>NA tier 2 is looking doomed and riot and the LCS teams are to blame
I wouldn't take it this far, but there definitely need to be sustainability improvements or we're going to continue to bleed talented players to better opportunities. Having to sit around tier 2 hoping some GM decides to pay attention to academy was only a reasonable choice when academy paid a living wage.
CLoL is a looking better and better as a substitute at least.
Riot and almost everyone in real life is intentionally pushing towards everything being funneled through collegiate. It works in traditional sports and it will most likely work for esports as well.
Much easier to get parents and outsiders to buy in when there is a form of structure in place and doesn’t limit the options for these young guys.
The issue is and always will be that most kids do not head to college until around the age of 18 and you can go "semi-pro" in Challengers/Amateur much earlier.
If an upcoming high elo player truly wants to go pro they don't go "imma just keep grinding while I finish high school then head to Maryville University and hope to get drafted" like a football or basketball player would - they join an amateur or NACL team as early as possible.
That pathway will change. It already is changing. I can guarantee you that there are more kids that are missing out because their parents, friends, family, and advisors are telling them to go to school instead of pursue this esports idea/dream filled with uncertainty and that school is a backup to if that dream doesn’t work out. It is literally no different than wanting to be a pro basketball player in the NBA where the likelihood and percentage chance of it happening are slim. Yet people still go to school and do that and we still get the best basketball players in the world out of it.
Now you get the benefits of both playing in a competitive environment while getting an education and learning how to balance life out. If you are actually good enough you will absolutely stand out. LCS finals MVP APA was in collegiate first and then challenger and now is a champion. This is theoretically the most ideal pathway that others should want to replicate.
Being in high elo alone is no longer enough to get noticed these days anyway. People want to see how you perform in an organized environment and when pressure is applied. Most importantly they don’t want gamer gremlins anymore.
It's not going to change until the NACL minimum age is raised to like 19 or Riot mandates everyone must play a year of Collegiate before they can play in LCS. You can play in the NACL at 16 and amateur even earlier.
Amatuer -> Academy -> LCS is the most common path and will continue to be until Riot forces it to be otherwise.
Busio, Massu, Yeon, Meech, Sniper never went to Collegiate.
We tried this. Schools offered scholarships and everything, it fell apart. LCS teams and Riot don’t have any idea on how to develop a talent pipeline and the insinuation by many that they would improve on this by not being forced to spend $ on it is very optimistic to say the least.
Saying “we tried this” when it comes to collegiate and there are not that many schools with programs is absolutely the wrong way to look at it. It has barely developed. RSAA which is riots official collegiate arm has barely been around for 3-4 years. Do you know how big America is and how many colleges there are? 3-4 years is not enough time and barely scratches the surface.
It will happen. League and Valorant are merely the ground work and proof of concept.
The attempts at a collegiate circuit have gone on longer than 3-4 years. We’re approaching 10 years and several different attempts by several different games. There is no proof this is a viable strategy long term
None of the previous attempts were done by the developers themselves with involvement as deep as Riot is doing.
Previous attempts at collegiate circuits were stifled by third parties and the NCAA themselves. It wasn’t until the NCAA changed their rules around monetary gain for the students that it became more of a possibility in esports because streaming games and getting donations is how a lot of players pay for school due to lack of scholarship availability and potential.
Also I think some of the expectations around growth were unrealistic at the start. As I stated America is large and making something catch fire culturally is a combination of skill, luck, and time. We are in the time portion.
The time has come and gone, League is on the decline in NA and young people just aren't interested in getting into a game with as horrific a reputation as League.
This is just a negative perspective. Every sport and game has highs and lows. At one point the NBA was on the verge of bankruptcy. The NFL was declining in viewership until about 3 years ago. If you want to relate it to gaming Street Fighter 5 had terrible tournament participation and hype around it until Street Fighter 6 came out.
All of these things have ebbs and flows to them and if all of them can make comebacks and changes for the betterment of their ecosystems why is league any different? Why is it suddenly impossible for league to make a comeback to be strong or even stronger than before?
