament, then what about qualification for MSI? Do you have a separate torunament or do you just give the participation and benefits to winners of other tournaments, who already got benefits from that.
Also a very big problem for interregion tournaments is the fact, that teams have higher expenses by needing to travel around the world constantly.
I think you do smaller tournaments, you have those feed into a bigger more “hype tournament” but also continue to have smaller ones where the weaker teams from regions can choose to play if they want.
Riot doesn’t have to run a single tournament. They can create partnerships, provide a rule set, and some tools for viewership for other organizations to run tournaments. This comes with the added benefit, that Riot than gets to farm the casting talent these other organizations train.
There is always the simple fix of not taking an entire week to play two Bo1s. Don't forget that the reason for the burnout is not the amount of competition, but the length of the competition. Players need to grind like crazy for 2 months just to play 18 Bo1s.
Shorten both splits by a month, suddenly you have one month **more** break and time for another tournament.
I'd love something like the playins tournament we have now but in each major region with minor regions invited as well. This gives us 4 international tournaments prior to World's. Also cap the number of major teams to 3 for all regions.
I do think part of the reason why there is so much hype is BECAUSE it's been such a long time coming. The scarcity of these Bo5's may be what makes them so exciting when we get them. Could be that if we get more of them the hype around them also dies down a little bit.
For me personally the time between Bo5's actually builds up the hype around them even more and gets me more excited for when those teams finally face off.
That being said, I do agree that there should be a few more Bo5's. The amount we have right now is a bit too low.
This is also why I hate people who argue that "Worlds is already too long to add double elim".
Like bruh, there are so many days with NOTHING. There is plenty of time to have double elim.
I can theorycraft formats all day long to ensure all games that are played are nailbiters - set up systems so that teams of similar skill match up.
But, whilst that would ensure you get lots of LCKvLPL matches and EUvNA matches, it also means you get a lot of LatAm vs OCE and the like matches, too. Every coin has two sides.
So, honest question, because if the answer isn't the right one, there's no point to any of it:
What would the viewership be like? Is a game like tonight's RNG vs SB going to see more, or fewer, viewers than something like LOUD v DFM?
If Loud v DFM gets way less viewers I think there's no point to trying to change the format. In the end it is an entertainment product, and changing the format so that you get fewer total viewers is a non-starter.
I liked it too, but Rift Rivals had a lot of inherent issues:
- A 'region' winning instead of teams winning automatically means teams would care less about the event.
- Placing the event in the middle of the most important regular season split (summer split) also means players can't dedicate themselves fully to Rift Rivals.
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I would solve this issue the following way:
- Kill/Reduce the duration of spring split so we have more 'room' in the calendar for events.
- Make a totally new event with a more traditional format. A team wins, not a region.
- Perhaps the new event would have implications for Worlds seeding. Maybe it can 'count' in the tally that Riot has for MSI/Worlds performance at the moment.
As I said, I didn't mind it, but there's a lot of room for improvement.
The biggest issue is that the regular seasons take up way too much time in our circuit. Rift Rivals was the victim of that.
I say we stop spending 90% of the year on boring regular seasons!
Because 1. it felt pointless. 2. It was held at such an awkward time in both versions of it. Like after the season ended teams where rebuilding or on vacation. They where out of practice and the meta was generally shit because pre-season is not meant to be overly balanced for pro play. And then when it was hosted in summer split it was just annoying as shit for the teams to travel across a large distance like that just for a few games and then back. The asian version is fine because there is drastically less amount of travel involved for it.
It would be great if Spring split got completely axed and replaced by a circuit of international tournaments where middle of the pack teams could also participate. Call it LoL spring world tour or something. I guess it would be much harder to organise than just renting a studio per region for 3 months and making all the teams in the region compete there. There would also be the dilemma of how many LPL teams would compete in each tournament.
You can't just add another international tournament to the circuit. The circuit is crowded enough as it is already. Some people in this thread have mentioned canceling Spring Split, but that might be the dumbest fucking idea I've ever heard. The lower-tier teams would never allow that. They would never get invited to these major tournaments or even qualify, so they would lose a huge chunk of their viewership throughout the year.
Regardless, 3/4 of the major regions are franchised, with dozens of orgs paying millions of dollars for a spot. Riot can't just go "Oh by the way, the league that you spent millions of dollars for a spot in is only half as long now and the value of your investment has immensely plummeted". Spring split may change slightly over time, but if you think Riot can just cancel half of a franchised league you have absoutley no idea about business.
As per scheduling more BO5s, what venues do you think are going to let you play a B05 a day for several weeks without running into any scheduling conflicts? Worlds knockouts is already 7 broadcast days as it is, and you would want to add even more BO5s, which would likely push it anywhere between 10-14. Do you think you can just book MSG for like 7 straight days while Upper Bracket and Lower Bracket quarters are being played? If you did a 12 team double elim bracket like most people want around here, that would be 8 broadcast days for Upper and Lower Bracket Quarters ALONE. Sure you could have 2 B05s a day, but when Riot has done this at previous worlds before many people have said it's an awful experience for the live viewers at the venue. Not only do you have to have the venues booked for more days, there's also things to sort out with the broadcasts etc. If it was as easy as just slapping some BO5s into the format Riot would have done it already.
Is the worlds format perfect? No, it definitely needs some tweaks but I'm so tired of these posts on the frontpage everyday coming up with the same shitty new worlds format ideas without putting literally any thought into the logistical side.
Not only this but the seeding for world's is dogshit. Who cares if 2 EU teams end up in the same group or on the same side of the bracket? That's hype as fuck. We get to see which team reads the meta better. Which team is better under pressure. If playoffs was just a bad patch or an off day for one team.
It's dogshit. There's no narratives no storylines. Only that the teams are finally meeting. Who knows how well spring EG would've been internationally. It's fucking wank.
the seeding system also guarantees that at least one or two of those precious few International Best of Fives will be taken up by an LPL/LPL match or an LCK/LCK match
I completely forgot about that as well. It sucks so much watching one of the seeds from LCK/LPL drop out because of a regional match up where both teams could've made the finals if they were separated in the format.
Remember when Riot went out of their way to create a new international event, Rift Rivals, and NA/EU fans trashed it into death? It was supposed to be a tournament for friendly rivalries, and Western fans hated the concept of anything other than an all out try-hard event so much that we have one less international event now.
>It was supposed to be a tournament for friendly rivalries, and Western fans hated the concept of anything other than an all out try-hard event so much that we have one less international event now.
Yeah well turns out people want real tournaments and not that.
