Best of 1s, feels bad man
As Somebody who has been playing LoL since Beta and Been watching 4 regions of LoL since Season 2 when WE and TF burst onto the scene I was happy to see LoL finally moving to franchising. The off-season was fun and exciting with roster moves and the anticipation for the upcoming season was at an all time high.
My issue comes in the amount of product we are now getting. I can't say there really is a quality difference between the new "State Farm Analyst desk" and the old analyst desk and as a whole, the number of matches is WAY down as a result of the move back to single game format. If I tune in for CLG vs TSM or Liquid vs TSM a 1 game set is quite disappointing.
Riot is making more money, the players are making more money and the fans are getting less content then in the past. Whirl-winding through a bunch of best of 1s doesn't tell much of a story and doesn't give us the fans, near the content we got previously with the best of 3. Overall the move to franchising may have made the league stronger, but for the non-casual fan, the ones of us who have helped build the product to what it is now, the 40 minutes and done rivalries feels pretty bad.
After 1 week of the season I can already tell you I'm much more interested in the LCK and LPL then I am in the EU and NA LCS, than I have been in the past. Even when I used to pay twitch to sub to OGN I much more enjoyed NA and EU LCS, but not this year, not back to this dated format. It feels like every argument that can be made for best of 1's can be countered with, VOD's, which are already way more popular then the live stream anyways.
We need more days out of NA and EU, and back to 3 game sets, plain and simple.
I just finished watching the VOD for MSF vs VIT. Individually it was a good and entertaining game. I'm left wondering though did the better team really win? Does Vitality have what it takes to bounce back in Game 2 after the split Baron call cost them game 1? Is MSF team fighting just good enough to propel them past early game snowballing teams? There are so many stories left untold in 1 game sets.
I'm not going to pretend I have as many metrics as you guys at Riot have, but one can easily see VOD stats vs live stats and see where the majority of viewing happens. Luckily as a fan we don't HAVE to choose between watching one or the other, thanks to VODs, but if forced, I think many people would prefer 4-6 days a week of spread out quality content like LCK and LPL are putting out, as opposed to the condensed and shotgun style the NA and EU LCS are currently putting out.
TL;DR Summary: Money is up, product quality and quantity is down as a result of going back to best of 1s.