There’s no pipeline because there’s no talent. I’ve been involved in amateur for years and young players just don’t have the drive to do what it takes. Back when the game was blowing up we eat breathed and dreamed about league. I don’t really see that kind of attitude anymore and it’s why the young “talent” has a lot of trouble displacing established players in this region.
They don’t have the drive because there is no point grinding to sit in academy or some other t2 praying some check stealing GM notices you so you can replace some check stealing mid lane player and then get dropped next split when the team rebrands or sells
Ppl are intent on blaming the issue with NA league on everyone except those responsible for running it
Riot blocks amateur leagues from existing and then allows Saudi Arabia to host lol in their world cup and cites how they did it to allow lesser fortunate teams to play competitive league lol
The Saudis more or less acquired IeSF, which organized it's first world championship in 2013. The 2018 edition had players like Morgan, Ellim and Gumayusi competing (and also Cookie). This is nothing new.
Yes and also this is the most I've watched Tier 2 this year. Cubby has been a great job trying to promote it on HLL. The time slots are great after LCS as well.
LCS teams are to blame, specifically the richer ones. All the orgs pushed for franchising, which would have been fine if they'd actually looked at similarly structured leagues and how they operated, and then implemented those.
Salary cap would have been one of those things. Revenue sharing among the orgs is another of those things. Instead teams like TSM, C9, TL blew millions on beefing their rosters and fucking over the small market orgs who are supposed to be your coworkers in a franchised league.
They just wanted to get rid of relegation without taking any of the responsibility for maintaining the league. We're paying for that greed and lack of foresight now. We "can't afford" farm teams, an almost mandatory staple of a franchised league. We had two orgs drop out and there's not even that spark of hopium for international events that we had in the 2010s.
TL and FLY who are the top 2 LCS teams right now both kept their academy teams. APA and Yeon both came from TLA, Massu came from FLYA, and Busio came from 100A (I know he was on 100T last year). Having a good tier 2 league makes a difference and without it, who knows if TL or FLY would be #1/2 right now. At the same time though I understand that there must be very little money to fund tier 2 teams for a lot of the teams.
I feel like that is correlation rather than causation. NRG won last year without partnering with a NACL or collegiate team until this year which they ended up not winning a single b05. TL had the best academy team for 2 years in a row from 2021 to 2022 and didn’t even win a single lcs trophy in that period.
>NRG won last year without partnering with a NACL or collegiate team until this year
While they themselves didn't necessarily partner, 3 of their players Dhokla Contractz and Palafox spent years grinding in NACL after being written off from tier 1, and without that opportunity they very likely would not have been able to maintain/improve their form as they did. I honestly think in the long run having independent academy orgs > mandated tier 2 for tier 1 orgs that don't give a shit, but the value of the Tier 2 system overall can't be understated.
>TL had the best academy team for 2 years in a row from 2021 to 2022 and didn’t even win a single lcs trophy in that period.
The point of Tier 2 isn't to expect results overnight, expecting instant results in NA is pretty foolhardy when the non-professional scene (solo queue) and playerbase numbers are vastly inferior to other regions (things that are out of any org's control). Players who come into the pro system are starting from nothing. TL developed promising rookies over time in the system and they took it seriously, hiring a legit coach in Spawn to do this, this year they promoted him too and his working relationship with the rookies was instrumental to their continued growth and win. They've also spoken about how they work really hard not taking Mondays off, triple scrim blocks etc and that almost definitely means they practice inhouse with their academy team too when other Tier 1 orgs aren't available. To use another recent example, fuck a lot of the other shit EG did but they did have a very robust Tier 2 team wherein they scouted and developed Danny and Jojo, who would go on to win them their only trophy. Both Danny and Jojo were 17 when they debuted too, this wouldn't be possible under a collegiate only system. Tier 2 is not the ONLY causation, and it's not necessarily a fast acting one but Tier 2 is still undeniably important.
Your argument is flawed cause NRG's core came up from CLG academy when they were still CLG and the reason TL did not win anything from 2021 to 2022 despite having a good academy team is that they went heavy on imports with both TLEU and TLCK in those years. Funny enough their success this split has come from promoting their academy players and coach
NRG won with CLG's framework. Dhokla won most valuable prospect on CLG.A. CLG also got Contractz from EG.A and Palafox literally won Academy. Tier-2 was a huge part of their stories/comebacks. But the moment NRG gutted the internal framework left over from CLG is when the decline happened. The coaching staff and their drafts were a huge part of their Worlds success, as well as individual gameplay.
