International Competition
A topic a bit out of my depth, since I usually post about balance and game design-related topics, but what do you guys think of Riot and the eSports model of quasi-exclusivity? I honestly think it's pretty bullshit, all of it---from the severe anti-poaching rules to the League systems (LCS, EU LCS, LCK, etc) to the restrictions on 3rd-party tournaments to even Riot literally paying the bottom-feeder teams to keep them artificially included in the LCS.
They say that the region-locked Leagues system is "foster international rivalries" and "make the international tournaments all the more exciting". Okay, in a theoretical sense, that doesn't pan out: how can you form a rivalry against a team that you meet once, maybe twice a year? How are international tournaments exciting at all when you have all that group stage Best of 1 bullshit and teams being unable to adequately prepare for teams that they've never seen before? In a practical sense (that is, what actually happened), it's also bullshit: this year's worlds was a complete shitshow. IEM San Jose is also looking to be pretty garbage, especially with all the restrictions that Riot places on the tournament.
The whole region-locked leagues in LCS, EU LCS, LCK, LPL, LMS, etc is such an artificial construction. Riot clearly wants to force certain identities on certain regions, maybe as an extrapolation of historical tendencies of regions developing their own internal competitive metagames, and they clearly die for the hype when an "underdog region" (NA, EU) goes up against the Asian Gods™ (CN, KR). It's almost like they're actively preventing teams from learning by playing against better teams from other regions. I think the competitive scene would become infinitely healthier and much, much more exciting to watch if there was an open circuit and teams were allowed to attend invitationals and third-party tournaments---in fact, as a consequence of Riot having to organise fewer events themselves, they could put all their eSports resources into making Worlds epic; they could put all their efforts into actually developing their game instead of playing footsies with the dozens of eSports organisations out there and trying to micro-manage the competitive scene.
I'd also like to see Riot just let the bottom feeder teams go. Nobody wanted to sit there and watch Team 8 get spanked. Nobody gave a flying fuck about TDK, even though they had some meaningful flailing gestures towards the end of the split with their full-force roster finally in place. The fact that Riot literally pays the salaries of players on bottom-feeding teams whose orgs can barely even keep themselves afloat is extremely telling in that Riot can barely even keep this shameful sham of a competitive scene alive. And what of the "wildcard regions"? What of Brazil and Turkey and yes, even Thailand maybe? They're given no attention whatsoever; not even given a chance or a brief glancing moment of credibility. These wildcard teams are literally invited to worlds as a sick joke. We've seen that they can actually be competitive. We've seen what pAIN Gaming could pull off, even if they were a bit emotionally unstable. I suspect that Riot isn't fostering other regions around the world because they simply can't afford (both in a monetary and a human resources sense) to micromanage as many competitive regions as they have servers.
At the moment, there are servers for Oceania, Latin South America, Latin North America, Russia, EU Nordic/East, Turkey, Brazil, EU West, and North America. I've seen better organised third party tournaments on Oceania servers for long-dead Steam games (peak concurrent online users of fewer than 1000 on any given day) than what we have going in League (concurrent online users peaking well over tens of millions every single day).
tldr Riot is just salty that IPL5 showed up S2 Worlds and has been playing a child's game of exclusivity ever since.