More Competitive and Interesting LCS seasons

The NA and EU LCS have teams a lot of potential on the world stage but because of the way they and the esports systems are arranged top tier teams in the NA and EU LCS are never really well prepared for international competition. Both leagues are stratified into one or two top teams like TSM, Fnatic and Origen this split who dominate almost all of their competition except for in rare throws, a one or two teams that consistently lose, like Coast before they got relegated, TDK and SK this split, and a large number of middle of the table teams which cannot consistently beat the upper teams and mainly fight for position among themselves. This pattern is sometimes broken like in the NA LCS spring playoffs when previously mediocre Team Liquid beat CLG for third and the EU LCS playoffs when UOL and H2K beat previously dominant SK but for the most part it stays true. Because of the way the schedule works this means that top teams in the NA and EU only play 2-4 games against teams of their skill level each normal season. This is not conductive to improvement and makes judging high level teams' skill levels in the power rankings almost impossible. For example, Origen's loss to Roccat this week is probably not indicative of Origen actually being worse than Roccat or even worse than they were originally thought to be, it really just shows that every team messes up. The same thing happened GE Tigers against WE at IEM Katowice. Because of the lack of competitive games for top tier teams in NA and EU they tend to stagnate, especially in EU, where being in first seems to cause to suck two splits later.

This is harmful to the Esports scene in general by limiting the number of really good teams to a couple in Korea and China and disappoints NA and EU fans each year at worlds. A solution should be found to increase their competitiveness. Two ideas which seem reasonable to me are to extend the season for the top teams and to increase interleague play. The number of games played per team each split in LCS is lower than LPL and far lower than LCK. A way to remedy this is to start the splits two weeks earlier than they do now and before the playoffs for the split add in a two week round robin style tournament for the top four teams to decide who gets byes. This would help teams step up their level of play for the playoffs and MSI or Worlds. Another thing that could help is adding for the top two teams in each region every three weeks a match between them and the team one up from or down from them and outside their region in the international power rankings. This would be difficult to coordinate because of the density of high level Korean and Chinese teams but it is definitely doable. It would expose teams to different play styles, give them competition against other similarly good teams and increase the accuracy of the power rankings. Also it would be cool to watch very high skill level games between EDG and SKT and exposes dominant teams weaknesses when sent up against similarly powerful teams. These "Mini MSI"s could be played on Mondays or Tuesdays because of the lack of activity on those days. It might be exhausting for the teams but that is also good practice for the intense schedules of Worlds. Also interleague play between the lower LCS teams and the higher CS teams with a similar format could really help strong CS teams when they make their shot for the LCS.

tl;dr NA and EU top teams needs more competition to become internationally powerful. They can get this through longer more competitive seasons and more interleague play

Thanks for reading and hopefully and a Red shows up to tell me why I am wrong