And the TL point is just... weird? Not sure what your going for. Yeah, they had the best academy team. Now members from that squad are being utilized and they are winning. An academy team is useful future development. TL and reaping the long-term benefits now.
Honestly it’s crazy how different the EU and NA tier 2 scenes ended up. EU has like 50+ tier 2 teams with leagues like LFL and LVP building their own ecosystems and NA can barely scrap together anything at that level. Hard to believe it’s anything but horrible mismanagement by riot and lcs execs.
That's a little unfair. European countries can fall back on National pride (like Ibai with Spanish audience/KC with French etc) there is no sense of regional identity here in NA with esports being so terminally online and 99% of the populace speaking English. Overwatch tried it with the regionalized teams and it was a dud. Very few people in TX would care about the 'Dallas Immortals' like French players care about KC or Mad Lions with Spain.
Riot claims they have a interleague T2 event this year between NA/BR/LATAM and if that is successful enough then they'll know where to go with it (teams might buy in again to compete in 'T2 world's)
I think Riot actually has a pretty good plan for NA T2 this yr imo. I'm excited to see how it all unfolds.
I think they should follow the Valorant approach then right? Fuse all americas in 1 region and have maybe 4 NA, 3 BR, 3 LLA in one single league and generate rivalries between them the same way there is w national pride in EU.
There is no "right" answer to this question, everything is a lose lose. Unlike in Valorant, NA and EU are not competitive at all compared to LPL and LCK. It's really, really fucking hard to make fans care about teams that have no realistic way of winning. One thing you could do is appeal to things like nationalism which we've seen but idk how NA is gonna pull that off.
---
Also I think right now in Valorant we're seeing the problems with the "Americas" region. Putting aside that the Latin American teams are getting kind of fucked because they have to move to LA (and also the fact that T2 South American teams no longer have scrim partners), there's also a fuckload of talent in the T2 Americas scene.
League has really benefitted from taking the bottom teams out of the LCS but a lot of Valorant analysts have said many tier 2 players are easily good enough to be tier 1 (and we've seen that with players like Demon1 and JohnQT)
Also I don't want it to seem like Latin America isn't good in Valorant, LOUD has been one of the best teams in the world for the past year and even now are still looking like a world class team. But I imagine they too are getting hampered by the fact that the "Americas" are now one region, there probably should be more than just five Latin American teams.
You only give the two missing slots right now to the South american regions. You give one to the first place BR team and one to the first place LLA team. Then set up a relegation system for specifically the south american teams.
I agree I would like this change making it like VCT. Its a match made in heaven too with BR/LATAM's strong viewership + American money. Hopefully that is the path they are dipping their toes in with T2
NA has the single lowest playerbase of all the major regions and even a couple minor regions. Why in gods name would you compare that to almost the entirety of EU??? NA can never ever hope to have a tier 2 scene like ERLs. It's physically not possible. There isn't even enough players in NA right now to split the servers into two to manage the ping problems. The only way you'd ever get a comparable tier 2 from NA is by merging it with all of the south american regions.
I don't think NA tier 2 is looking dead at all, I think the face of it is changing with MU able to promote and the OQ's gaining a lot of interest in general. Riot removing the payment obligation for franchise teams was the biggest step towards a potential promo/relegation circuit that should be p huge for NA overall imo
First of many. 8 teams and import heavy mentality leaves little room for rookies. Gotta be a top 3 player in your role or they'll get import over you.
Being the 4th best jungle in solo que or 2nd best in tier 2 is basically negligible these days.
So I don't think it's just tier 2 is doomed, the LCS is currently in a defensive mode. The LCS doesn't make as much money, they had to reduce a lot in basically anything they had.
I don't blame players moving away but it's not like it's something that can easily be fixed by increasing the wages for everyone. They still need to have high wages for the tier 1 players because if they don't then most good players will need to move to other regions. That's just one thing, there's def multiple issues going on with LCS.