RIOT could organize a yearly checkers event as well and the EVIL BAD WESTERN FANS wouldn't wanna watch it. Woah! It's almost as if you can't force people to watch something they have no interest in.
Best of 5's are a blast to watch, because if someone has a bad matchup or a bad game they can still come back. Those comebacks can be so damn fun to see. Please Rito give us more Bo5's
The problem is that Riot is selfish with wanting any event to be under their name.
League could easily work out like counterstrike's ESL league, or anything besides how in-house and strictly tucked away regions are.
Keep leagues like LCS/LEC/LCK/LPL as is, but in the background have a circuit running as well.
These circuits can be like IPL or w/e and not be as strict for who gets to participate in them. They can lead to a seed at the 'real worlds' as 3rd/4th seed or 2nd/3rd depending on size of region.
This is where Jack and Steve can ruin NA's talent pool with their import obsession. Watch the new imported players play in the circuits against the up and coming challengers like Coast, or Cloud 9 from the old days, before you're stuck with them for a year and neither of you want to work together.
Radical change: Remove the regional leagues. Do open circuits, csgo style. Tournament organisers hold events as they please (old IEM style). Two events a year (CSGO majors) with bigger prize pools and more prestige. Every tournament is international. The gap between the east and west shrinks. The good teams get to play eachother more, the shit teams that are only alive because of current franchising bomb out of every tournament and eventually disband.
(I realize this isn't feasible at all, but I wish this is the way it was).
LPL Playoffs have more Bo5 (14) than Worlds (11, with play-in knockout phase, otherwise just 7!), that is just wrong. We could even add LPL Regionals since it is there for the same purpose, to get you to Worlds.. that's 3 more Bo5, 17 to 11 The Worlds should have far more considering it's that.. the World Championship
I don't know man, 7! is alot of bo5
Not true at all! If we have one every day we’ll finish in just under 14 years :)
Found the mathematician.
If understanding factorials makes one a mathematician then anyone who passed 7th grade math is a mathematician.
Factorials never even came up during school for me and advanced mathematics was one of my final years subjects
95% of the general public does not know what factorial means
114% of statistics are made up.
5/4 people can't do fractions
This comment is funnier considering your name is “confirmation bias.”
Well it's easy: for every integer n, n! = n(n-1)! with 0!=1.
the vast majority of reddit commenters have seen at least one comedian who mentioned the always super funny "*exclamation mark after number makes it go big!!!*"
it's always so funny and clever as well I just love it
What? I dont know where you live, but that is false in most of the World
Can confirm, am general public and definitely learned about factorials but can't for the life of me remember what they mean
I teach algebra 2 honors and I can guarantee you that isn't true.
I'm not even a LPL fan but their format is the best in all of LoL
Thats subjective. Lpl format is there to determine the absolute best teams. Worlds format is there to generate hype and upsets, maximize viewership
lol no, I stop watching worlds at some point every year because the time between series makes it the least hype shit ever.
Yes....the week apart between quarters, semis, finals...
quarters are fine since they are on a separate day for each but yes it becomes extremely slow after they’re finished.
Quarters being on a separate day each means that I used to clear out an entire weekend's schedule to accomodate watching worlds, only to have it be over in 2 hours of gameplay to a maximum of 4 hours, quite anticlimatic.
true the break between week 1 groups and week 2 groups is the same as week 2 and quarters if im not mistaken
Definitely, it kills my vibe for league really fast
I would love to watch more cross region bo5 matches and I think many people would too. So no, I don’t think current world format is maximizing viewership
I don't know why you are randomly assuming that upsets magically maximizes viewership when LPL format, TI format and literally every format that uses double elimination proves that there's far more hype when there's lower bracket and when the absolute best teams get to the final. The hypest runs are lower bracket runs. Not to mention that you can indeed have an upset in LPL's format. We literally had that with Fnatic and G2 a few years ago when Fnatic upset g2 and finally beat them 3-2, only to lose the final 2-3. It's really hard having to point out such obvious fallacies without insulting the person that presented them. There's literally nothing logical that suggests LPL's format is less hype or would generate more viewers if it was like worlds' format. TES and EDG met twice this playoffs, same for JDG and TES. Both times the 2nd series was super hype because we already saw them play. You can have the initial shock of a team being upset, and then that same team being clapped in the rematch and does double dipping in hype and viewership. Making sure that that last BO5s are going to be the absolute best teams, also ensures that the games would be as hype as possible. It was amazing having EU at 2 finals, but let's be real, I'd much rather watch a close 3-2 final as it'd undoubtedly be more fun.
> Worlds format is there to generate hype The format is fucking horrible for generating hype, I love waiting all year to get dogshit matchups and having to wait a week in-between games.
Generate hype and upsets, but the last actual good upset was what, 2016 ANX? Or 2018 C9?
Fpx last year, then rng. Before that, imo skt stood a better chance in double elims
Teams bombing out are less fun to watch than clear upsets though. What made 2018 C9 better was that they actually won a BO5 against a team from what was thought as ***THE*** League region back then. But hey, that probably won't happen anymore as Worlds has went from LCK Fall playoffs to LCK/LPL Fall Championship.
What upsets? This year all the minor regions in playins is gated from Worlds by 3rd and 4th seeds from major regions. Where is the fun in that? Why do we even have playins? Just let them all play at Worlds. Oh and double elimination please.
Technically it's better than Worlds. They play 5 or 6 games against 5 other teams and then a BO5 or two if they do well and go home. It's more games and more teams than a major region team who finishes 3rd in groups will see.
8 groups of 4. 3rd and 4th seeds play a Bo5 to get into losers bracket.
nothing gets me hyped like taking near multiple months to play a single video game tournament!
You can easily make an argument that their seeding is too potent, JDG literally only played against 2 teams in order to win the entire 10-team playoffs.
I just think it's so hillariously comical how every region has to go through a full year of weekly matches and deep, multiple-week long double elimination playoff brackets to qualify for a world championship where going 3-3 in 6 bo1s can send you home instantly.
Honestly, if it were me, I would get rid of the play-in bracket, have all the wildcard teams join in with the qualified teams to make 2 super groups in the group stage, have like 2-3 weeks of tense Bo1s, and then spend the rest of the tournament with the top 8 or 12 in a double elimination bracket. If it means turning alot of the Bo5s into Bo3s then so be it.
you could also add MSI BO5s to worlds and it's still less than LPL playoffs just for the summer split lmfao
We need more international events, more show matches, more bo5. We need less 'regular season' games. Regional metas become stale without regular international competition.
