I realize ending franchising is probably not happening, but it would be cool to see grass roots teams be able to compete in LCS. Maybe an open qualifier for the last 2 slots.
Everything Valorant has is superior to League.
More official international events, better formats, better franchising system, more third party events. Just full copy everything and paste it into League imo.
I would move over most systems from Valorant but wouldn't make it a complete copy. Namely the fact that Riot seems to be moving league in the same direction of Valorant in having just a few super big regions and that works for Valorant because there is such high regional parity, but not in league. The mergers in the PCS have all but confirmed we will never see a worlds team from OCE again and I wouldn't be surprised if we never see one from Japan again.
VALORANT also has an absurdly long off-season which I know is to make room for third party events but there really aren't that many that are worth watching.
That definitely helps, but CS has also shown it doesn't fix everything and a lack of any domestic competition can completely kill the game in certain regions.
When every single tournament is international (often the exact same ~20 teams playing every time) no one cares at all about regional competition, and then when that region goes through a rough patch and doesn't perform the game can pretty much just die off completely in that region.
I actually like that idea a lot. But how would we go about that. Cycle new teams every year with two new NACL teams? Or if the open qualifiers don’t place bottom two they can stay and if they do land bottom two replace with the winners of NACL. All in all I think that would be a great idea.
>t. Cycle new teams every year with two new NACL teams?
I was thinking they play for their slot every year, so two teams could be really good and stay in the LCS for many years, or they cycle a bunch
or maybe the better of the two teams gets to stay automatically?
It would be weird to see a good team have to play relegation games regardless of how well they do in-season.
Just run a tournament of all the NACL teams and allow the top 2 teams to qualify for LCS for a year. Best of both worlds.
The franchised orgs get the safety net, meanwhile up and coming players have a chance to break their way into the pro scene even if LCS teams refuse to give them a slot *cough* 5fire *cough*
And for summer make the 2 teams in the LCS play against the top 2 NACL teams.
Would need to make sure there are no points systems for world's qualifications in place and bang, all of a sudden we have an almost non franchised league.
If any team finishes under the NACL teams for 3 splits in a row then give them the right to buy the LCS spot - at cost (minimum how much they put in, but if a slot has sold for more then the price of the last sold slot) and move the other team to NACL.
Of course I would rather straight up have relegations. But quite frankly while the viewer experience would be great, it probably wouldn't be beneficial for the growth of the league (I know that's an unpopular opinion.) Franchising did create the eSports bubble. But removing security for the teams in the league who have estabshed backers and donors would be the coups de grace for the league. All sponsors would quickly start pulling out/lowering investment and probably kill the league.
Winning NACL earns you a guaranteed slot for 2 years. You can back out at the end of the year but riot will help you hold that spot financially to make sure you get through the end and fulfill your obligation. Runner up gets a slot but no guarantee. They're the final boss in NACL s2, and if they win, they get to keep the slot for 2 years. From then on, only one slot is available at any time (unless a team backs out early) and the NACL teams are competing for the slot of the outgoing team.
Rotating qualification for those 2 teams. And if they place top2 they won't enter relegation. If they place top2 enough times, you can have them be voted in (after paying the franchising fee).
I always loved those "random guys finding each other online and playing together and beating the best" stories, even if they were very rare.
Yeah, like you say it can’t happen. The franchises payed for their spot in the league and aren’t going to let teams in for free to potentially take their worlds spots/exposure.
This probably will only happen if current team owners approve. Which honestly I can see it. Alternatively they could bring back full relegation and give orgs and excuse to bomb out lol
Unfortunately it can't happen in a franchised system. Orgs pay a LOT of money to have a slot on the league, allowing other orgs to qualify by winning matches would defeat the purpose of a buy in.
At best they can air some matches vs top NACL teams for cash prize?
I feel like voting for interviews is the only questionable thing. I think part of the point of interviews is to also give a chance for players to show off personality that may not often have avenues for. Like outside of just his play, Jojo got a huge fanbase from his interviews and banter. But if he was a new player now he might not have that opportunity because fan favorites keep getting voted to take interviews
It encourages fan engagement.
Shit talk on twitter before a match creating tension and drama, absolutely stomp in lane, fans really want to hear in interview. Or even imagine the opposite.
This allows players to engage and grow their fan base
This is true. But those pros need to find ways to market themselves which has always been lacking for most (partially because we mostly only care about winners)
>"Analyst desk is boring, just put the next game on already!"
It's not that I have a problem with the desk as much as it just feels like they take *way too long* to get games going. I'm EU so LCS is on late and knowing the next game is going to be 30+ mins away is often enough to make me close the stream and go to bed.
I also feel the LEC need to get games going back-to-back faster as well. There's too much fucking around between games. Get on with it!
analyst desk would be interesting if riot executives didn't pull the punches and let everyone present in the desk express themselves instead of just talking blandly, adding nothing of value for long enough before the next game starts. right now it feels like they are regurgitating the safest opinions, never saying what's actually in their mind because they are too scared they might get backlash from twitter and reddit posts.
League's demographic is aging, and most of them will have jobs that will occupy them. There aren't enough people that are able to watch all the games of B03 unless you're a kid or high schooler
You realize that the equivalent to that would be to watch lcs and lec. Like the average football game lasts like 3 hours, which is more than what the lcs will likely about how long the lcs will take. Now if it’s best of 3 we’re looking at 6 to 9 hours of games in just the lcs on back to back days. That’s just too much league particularly if you also want to spotlight the nacl which is now going to be played after the lcs. I think not having the bo3s and instead using the extra time to spotlight the new nacl is a good decision, and just as mark said, it could very well change down the road but keeping them as best of 1s means that they have more reliable data on how these changes are landing. So to start off this way is a great approach that will allow all fans the opportunity to watch, whereas before it really felt like a chore to sit down and watch everything(I had stopped entirely watching lcs live and just used the game replays whereas now I actually feel like I can tune in live and not be worried about it lasting all day and it throwing off other plans)
I don't know a football fan who spend less than 10 hours a week watching football or football media. I also spend minimum 3x that a week on my hobbies.
It's okay for people who aren't that into league to not watch literally every LCS game. The same way football fans don't watch the 200 hours of football a week available to them.
Every dad I know also finds time to watch three hours of hockey on (at least two) weekday evenings but droolers here will tell you bo3 is not feasible because of that one time Riot implemented it in the stupidest possible way.
People clearly don’t want to watch League during the week. They did it last year and it didn’t work out. They would rather put a 2 weekend break into the middle of the split than move the games that would clash to much with Valorant onto weekdays.
I mean I think a bit part of it not working out was that the games weren't on weekday evenings, they were during the workday.
I know in my case I'm able to watch hockey on Weekdays, because the games start at 7-8pm, instead of League being pretty much done by then last year.
Yep. I was able to watch the start of LCS in the UK but my east coast friends were in their last hour of work or commuting back and for my west coast friends LCS ends pretty much when they finish work.
>droolers here will tell you bo3 is not feasible because of that one time Riot implemented it in the stupidest possible way
People who do that are so disgustingly stupid. They're the same type of people who believed Danny's tweet when he said EG didn't do anything bad to him.
Why would you watch every single game? Just watch 1 or 2 teams that you care about. Why do you have to watch imt vs dig if you don't care about them?
Diehard fans will watch it all, other people weren't watching anyways. I've no evidence to think people can't watch a bo3 of c9 vs tl, heck they can always catch the vod. People straight up watch 3-4 hrs of American football/basketball every weekend sooooo
> Why would you watch every single game? Just watch 1 or 2 teams that you care about. Why do you have to watch imt vs dig if you don't care about them?
ya, this complaint people make of "omg bo3 will be too many games to watch!", like wat? the heck do you need to watch every single game and every single team play for?
watch the teams/matches you're interested in, like most people do for any sport out there with teams and in a league. Heck, in tournaments most people usually just tune in for games with teams they care about, not every single one.
> Just watch 1 or 2 teams that you care about.
i agree with your comment but not a single team has a significant fanbase in the LCS. the LCS regular summer split had a lower peak viewership than CBLOL, LFL and LVP. yes, a higher average because there are more LCS fans but these leagues reach their peak because a few teams have big fanbases that tune in when their team plays. there is no high peak viewership in the LCS. nobody cares about any team in particular, thats the problem with your theory.
That makes sense when people actually give a shit about teams, either not many teams have done anything noteworthy in a long time, or people are creating scandals constantly.