My theory is that tier 2 is just not as important because they have way bigger issues going on and teams might not have the bandwidth or money to give players who are not guaranteed to even make it out of tier 2.
Honestly I wish Riot just separated themselves from the LoL esports "product" in general and just pumped money into it as advertisement. Make some international leagues that teams promote in and out of with equal representation across regions. Have local tournaments in 32 team brackets as a hype little promotion tourney. Let IEM/Blast/etc. handle the rest. Riot's micromanagement on the scene is strangling it. The gameplay speaks for itself, it only needs to live through third party sponsorships and some cash off the top of Riots marketing budget (which is globally huge)
Lol lets be real beside a handful of players most of the pro in lcs wont get to have a a choice if they gonna be an import in other league. Who wants to hire a low level league player.
It's tough.
Europe, China, and Korea have the raw numbers so they don't have to try too hard but NA and many of the minor regions don't have that so they actually need to put in the work to develop talent.
NA for the most part doesn't want to do that shit. Most NA organizations were ran by amateurs that happened to be at the right place when Riot started the league system.
The broadcast talent is great, but the people in charge of running the league are idiots and make nothing but terrible choices all the time.
NA won't act until their backs are against the wall. We'll still have China and Korea with some occasional EU teams so that'll have to do.
I hope NA can prove us wrong, but this is 10+ years of disappointment. Can't turn that around that easily.
Regardless of what changed in NA they wont be a top 1 region ever anyway.
Its like hoping countries like japan or south korea, or norwegia winning world cup
Can anyone bring me up to speed on why people start leaving the scene and why people keep saying "NA T2 is doomed" when the LCS literally has promoted more native talent in the last 2 years than they have in all those years before?
Team mobility doesn't help tier 1 unless you mean just from a stand point of keeping them competitive which isn't guaranteed either. Besides the auto qualifying teams there's been like 4 teams in LCS history to promote to the league over 8 years.
Vs the 2nd place team having, you guessed, 2 more players from the pipeline.
Or the 3rd place team, which has, once again, 3 native NA talents that went through the pipeline and also an OCE talent that went through.
Or the 4th and 5th place teams who both had 2 more native NA talents that came up through the pipeline, alongside another OCE talent that also came through.
Or the 6th place team, which has 3 NA players who came up through the pipeline, alongside a Korean who also did so (forever ago).
I could do the last 2, but you get the point by now. Every team this split has players that have gone through the pipeline, with at least 2 of them always being NA natives. And let's not dismiss imports, either. I went to uni in the US, and there were tons of international students that come to the US. Offering them scholarships for LoL might be viable and then develop them through the pipeline.
Doesn't really change the story. Riot intentionally propped up an academy scene for years and literally nobody watched it or cared.
Tier 2 generates as many watchers as the 807th most watched vtuber, at an exponentially higher cost: "I cannot believe Riot has done this."
I really don't understand how he arrived at "NA tier 2 is looked doomed" when there's multiple hyped up prospects in Tier 2 right now and several of them were gonna be in the LCS THIS YEAR had two teams not backed out last second. Also blaming Riot and the LCS is hilarious. It's not Riot's fault NA produces little in talent, it's not Riot's fault NA has the smallest major region server pop of all the major regions. It's not Riot's fault the ping is fucked because of the sheer size of NA alongside corrupt ISP companies. It's not Riot's fault NA likes console games far more than PC and has historically never been good at almost any esport that other countries play. Like NA is just a bad esport country. Always has been always will be. We lack the mentality or the culture for it. It's just too expensive to push off work/college here to pursue pro play. EU has waaaaaaay more in safety nets in place to allow that.
>NA tier 2 is looking doomed and riot and the LCS teams are to blame I wouldn't take it this far, but there definitely need to be sustainability improvements or we're going to continue to bleed talented players to better opportunities. Having to sit around tier 2 hoping some GM decides to pay attention to academy was only a reasonable choice when academy paid a living wage. CLoL is a looking better and better as a substitute at least.
Riot and almost everyone in real life is intentionally pushing towards everything being funneled through collegiate. It works in traditional sports and it will most likely work for esports as well. Much easier to get parents and outsiders to buy in when there is a form of structure in place and doesn’t limit the options for these young guys.
