Dropping Best-of-3's for 'League of Legends' Shows Casuals Back in Charge

Late last week Riot announced a major change to the structure of professional League of Legends in North America, one that pits the interests of casual viewership against competitive purists. With the 2018 season, which begins January 20th, the North American LCS is dropping the three-game format for matches and returning to the tried-and-true single-game matchups that defined the early years of the championship.

When Riot started the LCS, all the teams competed in a round-robin format that had them playing each of their regional rivals twice in a season, on separate days. It was a bit like the NFL, where the weekend calendar proceeds according to single-game matchups each week. It was easy to follow, because each game only took about an hour to broadcast from start to finish. But there were also problems.

The biggest one being that esports in general and League in particular generally play series, not single games. A winner-take-all single game (a best-of-1) isn't really something you see very often in professional gaming, and especially not in east and south Asian leagues that represent the pinnacle and the heartland of League of Legends. Korea's League of Legends tournaments always pit teams against each other in best-of-3 series during the regular season, and the winner of the match got the W on their record.

As you might imagine, the dynamics completely change when two teams have to play a series against each other versus a one-off. It's harder for a lesser team to get an upset victory: a surprise strategy can sneak one game out from under a powerhouse, but rarely two. The strategic aspect of League of Legends comes to the fore with a series: teams can look at and react to which champions are getting picked, and how different players are performing on them. One of the measures that separates great players from good ones is the idea that they have a deeper pool of picks that they can draw from, that once you get past their favorite champions they can still show some great things with characters you weren't expecting. A series can showcase that kind of flexibility, but a single game rarely will.

Related to this, the more rigorous form that pro League takes in its Asian markets has produced more successful and more highly-regarded teams and players. There's always been a movement to mimic the forms and systems of these other competitive scenes, with the goal of eventually having European and North American teams achieve something close to parity. Or not even parity, at this point. Fans would mostly like it if North American teams in particular would stop cratering at Worlds.

So in late 2015, Riot started phasing that best-of-three system into their European and North American division. At the time Riot said of this new experiment:

Now, with the 2017 season in the books, the LCS is returning to the best-of-1 format. Their explanation is pretty straightforward: people didn't enjoy watching League as much.

In fact, Riot says that when they surveyed their audience, the Bo3 format was one of the major reasons people cited for why they watched less than they used to.

Now on the one hand, I'm a bit regretful to see the better competitive format getting cancelled like this, both because I know it allowed for some really dramatic regular-season clashes and also because I tend to agree that three-game series are probably better for the level of play in the long run.

On the other hand… thank God.

When Riot are talking about people who used to watch a lot of league but started watching less once they switched to Bo3? That's me. I am Spartacus.

The best-of-three format turned League into a much more serious commitment. If you watched six hours or so of League on a given weekend, you'd probably end up feeling at least conversant on the state of NA LCS and maybe even have a few things to say about Europe as well. If there was a match worth checking out, 30 minutes with a VOD could usually set you straight.

But with the last year or so of LCS, several hours of League usually left me feeling no more informed about the game's landscape than watching a single broadcast of Monday Night Football. Conversely, feeling like I was struggling to stay in touch with the scene made it less likely that I'd tune in for major matchups. League had started to feel like a chore, something I was investing time into out of obligation rather than interest.

I'm not assuming that everyone who lost touch with League over best-of-3 matches had the same issues that I did, but I do think the format change is at once welcome and disappointing. Welcome because it does make pro League of Legends more convenient, but disappointing because it feel like a tacit admission that NA LCS teams will never be playing the same game as their rivals from across the Pacific.

Maybe that's an admission whose time has come, however. Just as League tends to be a more casual game among North American audiences, it's esports division has also tended to be more about entertainment than pure sport. A lot of those people you hear chanting TSM at every tournament aren't going to be keeping notes on picks and bans between matches. They just want to see a fun game and then an interview where Doublelift might say something that straddles the line between refreshing honesty and nasty sarcasm.

With the move back to best-of-one matches for next season, as Riot introduce franchising in the NA LCS, it seems like American League of Legends is once again about having the biggest and best show in esports, not necessarily the best competition.