These finals were better than last years, but...

Well yea, I´d prefer them to make it a double-elimination-tournament instead of the K.O.-System to make sure the 2 absolute best Teams reach the finals. (and i really would like to see a 3rd-place match somehow)

My thoughts exactly, I think we need to move to double-elimination for worlds if we want to ensure that finals is the 2 best teams playing against each other. (I want 3rd matches too, OGN does them, why not worlds?)

If it's double elimination, play in bo3 format, bo5 format takes too long if it works with DE.

I don't mean to sound ungrateful for what Riot's giving us, all I'm saying is there seemed to be a lot of build up to a finale that ended up feeling anticlimactic, and I feel like something should change to alleviate that in the future.

Next season I believe Riot said they're thinking about (going to?) switching up the LCS to a circuit points system similar to what they use in the OGN to better represent which teams are better at all times during the season. While obviously the next world finals will likely not use these points, I think it's possible that next year Riot could be going for a different format for the World Championships to, as the circuit points are supposed to do, better represent which teams are truly the best of the best, as opposed to which teams are the best of their small group.

Also the Facebook page.

Riot games posted the outcome this morning, ON THE NA FACEBOOK PAGE, before rebroadcasting the event for NA players.

And Season 5 isn't look too great on that front, in terms of fixing snowballing and comebacking.

It's weird. I'd like less snowballing... Yet there need to be way to end the game early.

so we have the choice : snowballing, 'OP' champions that can come back, Late game assured because lack of snowballing makes it so that you can't realistically end the game before team fight stage, Make every skirmish before a certain point relatively unimportant (as to not have snowballing) and most fight after that point decisive (I grab a tower kind of decisive).

Thinking about it. League is not that snowbally in term of champs becoming unkillable, but it seems it's more in space control. In other words, it's hard to get back that map control when you lost it. And yet as I write this counter-examples pop in my head. I think it's just the nature of the game that does this.

Sums this up perfectly......

I'm not good enough to doublecheck the facts. But it loooks like a decent analysis. I'm curious if it's because the groups were badly balanced, because the brackets were badly balanced, or because a few teams (namely SSW this year) is just way above the rest.

In the first case, that meant that while group stages would be close, the best fights would have happened before KO. In the second case, it's a matter of balancing the groups or balancing the bracket by hand. IN the last case, it just can't be fixed by riot, every team just needs to mature to the point where they catch up. And judging by the team dynamic in NA where no roster is completely unchanged between seasons, it's going to be a while before it can be fixed.

You're demonstrating right here exactly the problem; the "bottom two" teams in each bracket aren't mentioned, because they're not relevant. 4 Groups with 4 teams each ends up being 4 Groups with 2 "Teams that matter" really fast. There were interesting fights and tie-breakers out of groups, but these were between the teams that, statistically, held almost no chance at getting into semi's.

The 'underdog' rush that we want to see, where some 'nobody' team crawls out of the bottom of a bad group and ends up taking worlds happened in Season 2, and won't happen again. The game is much more stable now, and reliability is the most important stat a player can have. Finals was Blue vs White, and we all knew it. =\

That money they get from advertisers is important actually, because I'm pretty sure like last year's World's they're operating this whole tournament at a monetary loss, but it helps to expose the game to more players so in the end it pays for itself. A LOT of people watch Worlds though, and the advertisements will certainly help relieve the temporary monetary sting.

I like this idea. Might also help with the general view of those game modes.

And then top two face off for 1 and 2 while bottom 2 face off for 3 and 4? I like that idea, sounds way more interesting.

I agree their should be more INTERNATIONAL events that take place allowing for NA and EUNE/EUW to have the chances to play against KR and CN teams instead of going 1 month early before and playing that then, you only learn so much from 1 month but more from other events.

You guys need to remember something. These players are just kids, barely out of high school. What you saw there wasn't a lack of emotion - that was a normal reaction a teenager/young adult has to a crowd of 40,000 cheering for them. Its a natural reaction to show little emotion when you are faced with that kind of circumstance and you aren't used to it.

Professional Sports players play in front of large crowds on nearly a daily, or weekly basis for years before they reach the professional level. I am not sure how it works with teams like SSW/SHRC but I doubt they play every match they have in front of thousands of people.

As far as the show quality, this is my first taste of Worlds and a live League of Legends event. That said, I was very impressed by the production quality of the event. If I had one complaint it was the shoddy audio during the opening ceremony when Imagine Dragons began singing. It was cleared up pretty quick, but it was really noticeable for the first few seconds of the song.

Just another point judging from the fighting game tournaments i've seen : The asian players never appear to have any emotion. I saw players like Daigo win major tournament and they had a face like the one I have doing a math problem. Idem for the looser. (I'm exagerating, I've seen some of them jump up when they won but I think there's an "education" part to it)

On american tournaments I see the players jumping or at least reacting strongly after every win.

That's added to what Whyzerman says.

It's too snowbally that you know the winners at 10-15 minutes. It has been the folly of the game since its inception but has never been fixed.

Well, if a team that outplays their opponents as hard as SSW did in Games 1,2 adn 4 wouldnßt be able to win off of it there would be sth. really wrong with the game. Some snowball-potential is really important so the better team can pull through and it´s not getting too much S2ish with stall-/lategame only.

It was too much time that both could capitalized on the most trivial mistake and snowball that to victory.

Just watch the games again, the amount of preperation and coordination invested from SSW early on to make the plays and get their snowball rolling had been just immense. Nothing Trivial about it, they just played beautifully - while SHRC just couldn´t step up their game enough to match it...which is the most apparent problem for me: SHRC just had been no match for SSW, which is mostly the result you get from the rng-group-draw combined with a K.O.-System instead of double-elimination.

unfortunately it's the nature of the game, unlike real sports, e-sports can't "re-set" the match that allows for comebacks. For example in football the field is completely re-set after each touchdown, in fact the ball is handed back to the team that just got scored on. In league the team that just "scored" gets exponentially stronger than the opposing team, unless they "re-set" the field snowballing will always be a problem. So they would need to completely change the game to allow for this, The 1v1 tournament they did last year is a perfect idea of how this could be done. except make it a best of 7, so the first team to score 4 points wins the match. then the next match is started.

Ye tthey aren't really "less epic" then the rest. I think it's mostly that the level is uneven. This year we had a 10-0 team vs a normal team when the 2nd best team was probably 7-3 or something. (memory's faulty). The year before, we had RC that basically got stuck on a cheese strat... It's like every year has a team way above the rest!

In general, I feel the bracket were badly seeded, I'd have loved to see ssb-ssw in final. Instead, the only 4 teams I knew about were all in the same semi-finals. Why weren't the old winners back in the knockout stage? Did they change or is it badluck or were they actually not that good? I'd have loved if ssb-ssw-C9-tsm had been further apart.