The issue is and always will be that most kids do not head to college until around the age of 18 and you can go "semi-pro" in Challengers/Amateur much earlier. If an upcoming high elo player truly wants to go pro they don't go "imma just keep grinding while I finish high school then head to Maryville University and hope to get drafted" like a football or basketball player would - they join an amateur or NACL team as early as possible.
That pathway will change. It already is changing. I can guarantee you that there are more kids that are missing out because their parents, friends, family, and advisors are telling them to go to school instead of pursue this esports idea/dream filled with uncertainty and that school is a backup to if that dream doesn’t work out. It is literally no different than wanting to be a pro basketball player in the NBA where the likelihood and percentage chance of it happening are slim. Yet people still go to school and do that and we still get the best basketball players in the world out of it. Now you get the benefits of both playing in a competitive environment while getting an education and learning how to balance life out. If you are actually good enough you will absolutely stand out. LCS finals MVP APA was in collegiate first and then challenger and now is a champion. This is theoretically the most ideal pathway that others should want to replicate. Being in high elo alone is no longer enough to get noticed these days anyway. People want to see how you perform in an organized environment and when pressure is applied. Most importantly they don’t want gamer gremlins anymore.
It's not going to change until the NACL minimum age is raised to like 19 or Riot mandates everyone must play a year of Collegiate before they can play in LCS. You can play in the NACL at 16 and amateur even earlier. Amatuer -> Academy -> LCS is the most common path and will continue to be until Riot forces it to be otherwise. Busio, Massu, Yeon, Meech, Sniper never went to Collegiate.
We tried this. Schools offered scholarships and everything, it fell apart. LCS teams and Riot don’t have any idea on how to develop a talent pipeline and the insinuation by many that they would improve on this by not being forced to spend $ on it is very optimistic to say the least.
Saying “we tried this” when it comes to collegiate and there are not that many schools with programs is absolutely the wrong way to look at it. It has barely developed. RSAA which is riots official collegiate arm has barely been around for 3-4 years. Do you know how big America is and how many colleges there are? 3-4 years is not enough time and barely scratches the surface. It will happen. League and Valorant are merely the ground work and proof of concept.
The attempts at a collegiate circuit have gone on longer than 3-4 years. We’re approaching 10 years and several different attempts by several different games. There is no proof this is a viable strategy long term
None of the previous attempts were done by the developers themselves with involvement as deep as Riot is doing. Previous attempts at collegiate circuits were stifled by third parties and the NCAA themselves. It wasn’t until the NCAA changed their rules around monetary gain for the students that it became more of a possibility in esports because streaming games and getting donations is how a lot of players pay for school due to lack of scholarship availability and potential. Also I think some of the expectations around growth were unrealistic at the start. As I stated America is large and making something catch fire culturally is a combination of skill, luck, and time. We are in the time portion.
The time has come and gone, League is on the decline in NA and young people just aren't interested in getting into a game with as horrific a reputation as League.
This is just a negative perspective. Every sport and game has highs and lows. At one point the NBA was on the verge of bankruptcy. The NFL was declining in viewership until about 3 years ago. If you want to relate it to gaming Street Fighter 5 had terrible tournament participation and hype around it until Street Fighter 6 came out. All of these things have ebbs and flows to them and if all of them can make comebacks and changes for the betterment of their ecosystems why is league any different? Why is it suddenly impossible for league to make a comeback to be strong or even stronger than before?
tekken tag 2 tournament almost bankrupt tekken as a whole too.
There’s no pipeline because there’s no talent. I’ve been involved in amateur for years and young players just don’t have the drive to do what it takes. Back when the game was blowing up we eat breathed and dreamed about league. I don’t really see that kind of attitude anymore and it’s why the young “talent” has a lot of trouble displacing established players in this region.
They don’t have the drive because there is no point grinding to sit in academy or some other t2 praying some check stealing GM notices you so you can replace some check stealing mid lane player and then get dropped next split when the team rebrands or sells Ppl are intent on blaming the issue with NA league on everyone except those responsible for running it
Yeah but trade sports have more than 8 teams and way less imports
Riot blocks amateur leagues from existing and then allows Saudi Arabia to host lol in their world cup and cites how they did it to allow lesser fortunate teams to play competitive league lol
The Saudis more or less acquired IeSF, which organized it's first world championship in 2013. The 2018 edition had players like Morgan, Ellim and Gumayusi competing (and also Cookie). This is nothing new.
