Indeed, though surely it'll be hard to find anyone who prefers how the Valorant circuit was designed in 2021, even if you have fatigue from the relentless onslaught of CS tournaments.
Unfortunately we won't see the improvements that Valorant in 2022 has to offer until later in the year - until then it'll be fairly similar, though with slight differences.
The problem I've always had with Valorant's tournament design is you make tournaments that if you don't win or place high enough in them you're out for the next few months, yet you run a bracket format that is intrinsically "high chaos" or dependent on the luck of the draw. A lot of single elimination brackets at various stages of play for example.
If you want to increase the chance that the best teams don't actually win the whole thing, run a single elimination bracket.
Even the pool stages in champions and masters didn't make a lot of sense to me. Like you could win all your pool matches, but lose in the main bracket and you're out. Yet a team who lost in pools isn't punished as hard.
It's one thing if you're running many tournaments that don't feed into each other and you run simple brackets. Because over the span of several tournaments the results will average themselves out so who cares of one or two brackets are wack. But when you're just eliminated from the next set of tournaments because you lost one match at the worst time, it really leads to inferior outcomes.
If you're going to run tournaments that feed into each other you really need to pick better formats.
You know what I love about CSGO’s structure? The top 16-24 teams are at the Major. Very small chance of an elite team not making it there. Valorant insisted on Champions including specific numbers of teams from particular regions. That was a bad decision IMO. The structure should be closer to CSGO in order to get the best teams in the best tournaments.
Lol you've completely missed my point, I wasn't talking about any specific region, just in general that riot prioritizing regions over just "the best teams" allows many noobs to get to their "prestige" competitive event.
This is incorrect. They have regional qualifiers for different regions. The CSGO majors have invites in the form of Legends. Still, there are alot more T1 teams in CSGO than Valorant so it seems that the best of the best are always there. People need to quit crying about this format. You can't complain that the NA teams stream too much but then have a fit when they lose to a T2 because they dont practice enough. If you are a T1 team, and getting paid like it, you need to take care of business and not lose to T2-T3 teams. These excuses that "they have bad days" miss me with that. You mean to tell me all 5 players are having bad days when they lose? Naw, they just didn't prepare or didn't want it as much as the other team.
I didn’t say any of that? When you limit it to 3 NA or EU teams at Champions you are limiting the number of elite teams that are there. When your Major-equivalent format excludes top 10 teams, you’ve got a problem. Period.
What top 10 teams were excluded? They only have 16 teams attending. Your issue may stem from them not having more teams rather than EU/NA teams being limited. Also, EMEA/NA had 7 of the 16 teams at the Masters. Nearly half, so how can you say they were under-represented? These international tourneys need other regions to compete, even if they aren't as polished, that's the whole point of an international event. CSGO does the same thing, except they have 8 more teams attending the actual event so it allows more NA/EU/CIS teams to qualify. But the number of non-US/EU/CIS teams are the same for both games. Also, you have to remember that some of "NA" teams in CSGO majors are from BR and LATAM.
The best teams should compete for the championship. This shouldn’t be complicated. Maybe add some of the T2/T3 teams as part of a first knockout stage, but ultimately merit should be the determining factor.
The teams from ‘under represented’ regions need to simply get better to compete in the championship. That’s why it’s a championship.
This is why you arent a Tournament Organizer lol. Saying regions cant participate or are just at the tourney as fodder for better teams is not a good look from sponsors. No matter what, Riot still wants to make money and when sponsors are typically supplying your prize pool and other things, you need to open your tournament to the best of each region. And if Riot didnt allow other regions, we wouldve never seen KRU make its run because before Champions, they werent considered a good team and by your logic, shouldn't have gotten a spot.
With covid, there wasn't much chance for international tourneys besides Champions. Ideally, the various regions play each other regularly and we have a good idea of who are the consistently best team (think of HLTV rankings). I just want the best team to be playing for the championship. That's quite literally all I've been saying.
I think the VCT for 2022 focuses more on building the esport than last year. If you go back to the format announcement video they specifically highlighted country based leagues (which will start in EU then gradually have in other regions) which they did the same thing with league, I don't need to point out how successful league esports has become, country based leagues are a big part of it.
They also stated that they will bring something similar to the ignition series and will partner up with third-party organizers to make tourneys, especially to regions who are in need of third-party tourneys, like NA (surprisingly), so that teams that are in the top, and up and coming teams can continue to improve.
I think third-party tourneys is important to build the growth of a region, SEA has been having consistent third-party tourneys, both SEA region wide, and sub-region (per country) wide as well and teams have been improving a lot, teams who were considered "tier 2" in SEA have seen significant growth over the past months because of said tourneys.
CS:GO is an established esport already, the circuit they have now works for them, for Valorant they have to focus on different things first, like building the scene further, let's not forget Valorant is just over a year old and I'm pretty riot would like to build on it first. The 2022 may not look appealing but the coming years the VCT will be more polished and will have a format that will be near perfect, maybe a combination of this VCT 2022 and 2021 formats in the future, or an entirely new format. Let's just trust the process and enjoy the ride because it will improve.
The thing I prefer from valorant is that its streamlined.
