3 reasons why RIOT’s LCS is slowly dying of a broken heart
- Money rules the world💰
Big American Money is ruining League of Legends as most teams shuffle their player decks season after season and sometimes during the split too . This inconsistency hurts the viewership who mostly hasn’t got time to fully follow the scene. Why is the team I was following last season, full of new players I have never heard of? American teams really love handing out big salaries and to import players from other regions who are literally being bought off, with piles of cash, from their previous teams.
It is not a surprise to see 2/3 of each LCS team fielding players born and raised out the U.S. With all the money being poured in esports in North America, esports organizations easily end up buying playoff spots for double digits millions of dollars. This leads to soul-less frankenstein teams that have been set up last minute with challenger-level players who have little team experience to fight LCS veterans. This will often create a huge one-sided fights (with a few exceptions). - Complexity ⚙
Itemisation and passive effects of spells and champions become harder and harder to understand— casual viewers have no idea why a tiny character can burst down suddenly a huge tank that looks like a rock or why someone who is supposed to be an assassin is easily countered with one click. More and more items are being worked on and made more complicated yet the LCS meta remains pretty much the same, game after game, thanks to the flavour of the patch picks and bans at the start of a game. No matter how many extra characters are added to the game, there will be only a small subset of them being used actively. Casual players and viewers don’t keep track of item changes nor they can keep track of how abilities are nerfed over time week after week.
Furthermore there is always that 20–30 minutes at the end of each game where analysts discuss the game, I believe this format needs to be disrupted as it is becoming quite stale and does not offer enough to younger viewers who are jumping all over the place. - Tournament 👑 and Features 📊
RIOT is hurting itself by keeping so much control over the franchise. While other games are spending tens of millions in tournaments and prize pool money, RIOT keeps it modest only a couple of millions.
It is not a surprise if most teams and players decide to migrate to other games as they see a higher chance to make a profit. Additionally There is no tournament support for newbies, not to mention that the player onboarding experience in League of Legends and the toxicity is hurting the game a lot.
A few solutions to the above problems
Young organisations are not necessarily bad for the LoL esports world but them being allowed to buy off LCS spots one another is highly toxic. Instead RIOT should work to help organisation make the most out of their time in LCS and not give them a disadvantageous position once they’re not top 8 anymore.
A diverse panorama of tournaments with different cups and tournaments happening during the big events would probably be healthy for the game and as some other have already suggested maybe try and mix the geography up a little because sure it’s nice to see two top performing teams of a region face one another but as we have seen there is a reason why teams bootcamp abroad.
Revamping the basics of the game (onboarding, chat system, ping system, UI), more lore and bringing back the beautiful fan-RIOT interactions. A new client (in the making apparently) and the hundreds of forgotten promises that RIOT (not a small game dev studio any longer) has broken, first and foremost a decent replay system and a sandbox mode. With the amount of money (let’s not forget TENCENT has poured so much money and acquired the whole of RIOT — therefore it’s not like they can’t afford to do it) Worst case scenario RIOT could just buy services like OP.GG and pour money into them and let them help out.
I hope RIOT steps their game up, I spent 5 years playing and spectating this game and I have poured way to many tears of sweat to see it all decline like that because of very easily solvable problems.
Thank you for reading this far 🙏🏻 — if needed, contact me here
