MAD played 60 games in the LEC but yes I agree.
How can someone like Armut expand his champ pool when every game is best of 1 (and so matters more)? IF we had best of 3 he could have experimented on stage more and teams could experiment on stage with more strategies.
It just pisses me off to think about it. We are destined to get worse at worlds until this changes.
Yes how could a professional player who plays League of Legends full time possibly expand his champion pool? I mean he's only played 271 games over the course of his career, not the mention scrims. It's literally impossible. There's no time to play solo queue, no time to play scrims, it's just impossible. You have to play your 18th Gnar game against Vitality otherwise you'll never make Worlds!
Oner's played a total of 55 pro games. By the metric of who played more stage games, Oner should be 1/5 the player that Armut is.
Guess who believes that? No one.
For reference, Cloud9 played more stage games this year than Gen.G did. And yet Cloud9 got clapped. They also played more bo5s than Gen.G did. Yet they got clapped.
Hmm maybe game count isn't actually the reason.
I'd argue that game count isn't the reason but on-stage experience. As Jankos said, there are many factors and Bo1 are one of them. There is even a point to argue that China caught up with LCK after switching from Bo2 to Bo3 - at least from a viewer perspective. Imo, the best format for EU was still the Bo2 format and it was really sad to see it back to Bo1. Riot should for sure consider to uniformize League systems across the globe.
What's odd about using bo2 as the landmark is that it's not actually different from best of 1: Every game matters. Every game directly results in more points for qualification into playoffs. Best of 3/5 is the only one where losing an individual game basically means nothing. Sure, sometimes you're tiebroken on game score (LPL did that this year for like five teams) but you can just 18-0 your season and not have to worry about it.
Either way, my comment was more about directly stating how Armut should clearly be able to have a larger champion pool than he does. I agree there are a plethora of reasons why the LCK and LPL have consistently outperformed the LCS and LEC (two years of Caps notwithstanding). It's clearly happening. It's definitely true.
I just take offense to the mudslinging at how it's all just Riot's fault because the league structure makes it so hard to improve. That's simply a lie. For reference, in 2016 summer and all of 2017 the LCS played best of 3 in regular season. No LCS team except Cloud9 got out of groups and they didn't win in quarterfinals. That's the exact same as every other year of LCS as Worlds. Meanwhile, viewership plummeted so maybe that's not a very good system.
At the same time, the LEC played best of 2 for 2016 summer and bo3 for all of 2017. 2016 was the year G2 bombed out of groups and H2k got their free quarterfinal over Albus Nox. Credit to H2k for topping the group with EDG in it, but that's all they did. 2017 had two teams in quarters, which seems about par for the course. Maybe Doublelift wouldn't have choked against SSG if he was playing best of 1 all year and realized that individual mistakes matter. Who knows?
For reference, the preceding year, 2015, had two LEC teams in semis. 2018, where both leagues went back to bo1, had the LEC's first world final since 2011 and the LCS's first semifinal since 2011. Sure seems like evidence for bo1 somehow being the better system for both leagues.
Maybe it's not the league structure's fault. Maybe people should stop picking it as their primary punching bag.
What I fail to understand is, why a game like League of Legends with the infrastructure that Riot has built for it as the premier E-sports has leagues that have different rules. I am not saying this as an argument for or against a reason as to why someone is underperforming or not. Just why isn't there a global rule that formats are even across the board for everyone. Doesn't that make it inherently a fairer system?
Because territories are different and have distinct needs. Iād much rather Americans Make decisions for an American league and Koreans make choices for a Korean league. The countries, continents, territories, etc. are not the same.
Just out of curiosity, does that mean that the LEC could switch to another format even if NA stuck to Bo1? I'm aware there were different formats in the past, but since they switched back to Bo1 at the same time I got the impression that was a single decision taken for both regions in conjunction. Was that the case (maybe due to LEC and LCS being more intertwined at the time)?
I don't see why not. As you noted, we already saw that the first split went separately: LCS went to bo3 while LEC went to bo2.
For what it's worth North America and western Europe are relatively similar culturally. Heck, the primary broadcast language for both leagues is even English. I'm certainly not an expert in league operations but it appears that viewers had similar reactions and so the experiments got shut down for both leagues in relatively short time frames.
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