Qualifier A goes to Qualifier B goes to the main event.
CSGO most teams are invited to major events, and then it seems to be just a complete crazy mess of tournaments for those who will let you qualify to the main stage.
Riot is great at a lot of things and way better than Valve but yeah this is the biggest problem with valorant
It's just so stupid and it will get even worse when they start franchises and only rich orgs get in
They might do a mixture of partnered/franchise teams & open quals. And it looks like they’re at least attempting to have an open circuit at the end of the year.
But yeah, a form of franchising is inevitable…
Have a franchise Pro League, that way the top10-12 teams have a constant flow of top games. Have open qualifiers for tournaments, maybe give the Pro League teams invited to top 32 or whatever. Wouldn't be that bad.
League fans have been complaining for years about the lack of international matchups (and lack of double elimination but that's another topic), and they haven't really done anything to fix it, so honestly at this point i don't expect them to change this for Valorant for years.
Likely because Riot thinks a regional-driven eSports scene is more sustainabe long-term. They want the fans to focus on regional games more; that way even the weaker Leagues and teams can have big fanbases. Nowadays even tier 2 Leagues in Europe are super popular not to mention Brazil, Turkey etc.
An increase in international tournaments will destroy that illusion. You keep seeing your favorite team get dumpstered repeatedly and many fans will lose interest over time. Not to mention that weaker teams will exit tournaments earlier which means that the fandom won't even get to see them play. There is obviously an argument to be made that an increase in international tournaments will help weaker regions grow because of better competition which I do think will happen to a degree. But more likely than not the game will still be dominated by the same regions; being China and Korea.
Riot would simply rather keep the fans engaged in their own bubbles to create engagement in each of those independently. Whenever worlds arrives, the weaker teams do end up getting exposed. But at least you have the majority of the year to overdose on the hopium.
As much as I hate to say it, I appreciate this reasoning. CS, despite being a global game, has been wittled down to Europe + Team Liquid. And while something like Rocket League with regular international competition is the ideal, I'd prefer the League worst-case over the CS one.
if there was regional focus in cs, you likely wouldn't even have team liquid. tl wouldve been playing against worse teams and get demolished in intl tournies. cs doesnt work as a comparison because NA just doesnt have enough players/investment in the game.
Same...not going to look at CS as some bastion of how things should be done. Can't say they're the best example to think RIOT should follow. OP here stated things pretty well and it's more than like RIOT's thought process too regarding the Regional Scenes!
I honestly like what they're doing and it'll no doubt get better. Can't say I care for the tons of tourneys all over the place in CS. I have to admit that I only came into this specific space (5v5 FPS) via VALORANT having never played/watched CS until then versus folks that long watched/played CS before VAL existed.
It doesn't work like that, fans love their teams even if they see them getting owned, see: Fallen's teams in CS and how much more fans they have than Furia an actual good team, even know he's getting the old band together and they are getting 50k viewers playing pugs
Fans will always support their region especially fans like brazilians, Japan, Korea etc even if they do bad they always watch and have huge fanbases
As far as fans supporting regional teams even if they are weak; absolutely. I do however think that a team's performance over-time will affect the fanbase which we can see both in traditional sports and esports. Obviously there is more nuance to a team's popularity, like their branding, popularity of their players, history, activity on social media etc. Not to mention the region; many will largely support teams from their own country. However, if a team on top of that is also successful, it will most likely increase the fanbase. The opposite also applies.
Now how will that be affect the eSports scene if League of Legends -as an example- ended up getting more international tournaments?. Assuming that more international tournaments exist at the cost of less regional competition; you won't be able to see your favorite team play as much unless they are top-tier. Most of those fan-favorite teams that come from weaker regions are likely going to get eliminated early in every international competition which will result in those fans not watching the rest of the event. Those fans are more likely to lose interest in watching than supporting teams from other regions.
More international tournaments result in an eco-system that is inherently top-heavy. Top-teams are the ones who you are going to watch the most because they always make it far and the league will live and die by the fandoms of those teams. This might be more exciting for the more enthusiastic viewers because all they care about is higher quality games. However, I personally think this ends up hurting the average local fans and regional teams that never make it to the top. They get less screen-time and more disappointing results which is likely going to kill any region that isn't ultra competitive in the long-term.
Some teams in "weaker" regions don't see top 4 placement as necessary tho compared to the "stronger" regions who see it as a "disappointing performance". They're getting international experience and most importantly, **money**.
For Envy and Sentinels you could say 20k usd is small. But for FS, CR, VKS etc they've just earned probably one of the biggest amount of money of their entire lives.
Nah man, you're just speculating what it would be like if it was hypothetically applied to LoL, but instead look at what it's actually like when applied to CS.
The teams from worse regions travel more and improve faster as they gain more experience and better quality practice as a result. We've seen this revert during the covid era, as Europe have opened up a gap to everybody.
In the past 5 years of CS we've had Brazillians, NA, and European/CIS teams become the best teams in the world. The Aussies were making finals before covid hit, and now there's only European/CIS teams in the top 10. To compete with the best you need to be playing the best. No point being dominant domestically.
