Following Cloud9’s quarterfinal loss yesterday at the 2021 League of Legends World Championship, every Western team has been eliminated from the tournament, leaving three squads from Korea and one from China left. And in a post-series press conference, C9 coach Mithy voiced his complaints about the current league system in League esports and how it’s “unfair” toward Western squads.
“I think the way the whole league system is designed is extremely unfair,” Mithy said. “The Korean teams get to scrim against the LPL, the LJL—everyone, basically. We’re hard stuck in EU or NA. For a Western team to do well, we’d have to boot camp in Korea for a while and do a tournament then. But that’s very hard because we have to play a lot of useless games, especially in the Spring Split, for example, where we could instead be boot camping.”
In terms of geography, the only way that both North American and European teams get to face off against new, international competition is to boot camp in another region. If they don’t, the only option they have is to scrim against their own regional rosters, which won’t help them prepare much since they’ve been playing against each other throughout the whole year.
EU and NA are way too far from other regions to scrim against top-tier teams across the world, unless they want to play with extremely high ping. As a result, they’re only ever able to do this a few times a year, compared to Eastern teams who get to practice against each other much more frequently.
“Generally speaking, it will be very hard in the long-term for a Western team to do well unless the tournament system changes and we [are] able to travel the world, so we can have teams learn from each other and practice against each other for more time,” Mithy said.
There are other reasons why both regions haven’t been able to win Worlds (in Europe’s case, since season one), but this lack of diversity throughout the year is a big problem for NA and EU’s improvement. Changes to the league system would involve a lot more planning from Riot Games, the various leagues, and the teams, which means we probably won’t see a different system for a long while (if at all).
Worlds 2021 continues on Saturday, Oct. 30 with a semifinal showdown between T1 and DWG KIA.
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