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League of Legends (LoL) Esports will be seeing some big changes in 2025, ranging from a new event to a new split schedule, and more.
LoL Esports: Building Towards a Brighter Future
Read: https://t.co/6GJsmearbS pic.twitter.com/aSzqvv3UZC
— LoL Esports (@lolesports) June 11, 2024
As per the original announcement, various changes would be coming to LoL Esports in 2025. They listed six changes, which we will be going through in turn:
- New, third international event
- Innovative “Fearless Draft” game mode in Tier-1 play
- Unified split schedule for all leagues
- Proposed multi-region leagues in Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Americas
- Experiment with “Guest Team” slots/promotion-relegation
- New international event league slots
Let's start with the new international event.
LoL Esports New International Event
Previously, there were only two international LoL Esports events: the Mid-Season International (MSI) and Worlds. In 2025, there will be a third one, although they did say that they are “still working on the event's name and branding.”
The timing for this new event will be at the start of the 2025 season, where they will create “a first split/global tournament across all regions.” The tournament's first round will start at regional play, with only one team from each of the five regions qualifying for the international round in March.
Qualifying teams will then participate in a round-robin format, with the top four teams advancing in the bracket. The event's champion will then be crowned at the end of the six-day international round.
The hope is that since this is a season-start event, pros and fans of the game will see everything that the new competitive season will offer. This event will also serve as the grounds for annual “experiments with different competitive formats”, allowing them to “inject exciting innovations” to the early-season competition.
The results of this tournament will be used to seed MSI. As the competitive formats in this tournament may change yearly, players who win the tournament will not auto-qualify into MSI.
Fearless Draft
Connected to the new tournament is a version of the Fearless Draft. This will happen during the best-of series in the regional and international rounds. During a best-of-series, Fearless Draft makes it such that previously picked champions in the series will be banned.
This format will hopefully “shake up the matchups and provide more variety” to the games players will see. This will be the first new draft format in Tier 1 play in years, so players and fans are asked to look forward to it.
Lol Esports New Split Schedule
Thanks to the introduction of the new event, there will be changes to the regional split schedule. Starting next season, “all regions will begin with the new international tournament/first split”. This will be followed by the second split, which will qualify teams for MSI. This also moves MSI forward to roughly the start of July.
The third and final split in each region will lead to a Regional Championship, which will crown the one-season-long champion in each region.
Focusing on a single-season Regional Championship makes the splits more cohesive and interconnected, raises the stakes for many of our regular season matches, and provides an enticing, season-long build-up to Worlds, our biggest event of the year.
New Multi-Regional Americas/APAC Leagues
In the upcoming season, LCS (North America) and CBLOL (Brazil) will now compete as North and South conferences. This is to “combine forces in a new pan-Americcas League that will be good for fans, teams, and pros.”
Each of the conferences will maintain six of its existing partnered teams, integrate one team from the LLA (based on geographical alignment), as well as reserve one “Guest team” for promotion and relegation through the Tier 2 System. This brings the total of teams up to eight per conference.
The America Splits will then operate like this:
- Split 1 – Teams would first compete within their respective conferences, with top performers qualifying for cross-conference play where a single team will qualify for the new global tournament;
- Split 2 – For MSI, the top team from each conference would secure one slot, a total of two Americas teams;
- Split 3 – An Americas Regional Championship would determine three teams advancing to Worlds, with at least one team from each conference.
Asia-Pacific (APAC) leagues, on the other hand, will see the rise of a brand new league in 2025. This league will bring together the top teams from Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, Japan, Oceania, and the rest of Southeast Asia.
This league aims to showcase “regular inter-regional competitions with the best talent, diverse matchups, and fresh rivalries.” With eight teams planned for the league, there will be a new hybrid partnership plus promotion/relegation league model, with details coming at a later date.
For the APAC league, the first group of guest teams will be determined by the results of the 2024 Pacific CHampionship Series and Vietnam Championship Series. This gives each team participating in the Summer Split of the APAC league a chance to secure a spot in the new league.
Guest Team System
You may have noticed the introduction of a Guest team in the previous part. The Guest team system an innovation that they are currently experimenting on, which the new Americas structure allows for. The Guest team, as mentioned above, will be coming from Tier-2.
Every season, the best teams from Tier-2 would fight against the existing Guest team from each conference in a Promotion/Relegation tournament. This tournament will happen at the end of each Americas season, with the victorious team earning a slot in their respective conference for the following season.
This system will hopefully enable continuous fresh talent infusion and provide competitive dynamism within the league.
More details about this will arrive in the future.
International Event Slots
As there will potentially be five total regions (Americas, LEC, LCK, LPL, and APAC), there will be a change in the slots reserved for each region.
For starters, the new event will have five total slots, one for each region. MSI will then have ten total slots, two per region. Finally, Worlds will have a total of 17 slots: one for the MSI champion, one for the second best-performing region, and the guaranteed three slots per region.
Worlds 2025 will feature Play-Ins as a single Best-of-5 match, with the winner joining the other 15 qualified teams directly in the Swiss stage.
LoL Esports – Trade-Offs for 2025 Changes
Of course, all of these new changes have their tradeoffs. For starters, there will be a reduction in the number of teams in the Tier-1 ecosystem. This reduction in teams will hopefully help ensure that the Global Revenue Pool (GRP) will be distributed among fewer teams, increasing the revenue per team, while also helping concentrate player talent.
That's all the information we have so far about the upcoming 2025 changes to the LoL Esports system, from the new event to the updated split schedule, and more. Should more information become available, we will be sure to let you know.
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