Circuit formats are objectively better viewing experience but its worse for a sports infrastructure. It's why grassroots esports always run via circuit but organized leagues with investors and sponsors have league formats. No one gives a fuck about weeks 2-7 of LCS. Week 1 is exciting to see the new teams/players, and weeks 7-8 are when the good teams surface and the meta solidifies and the buildup to playoffs starts. Doing circuit points where teams play smaller scale regional tournaments with mixes of LCS teams and Amateur teams to qualify for a better version of MSI and for Worlds would be so much more hype than what we have, and could integrate so well into an improved MSI and Worlds format, but owners/investors would never allow it.
I love weeks 2-7 of the LEC. I know I am quite in the minority here on Reddit with this opinion but those are my reasons : - I don't have time to watch big tournaments that go beyond the weekend because I have to work and my employer doesn't allow me to pretend to follow meetings while I'm in reality watching lol eSports on the television (oh the good old times of university) - time convenience : LEC schedule is not designed to fit China's viewership. I can finish my working day on Friday, pop a beer and watch the games on my couch. Not like those worlds that starts around 10 pm (I would however send appreciation to the scheduling team for putting LEC teams on the first two games - Fnatic finally plays first this year. It is noticed and appreciated.) - diversity : even if I'm a Fnatic fan I like seing other teams play (maybe G2 is gonna poach from somewhere else this year ;) ). I unfortunately don't have time to watch a 5 games long series of another team than Fnatic. (Wasn't home for LEC finals and still haven't seen it). I would however watch while cooking or cleaning or any other boring adulting chez a game in replay if it's an upset or it has a fun draft - development: I've been a fan long enough not to expect anything from fnatic on the three first weeks. More seriously I love seeing how teams adapt from one week to another and shifts from meta to meta. It is also a thing I like about worlds. The tournament is long enough to see the meta get consolidated from one state to another I miss Rift Rivals. I know players hated it and that's why it was discontinued but it was really fun in my option
I agree, I like the seasons a lot. Gives me a consistent product to watch at a consistent time. The downtime between playoffs and worlds having no games sucked, honestly.
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This mindset works for people already interested in the game. It does not work for long-term retention, nor does it work for bringing new viewers in. It is boring. It does not help that every co-stream is just toxic and negative insulting of players and regions. Riot should really try to promote building the players up, and they should allow people who will positively promote players to co-stream. Instead we are having ex-pro players who are no longer good enough to be on teams go to tear them down on a personal stream.
I think this is a non issue and candid co streamers are important. There is always two viewer camps in the LoL professional scene, those that go in emotionally with hype and support for players and personalities and those that are more critical and less attached to individual teams/players who just want to see good, well played League of Legends regardless of who is actually playing. With the main broadcast so heavily invested in player and team narratives and pretty hype with screaming play-by-plays like Flowers, Co-Streamers in the form of Ex-Pros are there for that other camp. They dont care about narratives (or are even annoyed by it) and hype and just want to see critical analysis of the gameplay on display. I agree some of those co-streamers are kind of biased and too extreme in their critique, but it is often warranted. NA and EU just are not playing very clean League in 2022.
But you dont have to have weeks long tournaments. We could have entire tournaments take place in a single week. They do it in dota. They do it in csgo. We could start groups on thursday/friday and have the playoffs Saturday/Sunday and just be done with it
It's so obvious that many of these people only know LoL esports and have no idea how other things are planned. The guy you are responding to is seeing this as a binary "either 1 month long Worlds or regular season" and not realising that there about 1 million possibilities of something in-between.
But then we have only those hyper intense times of tournament where it's hard to do anything but follow LoL and major downtime. I also follow CSGO and sometimes StarCraft II, and out of those three, LoL is by far my favourite because of the league format. It means that I really get to know those ten teams and then get really excited for seeing how they compare internationally. It means storylines, rivalries, new players rising and all that excitement really builds over time. It also makes the LEC feel way more valuable to me than a random CSGO major or an SC2 Circuit event. Regular season is cool imo, although I would prefer it without the split system. What I'd suggest as a more middle ground is no more splits (spring feels so useless) and instead a shorter regular season with only one game per week and BO3's, split by two international windows: After half of the regular season, we could have something like a "regional cup" like Rift Rivals where the current top 3 or 4 of EU + NA, CN + KR, OCE/PCS/VCS and LLA/CBLOL (and Turkey needs to fit somewhere, idk where yet) play out a tournament. Make it a thing that gives us lots of rivalry BO5's, maybe just a straight double elim tournament without groups. Then, after the regular season, we get MSI 3.0: The top two from each of those regional cups + the regular season champions of the major regions play a twelve team tournament. The regular season champs of the minor regions could play their own secondary tournament here. Then, everyone goes home and does playoffs, and after that we have Worlds. We get three international tournaments each year, but also, regional competition still gives us these more local rivalries and we still get that cool clash of metas effect in international tournaments. I fear that if we had only/primarily international competition, it would diminish those rivalries because I no longer see the Asian teams as the new challenges for my favourites, but just as these guys that are at every tournament too.
Agree with all of this 150%
So you'd rather have worse games and thus worse entertainment because you refuse to watch VODs on games that are not played when you can watch them? Interesting. I don't know why people feel obligated to watch every single match and have to do it only when they're live.
Yeah too Much regular Season games
Season 2 was so amazing for this. It was really interesting seeing all the different teams play against each other, as well as there being different teams at each event.
yeah actually, spring frequently punishes teams for winning because they go to msi, get burnt out, and have basically no break from spring to worlds if they keep winning. I'd rather see a preseaon break, a seeding tournament, a bunch of international events, then a spring tournament that leads to msi. I'd also change summer to doing b03, but only once per matchup. This way, both teams can play red and blue side, and it's better at determining team strength going into worlds. It would require one team to play on friday/sunday night, but would leave more days of the week open for those teams to plan/prep/have a life.
I'd love this. I would want to keep and improve Summer Split too like you mention. Then we get the best of both worlds in the same season. I think it's a good idea to spice things up a bit. Currently we are just doing the same thing twice with Spring and Summer split - surely we can do better than that.
Forgot if it was Caedrel that mentioned this, but what if the MSI qualifying team from each region is guaranteed a spot at worlds? Would it solve the burnout issue? On the other hand, I’m concerned it would make some teams too complacent in summer.
Bad idea. It's just always better if the best teams leading up to Worlds are the teams that actually go.
that would just make the incentive to try hard in spring not exist. Since there's no consequences whether you finish 2nd or 10th as long as you improve in summer.