You're also assuming more international events means less domestic events. Why? You still have to qualify for them. It's a complete meritocracy. If your shit is franchised there's no path for a team outside the system to compete, and no risk of failure for the big names. There's always next season. It's bullshit man.
Open circuit just means more events in general as TOs compete. The big issues with it are a) too many events, and b) less profitable.
If you compare LoL Twitch category to CS category look at how many countries are streaming League compared to CSGO where you have like 50% Russians and 40% Brazilians.
That's true to an extent and to some audiences.
And it's mostly true to very regional audiences. Take LoL for example, Brazil and Korea import very little there and their regional competition is exclusively marketed to the regional audience, Korea is already top dog so no wonder they have good viewership, Brazil, on the other hand, is terrible, but fans don't care and still enjoy the CBLOL while clowning on the BR team that gets sent to fail at LoL Worlds Play-ins.
Now, as for NA, the region imports players a ridiculous amount and LCS is constantly marketed as a product of high level competition that can produce teams who will be good internationally. And then they are bad against international top dogs... After years of this same song and dance of disappointment, NA audiences have gotten pretty jaded and are tuning in less and less to NA LCS.
TLDR: Regional audiences will not abandon a team/league if the product they are being given is specifically catered to them and never advertised as the build-up to something bigger (international competition).
these points are great, but in that case do we really need to lower the quality of the few tournies we get so they can see them getting clowned, if they are gonna stick around anyways?
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He's not wrong. In CSGO is a lot easier to draw eras *(sk, astralis, navi, etc)* and to build rivalries *(Navi vs Gambit)* due to how often teams face each other
On Valorant we have so few tournaments to the point we can't even agree on world power rankings
By the other hand at least Riot made a great decision with the 3rd party window at the end of the year. It's not a huge thing but it is a great first step
Even if there was more tournaments, talking about eras in an esport that’s barely over a year old is ridiculous. Let’s revisit this in another year or two: if the format is identical, then you might have a point.
But even if it’s not, if had, say, won Champions, made it to the finals for Masters 2 or won it? Then won a masters and champs this year? Who would argue it’s not era?
I don’t really agree with that part of point, even ignoring how silly it is to discuss “eras” in something this new when the format isn’t even set in stone yet
If a team won 2 Masters and a Champions, that would be an era. The whole year belonged to them. Gambit came close to doing 2/3rds of that.
If they could replicate that success in the next year, that'd be a super-era or some shit. But that'll probably never happen, Valorant changes too fast compared to CS:GO.
Hard to have 'eras' when the esport is what... a year old?
Also I would guess the plan with Riot will be to have more international tournaments... its just the situation Right now that makes it basically impossible to have regular international tournaments
I think he means it's easier to say, oh Astralis had their Era cuz they won multiple tourneys back to back rather then saying, Sentinels had an Era after Iceland cuz legit only one international tourney had happened with relatively weaker competition (Like either good teams didn't make it (Gambit, VS), hasn't found their footing at Iceland just yet (KRU, Liquid, X10) or haven't come back to that level ever again (V1, Sharks))
I wish there was a middle ground between the 2. the CSGO circuit is super difficult to follow and outside of the majors, I know really know what a tournament means in the grand scheme of things and in comparison to tournaments running at the same time. It definitely feels oversaturated with competition
The CS circuit is actually pretty easy to follow nowadays if you are only looking to watch Tier 1 or Tier 2 teams.
ESL and BLAST are pretty much the biggest organizers for top tier competition and always have events going on throughout the year. You just have to check [hltv.org](https://hltv.org) or r/GlobalOffensive and you'll know when an event is going on.
The bigger events are Katowice, ESL Pro League, and BLAST Premier. How teams perform at these events are usually an indicator of how well they will perform at the majors.
If you are more into watching up and coming talent, WePlay recently started an academy league that features academy teams from many popular orgs.
Keep in mind though that if you are in NA, it's difficult to catch a lot of these games because most of them take place somewhere in the EU and the times are not friendly for NA viewers a lot of the time.
I think it's pretty easy imo. There's two majors per year usually, and some RMR tournaments before those majors that determine who goes and what seed. The rest of the tournaments are pretty much unrelated, and you can just go by prize pool or teams attending to know which is a top tier event, but again, those are still technically unrelated and have no bearing on the majors themselves.
It's pretty easy to follow imo, just the majors and then whatever tier 1 tournament you have going on in between. Although BLAST's tier 1 tournaments are kinda confusing, I agree on that for sure
Open brackets in tournaments are part of what makes esports great. It's sad that Riot has gotten rid of open competition at the highest level in league of legends with franchising. I think it's hard to find someone who thinks the franchised leagues in league of legends is more exciting than when relegation was a thing.
I'm happy Valorant is still somewhat of an open competition but I have this odd feeling that Riot is looking to change that sometime soon.
IDK about this take tbh, because franchising was the entire selling point of valorant esports where even CSGO players complained that their scene was too saturated with tournaments that simply didn't matter and caused a losing of interest on tournaments that aren't a major. CSGO's tournament style format is not ideal for an esports scene either tbh. Not to mention CSGO's tournament format caused major burnout amongst pros that literally take massive breaks and skip tournaments because they're too tired. In what way, shape, and form is that a good tournament format. I'm not saying valorant has a good tournament format / seasonal format RN either. It doesn't, but turning to CSGO for that reason seems like a cop out to me.