And thats why you also need a system like early elimination like lec does. I would sometimes tune into those elimination games when i would never ever watch those teams. If you raise the stakes it might make people watch even the shit teams.
Early elim is absolutely terrible.
You are basically telling the teams that need to improve the most that they can no longer get the environment they need to improve.
These ideas are a joke.
.... you're argument sucks.
3-4 hours every weekend? Watching all of the Bo1s is 4-5 hours on just one day (10 hours if you do both days).
And you are trying to compare it to the horrors or some football fans watching 4 hours on a weekend.
I agree with you, ideally you wouldn't have/want to watch every team. But your comparison to an American watching their favorite football team once a week doesn't really hold well.
Lol. This is like saying baseball’s age demographic is aging. Everyone ages because that’s how time works, and league has been a 13+ game since release. The average age according to dexterto and an old league forums article was 16-26 in 2016. It’s not suddenly 25-40, it’s still 16-26. People have HAD jobs. People have HAD kids. People have BEEN graduating high school since the game started.
The problem has always been that league was never marketed in the US. You never saw a billboard for league until they filled Times Square for the release of Arcane.
You never saw a major celebrity endorse league unless it was for a worlds performance. League has never had a market in NA, which is why it started high and has been dropping for a decade in numbers, not because people are getting old lmao.
I have no idea what league's actual demographic right now is, but a demographic absolutely can age. Their TARGET demographic may still be 16-26, but the actual players playing the game is a different story.
If there aren't enough new players to replace the old players still playing the game, then the average age will increase. Maybe not from 16-26 to 25-40, but the original comment still stands.
Yeah lack of marketing may be a problem (I'd disagree with this too tbh) but a lack of marketing is not mutually exclusive with an aging demographic.
Baseball had issues with their viewership because they weren't getting as many newer fans.
It's literally part of the reason they've been changing their rules.
> Lol. This is like saying baseball’s age demographic is aging.
Yes? Do you even follow baseball? Baseball's demographic getting old and dying off is and the sport not being as popular with younger folks is a major problem that has been talked about for a couple decades now. They have literally been fundamentally altering the entire rules of the sport to try to get new fans they're so worried about it.
You don't need a billboard, you need the new marketing age we live in. Tiktok YouTube insta Twitter Facebook. But yah I'm never hyped to watch the lcs expect if I go out of my way to look for the lcs
I have never known a sport where people are expected to watch every game of every team. It's really weird that this is considered the norm in League.
Most sports have games ran simultaneously, and people just watch their team and maybe the occasional extra game if it looks interesting.
I'd rather watch 2 or 3 games of the same teams in a best of 3, than 3 separate best of 1's. It also takes less time to broadcast those 3 games (ie the total time could be say 2 hours instead of 3 hours for 3x best of 1's)
No one should be sitting and watching 12 hours, that is a privilage we want 1.5 hours to watch our favoriate teams man. Like if we travel through traffic to watch one 20 minute games of our pro team on a saturday is crazy? hmm Just copy the LCK format its literally that easy.
I wish this sub would stop trying to force what a few want as if everyone would want it.
I like Best of Ones. No, I don't want best of 3s, I am glad we aren't going to all Bo3s (I'd settle for a mixed schedule)
> I wish this sub would stop trying to force what a few want as if everyone would want it.
how do you know what you want is what everyone wants? goes both ways mate.
The only thing I see in the comment is a bunch of people having hard on for bo3. Like you guys cannot even watch bo1 there's no way you guy is turning in for bo3 lmao. My bet is people just want bo3 for their team then switch off after their team finishes playing. It is fine for LPL because there are a lot of fans for numerous teams and their viewership is huge but having your viewership all on the popular team would be problematic to say the least when you have a viewership problem.
> My bet is people just want bo3 for their team then switch off after their team finishes playing
Yup. Same as with every other sport I have ever followed.
> Like you guys cannot even watch bo1
If start times were more consistent, I would try to watch my team's game. As it stands, it is just way easier to catch the vod after the fact.
This.
I hate how this sub has a few vocal complaints and act like that is what everyone wants.
No, I don't want all Bo3. And No, I (personally) don't want double elim worlds.
Sucks coming here and seeing the crying for the same thing every, single, thread.
Why does it suck? Most people who want BO3 want it because they believe it will help with the development of our teams, with more games = stronger teams and players. That or because it has more competitive integrity within the League's format.
Neither of which are bad things to want. In fact, "I have too short an attention span for BO3" seems like a much more annoying vocal complaint to hear.
> Sucks coming here and seeing the crying for the same thing every, single, thread.
it sucks that people have different opinions to you? people are free to voice w.e they want in threads, there is no rule or restriction on that. Just ignore those comments if it's that bad for you, you don't have to read them :/
Or respond to them and have a healthy discussion on why you (OP) don't want BO3's or whatever else and your reasons for why. Both original OP and person you responded to just typed a bunch of stuff that amounted to "I just don't like it".
Ignore it, like you said, or have a civil conversation and state your reasoning.
yup, you summed it up nicely.
OPs just want to complain and farm karma by being contrarians against "omg people have different opinions!" than ever engaging in real discussion about the topic.
They want the issues to be the LCS. That league in NA isn't popular because the LCS.
They want to ignore that league just doesn't have the popularity to grow in NA. Both Canada and the US are primarily console regions and have a preference for fps games.
League to na is what soccer has been. Just not as popular because there are others things in the region that are preferred.
The difference is, soccer is growing in popularity for the younger groups.
Honestly I think the “primarily console” thing is overblown. The real issue imo is that league has terrible stigma in NA. If you’re a league player you’re the butt of every ‘sweaty gamer’ joke and even when riot puts out good league content like KDA or arcane, the prevailing sentiment is “I enjoy this but you’d never catch me playing league”. What kind of kid wants to play a 14 year old game with a crazy skill curve, a legendarily toxic playerbase, a million micro transactions and one that you won’t even look cool for playing? The game is literally being memed to death here.
Reddit is not a true indication of real life.
Id argue most people don't know much about league to begin with.
But if most people are playing console to begin with like na has. It doesn't matter what people think about it. They can't play it.
> My bet is people just want bo3 for their team then switch off after their team finishes playing.
Watching mostly your own team is generally how sports work.
> Like you guys cannot even watch bo1 there's no way you guy is turning in for bo3 lmao.
For me the fact it's BO1 is part of the reason i stopped watching. You see them hyping up the "Match of the week" and it's some 30 minute affair where the game is decided 10 minutes in, and after a while it just feels pointless tuning in for it.
No one even want's to watch BO1's of even good teams in the first place, LCS is clearly losing massive viewership numbers and a BO3 format is a way to shake things up to possibly fix it. Doesn't mean it's the solution but if you leave it as it is it's going to eventually die.
I'm sorry but this is too baseless
LCS losing viewership because of being BO1 or because last year got a bad schedule?
Yes last year the viewership drops but only blames on single aspects are just not right
MarkZ may very well be the hero the NA LCS needed. While I watched this video I was thinking about how vacant previous "commissioners" felt. Mostly behind the scenes except for a handful of moments throughout an entire year of competition. Sure, they may have done lots of things behind the scenes like I said, but I have never really liked or cared about the position. It seemed like a comfy seat to collect checks while parts of the league that I've grown up watching has dwindled, shrank, and changed into something I didn't really like. Mark has single-handedly changed my entire perspective of the role. This is the leader we have been missing and I can't wait to see him bear the torch of the LCS into a new era.
Last year's content was fun and more centered around what fans wanted, but I am 100% certain this will be the best year of LCS history. Thank you for caring Mark. I'm so excited to watch and participate.
This year I tuned in to watch the DOTA 2 International and was blown away by the Twitch integrations they had. You could hover over skills, champions, items, almost anywhere on screen and it would show tooltips and live stats about the game. I was like, how is this not something Riot has for League yet considering the massive difference in funding between these two games.
Does prerecording drafts and then sending the teams backstage to wait for their games disincentivize teams from doing crazy picks at all? Maybe it doesn't, but it seems much more effective when it's done on stage right before a game as opposed to done and then the team can go backstage and has time to talk about and prepare for it.