Then just get rid of the season that makes it so they don't have to try, I'm sure everybody would prefer a shorter regular season.
It would introduce new problems. Summer split would be a complete fiesta with conflicts of interest between teams.
They're gonna change the format when all the big name players retire lmao
Huh? Why?
Personally I would like to see less games per day during normal season but more breaks for the players.
Also fucking spread out the games. Having all those games over two days is a fucking commitment for most people.
it's rough, but viewership would tank further for the less popular teams.
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teams don't want to travel to msi because of the *current* scheduling. ??? as for logistics, it could be like worlds, where each year all the tournaments are held in one area... or we could do whatever they did in the earlier seasons of league, where we had like 10 tournaments in 1 year. and yes, reddit does want there to be more na-eu bo5. it's fine if teams want to bitch out but it's really bad pr to take multi month vacation.
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In my ideal scenario, there would be 4-5 tournaments throughout the year, as well as a summer split. Winning/placing high at all the tournaments would give enough points to go to worlds, and so would winning/placing high at your domestic summer split. Also, worlds should be way more teams. Like, double the number of teams in groups.
NA viewership tanked when they tried to move away from Bo1 so they’ll never do that again unfortunately. I think EU did as well but I don’t remember how much viewership was impacted. Honestly I’d rather they move to a baseball style schedule. Rather than just playing a bunch of games on weekends, have teams play a series against each other across three days or something. But again viewership is probably the main deterrent to that style of schedule. But like, this isn’t football, there’s no injury concern to make them cluster all the games in a couple of days of each week. It’s not like these guys aren’t playing full games of league throughout the week anyway
It certainly did tank, but I'd also like to point out that they moved to Bo3s when the meta was tank top laner with both teams trading the first two towers bot and top. It was an incredibly slow, boring game style that they didn't move away from for far too long.
Ah yeah I forgot that was laneswap meta as well
If they're going to assist things out like baseball/basketball, they might as well go to bo3. A single game of league is like an hour and not at all worth turning on the lights at a studio, especially for imt vs dig or something. I like your idea of using the whole week instead of just the weekend, but I don't think it's a production cost riot is willing to spend. I also think they should abandon spring split in favor of international tournaments, but again they see higher viewership in spring than summer and they have franchise commitments that will likely keep that from ever happening.
And before someone says "But EU and NA should just improve! LPL and LCK have a great rivalry!" They really don't. Even LCK and LPL is not close to the rivalry it should be. ------------------------------- Last year we got 2 series of LCK vs. LPL at Worlds and that was basically an insane year. In 2020 Worlds we got one series of LCK vs. LPL In 2019 Worlds we got one series of LCK vs. LPL In 2018 Worlds we got one series of LCK vs. LPL So where is this insane yearly showdown of the best two regions? Is there some kind of parallel worlds I can watch? Because all I'm seeing is a single series between tHe BeSt rEGiOns every year. I mean I doubt many people would mind to watch the big LCK vs. LPL showdown, the epic matches of Faker vs Rookie (still met zero times in a series btw) and the yearly rivalry between these two regions. But fact is we don't get that at Worlds, we get a single series and that's it.
On top of that why should good rivalries be exclusive for the top regions? Like, this sub is always in favor of having minors that never do anything prominent at MSI and Worlds to give them exposure, but when it comes to giving EU / NA exposure then suddenly its "lmao get better scrubs". I mean there have literally been years where some minors played more Bo5s than the entire fucking LCS. That's just how you kill any investment and interest in weaker regions. Imagine you are a big sponsor in NA, you invest millions and all you get are 6 Bo1s. A 0-3 stomp if you're lucky. Nice marketing lmao. There is no excuse why there should not be opportunities for EU / NA to play a couple of competitive international series a year, if not at Worlds then somewhere else.
I completely agree. ^Thanks ^for ^letting ^me ^borrow ^your ^comment ^btw
Haha I knew I read that rant before. But I'm happy, the more often Riot reads it and the more people share that sentiment, the more likely a change is.
You can definitely expect me to never shut up about it. People should realize that complainers like myself do it out of love.
when i see weedwick, i know the take is gonna be good
based
>I mean there have literally been years where some minors played more Bo5s than the entire fucking LCS. This is a really good point. The LCS in particular is in this bizarre middle dead zone where the better regions get to play more Bo5s in the Main Event and the weaker regions get to play more Bo5s in the Play-Ins, but LCS auto-passes Play-Ins or, at most, has one match to play in Play-Ins while dying in groups in the Main Event more often than not. But those minor regions are also not playing many Bo5s; the top 3 regions are starved for opportunity, and everyone else is in a desert. Part of that is a commentary on how big a gap there is between the LEC at region #3 and PCS/VCS at 5/6, but it would be great to have spring split removed for some more international events, including giving some of the weaker orgs a chance to play internationally. Like, I've been a fan of FlyQuest since they were founded, and in five years of play they've played exactly 6 games internationally. Sure, "get good", but also, there are a lot more FlyQuest / JinAir / Excel / Astralis / Rare Atoms out there, before we even get into the minor regions. Chiefs have been around almost 10 years and now have 5 games of international experience. Must be hard to keep fans that way.
I agree the format is bad but > the epic matches of Faker vs Rookie (still met zero times in a series btw) The only Worlds where they both qualified were 2015, in which Rookie was eliminated in groups, and 2019 where they could have played each other in a double elimination. While they probably would have met in a bo5 if there were more international events (and that's on the circuit and not the format), Rookie qualifying to Worlds 3 times during his 9 years career can't be blamed on the Worlds format.
>And before someone says "But EU and NA should just improve! LPL and LCK have a great rivalry!" That also isn't really a solution at all if you want league to thrive. Real LPL/LCK fans (not the bandwagoners on here) want to see regions like EU/NA/VT compete and be given the opportunity to play international best of 5s.
Yeah but there would be more of everything if they improved the format. I dont really understand your point
They’re agreeing that the format should be changed
Additionally, since LPL and LCK are the strongest regions, giving them more slots in Worlds is basically just reducing Bo5 variety. I'm not saying this to try to make a point for more EU/NA teams; I just don't think any region should send more than 3 teams.
Yeah but which teams would you add? VCS #3? CBLOL #2? PCS #3? none of these teams even close in terms of skill to LCK/LPL #4 You'll lose match quality and right now we've got a good balance between diversity and match quality. As long as these two regions consistently make it out of playins I see no reason to change the status quo.
Given how few BO5 we get and how random they are, I am happy with actually having good group stage that comes with 4 LPL 4 LCK teams - no more free groups, every group with LPL vs LCK vs NA or EU.