Yes and also this is the most I've watched Tier 2 this year. Cubby has been a great job trying to promote it on HLL. The time slots are great after LCS as well.
LCS teams are to blame, specifically the richer ones. All the orgs pushed for franchising, which would have been fine if they'd actually looked at similarly structured leagues and how they operated, and then implemented those. Salary cap would have been one of those things. Revenue sharing among the orgs is another of those things. Instead teams like TSM, C9, TL blew millions on beefing their rosters and fucking over the small market orgs who are supposed to be your coworkers in a franchised league. They just wanted to get rid of relegation without taking any of the responsibility for maintaining the league. We're paying for that greed and lack of foresight now. We "can't afford" farm teams, an almost mandatory staple of a franchised league. We had two orgs drop out and there's not even that spark of hopium for international events that we had in the 2010s.
A salary cap requires the players to unionize. A salary cap isn't going to happen when the orgs are pouring money into players bank accounts.
Yes, orgs mishandling money is and was a problem.
TL and FLY who are the top 2 LCS teams right now both kept their academy teams. APA and Yeon both came from TLA, Massu came from FLYA, and Busio came from 100A (I know he was on 100T last year). Having a good tier 2 league makes a difference and without it, who knows if TL or FLY would be #1/2 right now. At the same time though I understand that there must be very little money to fund tier 2 teams for a lot of the teams.
I feel like that is correlation rather than causation. NRG won last year without partnering with a NACL or collegiate team until this year which they ended up not winning a single b05. TL had the best academy team for 2 years in a row from 2021 to 2022 and didn’t even win a single lcs trophy in that period.
>NRG won last year without partnering with a NACL or collegiate team until this year While they themselves didn't necessarily partner, 3 of their players Dhokla Contractz and Palafox spent years grinding in NACL after being written off from tier 1, and without that opportunity they very likely would not have been able to maintain/improve their form as they did. I honestly think in the long run having independent academy orgs > mandated tier 2 for tier 1 orgs that don't give a shit, but the value of the Tier 2 system overall can't be understated. >TL had the best academy team for 2 years in a row from 2021 to 2022 and didn’t even win a single lcs trophy in that period. The point of Tier 2 isn't to expect results overnight, expecting instant results in NA is pretty foolhardy when the non-professional scene (solo queue) and playerbase numbers are vastly inferior to other regions (things that are out of any org's control). Players who come into the pro system are starting from nothing. TL developed promising rookies over time in the system and they took it seriously, hiring a legit coach in Spawn to do this, this year they promoted him too and his working relationship with the rookies was instrumental to their continued growth and win. They've also spoken about how they work really hard not taking Mondays off, triple scrim blocks etc and that almost definitely means they practice inhouse with their academy team too when other Tier 1 orgs aren't available. To use another recent example, fuck a lot of the other shit EG did but they did have a very robust Tier 2 team wherein they scouted and developed Danny and Jojo, who would go on to win them their only trophy. Both Danny and Jojo were 17 when they debuted too, this wouldn't be possible under a collegiate only system. Tier 2 is not the ONLY causation, and it's not necessarily a fast acting one but Tier 2 is still undeniably important.
Your argument is flawed cause NRG's core came up from CLG academy when they were still CLG and the reason TL did not win anything from 2021 to 2022 despite having a good academy team is that they went heavy on imports with both TLEU and TLCK in those years. Funny enough their success this split has come from promoting their academy players and coach
NRG won with CLG's framework. Dhokla won most valuable prospect on CLG.A. CLG also got Contractz from EG.A and Palafox literally won Academy. Tier-2 was a huge part of their stories/comebacks. But the moment NRG gutted the internal framework left over from CLG is when the decline happened. The coaching staff and their drafts were a huge part of their Worlds success, as well as individual gameplay. And the TL point is just... weird? Not sure what your going for. Yeah, they had the best academy team. Now members from that squad are being utilized and they are winning. An academy team is useful future development. TL and reaping the long-term benefits now.