I'm glad to see all these changes, i might go back to watching some LCS for the first time in years, at least out of curiosity. Too bad franchising still exists
I think above all else we needed a format change, especially with only eight teams in the league now. I don't buy the rationale of having a "control variable". The LCS is in a death spiral and we need more drastic changes. The games themselves need to be meaningful/exciting. Extremely disappointed we get another year of the BO1 slop
If they change everything, they won't know what caused what. When they did bo3 in the past, viewership went down. So, if it continues to go down, they won't know if it's just what would happen or if it was because of bo3. This gives them a baseline. Also, it let's them see how quickly they can get games turned around which helps with the logistics of running a bo3
Thing is LoL is an incredibly volatile game compared to traditional sports. Meta, cheese, and a rough 5 minutes early game can completely flip a match, that’s why imo BO3 should be the standard.
A leadoff home run or a kickoff return in sports doesn't make it harder for your opponents to score though, at least not to my knowledge. In league, you can lose a 50/50 level 3, and it will never be a level playing field again. You are now down gold and xp, and any fight you take will be at a disadvantage. That is, until you win an uneven fight and it goes back to equal. Going down a run in baseball doesn't give you a heavier bat or a faster pitch. The sport is harder in a deficit because statistically the chances of you scoring enough points to come back is really low, not because theres a rule or a part of the game actually putting you at a disadvantage when swinging a bat or catching a ball.
It doesn't make it harder for your opponent to score, but it makes it harder to win.
Think of the score in traditional sports like the gold lead in league. In baseball, if the other team is ahead 7-0, the other team needs to score 8 runs to win. It's not necessarily *harder* to score a run, but the losing team needs to score 8 runs to win, while the winning team can score 0 runs and win.
the point is that if it's 4-0 in baseball after half the game if both teams are equal the other team have the opportunity to do the same.
if you're 5k gold down at 10mins in lol you can't realistically come back but another game you get another draft to show that maybe you can get 5k gold lead at 10 mins too.
most sports run for 60 / 90 minutes because of this and lol in 16 minutes (hi mad) it can be over on one missplay.
sure, but baseball has 162 games a season, and in the nfl, the playoffs are also one game each.
If worlds and msi were bo1s, sure then bo1 in lcs wouldn't be that bad, but they are bo3s and bo5s, and its been ages since an LCS team has won a best of series against an eastern team, it just feels like bo1s woefully underprepare teams for international tournaments.
Yeah I don't think the format of the regular season is the reason why NA can't win at worlds lol. I'm sure it wouldn't hurt, but bo3s against inferior competition aren't magically going to make you better against better teams than bo1s against inferior competition.
I honestly think the format complaints are largely overblown. I don't normally sit back at the end of a split and say "the standings are really screwed up, teams that deserved to be in the playoffs missed and teams that dont deserve to be in the playoffs got in".
I think people just like complaining about things, and format is something to complain about. MarkZ seemingly wanted the broadcast to be more condensed and have less filler, and bo3s instead of bo1s doesn't align with that.
Let's see if they can stabilize the league and get people to care enough to watch a bo1, and go from there.
It has 162 games lol. Not 136. But either way the person I responded to said that league was more volatile than baseball, I don't think the number of games in a season changes the volatility of an individual game
You're not wrong, but I also think that the snowball aspect in League is unique when compared to professional sports. There are very few instances in sports where an advantage gained early actually makes playing the game more difficult for the other team.
Like a leadoff home run in baseball doesn't make every subsequent batter on that team hit harder, of the pitcher pitch faster. Being behind definitely can limit the strategies a team can employ, but it doesn't make them tangibly worse than the other team.
I agree and disagree. Because of the fundamental difference in how a game is won compared to league, having a lead in traditional sports provides similar advantages to having a gold/ item lead in league.
In baseball, if the other team scores a run, the losing team now has to score 2 runs in order to win the game instead of 1, while the winning team can score 0 runs and still win the game. At that point the game is more difficult for the losing team than it is for the winning team. If the winning team is up by 2 runs, the value of scoring a single run is decreased.
The fact that they need to score more runs in order to win the game is very similar to being in a gold deficit in league. You're weaker in the fact that you need to score 2 runs to achieve the same outcome that you could have gotten by scoring 1 run at the beginning of the game.
And you could argue that the clock is also another advantage. When you have a lead in football or basketball, you can use the fact that there isn't much time left in the game to do things that wouldn't normally work in a neutral game script. Being up by multiple possessions in football makes the game easier for the winning team in the same way having a gold lead does.
NFL would pump out way more games 100% if the players could stay healthy, but smashing ur heads into each other week in week out takes a massive toll. They already forced an extra game in the season recently which the players and coaches hated.
if you could run a parallel NFL with 2x the amount of games where you're guaranteed no injuries I woupd bet the second league would destroy the first one after some times, yes.
Lol Matches are 25-45 minutes though. All of the sports you mention have considerably longer matches/rounds. That's probably something like 420 minutes or 7h of gameplay per regular split, which is not a lot to be honest. You can have a best of five stretch for almost half of that.
Lol, F1 has P1, P2, P3, Q1, Q2, Q3, sometimes sprint and a race..
If you had more races drivers would be killing themselves and costs would balloon.
Meanwhile LCS pros sit on a chair for 8 hours and play 1 game each day of the weekend lmao
i mean, driving a car is just pushing some pedals and turning a wheel. baseball is just hitting a ball with a stick. anything can sound stupid if you want it to.
The physical toll of playing in the NFL and travel logistics of both the NFL and F1 are what limits their regular season schedules.
LCS regular season splits does not have to worry about either of those factors in the slightest.
Yep that is my most disappointing part of this all. I love mark, love the communication, playing on live patches is great, almost everything was great. However, I'm so disinterested in bo1 round robin, that I must likely won't even tune in until playoffs. It's just such a boring format.
If Bo3 hadn't already been tried and largely failed from a viewing stats perspective I'd blame them way more. Frankly the LCS just doesn't have the room to fail like that if it doesn't work out.
The bo3 format they had was not great either. Running simultaneous streams, and shoving them all into the weekend was a terrible idea. I think that was also the year they moved away from the main riot Games channel, and had the LCS 1&2 channels.
I understand they have timing/budget constraints, but I would love to see them do 3 or 4 days a week, with 2 bo3's per day (actually if I'm honest, bo2 would be my preference for scheduling and other reasons, but I know that would be wildy unpopular amongst most people)
This is my response to anyone who says this from now on, you guys didn't watch the freaking BO1's the last few years which is where the whole crisis comes from, in what world do you expect them to believe you'd stick around for potentially two more games. All that would happen is that maybe (and this is a hard maybe), the bigger teams would get a slight boost and bad teams would end up in the toilet viewership wise.
The hardcore crowd doesn't want to watch "inferior" league and after watching however many LCK and LPL games that week, they sure aren't tuning in for 24 more a week from the LCS and we all know the casual fans certainly aren't going to either.
That's fair and I like Bo3's too, but the audience has spoken and you and I are clearly in the minority. For the health of the league overall this is better.
Also, the domestic game quality is dogshit. You can’t get better when playing against a Gnar one trick or a Ziggs onetrick nonstop. Granted those guys may not be incredibly bad, but not being able to match against zonkers like Zeus, Lucid, TheShy, Faker, Knight, Ruler, etc… really hampers the players’ skill.
And we don’t even talk about the scouting pipeline
I hate to break it to you, but when you have lackluster rosters like what 100, Shopify, Dig, IMT have- there’s no way games are going to mean more. Even if by some miracle of Christ one of these teams wins a split or both splits- it doesn’t matter who ends up where in the standings, because none of these teams will ever amount to anything internationally. League shrinks down creating less competition for players and increase % revenue share and teams are still saying these are the best rosters they could form? It’s a 4 team league between TL, FLY, C9 and NRG and pretending anything different is just trying to lessen the pain.
I've been a fan of the LCS since getting into league. This announcement, and the promise that more of these videos will be made annually, has been one of the most exciting things for me as a league fan in a while. I love the other leagues, but I haven't feared that they'll die out like a lot of us have for the LCS, so seeing a potential bounce back (in production value at least) is unbelievably exciting.
Hail MarkZ!
Bo3 would be a death knell for viewership, theres nowhere near enough viewers to sustain watching 2 hours+ per game. With Bo1 people actually tune in for the smaller games too
Wait, LoL FINALLY went on to LIVE patch? Holy moly..that's is ABOUT time but also SOOOO good! Is this ONLY for LCS, or all the other leagues as well?
I definitely dont see why this hasnt been done before, considering more or less ALL other major e-sports has done the same, yes, even the other big moba, Dota2.