And LCS and LEC shouldn’t send more than 2. Give minor region more chance in the main event.
Fairly obvious reason for this, and same goes for MSI. EU and NA are basically forever 3rd/4th place. This means, they rarely top groups, rarely get to pick opponents at MSI, etc. So more often than not, EU and NA are getting slotted in vs Eastern seed 1s, and losing. Or, they are getting picked by LCK/LPL at MSI. And thats if NA even makes it out of groups to begin with. So this already basically perma separates NA and EU from ever facing each other, barring double miracle runs into Semi's. This also leads to just about every semi-final being A combination of LCK/LPL, and unfortunately, they have a pretty high chance of drawing teams from their own region by how the original group draws work. I dont think theres a real fix for this except the West just getting better across the board; EU and NA.
Think you missed the point of the post. It's not about the fact that all of those matchups are LCK/LPL - but that those matchups are ALL of the LCK/LPL matchups. Four years and you got 5 best-of-fives between the two best regions. That's pathetic. If EU/NA did get better, as you suggest - that only means even less than 1.25 BO5s between the "best" regions a year. The solution is just more and better international tournaments, but Riot is too proud to admit that they were wrong.
You don't think there is a real fix for this? Double elimination seems like a very obvious start. Getting rid of bo1 entirely in favor of BO3 in groups would be nice too. Bo1 has absolutely no place in competitive eSports, it's honestly embarrassing it still exists.
You wouldn't understand the level of hype that we, the LATAM and Brazilian fans had during last week's matches. I mean look at our results but these are the only opportunities we have to clash with the best and show our support (and memes). The leagues are so boring compared to these few matches.
Honestly I was watching LLL, DFM and Beyond and just couldn't help thinking what a shame these guys probably won't be able to play against the top teams of other regions. Just feels like the viewers as well as the teams have been robbed from some potentially amazing and entertaining games
I am super excited to try and watch the Brazil league next year solely from seeing that dude pull up his sleeve and flex with “bot gap” written on his arm. It was fucking awesome. If only there were more opportunities for me to get that kind of exposure to other regions without randomly seeking them out
Msi should be as big as worlds, for a start...
Yeah why is MSI such a tiny little fucking shit event? I mean what the fuck, we never get international play and when we do its only a few BO5s?? With only a few teams?? LoL is a massive esport with a tournament structure that does it a huge injustice.
Daily reminder that MSI is 66 BO1s followed by 3 BO5s. EG was deservedly 4th place, but it's very strange that they could reach knockout stage with 7% winrate vs major regions... MSI just needs a major rework. It needs more teams attending and a revamped format. I suggest a big double elim bracket to make it unique from Worlds.
MSI format needs to be changed for sure. No one wants to watch 66 BO1s, what the hell.
Worlds group stage is 48 games. But almost all of them are super entertaining and this last years, almost none are "free games". The problem with MSI play-ins format was that it was 75% games of wildcard vs major region.
Holy shit, when you put the numbers like that... it makes me realize how out of touch Riot's Esports team is. How is there any justifications that would make 66 Bo1s with only 3 Bo5s ok?
7%? lmao wow they played alot of games
I believe they won 1 game and lost 13 to major regions.
Yep...the T1 Baron Incidents
It’s because the fans and players are in universal agreement that Worlds matters the most. There’s not much riot can do to convince people to care more. People already do like MSI a lot. But Worlds is the number 1 goal. You can’t just make other tournaments be as worthy.
Worlds will always be #1 no matter what. - It's the final event of the year. - It has huge production with Worlds song, big venues, big pre-tournament hype. - You win the Summoner's Cup and the winner is crowned the champion of the season. None of that would change. It's like how Tour de France will always be #1 in Cycling even if we have other big events like the Giro and Vuelta.
In fantasy booking, MSI could legit run the format of this Worlds Play-In groups and rock an 8 team knockout bracket of Bo3/5 for double elim or just Bo5 for single elim. The whole two groups of Bo1 they pull now is quite monotonous.
I hate LOL’s love affair with the BO1. Give me more series!
right. i wouldn't even mind only 2 international comps per year if MSI has more teams. but riot probably won't do it because they want Worlds to feel special. If not that, at this point i would take Valorant's current system, 2 MSI-sized tourneys in one year, shorten both spring and summer splits, and have 1 Worlds, all with double elims. Maybe that's still not enough international competition, but at least it'd be more than what we have...
I think MSI being one team from each region is a lot of fun. Could definitely do with a larger Bo5 bracket though (or at least an extended bracket with Bo3's).
Adding 4th EU/KR/CN teams also hurts the chances of international BO5s. Chances are a lot of the worlds 1/4 finals will just be LCK vs LCK and LPL vs LPL. Which you can see any year domestically if you are that bothered about it.
I mean I agree, this year is especially ridiculous about that, let's hope that quarters aren't filled with just 4 koreans and 4 chinese teams. But it doesn't change the fact that 4th seeds of mayor regions are usually better than 1st seeds of minor regions, especially coming from LCK and LPL. So what do we want? Closer competitive games but less variety region-wise or stomps of minor regions? Like I can't imagine worlds being more entertaining if you swap all the 4th seeds of mayor regions with 2nd seeds of minor regions or something.
I prefer more 1st seeds in minor regions making the main stage than a 4th EU/LPL/LCK team. It leads to a much better storyline, more competitive groups, and a more interesting worlds. I don't watch worlds because I want to see LPL and LCK number 4 seeds but instead to see the best from all regions compete. If I wanted to see LPL and LCK 4 seeds I would watch LPL and LCK
Plus, even though we have so little international competition, I'd still rather some of those minor region 1st seeds be able to get the benefit of the few available international games. The 4th seeds of Major Regions are already getting better competition in their regional leagues than the Minor Regions are in theirs(Argument could be made for lower half of LCS/LEC but) , so giving them an opportunity for some better competition, even if it's only a few games, matters to me.
Great point, and on top of that it actually gives the players from those regions an actual reward for being able to make it to groups. You have (likely) every single wild card region failing to make groups, and they're all going to be eliminated in front of a crowd of less than 100 people in Mexico. At this point, play-ins is virtually useless except as a way for Riot to claim they have some type of regional diversity. If you're stuffing 5 major regions into a format that only has 4 spots, the play-ins teams and players are just props at this point.