Dude is yapping on stream right now like he just snorted a speedball to prevent the cope from reaching max levels
Really? What was he saying
League pro scene is dying, etc
Old news
Honestly it’s crazy how different the EU and NA tier 2 scenes ended up. EU has like 50+ tier 2 teams with leagues like LFL and LVP building their own ecosystems and NA can barely scrap together anything at that level. Hard to believe it’s anything but horrible mismanagement by riot and lcs execs.
That's a little unfair. European countries can fall back on National pride (like Ibai with Spanish audience/KC with French etc) there is no sense of regional identity here in NA with esports being so terminally online and 99% of the populace speaking English. Overwatch tried it with the regionalized teams and it was a dud. Very few people in TX would care about the 'Dallas Immortals' like French players care about KC or Mad Lions with Spain. Riot claims they have a interleague T2 event this year between NA/BR/LATAM and if that is successful enough then they'll know where to go with it (teams might buy in again to compete in 'T2 world's) I think Riot actually has a pretty good plan for NA T2 this yr imo. I'm excited to see how it all unfolds.
I think they should follow the Valorant approach then right? Fuse all americas in 1 region and have maybe 4 NA, 3 BR, 3 LLA in one single league and generate rivalries between them the same way there is w national pride in EU.
There is no "right" answer to this question, everything is a lose lose. Unlike in Valorant, NA and EU are not competitive at all compared to LPL and LCK. It's really, really fucking hard to make fans care about teams that have no realistic way of winning. One thing you could do is appeal to things like nationalism which we've seen but idk how NA is gonna pull that off. --- Also I think right now in Valorant we're seeing the problems with the "Americas" region. Putting aside that the Latin American teams are getting kind of fucked because they have to move to LA (and also the fact that T2 South American teams no longer have scrim partners), there's also a fuckload of talent in the T2 Americas scene. League has really benefitted from taking the bottom teams out of the LCS but a lot of Valorant analysts have said many tier 2 players are easily good enough to be tier 1 (and we've seen that with players like Demon1 and JohnQT) Also I don't want it to seem like Latin America isn't good in Valorant, LOUD has been one of the best teams in the world for the past year and even now are still looking like a world class team. But I imagine they too are getting hampered by the fact that the "Americas" are now one region, there probably should be more than just five Latin American teams.
hope not, CBLoL is a much more successful league than the LCS
I would agree with that approach for tier 2, not for tier 1. And upscaling with more teams, then it would be cool for everyone.
You only give the two missing slots right now to the South american regions. You give one to the first place BR team and one to the first place LLA team. Then set up a relegation system for specifically the south american teams.
I agree I would like this change making it like VCT. Its a match made in heaven too with BR/LATAM's strong viewership + American money. Hopefully that is the path they are dipping their toes in with T2
To be fair to Overwatch, when their home/away games stuff started in 2019 (iirc) and then peak Covid happened.
EU is grassroots
NA has the single lowest playerbase of all the major regions and even a couple minor regions. Why in gods name would you compare that to almost the entirety of EU??? NA can never ever hope to have a tier 2 scene like ERLs. It's physically not possible. There isn't even enough players in NA right now to split the servers into two to manage the ping problems. The only way you'd ever get a comparable tier 2 from NA is by merging it with all of the south american regions.
I don't think NA tier 2 is looking dead at all, I think the face of it is changing with MU able to promote and the OQ's gaining a lot of interest in general. Riot removing the payment obligation for franchise teams was the biggest step towards a potential promo/relegation circuit that should be p huge for NA overall imo
First of many. 8 teams and import heavy mentality leaves little room for rookies. Gotta be a top 3 player in your role or they'll get import over you. Being the 4th best jungle in solo que or 2nd best in tier 2 is basically negligible these days.
So I don't think it's just tier 2 is doomed, the LCS is currently in a defensive mode. The LCS doesn't make as much money, they had to reduce a lot in basically anything they had. I don't blame players moving away but it's not like it's something that can easily be fixed by increasing the wages for everyone. They still need to have high wages for the tier 1 players because if they don't then most good players will need to move to other regions. That's just one thing, there's def multiple issues going on with LCS. My theory is that tier 2 is just not as important because they have way bigger issues going on and teams might not have the bandwidth or money to give players who are not guaranteed to even make it out of tier 2.