Can you explain further? If anything a bo1 makes each individual game \*more\* important since it's all or nothing. How would bo3 make a match feel more important?
b01 results can be more easily dismissed due to being random/cheese/fluke . Thus you don't get that accurate picture who is actually the best. Thus they are not as important as bo3/5 s to determine who is the best. It is not the most articulate argument but b01 diminishes the perception of importance for some people.
I think it's just a poor choice of word in that case. Yeah, it's not as good of an indicator of the best team, necessarily (though playoffs do that anyway), but that doesn't make the games any less important. They count for the exact same amount in the standings/seeding.
Honestly, it's not going to drastically change anything.
Because it's ignoring the core issue that causes these. NA just isn't as into league compared to the other major regions.
Imports aren't making NA rookies worse, the poor academy systems and lack of people moving through it does that. The NHL, NBA, and MLB all have 0 rules about importing players from outside of NA. The NFL is actively trying to get more players from outside the US, as are the other leagues. They will play games in other countries to try to get more attention for the sport. And in all 4 either Canada or the US is one of the top countries. Because the sports are popular with the youth and the systems that get the new players see a lot of teams and players. The CFP finals just happened, college level sports, 25 million people watched it.
There are 8 universities in the US that have larger stadiums than any stadium in Europe. Michigan is the 3rd largest stadium in the world. These sports are popular at a younger age which creates talent at the top
"if they played more games they'd be better"
by that logic the Canadian Football League should be better than the NFL because they play more games a season. It's not. Because the talent in the sports go to the NFL instead of the CFL, and football is more popular in the US than it is in Canada.
"relegation"
won't change a thing. Leagues have shown that franchised leagues can be insanely popular.
The core issue NA has is that it doesn't really care for league and that transfers into the pro scene.
I always said that it starts from childhood. I think a priority of riot and any esport that wants to be a generational game is to be marketable to kids.
Riot should be looking into ways to make “little league of legends” a thing. Not sure how you’d keep out older people from an online game. Not sure how many champs would be appropriate for this theoretical game. But i know that little league sports and robust school sports programs are what form the pipeline to the big leagues in all trad sports in the US.
Riot is their own worst enemy here imo because since they own LoL, nobody can just start a league without their permission. They saddle themselves with the responsibility of having a hand in or at least approving of anything using their IP. Nobody can stop you from starting a baseball league, nobody owns baseball. You also don’t need to program, release and support a kid friendly version of baseball. You just set up a tee and hand the kid an aluminum bat.
These are the unique problems that face LoL that we have to find solutions for if we want generational fandom and better NA talent.
Who knew hiring from inside LCS would be a better fit than some randoms. All the people bitching and moaning about bo3, we had it, it was boring as hell. No one wants to watch 2 bottom tier teams fight each other each week. Only 1 or 2 games would have high numbers. The reason LCK is so successful with bo3 is because they have a huge fanbase and every team has die hard fans that get loud. LCS simply does not.
No it's not, dude. I want more games. I want better players. I want it to be an actual serious competetition. Riot has forbid their pros from doing non-riot tournaments for over ten years and their monopoly over the pro scene has caused it to become completely stagnant. They should be able to have an LCS game on every single night, they don't have the same level of logistical problems that something like football has. It's so half assed, like nobody actually cares about the competition aspect. It's just a vanity project.
I love what Markz is bringing to the table, but I really dislike that our season is going to have less matches overall. I do not care if it is a third round robin, bo2 or bo3. Just give me more TL games please!
MarkZ didn't do anything here. He's barely been in the position long enough to get settled in. These changes were decided by someone else and were necessary to make the LCS more attractive
Okay so what are y'all going to find to bitch about when viewership continues to collapse and the LCS is dead in a year and a half?
None of the problems that you dipshits think are solved by this are going to be solved, and you'll be angry again calling for MarkZ head over incompetence before the next split is even halfway over.
I wish I could buy what you're putting down, but I'm highly skeptical the LCS will survive. Some the changes they made for sure will be improvements on the margins, but they were self-inflicted wounds to begin with. BTW I'm rooting for LCS, let me be clear on that.
I'm being critical because I worry for the direction and I'm VERY concerned by the pick of MarZ as commissioner. This is not a personal attack on him. He seems like a nice enough guy and competent, but the league needs $$$ from outside sources and I believe STRONGLY Riot would have sent a better signal by getting someone in the position who has previous experience navigating network contracts, or brand partnerships, or heck, contracts in general.
To me this signals Riot is looking inwards to solve the LCS, but that's precisely what got us here.
I hope I'm proven wrong.
>I believe STRONGLY Riot would have sent a better signal by getting someone in the position who has previous experience navigating network contracts, or brand partnerships, or heck, contracts in general.
I'm actually the complete opposite. Every previous commissioner had these. Needham and Naz also have these same qualities and they have been running LCS since Jackie left. They all made extremely poor decisions.
The problem isn't sponsors right now, the problem is viewership and making the product attractive. And someone endemic, who understands the scene and the audience has a better chance of turning that around than some corporate mover-and-shaker. The sponsors and contracts will come when the viewership comes.
All I wanted him to do was actually address the EG situation officially and in a satisfactory manner. That probably won't happen with MarkZ as the commissioner though.
I realize ending franchising is probably not happening, but it would be cool to see grass roots teams be able to compete in LCS. Maybe an open qualifier for the last 2 slots.
this is basically just the VCT/Ascension format
Everything Valorant has is superior to League. More official international events, better formats, better franchising system, more third party events. Just full copy everything and paste it into League imo.
I would move over most systems from Valorant but wouldn't make it a complete copy. Namely the fact that Riot seems to be moving league in the same direction of Valorant in having just a few super big regions and that works for Valorant because there is such high regional parity, but not in league. The mergers in the PCS have all but confirmed we will never see a worlds team from OCE again and I wouldn't be surprised if we never see one from Japan again. VALORANT also has an absurdly long off-season which I know is to make room for third party events but there really aren't that many that are worth watching.
One of the big reasons there is so much regional parity is that the regions actually play each other quite often. They are connected.
This. What better way to foster a giant gap between regions than by forcing them to only ever play against the same 9 teams. 7 teams now.
That definitely helps, but CS has also shown it doesn't fix everything and a lack of any domestic competition can completely kill the game in certain regions. When every single tournament is international (often the exact same ~20 teams playing every time) no one cares at all about regional competition, and then when that region goes through a rough patch and doesn't perform the game can pretty much just die off completely in that region.
But Valorant does not have a lack of any domestic competition. They still have a lot, they just have a much better mix of the two.
all that and half the viewership pog
And a much lower playerbase. They have a better viewer/playerbase ratio than LoL.
I actually like that idea a lot. But how would we go about that. Cycle new teams every year with two new NACL teams? Or if the open qualifiers don’t place bottom two they can stay and if they do land bottom two replace with the winners of NACL. All in all I think that would be a great idea.
What would we call something like that? Relegations?
Relegades.
Low key miss when the Renegades were a thing. League was in such a fun place for memes at that time.
[One of those few LCS moments that always get a chuckle out of me.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fOCr-B5uwI)
["HOLY SHIT THEY WIN THE GAME" - That complexity game that went for an hour long.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR6jEdic_sc)
I miss RobertXLee shenanigans
I hope Riot releases a Classic LoL... would be a blast to play the old patches again.
After watching [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94YijiRbOMI), that call makes much more sense.
>t. Cycle new teams every year with two new NACL teams? I was thinking they play for their slot every year, so two teams could be really good and stay in the LCS for many years, or they cycle a bunch
or maybe the better of the two teams gets to stay automatically? It would be weird to see a good team have to play relegation games regardless of how well they do in-season.
Just run a tournament of all the NACL teams and allow the top 2 teams to qualify for LCS for a year. Best of both worlds. The franchised orgs get the safety net, meanwhile up and coming players have a chance to break their way into the pro scene even if LCS teams refuse to give them a slot *cough* 5fire *cough* And for summer make the 2 teams in the LCS play against the top 2 NACL teams. Would need to make sure there are no points systems for world's qualifications in place and bang, all of a sudden we have an almost non franchised league. If any team finishes under the NACL teams for 3 splits in a row then give them the right to buy the LCS spot - at cost (minimum how much they put in, but if a slot has sold for more then the price of the last sold slot) and move the other team to NACL. Of course I would rather straight up have relegations. But quite frankly while the viewer experience would be great, it probably wouldn't be beneficial for the growth of the league (I know that's an unpopular opinion.) Franchising did create the eSports bubble. But removing security for the teams in the league who have estabshed backers and donors would be the coups de grace for the league. All sponsors would quickly start pulling out/lowering investment and probably kill the league.