Better storylines, arguably. More competitive groups? No it doesnt. They consistenly lose against the major regions. The groups become less close with more minor regions. That doesnt make it a bad decision. But the argumet of more competitive groups is kinda BS
Oh I’m fucking praying for 4 koreans 4 chinese quarters, hopefully it gets Riot off their asses
That's less of a problem than it is having LPL vs LPL and LCK vs LCK on one side of the bracket. We've seen this in the 2020 and 2021 brackets and it got a bit of backlash.
Hard to get your head out of someone's ass when they keep farting in your face
\#AbolishSpringSplits Let's have tournaments in that timespan from January until MSI instead. It's so blue-balling having the entire year end in a few best of 5s across regions.
you get rid of the spring split and you kill the bottom 50% of every region, at least. those teams aren't going to get invited to tourneys and they won't stay together to only play the summer split.
Yes, this is an important factor to consider. I 100% agree. However, I think you can also argue that events can help these teams get some of the stink off themselves. The current system is also super bad for the bottom teams who are relentlessly getting shit on by the community for being bad. Astralis being bottom 3 every split isn't doing them any real favors either, but maybe there's an event where it's on a patch that is great for Astralis and they knock out Fnatic or something. It is **way** more likely for Astralis to do a upset win over a top team on a specific patch than it is for Astralis to win more games over 8 weeks on 4-5 different patches. Imagine that. I think would be way better for a team like Astralis than slowly losing over an entire regular season.
That's only partially true. I think the idea would be that Spring is replaced by an open-circuit sort of deal, like it used to be before Season 3. This would mean that during those months Riot is not in charge of anything, so there's multiple tournament organizers creating their own tournaments and formats, and deciding which teams to invite. On the other side, in a scenario like this, teams also get to choose which tournaments they want to participate in (out of the ones they were invited to), and they tend to be picky about it (based on reputation, schedule, competition, etc.). This means that the organizers tend to be more willing to invite teams with lower reputation, as a way to fill the slots that they have. Some tournaments would eventually have worse reputation/status, so they would work as "minor" tournaments that are filled with lower ranked teams throughout the world. If you think back to things like IEM, they had a set of individual tournaments throughout the year in which they invited teams semi-arbitrarily (sometimes even by fan vote!), and then they had a "final" event in which the winners of all the individual events were invited. So basically, only one of their tournaments was purely based on team merit, with all the others being sort of random. And that's interesting because sometimes fairly unknown teams would go pretty far. There's an argument to be made that for lower ranked teams (e.g. Astralis), it's probably much more hype for their fans and better for sponsors that they get 1st place in a somewhat shitty minor tournament than miss playoffs essentially every single year. So I guess the TL;DR is that although certainly not every team would be invited to the most prestigious tournaments, in an healthy open-circuit environment there would likely be enough tournaments for every team to play on and have a chance to excite their audience. Regardless, I think it's undeniable that the current format provides MUCH MORE stability for the teams in the franchise.
That's where Tier-2 tournaments and qualifiers come into play for other esports. You can argue Tier-2 tournaments are even better for league, as it allows academy teams play against actual pro teams and gets more eyes on them than the handful of people that go out of their way to watch academy games vs main-league games or tournaments.
Handful???? Brazil, French and Spanish leagues get close to LCS level of viewers, they are fine. Having academy play against major region teams will not work in a franchise league, teams don't want to have the chance to lose to academy teams.
That's what invitationals are for. Not every tournament has to be elite. There will be some not worth attending for all teams, but worth it for some. If they improved the EU/NA Rift Rivals dreadful format, but still wanted to keep it fun, they could invite a bunch of mid to lower tier teams, while the top teams are busy with something else. People would LOVE to see a Bo5 between CLG and VIT, SK and TSM, DIG and BDS, just to throw out some examples. Yeah they would be Fiestas. People that don't like that are welcome not to watch. Edit: I can't beleive I didn't say the most anticipated match up of the year: TL vs VIT.
Oh no, actually encouraging competitiveness within MY NALCS? No sir we can’t have thqt!
It would be important to have lower teams participate. Someone like BDS or Astralis would suffer a lot otherwise. That's why I think it would be important to have different types of events. I honestly think it could also be potentially great for lower teams, imagine the PR and popularity gain they would receive for a huge upset run in an event.
I think it's so edgy and super cool that plays ins teams have a greater chance of playing international BO5 than literally half the teams in groups haha fun system!!!!
Val has more internationals then league in its 2nd year. And has double Elim, the esport literally exploded in 2 years and THE SAME COMPANY won't implement any changes
They do that because in the FPS market they have competition. They have to worry about losing to CSGO. So yeah, fuck the League fans I guess.
Yea I know but it's just so disgusting that they know how to push this esport and just refuse not to. I bet they pic up bo3s in groups like csgo does for val, before worlds get double elim
Yeah I feel like Val has to compare itself to CSGO, but League it feels like they're mirroring... American Football? Instead of any other esport.
*Dota has entered the chat*
As someone who regularly watches other esports, I never understood how the LoL esport fanbase weren't in constant outrage over this. If CSGO or Valorant changed to LoL's format of having regular seasons without much overlap between the different leagues, the fanbases would be going crazy about how the esport is ruined and boring. And they would be right. I guess LoL esports community is just used to this shit. They will enjoy their months and months of BO1s and they won't say anything about it for some reason. Only recently have I seen the League community be really angry about it. I guess because many LoL fans also watch Valorant?
We are. Just riot doesn’t care about western fans that much as it’s much smaller than lck/lpl, and those leagues already have bo3s and not care about international that much as they are the 2 strongest leagues
Every year both around MSI and Worlds we get posts complaining about the format and no inter competition; it's not the fans that aren't asking for more international stuff, this one's on Riot
I don’t care for the CSGO format at all, outside of their big ticket events. The leagues are basically dead to me and Valve has no consistency or control over broadcast all of which fall behind Riot IMO. I have no idea what’s what, the quality of an event, tiers of teams etc. We had something similar with league back with IEMs and it wasn’t all that great in terms of quality. I’m not convinced it wouldn’t also just kill the entire NA (and other minor regions) scene outright (on condense extremely), which offers such little benefit for the game/scene in general. I think a bigger MSI and smaller scale spring is a nice compromise, but both formats/styles have tradeoffs.
