I wanted to write a longer post to expand upon my thoughts on how Riot is spreading out the regionals across different dates and how this impacts the tournament from both a competitor and spectator point of view. Spreading regional tournaments across different dates reduces the competitive integrity of worlds because the practice environment of teams with later regionals will be drastically lower. At first I had dismissed this point as unimportant but after reading Montecristos tumblr statement, which I recommend to everyone reading this because it covers a lot of what Im talking about, as well as talking to him, I realized how important international practice is leading up to an international tourney. Korea is so vastly ahead of the other regions from what Ive seen watching OGN, LPL, NALCS, and EULCS so I dont think having regionals spread out will alter which team takes first at the tournament, but there is more to it than that. The European and Korean teams will have 1-2 weeks of extra time to scrim vs international teams if they decide to boot camp in Korea compared to NA and Chinese teams. International practice is very important especially for regions such as NA which have a lot to learn from playing vs top tier Korean teams. Its hard to quantify exactly how important it is but I can be sure TSM, or any LCS team for that matter, would improve at a much faster rate scrimming OGN teams instead of the other NALCS teams. I think there is some value in playing in front of a large live audience for new pros , though. I have played in smaller scale LAN events such as LSC3 and the Riot studios in Manhattan Beach but the size of those crowds are dwarfed by the audiences in the Galen Center, Staples Center, and the venues that the 2014 WC will take place at. In this regard, heading to PAX will give newer pro-players such as myself, Seraph, Altec, the experience of playing in front of an enormous crowd. Even playing in front of small audiences took time to get 100% used to for me. In that regard, getting to go to PAX and play potentially two best of five series is actually quite beneficial and gives new NA players more LAN experience with big crowds. These new LCS players are a very small subset of the entire pool of LCS players, though, and the minor benefit for these few is outweighed by losing out on time that could be spent practicing vs KR/CN teams and boot camping. NA teams are being denied practice time vs KR/CN/EU teams which is actually very valuable and should not be ignored when scheduling the tournament. While this schedule does hurt competitive integrity, from a spectator point of view this does work out to be better for viewers who are interested in watching multiple regional tournaments and for viewers who are attending PAX. If a spectator cared about every region and wanted to watch each regional tourney they would be unable to watch them all live and would have to pick one and watch vods for the rest. Its not an ideal situation, but it is definitely manageable. Also, PAX is much later than Gamescom/OGN Summer 2014 Champions finals so if regionals were all at the same time fans heading out to PAX would miss out. Regionals could still be held in the regular NALCS studios in Manhattan Beach, but they accommodate a much smaller audience. Scheduling all of the regional tournaments to occur during the same time-frame has concrete disadvantages for spectators, but as a whole they are minute compared to the massive disadvantages pro-teams from the regions with the later tournaments face, specifically NA and CN this year. Having 1-2 weeks less time to scrim vs the best teams in the world is unfair to these regions. Even if top NA teams lose 19 of 20 scrims to top tier Korean teams, practicing against them is huge for improving. When you play against a team that is better than you it is much easier to identify your weaknesses and what steps you should take to improve whereas consistently beating weaker teams does much, much less for you. C9 was by far the best team in NA in the 2013 Summer Split yet had a hard time improving further because the only international competition they faced was a single set vs Fnatic at the S3 World Championships. An analogy that describes the current situation with spread out regionals aptly is if every NALCS team with the exception of TSM and EG were allowed to scrim each other leading up to NALCS playoffs while TSM and EG could only play with each other. Assume every NALCS team is just as good as the others for the purpose of this analogy. CRS, C9, CLG, coL, LMQ, and DIG would all have five other teams to practice against. The practice would be more competitive than the scrims between TSM/EG because there are six teams playing in the same pool instead of two. Whenever one team tries something new and innovative the team they are practicing against is exposed to the new pick or play style and can begin using it themselves, helping the teams stay up to date with the meta and catch on to the best strategies for the current patch ASAP. On the other hand, TSM/EG would be stuck only playing vs each other over and over. They would catch onto new picks at a slower rate and in general their play would improve at a much slower rate. In this analogy we assume all the teams are of equal skill and even in this scenario TSM/EG would be at a big disadvantage. 3 of the group of 6 NALCS teams are KR, 3 are EU, and TSM / EG represent the isolated NA region that will be get by far the least amount of international practice leading up to worlds. CN is in a similar position this year as NA in that they will get much less international exposure leading up to the event and be behind the curve compared to teams that finish regionals early and proceed to boot camp in KR. While the current setup has some benefits for spectators, it prioritizes the regions with earlier tournaments and sets the World Championship, the most important League of Legends tournament of the year, on an uneven playing field. TL;DR: Spreading out regionals is better for spectators if they actually want to watch multiple regional tournaments but is not worth it overall because it hurts the competitive integrity of the event by giving teams who have later regionals much less time to scrim top international teams.
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 17:09:51 +0000
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