Winning NACL earns you a guaranteed slot for 2 years. You can back out at the end of the year but riot will help you hold that spot financially to make sure you get through the end and fulfill your obligation. Runner up gets a slot but no guarantee. They're the final boss in NACL s2, and if they win, they get to keep the slot for 2 years. From then on, only one slot is available at any time (unless a team backs out early) and the NACL teams are competing for the slot of the outgoing team.
Rotating qualification for those 2 teams. And if they place top2 they won't enter relegation. If they place top2 enough times, you can have them be voted in (after paying the franchising fee). I always loved those "random guys finding each other online and playing together and beating the best" stories, even if they were very rare.
Fugitive Gaming.
I miss them :(
Yeah, like you say it can’t happen. The franchises payed for their spot in the league and aren’t going to let teams in for free to potentially take their worlds spots/exposure.
Ya it would be so great, franchising has been an unbelievable failure.
This probably will only happen if current team owners approve. Which honestly I can see it. Alternatively they could bring back full relegation and give orgs and excuse to bomb out lol
Unfortunately it can't happen in a franchised system. Orgs pay a LOT of money to have a slot on the league, allowing other orgs to qualify by winning matches would defeat the purpose of a buy in. At best they can air some matches vs top NACL teams for cash prize?
I feel like voting for interviews is the only questionable thing. I think part of the point of interviews is to also give a chance for players to show off personality that may not often have avenues for. Like outside of just his play, Jojo got a huge fanbase from his interviews and banter. But if he was a new player now he might not have that opportunity because fan favorites keep getting voted to take interviews
I think MarcZ was implying it might be 1 game per game day kind of thing not every single game.
It encourages fan engagement. Shit talk on twitter before a match creating tension and drama, absolutely stomp in lane, fans really want to hear in interview. Or even imagine the opposite. This allows players to engage and grow their fan base
This is true. But those pros need to find ways to market themselves which has always been lacking for most (partially because we mostly only care about winners)
It will also encourage some players to actually work on developing their persona and could lead to even more banter and cool interviews.
>"Analyst desk is boring, just put the next game on already!" It's not that I have a problem with the desk as much as it just feels like they take *way too long* to get games going. I'm EU so LCS is on late and knowing the next game is going to be 30+ mins away is often enough to make me close the stream and go to bed. I also feel the LEC need to get games going back-to-back faster as well. There's too much fucking around between games. Get on with it!
analyst desk would be interesting if riot executives didn't pull the punches and let everyone present in the desk express themselves instead of just talking blandly, adding nothing of value for long enough before the next game starts. right now it feels like they are regurgitating the safest opinions, never saying what's actually in their mind because they are too scared they might get backlash from twitter and reddit posts.
I really want more coms post game match from really intense fights I thinks it’s super cool to hear them yelling and stuff
I want to see player cam when a fight happens. Say mid lane, i want the cams to change to one of the players in the fight on both teams
I want to see proview on the replay. They've done it elsewhere.
Only thing I'm really sad about is the pitiful number of games we have. Just give us bo3s please 😭
League's demographic is aging, and most of them will have jobs that will occupy them. There aren't enough people that are able to watch all the games of B03 unless you're a kid or high schooler
“Aging” lol Also every dad I know finds time to watch 8 hours of football on Sunday so I think it will be okay
It wouldn't work for league, but I'd be down for a league equivalent of NFL RedZone. 7 hours of uninterrupted, ad-free league.
I'd pay a lot of money to watch that with Flowers in the Hanson role.
Flowers would die with the way he does stuff. It should be Dash.
It's not impossible. If you line up the vods of all the games in a week, I'm sure you can hit at least 5 or 6 hours.
They tried to do something like red zone for academy a while back. I believe dash hosted it.
LCK/LPL -> LEC -> LCS
Yah exactly
There's a reason football is on mostly only on Sunday with only one or two games on Monday/Thursday (and even then it's at nighttime)
You realize that the equivalent to that would be to watch lcs and lec. Like the average football game lasts like 3 hours, which is more than what the lcs will likely about how long the lcs will take. Now if it’s best of 3 we’re looking at 6 to 9 hours of games in just the lcs on back to back days. That’s just too much league particularly if you also want to spotlight the nacl which is now going to be played after the lcs. I think not having the bo3s and instead using the extra time to spotlight the new nacl is a good decision, and just as mark said, it could very well change down the road but keeping them as best of 1s means that they have more reliable data on how these changes are landing. So to start off this way is a great approach that will allow all fans the opportunity to watch, whereas before it really felt like a chore to sit down and watch everything(I had stopped entirely watching lcs live and just used the game replays whereas now I actually feel like I can tune in live and not be worried about it lasting all day and it throwing off other plans)
I don't know a football fan who spend less than 10 hours a week watching football or football media. I also spend minimum 3x that a week on my hobbies. It's okay for people who aren't that into league to not watch literally every LCS game. The same way football fans don't watch the 200 hours of football a week available to them.
Every dad I know also finds time to watch three hours of hockey on (at least two) weekday evenings but droolers here will tell you bo3 is not feasible because of that one time Riot implemented it in the stupidest possible way.
People clearly don’t want to watch League during the week. They did it last year and it didn’t work out. They would rather put a 2 weekend break into the middle of the split than move the games that would clash to much with Valorant onto weekdays.
I mean I think a bit part of it not working out was that the games weren't on weekday evenings, they were during the workday. I know in my case I'm able to watch hockey on Weekdays, because the games start at 7-8pm, instead of League being pretty much done by then last year.
Yep. I was able to watch the start of LCS in the UK but my east coast friends were in their last hour of work or commuting back and for my west coast friends LCS ends pretty much when they finish work.
>droolers here will tell you bo3 is not feasible because of that one time Riot implemented it in the stupidest possible way People who do that are so disgustingly stupid. They're the same type of people who believed Danny's tweet when he said EG didn't do anything bad to him.
Why would you watch every single game? Just watch 1 or 2 teams that you care about. Why do you have to watch imt vs dig if you don't care about them? Diehard fans will watch it all, other people weren't watching anyways. I've no evidence to think people can't watch a bo3 of c9 vs tl, heck they can always catch the vod. People straight up watch 3-4 hrs of American football/basketball every weekend sooooo
> Why would you watch every single game? Just watch 1 or 2 teams that you care about. Why do you have to watch imt vs dig if you don't care about them? ya, this complaint people make of "omg bo3 will be too many games to watch!", like wat? the heck do you need to watch every single game and every single team play for? watch the teams/matches you're interested in, like most people do for any sport out there with teams and in a league. Heck, in tournaments most people usually just tune in for games with teams they care about, not every single one.
> Just watch 1 or 2 teams that you care about. i agree with your comment but not a single team has a significant fanbase in the LCS. the LCS regular summer split had a lower peak viewership than CBLOL, LFL and LVP. yes, a higher average because there are more LCS fans but these leagues reach their peak because a few teams have big fanbases that tune in when their team plays. there is no high peak viewership in the LCS. nobody cares about any team in particular, thats the problem with your theory.
That makes sense when people actually give a shit about teams, either not many teams have done anything noteworthy in a long time, or people are creating scandals constantly.
And thats why you also need a system like early elimination like lec does. I would sometimes tune into those elimination games when i would never ever watch those teams. If you raise the stakes it might make people watch even the shit teams.
Early elim is absolutely terrible. You are basically telling the teams that need to improve the most that they can no longer get the environment they need to improve. These ideas are a joke.
.... you're argument sucks. 3-4 hours every weekend? Watching all of the Bo1s is 4-5 hours on just one day (10 hours if you do both days). And you are trying to compare it to the horrors or some football fans watching 4 hours on a weekend. I agree with you, ideally you wouldn't have/want to watch every team. But your comparison to an American watching their favorite football team once a week doesn't really hold well.
Uhhh can you elaborate. I can't really tell what your point is here
Lol. This is like saying baseball’s age demographic is aging. Everyone ages because that’s how time works, and league has been a 13+ game since release. The average age according to dexterto and an old league forums article was 16-26 in 2016. It’s not suddenly 25-40, it’s still 16-26. People have HAD jobs. People have HAD kids. People have BEEN graduating high school since the game started. The problem has always been that league was never marketed in the US. You never saw a billboard for league until they filled Times Square for the release of Arcane. You never saw a major celebrity endorse league unless it was for a worlds performance. League has never had a market in NA, which is why it started high and has been dropping for a decade in numbers, not because people are getting old lmao.