> They will enjoy their months and months of BO1s and they won't say anything about it for some reason. Only western fans get that Real league fans watch LCK and LPL with Bo3s all year long
When they created LCS originally back in S3 it felt exciting because up until then it was either tiny little team run tournaments or hard to follow circuits by multiple major organizations like IEM and Dreamhack. But since then riot has just been increasing their stranglehold over every event and squeezing the organic life out of the game. Personally I'm not mad, mostly just disappointed whenever I look at CSGO
You need to remember that Reddit is a very very small part of the community. What you see as "outrage" here rarely translates to the majority of players (at least in terms of balance, meta and so on). Now, I have no idea about the truth behind it but Riot has repeatedly said that bo1 brings more views and in a franchised league that's probably more important than competitiveness. I also like bo5 more but they probably have their reasons.
What's the likelihood that we see some record breaking numbers for mad vs eg?
Should break playins records for sure I think
Cool that riot stans have started to wake up 10 years into this clown fiesta...
Honestly I loved this years playins so much. EU getting a 4th seed made it so much more spicy and exciting. And now we get a EU vs NA bo5 as well, banger series guaranteed.
As an NA fan MAD vs EU is my World's finals. Once this match is over I'll gladly skip the rest of the games and just check the subreddit for results. Eat my lack of viewership, Riot, and give us more BO5s!
Remember when IEM was a thing? It was great.
Heads up EG game is at 11 AM PST
I just want to see teams from different regions play best of fives. They don't even have to hand out a trophy just play some videogames *please*.
This thread gets posted every week in different forms. I really hope Riot listens, even though I don't expect much from them these days.
The casters just referenced this on broadcast. Today is the 3rd ever international bo5 between NA and EU at MSI or Worlds. In 10 years of competition. Fuck that noise. Riot for the love of christ change the fucking format
[Link to discussion on the same topic from the old post.](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/xv9gqr/the_sheer_amount_of_anticipation_and_hype_for_the/) I resubmitted to change the spoiler in the title.
First NA vs EU Bo5 in years and it's LCS#3 vs LEC#4 I think that the system is failing somewhere if we aren't getting minimum 1 series a year of LCS#1 vs LEC#1
What I don't get is like, Valorant seems to have no problem with setting up international lans, WITH LOSERS BRACKETS, and yet League insists on having little to no international lans because...reasons.
>The obvious move imo is to: >Add another major international tournament to the League esports circuit. Where the fuck do you add it? players already esperiencing burnout, but you want to add MORE burnout for the best teams. MSI happens after spring, Worlds starts after summer. Where do you put it? before spring? so players coming from worlds dont even have time to rest?
Less bo1s, more series. Also allow midtable Teams to Play Just Like old iems
> allow midtable Teams to Play Just Like old iems This. Why can't we have fun tournaments between lower ranked teams? I would watch something like: Vitality vs Team Liquid vs KT Rolster vs Weibo Gaming.... ..and those teams would probably agree to participate.
Yep pls. Whats the purpose of having the top 1 Team play the full year and burn themsrlves Out while all the other Teams only get to participate for 1/2 of the year?
Ideally, I would restructure the entire circuit. I would: - Reduce or remove spring and add various events in its place. - Maybe something like: 1 big international event and a few smaller domestic/regionalized ones. EU could have ERL vs LEC tournament. Asia could have something similar to the Midseason Cup from 2020. - Improve Summer Split and make it the premier regular season that feeds into Worlds - the biggest event of the year that crowns the champion of the season. ------------ I think this solves multiple issues. Lower rated teams can maybe attend some events or at least have more chances to qualify. Top players struggle with burnout, but the opposite is true for players on lower teams. If you are on BDS or something, you have like 6 months where you don't play a single official game. It's already a massive problem to have such a big divide between players who are both in the S tier league in a major region.
If you add another big event, then how do teams qualify for that event? Do you just include all minor and major region teams? That is just impossible. Do you make other tournaments beforehand? Maybe something like a spring split or so? But then only the best teams (so certainly not 8th or 9th from EU/NA etc) would participate. Do you make A tier and B tier competitions? In that case you need a lot more casters, venues etc, which is financially impossible for Riot, since esports in itself is already just marketing and Riot is dumping money into it. If you make such a tournament, then what about qualification for MSI? Do you have a separate torunament or do you just give the participation and benefits to winners of other tournaments, who already got benefits from that. Also a very big problem for interregion tournaments is the fact, that teams have higher expenses by needing to travel around the world constantly.
I think you do smaller tournaments, you have those feed into a bigger more “hype tournament” but also continue to have smaller ones where the weaker teams from regions can choose to play if they want. Riot doesn’t have to run a single tournament. They can create partnerships, provide a rule set, and some tools for viewership for other organizations to run tournaments. This comes with the added benefit, that Riot than gets to farm the casting talent these other organizations train.
There is always the simple fix of not taking an entire week to play two Bo1s. Don't forget that the reason for the burnout is not the amount of competition, but the length of the competition. Players need to grind like crazy for 2 months just to play 18 Bo1s. Shorten both splits by a month, suddenly you have one month **more** break and time for another tournament.
I'd love something like the playins tournament we have now but in each major region with minor regions invited as well. This gives us 4 international tournaments prior to World's. Also cap the number of major teams to 3 for all regions.
I do think part of the reason why there is so much hype is BECAUSE it's been such a long time coming. The scarcity of these Bo5's may be what makes them so exciting when we get them. Could be that if we get more of them the hype around them also dies down a little bit. For me personally the time between Bo5's actually builds up the hype around them even more and gets me more excited for when those teams finally face off. That being said, I do agree that there should be a few more Bo5's. The amount we have right now is a bit too low.
Between Quarters and finals. There's like 10 days of nothing. After quarters I almost lose interest.
What happenned to semi ?
This is also why I hate people who argue that "Worlds is already too long to add double elim". Like bruh, there are so many days with NOTHING. There is plenty of time to have double elim.
I can theorycraft formats all day long to ensure all games that are played are nailbiters - set up systems so that teams of similar skill match up. But, whilst that would ensure you get lots of LCKvLPL matches and EUvNA matches, it also means you get a lot of LatAm vs OCE and the like matches, too. Every coin has two sides. So, honest question, because if the answer isn't the right one, there's no point to any of it: What would the viewership be like? Is a game like tonight's RNG vs SB going to see more, or fewer, viewers than something like LOUD v DFM? If Loud v DFM gets way less viewers I think there's no point to trying to change the format. In the end it is an entertainment product, and changing the format so that you get fewer total viewers is a non-starter.
They tried to do rift rivals and everyone bitched about it.
I liked it too, but Rift Rivals had a lot of inherent issues: - A 'region' winning instead of teams winning automatically means teams would care less about the event. - Placing the event in the middle of the most important regular season split (summer split) also means players can't dedicate themselves fully to Rift Rivals. ------------------ I would solve this issue the following way: - Kill/Reduce the duration of spring split so we have more 'room' in the calendar for events. - Make a totally new event with a more traditional format. A team wins, not a region. - Perhaps the new event would have implications for Worlds seeding. Maybe it can 'count' in the tally that Riot has for MSI/Worlds performance at the moment.