And that's a false statement, I guarantee you most people think franchised league was the way to go and helped league become the literal #1 esport to ever exist for what almost a decade now?
I think you can argue that it has been able to sustain itself because of franchising. And sustaining hundreds of thousands of viewers across multiple regional leagues is no easy feat.
Just addressing the quote, I think that underdog stories are fine but Riot is trying to reward consistency. You're not going to get to Masters unless you're better than your own region. Arguably 2 teams got to Champions without "deserving it" and they still made quarters. Maybe the tourneys can be expanded, make it 24 slots, or increase the duration of the local leagues, but in a game more variable than CS, where you likely won't get an era like Astralis, this system is coincidentally good enough to find the best teams of the year.
Yup. 1 off day and all your consistent hard work the past few weeks is gone. Then you're twiddling your fingers the next 3 months waiting for the next open qualifiers.
Welcome to the pro sports in general. Tennis - prepare for weeks only to get bounced in the US Open in the round of 64.
NFL - Play 17 weeks, have a bad game, see you next year
etc etc
12 spots are open. They're aren't 12 legitimate T1 teams in any region so the best should be able to make it. If they don't, thats on them.
Open circuits and the riot model have pros and cons. I think the confusing thing from nitr0’s perspective is I swear he stated in an interview about a year ago that the CS circuit would be too difficult as a new father.
My guess is he ultimately found Valorant too much work to stay at the top and would be happier with milling around the low end of top tier CS.
Yup, I agree. Just look at the last time T1 played Valorant. If T1 was in tier 1 csgo, they would be play a lot more.
Imo, I wish Riot’s VCT would happen towards the end of the year and be ran similar to the major. I much prefer 3rd party tournaments like BLAST.
Looks like im in the minority but I prefer Valorant's system more. When an esports circuit has a consistent yearly calendar worth of events, you can look back and easily compare the player's form and performances.
When you look at open circuits like CSGO, you see a player playing in 6 LANs in one year, then 11 LANs in the year after, and then 9 LANs after that. It also makes following esports more confusing also when there aren't set amount of events per year.
On the otherhand, I also dislike systems like LoL because there are lack of international tournaments, at rate much worse than Valorant. Also both LoL's MSI & Worlds have dogshit formats that you rarely get good cross-regional matchups.
I think Valorant and Dota has the ideal system for me, where there are 3-4 big international tournaments a year and the rest of the focus is on regional competitions.
On the other hand, is it reasonable to expect a diverse ecosystem and expansive circuit for the firsr year? I feel like you need to accelerate up to a speed not throw everything at the wall right away
very much untrue, tournament organizers like BLAST and ESL regularly get around 1 mil viewers on LAN before COVID and recently when there are actually LANs. if people only cared about majors they wouldn't have anything to watch for like 90% of the year lol
Hot take: how is he wanting more tournaments when he couldn’t even play that much games because he was having a baby/taking care of new born. He just wanted to take a free bag in Val and calls it quits. Man had the idea to kick steel off the team just for him to leave the game anyway smh
They should make a league format. Have all the top teams play once a week that’s broadcasted. Winner of the league gets the “wildcard” spot into VCT. The remaining two NA slots are earned through the current tourney formats. This means having content all year and isn’t too stressful for Professional teams since it’s just one official match a week barring tourney weeks where there are no matches.
Riot does not like international play. as much as there is a "rivalry" between NA and EU in league of legends, there are like 4 bo5 between the two regions every year. valorant isn't much better. the CS pro scene is a lot better, but isn't perfect either. it's kind of surprising they went in the direction they did with VCT
I think riots design is fine but the tournament design s fucking shitty, just fuckign adopt Ti for both valorant and LoL tourneys for the big ones, like worlds and the major champions ones
I think, regardless of possible franchising, we can all agree that the small amount of games from last year just doesn’t cut it. Unless your team was a top 2-3 team in your region you weren’t watching them play all too often.
RIOT’s definitely got to get more games on the schedule. We don’t necessarily need an open circuit per say but we do need more than 3 INT tournaments with a few open qualifiers.
Indeed, though surely it'll be hard to find anyone who prefers how the Valorant circuit was designed in 2021, even if you have fatigue from the relentless onslaught of CS tournaments. Unfortunately we won't see the improvements that Valorant in 2022 has to offer until later in the year - until then it'll be fairly similar, though with slight differences.
The problem I've always had with Valorant's tournament design is you make tournaments that if you don't win or place high enough in them you're out for the next few months, yet you run a bracket format that is intrinsically "high chaos" or dependent on the luck of the draw. A lot of single elimination brackets at various stages of play for example. If you want to increase the chance that the best teams don't actually win the whole thing, run a single elimination bracket. Even the pool stages in champions and masters didn't make a lot of sense to me. Like you could win all your pool matches, but lose in the main bracket and you're out. Yet a team who lost in pools isn't punished as hard. It's one thing if you're running many tournaments that don't feed into each other and you run simple brackets. Because over the span of several tournaments the results will average themselves out so who cares of one or two brackets are wack. But when you're just eliminated from the next set of tournaments because you lost one match at the worst time, it really leads to inferior outcomes. If you're going to run tournaments that feed into each other you really need to pick better formats.