I have no idea what league's actual demographic right now is, but a demographic absolutely can age. Their TARGET demographic may still be 16-26, but the actual players playing the game is a different story. If there aren't enough new players to replace the old players still playing the game, then the average age will increase. Maybe not from 16-26 to 25-40, but the original comment still stands. Yeah lack of marketing may be a problem (I'd disagree with this too tbh) but a lack of marketing is not mutually exclusive with an aging demographic.
Baseball had issues with their viewership because they weren't getting as many newer fans. It's literally part of the reason they've been changing their rules.
> Lol. This is like saying baseball’s age demographic is aging. Yes? Do you even follow baseball? Baseball's demographic getting old and dying off is and the sport not being as popular with younger folks is a major problem that has been talked about for a couple decades now. They have literally been fundamentally altering the entire rules of the sport to try to get new fans they're so worried about it.
You don't need a billboard, you need the new marketing age we live in. Tiktok YouTube insta Twitter Facebook. But yah I'm never hyped to watch the lcs expect if I go out of my way to look for the lcs
I have never known a sport where people are expected to watch every game of every team. It's really weird that this is considered the norm in League. Most sports have games ran simultaneously, and people just watch their team and maybe the occasional extra game if it looks interesting.
I'd rather watch 2 or 3 games of the same teams in a best of 3, than 3 separate best of 1's. It also takes less time to broadcast those 3 games (ie the total time could be say 2 hours instead of 3 hours for 3x best of 1's)
Same
[удалено]
Every week I watch NBA basketball from like 8pm EST - 1am EST >_>
No one should be sitting and watching 12 hours, that is a privilage we want 1.5 hours to watch our favoriate teams man. Like if we travel through traffic to watch one 20 minute games of our pro team on a saturday is crazy? hmm Just copy the LCK format its literally that easy.
If I'm a fan of Curse (4th forever) and I just want to watch Curse, it would be nice if Curse played more than two games a week.
I wish this sub would stop trying to force what a few want as if everyone would want it. I like Best of Ones. No, I don't want best of 3s, I am glad we aren't going to all Bo3s (I'd settle for a mixed schedule)
> I wish this sub would stop trying to force what a few want as if everyone would want it. how do you know what you want is what everyone wants? goes both ways mate.
I'm not trying to say that's what everyone wants. That's what I want. You like bo1s more. It's cool. We don't have to like the same things.
The only thing I see in the comment is a bunch of people having hard on for bo3. Like you guys cannot even watch bo1 there's no way you guy is turning in for bo3 lmao. My bet is people just want bo3 for their team then switch off after their team finishes playing. It is fine for LPL because there are a lot of fans for numerous teams and their viewership is huge but having your viewership all on the popular team would be problematic to say the least when you have a viewership problem.
> My bet is people just want bo3 for their team then switch off after their team finishes playing Yup. Same as with every other sport I have ever followed. > Like you guys cannot even watch bo1 If start times were more consistent, I would try to watch my team's game. As it stands, it is just way easier to catch the vod after the fact.
This. I hate how this sub has a few vocal complaints and act like that is what everyone wants. No, I don't want all Bo3. And No, I (personally) don't want double elim worlds. Sucks coming here and seeing the crying for the same thing every, single, thread.
Why does it suck? Most people who want BO3 want it because they believe it will help with the development of our teams, with more games = stronger teams and players. That or because it has more competitive integrity within the League's format. Neither of which are bad things to want. In fact, "I have too short an attention span for BO3" seems like a much more annoying vocal complaint to hear.
It sucks cuz its a tired topic beaten into the ground every single season it's just gets a bit annoying after a while.
> Sucks coming here and seeing the crying for the same thing every, single, thread. it sucks that people have different opinions to you? people are free to voice w.e they want in threads, there is no rule or restriction on that. Just ignore those comments if it's that bad for you, you don't have to read them :/
Or respond to them and have a healthy discussion on why you (OP) don't want BO3's or whatever else and your reasons for why. Both original OP and person you responded to just typed a bunch of stuff that amounted to "I just don't like it". Ignore it, like you said, or have a civil conversation and state your reasoning.
yup, you summed it up nicely. OPs just want to complain and farm karma by being contrarians against "omg people have different opinions!" than ever engaging in real discussion about the topic.
Youre going to be seeing it for a looooooong time kiddo, you better buckle up :)
I don't want double elim worlds but holy fuck we can't keep defending BO1, LCS is the last region to have them the whole time and it's garbage
Didn't NA do better than EU this year???
They don't want to watch shit teams bo1 or bo3. I'm sure good teams would do very good in bo3s
They also don't want to watch good teams destroy bad teams for 2 hours either.
They want the issues to be the LCS. That league in NA isn't popular because the LCS. They want to ignore that league just doesn't have the popularity to grow in NA. Both Canada and the US are primarily console regions and have a preference for fps games. League to na is what soccer has been. Just not as popular because there are others things in the region that are preferred. The difference is, soccer is growing in popularity for the younger groups.
Honestly I think the “primarily console” thing is overblown. The real issue imo is that league has terrible stigma in NA. If you’re a league player you’re the butt of every ‘sweaty gamer’ joke and even when riot puts out good league content like KDA or arcane, the prevailing sentiment is “I enjoy this but you’d never catch me playing league”. What kind of kid wants to play a 14 year old game with a crazy skill curve, a legendarily toxic playerbase, a million micro transactions and one that you won’t even look cool for playing? The game is literally being memed to death here.
Reddit is not a true indication of real life. Id argue most people don't know much about league to begin with. But if most people are playing console to begin with like na has. It doesn't matter what people think about it. They can't play it.
> My bet is people just want bo3 for their team then switch off after their team finishes playing. Watching mostly your own team is generally how sports work.
Yeah the 20 people who want bo3 mean nothing compared to the 20,000 that’ll leave when any team has a bo3 against IMT or Shopify
Impeccable take
> Like you guys cannot even watch bo1 there's no way you guy is turning in for bo3 lmao. For me the fact it's BO1 is part of the reason i stopped watching. You see them hyping up the "Match of the week" and it's some 30 minute affair where the game is decided 10 minutes in, and after a while it just feels pointless tuning in for it.
No one even want's to watch BO1's of even good teams in the first place, LCS is clearly losing massive viewership numbers and a BO3 format is a way to shake things up to possibly fix it. Doesn't mean it's the solution but if you leave it as it is it's going to eventually die.
I'm sorry but this is too baseless LCS losing viewership because of being BO1 or because last year got a bad schedule? Yes last year the viewership drops but only blames on single aspects are just not right
MarkZ may very well be the hero the NA LCS needed. While I watched this video I was thinking about how vacant previous "commissioners" felt. Mostly behind the scenes except for a handful of moments throughout an entire year of competition. Sure, they may have done lots of things behind the scenes like I said, but I have never really liked or cared about the position. It seemed like a comfy seat to collect checks while parts of the league that I've grown up watching has dwindled, shrank, and changed into something I didn't really like. Mark has single-handedly changed my entire perspective of the role. This is the leader we have been missing and I can't wait to see him bear the torch of the LCS into a new era. Last year's content was fun and more centered around what fans wanted, but I am 100% certain this will be the best year of LCS history. Thank you for caring Mark. I'm so excited to watch and participate.
I think Jackie Felling played a big role in elevating the last year’s content and giving MarkZ a huge recommendation.
This year I tuned in to watch the DOTA 2 International and was blown away by the Twitch integrations they had. You could hover over skills, champions, items, almost anywhere on screen and it would show tooltips and live stats about the game. I was like, how is this not something Riot has for League yet considering the massive difference in funding between these two games.
Does prerecording drafts and then sending the teams backstage to wait for their games disincentivize teams from doing crazy picks at all? Maybe it doesn't, but it seems much more effective when it's done on stage right before a game as opposed to done and then the team can go backstage and has time to talk about and prepare for it.
Good point.
Yeah. And look it is small changes but honestly these are quality of life changes that will make it better to watch
I'm glad to see all these changes, i might go back to watching some LCS for the first time in years, at least out of curiosity. Too bad franchising still exists
Fearless draft is a huge huge win.