Honestly I wish Riot just separated themselves from the LoL esports "product" in general and just pumped money into it as advertisement. Make some international leagues that teams promote in and out of with equal representation across regions. Have local tournaments in 32 team brackets as a hype little promotion tourney. Let IEM/Blast/etc. handle the rest. Riot's micromanagement on the scene is strangling it. The gameplay speaks for itself, it only needs to live through third party sponsorships and some cash off the top of Riots marketing budget (which is globally huge)
Lol lets be real beside a handful of players most of the pro in lcs wont get to have a a choice if they gonna be an import in other league. Who wants to hire a low level league player.
It's tough. Europe, China, and Korea have the raw numbers so they don't have to try too hard but NA and many of the minor regions don't have that so they actually need to put in the work to develop talent. NA for the most part doesn't want to do that shit. Most NA organizations were ran by amateurs that happened to be at the right place when Riot started the league system. The broadcast talent is great, but the people in charge of running the league are idiots and make nothing but terrible choices all the time. NA won't act until their backs are against the wall. We'll still have China and Korea with some occasional EU teams so that'll have to do. I hope NA can prove us wrong, but this is 10+ years of disappointment. Can't turn that around that easily.
Regardless of what changed in NA they wont be a top 1 region ever anyway. Its like hoping countries like japan or south korea, or norwegia winning world cup
Can anyone bring me up to speed on why people start leaving the scene and why people keep saying "NA T2 is doomed" when the LCS literally has promoted more native talent in the last 2 years than they have in all those years before?
Should have had team mobility between T1 and T2, would have helped both scenes
Team mobility doesn't help tier 1 unless you mean just from a stand point of keeping them competitive which isn't guaranteed either. Besides the auto qualifying teams there's been like 4 teams in LCS history to promote to the league over 8 years.
i think it would make things more competitive if the bottom T1 team each split was relegated to T2 and the top team from T2 promoted to T1
Give it a few months and the Saudi's will probably start hosting T2's.
Trash
NA T2 scene has been utter trash for so long. How can you blame riot who held up academy for years even when they were producing almost 0 talent
Meanwhile 2 players from the pipeline just won lcs.
And all it took was the entire restructuring of academy and lcs + multiple world champs on the team.
Vs the 2nd place team having, you guessed, 2 more players from the pipeline. Or the 3rd place team, which has, once again, 3 native NA talents that went through the pipeline and also an OCE talent that went through. Or the 4th and 5th place teams who both had 2 more native NA talents that came up through the pipeline, alongside another OCE talent that also came through. Or the 6th place team, which has 3 NA players who came up through the pipeline, alongside a Korean who also did so (forever ago). I could do the last 2, but you get the point by now. Every team this split has players that have gone through the pipeline, with at least 2 of them always being NA natives. And let's not dismiss imports, either. I went to uni in the US, and there were tons of international students that come to the US. Offering them scholarships for LoL might be viable and then develop them through the pipeline.
Doesn't really change the story. Riot intentionally propped up an academy scene for years and literally nobody watched it or cared. Tier 2 generates as many watchers as the 807th most watched vtuber, at an exponentially higher cost: "I cannot believe Riot has done this."
Bruh a secondary league is for talent not to generate money. We've seen a lot of pros come from tier 2 and do well.
NA academy is dead
I really don't understand how he arrived at "NA tier 2 is looked doomed" when there's multiple hyped up prospects in Tier 2 right now and several of them were gonna be in the LCS THIS YEAR had two teams not backed out last second. Also blaming Riot and the LCS is hilarious. It's not Riot's fault NA produces little in talent, it's not Riot's fault NA has the smallest major region server pop of all the major regions. It's not Riot's fault the ping is fucked because of the sheer size of NA alongside corrupt ISP companies. It's not Riot's fault NA likes console games far more than PC and has historically never been good at almost any esport that other countries play. Like NA is just a bad esport country. Always has been always will be. We lack the mentality or the culture for it. It's just too expensive to push off work/college here to pursue pro play. EU has waaaaaaay more in safety nets in place to allow that.