In 2023, the Swiss format was first applied in professional League of Legends. In addition, tickets to the VCS region World Championship have been “reduced in value”.
A few hours ago, Riot Games announced information about the two biggest tournaments of the year of League of Legends: MSI 2023 and Worlds 2023. In addition to announcing the official venue, these two tournaments will have big changes in 2023.
MSI 2023 will increase from 11 teams to 13 teams and compete in a new format consisting of 2 rounds: Play-ins (Swiss format) and Playoffs (win-lose bracket format). The 4 major regions LCK, LPL, LEC and LCS will have more places to compete for the 2nd seeds.
The Play-ins round will include the 1st Seed teams of the VCS – PCS – LJL – CBLOL – LLA regions and the 2nd Seed of the LPL – LEC – LCS regions. The 2nd seed of the LCK region will go straight to the Playoffs because this is the region that won the World Championship 2022.
In the Play-in round, 8 teams are divided into 2 groups, each group will play against each other in the form of BO3 to choose 2 winners (1 team from each group) to enter the next round. The losing teams move to the losing bracket and continue to compete for the last 1 slot in the qualifying round (1 slot for both groups). Qualifiers will also apply the win-lose bracket format.
Worlds 2023 will also have major changes in the format of the competition. The first was the appearance of the Worlds qualifier between the LEC 4th Seed and the LCS 4th Seed, BO5 format. Riot hopes to add more regions to the Worlds Qualifier in the future. The team that wins this match will become the 22nd team to make it to Worlds 2023.
Worlds 2023 will have 3 stages of competition, including: the warm-up round (including 2 PCS teams, 2 VCS teams, the champion of the Minor regions and the champion of the World Championship qualifiers). The warm-up round will apply the winning branch losing branch format. The winning bracket 1 will play against the losing bracket 2, the losing bracket 1 will play against the winning branch 2 to select 2 teams to enter the next round (BO5 format).
The group stage of Worlds (including 4 teams LPL, LCK, 3 teams LEC, LCS, 2 teams passed the warm-up) will apply the Swiss format for the first time, specifically as follows:
– There will be 5 rounds. When a team gets 3 wins, they move on. Conversely, if they have 3 losses, they will be eliminated from the tournament.
– In turn 1, each team from different area will randomly pair up to compete in BO1 format. Teams will compete in a BO1 or BO3 format. Teams with the same score will meet in the following rounds.
– Bo3 series will be applied to decisive matches.
Basically, the top teams in the strongest regions in the world will be sent directly to the Swiss round, the remaining teams will be sorted into the Play-In – this is also where both VCS representatives will ” debut” at Worlds 2023. As a result, VCS’s 2 Worlds spots have been “degraded” compared to 2022.
The Playoffs round will include 8 advances from the Group stage, where the Quarterfinals, Semi-Finals and Finals will be played to find the champion of Worlds 2023.