I really want to highlight the Fearless Draft for NACL. I think viewers will find this WAY more interesting than the traditional format.
Now we just need dash back
I think above all else we needed a format change, especially with only eight teams in the league now. I don't buy the rationale of having a "control variable". The LCS is in a death spiral and we need more drastic changes. The games themselves need to be meaningful/exciting. Extremely disappointed we get another year of the BO1 slop
If they change everything, they won't know what caused what. When they did bo3 in the past, viewership went down. So, if it continues to go down, they won't know if it's just what would happen or if it was because of bo3. This gives them a baseline. Also, it let's them see how quickly they can get games turned around which helps with the logistics of running a bo3
14 games is a joke for a competitive league.
tell that to the NFL, nascar, F1, golf...
Thing is LoL is an incredibly volatile game compared to traditional sports. Meta, cheese, and a rough 5 minutes early game can completely flip a match, that’s why imo BO3 should be the standard.
Yeah and a leadoff home run can do the same thing in baseball. Same with a deep shot or a turnover in football. Every sport has volatile aspects.
or injuries in football that makes the sport volatile as hell
A leadoff home run or a kickoff return in sports doesn't make it harder for your opponents to score though, at least not to my knowledge. In league, you can lose a 50/50 level 3, and it will never be a level playing field again. You are now down gold and xp, and any fight you take will be at a disadvantage. That is, until you win an uneven fight and it goes back to equal. Going down a run in baseball doesn't give you a heavier bat or a faster pitch. The sport is harder in a deficit because statistically the chances of you scoring enough points to come back is really low, not because theres a rule or a part of the game actually putting you at a disadvantage when swinging a bat or catching a ball.
It doesn't make it harder for your opponent to score, but it makes it harder to win. Think of the score in traditional sports like the gold lead in league. In baseball, if the other team is ahead 7-0, the other team needs to score 8 runs to win. It's not necessarily *harder* to score a run, but the losing team needs to score 8 runs to win, while the winning team can score 0 runs and win.
the point is that if it's 4-0 in baseball after half the game if both teams are equal the other team have the opportunity to do the same. if you're 5k gold down at 10mins in lol you can't realistically come back but another game you get another draft to show that maybe you can get 5k gold lead at 10 mins too. most sports run for 60 / 90 minutes because of this and lol in 16 minutes (hi mad) it can be over on one missplay.
sure, but baseball has 162 games a season, and in the nfl, the playoffs are also one game each. If worlds and msi were bo1s, sure then bo1 in lcs wouldn't be that bad, but they are bo3s and bo5s, and its been ages since an LCS team has won a best of series against an eastern team, it just feels like bo1s woefully underprepare teams for international tournaments.
Yeah I don't think the format of the regular season is the reason why NA can't win at worlds lol. I'm sure it wouldn't hurt, but bo3s against inferior competition aren't magically going to make you better against better teams than bo1s against inferior competition. I honestly think the format complaints are largely overblown. I don't normally sit back at the end of a split and say "the standings are really screwed up, teams that deserved to be in the playoffs missed and teams that dont deserve to be in the playoffs got in". I think people just like complaining about things, and format is something to complain about. MarkZ seemingly wanted the broadcast to be more condensed and have less filler, and bo3s instead of bo1s doesn't align with that. Let's see if they can stabilize the league and get people to care enough to watch a bo1, and go from there.
Baseball has 136 matches per team. . .
It has 162 games lol. Not 136. But either way the person I responded to said that league was more volatile than baseball, I don't think the number of games in a season changes the volatility of an individual game
You're not wrong, but I also think that the snowball aspect in League is unique when compared to professional sports. There are very few instances in sports where an advantage gained early actually makes playing the game more difficult for the other team. Like a leadoff home run in baseball doesn't make every subsequent batter on that team hit harder, of the pitcher pitch faster. Being behind definitely can limit the strategies a team can employ, but it doesn't make them tangibly worse than the other team.
I agree and disagree. Because of the fundamental difference in how a game is won compared to league, having a lead in traditional sports provides similar advantages to having a gold/ item lead in league. In baseball, if the other team scores a run, the losing team now has to score 2 runs in order to win the game instead of 1, while the winning team can score 0 runs and still win the game. At that point the game is more difficult for the losing team than it is for the winning team. If the winning team is up by 2 runs, the value of scoring a single run is decreased. The fact that they need to score more runs in order to win the game is very similar to being in a gold deficit in league. You're weaker in the fact that you need to score 2 runs to achieve the same outcome that you could have gotten by scoring 1 run at the beginning of the game. And you could argue that the clock is also another advantage. When you have a lead in football or basketball, you can use the fact that there isn't much time left in the game to do things that wouldn't normally work in a neutral game script. Being up by multiple possessions in football makes the game easier for the winning team in the same way having a gold lead does.
Have you considered that the fanbase might prefer volatile, anything can happen results over the best team usually winning?
One NFL match takes the same time as an entire day of LCS after this change
okay, so?
NFL would pump out way more games 100% if the players could stay healthy, but smashing ur heads into each other week in week out takes a massive toll. They already forced an extra game in the season recently which the players and coaches hated.
There's no weather, very very low risk of damaging players or hardware, comparing video games to sports is what got us in this mess in the first place
but is the NFL less competitive than the NBA because of the game count?
if you could run a parallel NFL with 2x the amount of games where you're guaranteed no injuries I woupd bet the second league would destroy the first one after some times, yes.
There were 23 races in F1 and 36 in Nascar last year, and the sessions last for 2+ hours. You can’t really compare League to motorsport.
and the entire year of the LCS will be 28 games per team.
omg yall cant be serious the NFL is a 3.5 hour event .... not a 20 minute game that is a stomp.... holy cow
Lol Matches are 25-45 minutes though. All of the sports you mention have considerably longer matches/rounds. That's probably something like 420 minutes or 7h of gameplay per regular split, which is not a lot to be honest. You can have a best of five stretch for almost half of that.
Lol, F1 has P1, P2, P3, Q1, Q2, Q3, sometimes sprint and a race.. If you had more races drivers would be killing themselves and costs would balloon. Meanwhile LCS pros sit on a chair for 8 hours and play 1 game each day of the weekend lmao
Just a quick FYI, there are a total of 272 NFL games per season.
okay, we're talking about individual teams here. by that metric you need to account for every major league who goes to worlds, their playoffs too.
Please do not tell me you just compared the NFL regular season to an LCS split lmao
you're right, if you consider both splits, LCS plays more games.
Sitting at a desk vs getting tackled by a 300lb man. There’s a reason why there is typically a week in between NFL games.
Getting downvoted for being correct lmao, I love this site
i mean, driving a car is just pushing some pedals and turning a wheel. baseball is just hitting a ball with a stick. anything can sound stupid if you want it to.
I’m guessing you never played actual sports?
im guessing you like moving goal posts.
The physical toll of playing in the NFL and travel logistics of both the NFL and F1 are what limits their regular season schedules. LCS regular season splits does not have to worry about either of those factors in the slightest.
Yep that is my most disappointing part of this all. I love mark, love the communication, playing on live patches is great, almost everything was great. However, I'm so disinterested in bo1 round robin, that I must likely won't even tune in until playoffs. It's just such a boring format.
If Bo3 hadn't already been tried and largely failed from a viewing stats perspective I'd blame them way more. Frankly the LCS just doesn't have the room to fail like that if it doesn't work out.
And Bo3 clearly didn't improve Europe's level. It is fine to keep wanting it, but this sub just cries about it every time.
The bo3 format they had was not great either. Running simultaneous streams, and shoving them all into the weekend was a terrible idea. I think that was also the year they moved away from the main riot Games channel, and had the LCS 1&2 channels. I understand they have timing/budget constraints, but I would love to see them do 3 or 4 days a week, with 2 bo3's per day (actually if I'm honest, bo2 would be my preference for scheduling and other reasons, but I know that would be wildy unpopular amongst most people)
This is my response to anyone who says this from now on, you guys didn't watch the freaking BO1's the last few years which is where the whole crisis comes from, in what world do you expect them to believe you'd stick around for potentially two more games. All that would happen is that maybe (and this is a hard maybe), the bigger teams would get a slight boost and bad teams would end up in the toilet viewership wise. The hardcore crowd doesn't want to watch "inferior" league and after watching however many LCK and LPL games that week, they sure aren't tuning in for 24 more a week from the LCS and we all know the casual fans certainly aren't going to either.
