PhreakRiot

But how could you possibly fix them? Outside of just saying “nah actually T1 is better we are going to overwrite your seeding” you’re going to get misshapen groups unless the regions seed better. Similar is seeding a 1st place group team vs. 2nd. What, we just say “yeah don’t care, IG is still top seed”? The tournament has to play out.

Playing 2-3x as many games is not the solve for that.

You should be remembered for what you did. Plenty of TSM fans are still upset that they failed to get out of groups because Doublelift inted into Crown instead of taking Baron. They should have topped their group instead and played Cloud9 in the quarterfinals and then maybe H2k in the semifinals and then maybe made the finals. But they didn't. Because we play the games and what happened is Doublelift threw the game and TSM lost. KT Rolster may have been "actually" the second best team. But they lost in quarterfinals.

You can still be proud of your results. Maybe TSM fans are happy they got 3 wins. Maybe Fnatic fans are happy they made the finals. Maybe G2 fans are happy that they beat RNG in a nail-biting series. Maybe Misfits are happy they went to 5 games against T1. That's for them to decide. KT Rolster fans may still play that series back in their head. That's fine. But they didn't come close to winning Worlds that year.

I also don't think groups are unreasonabl...

There are never 6-7 day breaks, at least not until world finals.

For reference, groups ended on a Monday and QF began on Friday. QF ended on Monday and SF start on Saturday. So the break is 3 (G -> QF), then 4 (QF -> SF), then 5 days (SF -> F).

I feel the downtime for sure. I'm sitting here in my hotel room and the only direct work I've done since casting C9 vs Gen.G (outside of prep) is a 1 hour story meeting and then I'm back to having tomorrow off as well.

That said, weekends are pretty prime. This is an event that the entire world watches and that means someone's got the games at 5am and someone's got the games at noon and someone's got the games at 8pm, or thereabouts. You miss out on a lot of people if you don't let people have a weird schedule for a day or two to catch the games.

The 2016 and 2017 world championships already showed us that isn't true. Compare the results of either region to the following year, 2018, where they went back to best of 1, and they both improved.

In 2015, with best of 1, LEC had two teams in semis. They failed to replicate that during the bo2/bo3 era. They went back to bo1 and made finals in back to back years, including an MSI championship.

LCS's first and only worlds semifinal was that same year of coming back into bo1s.

We have teams celebrating their draw because the competition is not even. Is 100T a worse team for not being able to get out of a group that had 2 semifinalists than the current quarter finalists?

Is whoever wins GenG vs EDG better than loser of DWG vs T1?

Playing the bracket from GenGs side, it is actually much easier for GenG to win worlds than for them to win LCK

Here's what's interesting though: This isn't the fault of Worlds seeding or of the quarterfinal bracket. This is the fault of regional seeding. The fault (in my estimation) lies with the LCK. Gen.G is LCK #2 and T1 is LCK #3. By all rights, the way that teams were seeded, 100 Thieves are supposed to have an "easy" Korean opponent when they draw LCK 3. The reason C9 and Rogue were in the group of death is because they faced actual top teams: LPL #2 and LCK #1. Such is your life when you're LEC #3 and LCS #3. That's rightly deserved.

I think it is very, very reaso...

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.

Because territories are different and have distinct needs. I’d 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.

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 ...

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.

Counter-point: LEC/LCS play far more bo5s. For example, Cloud9 played more bo5s in this year than GenG did over the last two.

Also missing from this analysis is the MSI championship and two world finals from LEC. Yet this year they generally failed. Is this because their source of scrim partners dried up? Or are we overreacting to one year of results?

The LCS is a consistent weak performer. The LEC is not. Yet they have similar access to CN/KR practice.

Super cool and well done thorough analysis! I very much appreciate you making this post!

Got it. Thanks!

This is awesome, thanks!

Could you clarify what "Helped" and "Ganked" mean? The wording feels ambiguous to me.

Oh I've got almost zero points. I bet on the wrong 2 LCS teams getting out and heavily overrated the LPL.

The only teams I got exactly right were RNG, Fnatic, and DFM.

Personally I'd love there to never be an EU-EU or LCK-LCK final again. I think entertainment is way up in those cases. Like we already saw DK vs. T1. It wasn't very long ago. Revenge for RNG vs. DK is way cooler.

So it's more a shift of when are the hype matchups? Certainly I'm sad that IG vs. KT was only the quarterfinal back in 2018, but that's IG's fault for tanking groups. That wasn't same-region.

The best teams are meant to dodge each other. That's a hard fact. If the best teams really are four LCK teams, then they could all top their groups and guarantee that they don't meet until semis. Too bad Hanwha Life isn't actually that good and thus had a literal guarantee to draw another LCK opponent.

RNG EDG, sure, that's a 1/3 draw. If EDG would just top their group, this could have been avoided. But even outside that, I think you get huge problems if you start force-seeding cross-region matchups.

As one final paragraph to make my position very clear...

Ah yes, the corporate buzzwords of yasuo 0/10 power spike lmao.

I have opinions. I shared them. Deal with it lmao.

Haha joke's on you they've been calculated and the quarterfinal pickems are ready. Don't you look stupid now 20 hours in the future?

I'm not too worried about it. Could be good for the game. Could not be. Good thing Riot isn't shy about reverting changes.

Yeah pretty much

Hey, Zed jungle was a thing back in 2013ish!