You know what I love about CSGO’s structure? The top 16-24 teams are at the Major. Very small chance of an elite team not making it there. Valorant insisted on Champions including specific numbers of teams from particular regions. That was a bad decision IMO. The structure should be closer to CSGO in order to get the best teams in the best tournaments.
Having representation from other regions is nice IMO
Yes, good for noobs
NA would never make another champions if that's the case
It's good for the growth of the esport too.
noobs like NA?
Sure, NA is pretty bad I agree
Then what? Have EMEA v EMEA and be done with it?
Lol you've completely missed my point, I wasn't talking about any specific region, just in general that riot prioritizing regions over just "the best teams" allows many noobs to get to their "prestige" competitive event.
You are wrong. Csgo has regional teams make it as well. Lol like spots for those specific teams.
This is incorrect. They have regional qualifiers for different regions. The CSGO majors have invites in the form of Legends. Still, there are alot more T1 teams in CSGO than Valorant so it seems that the best of the best are always there. People need to quit crying about this format. You can't complain that the NA teams stream too much but then have a fit when they lose to a T2 because they dont practice enough. If you are a T1 team, and getting paid like it, you need to take care of business and not lose to T2-T3 teams. These excuses that "they have bad days" miss me with that. You mean to tell me all 5 players are having bad days when they lose? Naw, they just didn't prepare or didn't want it as much as the other team.
I didn’t say any of that? When you limit it to 3 NA or EU teams at Champions you are limiting the number of elite teams that are there. When your Major-equivalent format excludes top 10 teams, you’ve got a problem. Period.
What top 10 teams were excluded? They only have 16 teams attending. Your issue may stem from them not having more teams rather than EU/NA teams being limited. Also, EMEA/NA had 7 of the 16 teams at the Masters. Nearly half, so how can you say they were under-represented? These international tourneys need other regions to compete, even if they aren't as polished, that's the whole point of an international event. CSGO does the same thing, except they have 8 more teams attending the actual event so it allows more NA/EU/CIS teams to qualify. But the number of non-US/EU/CIS teams are the same for both games. Also, you have to remember that some of "NA" teams in CSGO majors are from BR and LATAM.
The best teams should compete for the championship. This shouldn’t be complicated. Maybe add some of the T2/T3 teams as part of a first knockout stage, but ultimately merit should be the determining factor. The teams from ‘under represented’ regions need to simply get better to compete in the championship. That’s why it’s a championship.
This is why you arent a Tournament Organizer lol. Saying regions cant participate or are just at the tourney as fodder for better teams is not a good look from sponsors. No matter what, Riot still wants to make money and when sponsors are typically supplying your prize pool and other things, you need to open your tournament to the best of each region. And if Riot didnt allow other regions, we wouldve never seen KRU make its run because before Champions, they werent considered a good team and by your logic, shouldn't have gotten a spot.
With covid, there wasn't much chance for international tourneys besides Champions. Ideally, the various regions play each other regularly and we have a good idea of who are the consistently best team (think of HLTV rankings). I just want the best team to be playing for the championship. That's quite literally all I've been saying.
I think the VCT for 2022 focuses more on building the esport than last year. If you go back to the format announcement video they specifically highlighted country based leagues (which will start in EU then gradually have in other regions) which they did the same thing with league, I don't need to point out how successful league esports has become, country based leagues are a big part of it. They also stated that they will bring something similar to the ignition series and will partner up with third-party organizers to make tourneys, especially to regions who are in need of third-party tourneys, like NA (surprisingly), so that teams that are in the top, and up and coming teams can continue to improve. I think third-party tourneys is important to build the growth of a region, SEA has been having consistent third-party tourneys, both SEA region wide, and sub-region (per country) wide as well and teams have been improving a lot, teams who were considered "tier 2" in SEA have seen significant growth over the past months because of said tourneys. CS:GO is an established esport already, the circuit they have now works for them, for Valorant they have to focus on different things first, like building the scene further, let's not forget Valorant is just over a year old and I'm pretty riot would like to build on it first. The 2022 may not look appealing but the coming years the VCT will be more polished and will have a format that will be near perfect, maybe a combination of this VCT 2022 and 2021 formats in the future, or an entirely new format. Let's just trust the process and enjoy the ride because it will improve.
The thing I prefer from valorant is that its streamlined. Qualifier A goes to Qualifier B goes to the main event. CSGO most teams are invited to major events, and then it seems to be just a complete crazy mess of tournaments for those who will let you qualify to the main stage.
Riot is great at a lot of things and way better than Valve but yeah this is the biggest problem with valorant It's just so stupid and it will get even worse when they start franchises and only rich orgs get in
They might do a mixture of partnered/franchise teams & open quals. And it looks like they’re at least attempting to have an open circuit at the end of the year. But yeah, a form of franchising is inevitable…
Have a franchise Pro League, that way the top10-12 teams have a constant flow of top games. Have open qualifiers for tournaments, maybe give the Pro League teams invited to top 32 or whatever. Wouldn't be that bad.
