The competitive season League of Legends ended after the finals of Worlds 2022. A confrontation between DRX and T1 that ended in victory for the underdogs and ended an event that will go down in video game history as one of the best according to the opinions shared by the community on the SRs. However, even that wasn’t enough to silence some format-related complaints. Riot Games heard some of the complaints, and decided to make some changes for the 2023 edition. However, these are not necessarily the most requested adjustments by the community.
No double elimination in 2023
In a very interesting interview conducted by Travis Gafford, the American journalist had the opportunity to chat with John Needham, the president of the esports section of Riot Games. The latter returned to the organization of the Worlds, to the future of the competition, and to some of the adjustments requested in terms of the format. The studio representative has clarified that introducing a loser bracket was not relevant , while going a little deeper into the explanations on this subject. He also talked about changes needed to improve the long-term competitive ecosystem.
“We always talk about the format of our competitions and we have spent the last year working on the format of League of Legends Worlds (…) We believe that the World Championship should be the event with the most stakes of the whole season. For us, the excitement generated by the fact that a great team can be eliminated in a single match is something important for the spectator experience. This is the main reason why we won’t be integrating double kills. It’s not something we hate, and this format has some undeniable advantages. However, our opinion is that for a tournament as big and important as Worlds, the single elimination format is more interesting today. “, explained John Needham.
The president of Riot’s esports section also specifies that the format of Valorant tournaments will remain the same to reassure fans. However, he recognizes that the current format is far from perfect. “There are matches that are of little value in the current format and that is a problem we are looking at . Ideally, we’d like every League of Legends World Cup match to have a high stake, and that’s not always the case. From the quarter-finals it’s an incredible tournament, but before the format is not optimal at all“, he explained before ending with the following sentence: “Part of the problem with Worlds is that it’s not necessarily the best team in the world that wins, but the one that’s the best on a specific day.“.
In addition to this question about the format, other interesting points were raised throughout the interview. John Needham assured that the esports division of Riot Games is working on improving communication with the community , hence the importance of the ‘co-streaming’ set up this year. Regarding this last practice, which consists of allowing content creators to broadcast the competition live, he assures us that the feedback has been very positive, as had already been the case with Valorant. He specifies that this co-streaming will not necessarily become the norm, but that it remains a subject that they are studying and on which he is quite enthusiastic.
Of course, the full interview is available at Travis Gafford’s YouTube channel . Unfortunately the latter is not subtitled, a good understanding of English is therefore required.
esport-lol
In League of Legends, everything can go very quickly. Several players who were present at Worlds to represent the LEC now seem to be sidelined. In the space of a few months, they went from heroes to tricards… The transfer window is really ruthless.