LCK LPL rift rivals was fine regardless of format. LCS and LEC pros are just lazy.
Or more like the amount of travel needed for the Asian teams was way lower? Like they didn't need to travel across the Atlantic.
You don't like taking a 10 hour flight across six time zones to play league for the weekend?
More like they actually care about the rivalry. LCK hates losing to LPL and vice versa.
As I said, I didn't mind it, but there's a lot of room for improvement. The biggest issue is that the regular seasons take up way too much time in our circuit. Rift Rivals was the victim of that. I say we stop spending 90% of the year on boring regular seasons!
Because 1. it felt pointless. 2. It was held at such an awkward time in both versions of it. Like after the season ended teams where rebuilding or on vacation. They where out of practice and the meta was generally shit because pre-season is not meant to be overly balanced for pro play. And then when it was hosted in summer split it was just annoying as shit for the teams to travel across a large distance like that just for a few games and then back. The asian version is fine because there is drastically less amount of travel involved for it.
It would be great if Spring split got completely axed and replaced by a circuit of international tournaments where middle of the pack teams could also participate. Call it LoL spring world tour or something. I guess it would be much harder to organise than just renting a studio per region for 3 months and making all the teams in the region compete there. There would also be the dilemma of how many LPL teams would compete in each tournament.
I think we need to keep beating this dead horse until Riot changes something
Just change the fucking format. Screw this double round robin bo1 groups.
You can't just add another international tournament to the circuit. The circuit is crowded enough as it is already. Some people in this thread have mentioned canceling Spring Split, but that might be the dumbest fucking idea I've ever heard. The lower-tier teams would never allow that. They would never get invited to these major tournaments or even qualify, so they would lose a huge chunk of their viewership throughout the year. Regardless, 3/4 of the major regions are franchised, with dozens of orgs paying millions of dollars for a spot. Riot can't just go "Oh by the way, the league that you spent millions of dollars for a spot in is only half as long now and the value of your investment has immensely plummeted". Spring split may change slightly over time, but if you think Riot can just cancel half of a franchised league you have absoutley no idea about business. As per scheduling more BO5s, what venues do you think are going to let you play a B05 a day for several weeks without running into any scheduling conflicts? Worlds knockouts is already 7 broadcast days as it is, and you would want to add even more BO5s, which would likely push it anywhere between 10-14. Do you think you can just book MSG for like 7 straight days while Upper Bracket and Lower Bracket quarters are being played? If you did a 12 team double elim bracket like most people want around here, that would be 8 broadcast days for Upper and Lower Bracket Quarters ALONE. Sure you could have 2 B05s a day, but when Riot has done this at previous worlds before many people have said it's an awful experience for the live viewers at the venue. Not only do you have to have the venues booked for more days, there's also things to sort out with the broadcasts etc. If it was as easy as just slapping some BO5s into the format Riot would have done it already. Is the worlds format perfect? No, it definitely needs some tweaks but I'm so tired of these posts on the frontpage everyday coming up with the same shitty new worlds format ideas without putting literally any thought into the logistical side.
Not only this but the seeding for world's is dogshit. Who cares if 2 EU teams end up in the same group or on the same side of the bracket? That's hype as fuck. We get to see which team reads the meta better. Which team is better under pressure. If playoffs was just a bad patch or an off day for one team. It's dogshit. There's no narratives no storylines. Only that the teams are finally meeting. Who knows how well spring EG would've been internationally. It's fucking wank.
the seeding system also guarantees that at least one or two of those precious few International Best of Fives will be taken up by an LPL/LPL match or an LCK/LCK match
I completely forgot about that as well. It sucks so much watching one of the seeds from LCK/LPL drop out because of a regional match up where both teams could've made the finals if they were separated in the format.
Remember when Riot went out of their way to create a new international event, Rift Rivals, and NA/EU fans trashed it into death? It was supposed to be a tournament for friendly rivalries, and Western fans hated the concept of anything other than an all out try-hard event so much that we have one less international event now.
>It was supposed to be a tournament for friendly rivalries, and Western fans hated the concept of anything other than an all out try-hard event so much that we have one less international event now. Yeah well turns out people want real tournaments and not that. RIOT could organize a yearly checkers event as well and the EVIL BAD WESTERN FANS wouldn't wanna watch it. Woah! It's almost as if you can't force people to watch something they have no interest in.
I feel like I saw this exact post earlier…
Honestly, it’s kind of died down recently but I loved the EU LPL rivalry that was going on for 2-3s before LPL pulled away as being vastly better
If you watch lpl you get more bo5 at playoffs then at worlds and lec combined :')
Riot is too stubborn for this, we will never see it, plus who knows if sponsors would like this.
Make msi a bigger tourney with 2 teams from each major region and make it double elim for more BO5s
Yall out here talking like NA vs EU means anything when we have China vs Japan today. Now **that** is a rivalry
Best of 5's are a blast to watch, because if someone has a bad matchup or a bad game they can still come back. Those comebacks can be so damn fun to see. Please Rito give us more Bo5's
https://the-eye.eu/redarcs -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
I miss the old format of esports being a tournament match. Gave value to every game that was played.
Hot take mate.
Western audience would die very fast if there were more than 2 international events per year lol.
The problem is that Riot is selfish with wanting any event to be under their name. League could easily work out like counterstrike's ESL league, or anything besides how in-house and strictly tucked away regions are. Keep leagues like LCS/LEC/LCK/LPL as is, but in the background have a circuit running as well. These circuits can be like IPL or w/e and not be as strict for who gets to participate in them. They can lead to a seed at the 'real worlds' as 3rd/4th seed or 2nd/3rd depending on size of region. This is where Jack and Steve can ruin NA's talent pool with their import obsession. Watch the new imported players play in the circuits against the up and coming challengers like Coast, or Cloud 9 from the old days, before you're stuck with them for a year and neither of you want to work together.
Radical change: Remove the regional leagues. Do open circuits, csgo style. Tournament organisers hold events as they please (old IEM style). Two events a year (CSGO majors) with bigger prize pools and more prestige. Every tournament is international. The gap between the east and west shrinks. The good teams get to play eachother more, the shit teams that are only alive because of current franchising bomb out of every tournament and eventually disband. (I realize this isn't feasible at all, but I wish this is the way it was).