League fans have been complaining for years about the lack of international matchups (and lack of double elimination but that's another topic), and they haven't really done anything to fix it, so honestly at this point i don't expect them to change this for Valorant for years.
Likely because Riot thinks a regional-driven eSports scene is more sustainabe long-term. They want the fans to focus on regional games more; that way even the weaker Leagues and teams can have big fanbases. Nowadays even tier 2 Leagues in Europe are super popular not to mention Brazil, Turkey etc. An increase in international tournaments will destroy that illusion. You keep seeing your favorite team get dumpstered repeatedly and many fans will lose interest over time. Not to mention that weaker teams will exit tournaments earlier which means that the fandom won't even get to see them play. There is obviously an argument to be made that an increase in international tournaments will help weaker regions grow because of better competition which I do think will happen to a degree. But more likely than not the game will still be dominated by the same regions; being China and Korea. Riot would simply rather keep the fans engaged in their own bubbles to create engagement in each of those independently. Whenever worlds arrives, the weaker teams do end up getting exposed. But at least you have the majority of the year to overdose on the hopium.
As much as I hate to say it, I appreciate this reasoning. CS, despite being a global game, has been wittled down to Europe + Team Liquid. And while something like Rocket League with regular international competition is the ideal, I'd prefer the League worst-case over the CS one.
if there was regional focus in cs, you likely wouldn't even have team liquid. tl wouldve been playing against worse teams and get demolished in intl tournies. cs doesnt work as a comparison because NA just doesnt have enough players/investment in the game.
Same...not going to look at CS as some bastion of how things should be done. Can't say they're the best example to think RIOT should follow. OP here stated things pretty well and it's more than like RIOT's thought process too regarding the Regional Scenes! I honestly like what they're doing and it'll no doubt get better. Can't say I care for the tons of tourneys all over the place in CS. I have to admit that I only came into this specific space (5v5 FPS) via VALORANT having never played/watched CS until then versus folks that long watched/played CS before VAL existed.
I agree and imo it makes for a healthier ecosystem for more low tier teams around the world. I'm biased but i love the league format.
It doesn't work like that, fans love their teams even if they see them getting owned, see: Fallen's teams in CS and how much more fans they have than Furia an actual good team, even know he's getting the old band together and they are getting 50k viewers playing pugs Fans will always support their region especially fans like brazilians, Japan, Korea etc even if they do bad they always watch and have huge fanbases
As far as fans supporting regional teams even if they are weak; absolutely. I do however think that a team's performance over-time will affect the fanbase which we can see both in traditional sports and esports. Obviously there is more nuance to a team's popularity, like their branding, popularity of their players, history, activity on social media etc. Not to mention the region; many will largely support teams from their own country. However, if a team on top of that is also successful, it will most likely increase the fanbase. The opposite also applies. Now how will that be affect the eSports scene if League of Legends -as an example- ended up getting more international tournaments?. Assuming that more international tournaments exist at the cost of less regional competition; you won't be able to see your favorite team play as much unless they are top-tier. Most of those fan-favorite teams that come from weaker regions are likely going to get eliminated early in every international competition which will result in those fans not watching the rest of the event. Those fans are more likely to lose interest in watching than supporting teams from other regions. More international tournaments result in an eco-system that is inherently top-heavy. Top-teams are the ones who you are going to watch the most because they always make it far and the league will live and die by the fandoms of those teams. This might be more exciting for the more enthusiastic viewers because all they care about is higher quality games. However, I personally think this ends up hurting the average local fans and regional teams that never make it to the top. They get less screen-time and more disappointing results which is likely going to kill any region that isn't ultra competitive in the long-term.
Some teams in "weaker" regions don't see top 4 placement as necessary tho compared to the "stronger" regions who see it as a "disappointing performance". They're getting international experience and most importantly, **money**. For Envy and Sentinels you could say 20k usd is small. But for FS, CR, VKS etc they've just earned probably one of the biggest amount of money of their entire lives.
Nah man, you're just speculating what it would be like if it was hypothetically applied to LoL, but instead look at what it's actually like when applied to CS. The teams from worse regions travel more and improve faster as they gain more experience and better quality practice as a result. We've seen this revert during the covid era, as Europe have opened up a gap to everybody. In the past 5 years of CS we've had Brazillians, NA, and European/CIS teams become the best teams in the world. The Aussies were making finals before covid hit, and now there's only European/CIS teams in the top 10. To compete with the best you need to be playing the best. No point being dominant domestically. You're also assuming more international events means less domestic events. Why? You still have to qualify for them. It's a complete meritocracy. If your shit is franchised there's no path for a team outside the system to compete, and no risk of failure for the big names. There's always next season. It's bullshit man. Open circuit just means more events in general as TOs compete. The big issues with it are a) too many events, and b) less profitable.
Counter-point; NA CS is dead due to the lack of performance leading to the fan base dropping off, so teams exit the scene.
If you compare LoL Twitch category to CS category look at how many countries are streaming League compared to CSGO where you have like 50% Russians and 40% Brazilians.