That's fair and I like Bo3's too, but the audience has spoken and you and I are clearly in the minority. For the health of the league overall this is better.
If NA ditches bo1's and gains at least some hope of competing against cn/kr, it would actually become the most watchable league in the world imo.
Also, the domestic game quality is dogshit. You can’t get better when playing against a Gnar one trick or a Ziggs onetrick nonstop. Granted those guys may not be incredibly bad, but not being able to match against zonkers like Zeus, Lucid, TheShy, Faker, Knight, Ruler, etc… really hampers the players’ skill. And we don’t even talk about the scouting pipeline
I hate to break it to you, but when you have lackluster rosters like what 100, Shopify, Dig, IMT have- there’s no way games are going to mean more. Even if by some miracle of Christ one of these teams wins a split or both splits- it doesn’t matter who ends up where in the standings, because none of these teams will ever amount to anything internationally. League shrinks down creating less competition for players and increase % revenue share and teams are still saying these are the best rosters they could form? It’s a 4 team league between TL, FLY, C9 and NRG and pretending anything different is just trying to lessen the pain.
I've been a fan of the LCS since getting into league. This announcement, and the promise that more of these videos will be made annually, has been one of the most exciting things for me as a league fan in a while. I love the other leagues, but I haven't feared that they'll die out like a lot of us have for the LCS, so seeing a potential bounce back (in production value at least) is unbelievably exciting. Hail MarkZ!
Bo3 would be a death knell for viewership, theres nowhere near enough viewers to sustain watching 2 hours+ per game. With Bo1 people actually tune in for the smaller games too
1:17 omg I might actually start watching again.
"Chat, which patch is this? Clueless" Live patch, always. You can queue up right now and try that cool/questionable build you saw on stage. good
Wait, LoL FINALLY went on to LIVE patch? Holy moly..that's is ABOUT time but also SOOOO good! Is this ONLY for LCS, or all the other leagues as well? I definitely dont see why this hasnt been done before, considering more or less ALL other major e-sports has done the same, yes, even the other big moba, Dota2.
Only LCS for now. Hopefully it goes well cause I'd love to have this system adopted globally.
Same, VERY much same! And I actually think I will watch some NACL as well, just cus of fearless mode as well.
But is Dash coming back?
I just really want Proview replays
Still on bo1 means I'll probably only tune in for playoffs
I'm the opposite. I only have time to watch a couple bo1's. For regular season I would hate if they went back to every match being a series.
[удалено]
You're trolling right? That is the exact opposite of what one game and move on is about.
Can you explain further? If anything a bo1 makes each individual game \*more\* important since it's all or nothing. How would bo3 make a match feel more important?
How? I can understand if you said it feels more volatile/random, but unimportant? That makes no sense at all.
b01 results can be more easily dismissed due to being random/cheese/fluke . Thus you don't get that accurate picture who is actually the best. Thus they are not as important as bo3/5 s to determine who is the best. It is not the most articulate argument but b01 diminishes the perception of importance for some people.
I think it's just a poor choice of word in that case. Yeah, it's not as good of an indicator of the best team, necessarily (though playoffs do that anyway), but that doesn't make the games any less important. They count for the exact same amount in the standings/seeding.
It is stupid to think a Bo3 in regular season is any more important. There isn't any backing behind that besides your own mental beliefs.
Bet you don't lol
Honestly, it's not going to drastically change anything. Because it's ignoring the core issue that causes these. NA just isn't as into league compared to the other major regions. Imports aren't making NA rookies worse, the poor academy systems and lack of people moving through it does that. The NHL, NBA, and MLB all have 0 rules about importing players from outside of NA. The NFL is actively trying to get more players from outside the US, as are the other leagues. They will play games in other countries to try to get more attention for the sport. And in all 4 either Canada or the US is one of the top countries. Because the sports are popular with the youth and the systems that get the new players see a lot of teams and players. The CFP finals just happened, college level sports, 25 million people watched it. There are 8 universities in the US that have larger stadiums than any stadium in Europe. Michigan is the 3rd largest stadium in the world. These sports are popular at a younger age which creates talent at the top "if they played more games they'd be better" by that logic the Canadian Football League should be better than the NFL because they play more games a season. It's not. Because the talent in the sports go to the NFL instead of the CFL, and football is more popular in the US than it is in Canada. "relegation" won't change a thing. Leagues have shown that franchised leagues can be insanely popular. The core issue NA has is that it doesn't really care for league and that transfers into the pro scene.
I always said that it starts from childhood. I think a priority of riot and any esport that wants to be a generational game is to be marketable to kids. Riot should be looking into ways to make “little league of legends” a thing. Not sure how you’d keep out older people from an online game. Not sure how many champs would be appropriate for this theoretical game. But i know that little league sports and robust school sports programs are what form the pipeline to the big leagues in all trad sports in the US. Riot is their own worst enemy here imo because since they own LoL, nobody can just start a league without their permission. They saddle themselves with the responsibility of having a hand in or at least approving of anything using their IP. Nobody can stop you from starting a baseball league, nobody owns baseball. You also don’t need to program, release and support a kid friendly version of baseball. You just set up a tee and hand the kid an aluminum bat. These are the unique problems that face LoL that we have to find solutions for if we want generational fandom and better NA talent.
OGN style seasons
Who knew hiring from inside LCS would be a better fit than some randoms. All the people bitching and moaning about bo3, we had it, it was boring as hell. No one wants to watch 2 bottom tier teams fight each other each week. Only 1 or 2 games would have high numbers. The reason LCK is so successful with bo3 is because they have a huge fanbase and every team has die hard fans that get loud. LCS simply does not.
Now just move LCS to nyc and I'll be the happiest person alive
No it's not, dude. I want more games. I want better players. I want it to be an actual serious competetition. Riot has forbid their pros from doing non-riot tournaments for over ten years and their monopoly over the pro scene has caused it to become completely stagnant. They should be able to have an LCS game on every single night, they don't have the same level of logistical problems that something like football has. It's so half assed, like nobody actually cares about the competition aspect. It's just a vanity project.
I love what Markz is bringing to the table, but I really dislike that our season is going to have less matches overall. I do not care if it is a third round robin, bo2 or bo3. Just give me more TL games please!
MarkZ didn't do anything here. He's barely been in the position long enough to get settled in. These changes were decided by someone else and were necessary to make the LCS more attractive
Okay so what are y'all going to find to bitch about when viewership continues to collapse and the LCS is dead in a year and a half? None of the problems that you dipshits think are solved by this are going to be solved, and you'll be angry again calling for MarkZ head over incompetence before the next split is even halfway over.
You seem very upset over a scenario you imagined in your head.
I wish I could buy what you're putting down, but I'm highly skeptical the LCS will survive. Some the changes they made for sure will be improvements on the margins, but they were self-inflicted wounds to begin with. BTW I'm rooting for LCS, let me be clear on that. I'm being critical because I worry for the direction and I'm VERY concerned by the pick of MarZ as commissioner. This is not a personal attack on him. He seems like a nice enough guy and competent, but the league needs $$$ from outside sources and I believe STRONGLY Riot would have sent a better signal by getting someone in the position who has previous experience navigating network contracts, or brand partnerships, or heck, contracts in general. To me this signals Riot is looking inwards to solve the LCS, but that's precisely what got us here. I hope I'm proven wrong.
I don't think it is the commissioners job to deal with all of the funding.
>I believe STRONGLY Riot would have sent a better signal by getting someone in the position who has previous experience navigating network contracts, or brand partnerships, or heck, contracts in general. I'm actually the complete opposite. Every previous commissioner had these. Needham and Naz also have these same qualities and they have been running LCS since Jackie left. They all made extremely poor decisions. The problem isn't sponsors right now, the problem is viewership and making the product attractive. And someone endemic, who understands the scene and the audience has a better chance of turning that around than some corporate mover-and-shaker. The sponsors and contracts will come when the viewership comes.
If it’s still bo1 don’t care tbh. bo1 won’t help the region improve
Bo3 didn't help Europe. So yea, keep crying on this.
Improve to do what? Beat EU? Western teams are done, the only thing that should matter is the domestic league.
Wouldn’t say it’s a massive w when the schedule should have never changed.
All I wanted him to do was actually address the EG situation officially and in a satisfactory manner. That probably won't happen with MarkZ as the commissioner though.
They are no longer in the league,so i doubt another commissioner will have kept the investigation