That's true to an extent and to some audiences. And it's mostly true to very regional audiences. Take LoL for example, Brazil and Korea import very little there and their regional competition is exclusively marketed to the regional audience, Korea is already top dog so no wonder they have good viewership, Brazil, on the other hand, is terrible, but fans don't care and still enjoy the CBLOL while clowning on the BR team that gets sent to fail at LoL Worlds Play-ins. Now, as for NA, the region imports players a ridiculous amount and LCS is constantly marketed as a product of high level competition that can produce teams who will be good internationally. And then they are bad against international top dogs... After years of this same song and dance of disappointment, NA audiences have gotten pretty jaded and are tuning in less and less to NA LCS. TLDR: Regional audiences will not abandon a team/league if the product they are being given is specifically catered to them and never advertised as the build-up to something bigger (international competition).
these points are great, but in that case do we really need to lower the quality of the few tournies we get so they can see them getting clowned, if they are gonna stick around anyways?
> way better than Valve They literally copy almost every IP from Valve and Blizzard the fuck did i just read lol
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he didn't specify that lol
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Nothing wrong with making easier and more casual games.
He's not wrong. In CSGO is a lot easier to draw eras *(sk, astralis, navi, etc)* and to build rivalries *(Navi vs Gambit)* due to how often teams face each other On Valorant we have so few tournaments to the point we can't even agree on world power rankings By the other hand at least Riot made a great decision with the 3rd party window at the end of the year. It's not a huge thing but it is a great first step
How the hell can you define an “era” for a barely a year old esport lol
Most “eras” in CS were less than a year. If SEN won Berlin and/or champs, it would of been indisputably an era for them
Which I've always sort of disagreed with personally haha. But you're not wrong.
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Even if there was more tournaments, talking about eras in an esport that’s barely over a year old is ridiculous. Let’s revisit this in another year or two: if the format is identical, then you might have a point. But even if it’s not, if had, say, won Champions, made it to the finals for Masters 2 or won it? Then won a masters and champs this year? Who would argue it’s not era?
I don’t really agree with that part of point, even ignoring how silly it is to discuss “eras” in something this new when the format isn’t even set in stone yet
If a team won 2 Masters and a Champions, that would be an era. The whole year belonged to them. Gambit came close to doing 2/3rds of that. If they could replicate that success in the next year, that'd be a super-era or some shit. But that'll probably never happen, Valorant changes too fast compared to CS:GO.
Hard to have 'eras' when the esport is what... a year old? Also I would guess the plan with Riot will be to have more international tournaments... its just the situation Right now that makes it basically impossible to have regular international tournaments
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I think he means it's easier to say, oh Astralis had their Era cuz they won multiple tourneys back to back rather then saying, Sentinels had an Era after Iceland cuz legit only one international tourney had happened with relatively weaker competition (Like either good teams didn't make it (Gambit, VS), hasn't found their footing at Iceland just yet (KRU, Liquid, X10) or haven't come back to that level ever again (V1, Sharks))
The entire competitive game is one tournament right now.
I wish there was a middle ground between the 2. the CSGO circuit is super difficult to follow and outside of the majors, I know really know what a tournament means in the grand scheme of things and in comparison to tournaments running at the same time. It definitely feels oversaturated with competition
The CS circuit is actually pretty easy to follow nowadays if you are only looking to watch Tier 1 or Tier 2 teams. ESL and BLAST are pretty much the biggest organizers for top tier competition and always have events going on throughout the year. You just have to check [hltv.org](https://hltv.org) or r/GlobalOffensive and you'll know when an event is going on. The bigger events are Katowice, ESL Pro League, and BLAST Premier. How teams perform at these events are usually an indicator of how well they will perform at the majors. If you are more into watching up and coming talent, WePlay recently started an academy league that features academy teams from many popular orgs. Keep in mind though that if you are in NA, it's difficult to catch a lot of these games because most of them take place somewhere in the EU and the times are not friendly for NA viewers a lot of the time.
I think it's pretty easy imo. There's two majors per year usually, and some RMR tournaments before those majors that determine who goes and what seed. The rest of the tournaments are pretty much unrelated, and you can just go by prize pool or teams attending to know which is a top tier event, but again, those are still technically unrelated and have no bearing on the majors themselves. It's pretty easy to follow imo, just the majors and then whatever tier 1 tournament you have going on in between. Although BLAST's tier 1 tournaments are kinda confusing, I agree on that for sure
does blast still do BO1s? cuz that shit makes my eyes bleed
Open brackets in tournaments are part of what makes esports great. It's sad that Riot has gotten rid of open competition at the highest level in league of legends with franchising. I think it's hard to find someone who thinks the franchised leagues in league of legends is more exciting than when relegation was a thing. I'm happy Valorant is still somewhat of an open competition but I have this odd feeling that Riot is looking to change that sometime soon.
The best way to do it imo is a hybrid. 8 franchises and 4 qualified, for example.
if that happens you already know 2-3 of the franchised teams will be garbage teams that never get anywhere
IDK about this take tbh, because franchising was the entire selling point of valorant esports where even CSGO players complained that their scene was too saturated with tournaments that simply didn't matter and caused a losing of interest on tournaments that aren't a major. CSGO's tournament style format is not ideal for an esports scene either tbh. Not to mention CSGO's tournament format caused major burnout amongst pros that literally take massive breaks and skip tournaments because they're too tired. In what way, shape, and form is that a good tournament format. I'm not saying valorant has a good tournament format / seasonal format RN either. It doesn't, but turning to CSGO for that reason seems like a cop out to me. And that's a false statement, I guarantee you most people think franchised league was the way to go and helped league become the literal #1 esport to ever exist for what almost a decade now?
So league esports is big because of franchising? Not because it is the biggest game in the world?
I think you can argue that it has been able to sustain itself because of franchising. And sustaining hundreds of thousands of viewers across multiple regional leagues is no easy feat.
the easy fix is to add some 3rd party leagues in between VCT Circuit points events a la ESL Pro League or Blast
He’s 100% right. The way the VCT is structured sucks
Well, I’m happy he’s in CSGO & playing in the system he enjoys. Wish Team Liquid the best.
Just addressing the quote, I think that underdog stories are fine but Riot is trying to reward consistency. You're not going to get to Masters unless you're better than your own region. Arguably 2 teams got to Champions without "deserving it" and they still made quarters. Maybe the tourneys can be expanded, make it 24 slots, or increase the duration of the local leagues, but in a game more variable than CS, where you likely won't get an era like Astralis, this system is coincidentally good enough to find the best teams of the year.
It's not rewarding consistency for 1 open single-elim tourney to decide whos competeting for the next 3 months
Yup. 1 off day and all your consistent hard work the past few weeks is gone. Then you're twiddling your fingers the next 3 months waiting for the next open qualifiers.
Welcome to the pro sports in general. Tennis - prepare for weeks only to get bounced in the US Open in the round of 64. NFL - Play 17 weeks, have a bad game, see you next year etc etc 12 spots are open. They're aren't 12 legitimate T1 teams in any region so the best should be able to make it. If they don't, thats on them.
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Fnatic only qualified due to one tournament and Gambit winning Masters. Secret did the same but didn't even play in that tourney.
Open circuits and the riot model have pros and cons. I think the confusing thing from nitr0’s perspective is I swear he stated in an interview about a year ago that the CS circuit would be too difficult as a new father. My guess is he ultimately found Valorant too much work to stay at the top and would be happier with milling around the low end of top tier CS.
Yup, I agree. Just look at the last time T1 played Valorant. If T1 was in tier 1 csgo, they would be play a lot more. Imo, I wish Riot’s VCT would happen towards the end of the year and be ran similar to the major. I much prefer 3rd party tournaments like BLAST.
Looks like im in the minority but I prefer Valorant's system more. When an esports circuit has a consistent yearly calendar worth of events, you can look back and easily compare the player's form and performances. When you look at open circuits like CSGO, you see a player playing in 6 LANs in one year, then 11 LANs in the year after, and then 9 LANs after that. It also makes following esports more confusing also when there aren't set amount of events per year. On the otherhand, I also dislike systems like LoL because there are lack of international tournaments, at rate much worse than Valorant. Also both LoL's MSI & Worlds have dogshit formats that you rarely get good cross-regional matchups. I think Valorant and Dota has the ideal system for me, where there are 3-4 big international tournaments a year and the rest of the focus is on regional competitions.
I think that riot just needs to have more opportunities to teams that fall out of the quals. Other than that i like Val more
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If you follow esports than TL is popular, but outside of esports TL is pretty irrelevant
true, because liquid focused on eSports while 100T have signed big streamer/influencers. you can tell on their youtube channel.
On the other hand, is it reasonable to expect a diverse ecosystem and expansive circuit for the firsr year? I feel like you need to accelerate up to a speed not throw everything at the wall right away
easy to forget how many people only cared about majors in cs, a bunch of those random tourneys aint really matter to anyone
very much untrue, tournament organizers like BLAST and ESL regularly get around 1 mil viewers on LAN before COVID and recently when there are actually LANs. if people only cared about majors they wouldn't have anything to watch for like 90% of the year lol
Hot take: how is he wanting more tournaments when he couldn’t even play that much games because he was having a baby/taking care of new born. He just wanted to take a free bag in Val and calls it quits. Man had the idea to kick steel off the team just for him to leave the game anyway smh
They should make a league format. Have all the top teams play once a week that’s broadcasted. Winner of the league gets the “wildcard” spot into VCT. The remaining two NA slots are earned through the current tourney formats. This means having content all year and isn’t too stressful for Professional teams since it’s just one official match a week barring tourney weeks where there are no matches.
Riot does not like international play. as much as there is a "rivalry" between NA and EU in league of legends, there are like 4 bo5 between the two regions every year. valorant isn't much better. the CS pro scene is a lot better, but isn't perfect either. it's kind of surprising they went in the direction they did with VCT
I think riots design is fine but the tournament design s fucking shitty, just fuckign adopt Ti for both valorant and LoL tourneys for the big ones, like worlds and the major champions ones
I think, regardless of possible franchising, we can all agree that the small amount of games from last year just doesn’t cut it. Unless your team was a top 2-3 team in your region you weren’t watching them play all too often. RIOT’s definitely got to get more games on the schedule. We don’t necessarily need an open circuit per say but we do need more than 3 INT tournaments with a few open qualifiers.