Building a Competitive Scene from Scratch

Feb 18, 2021

Introduction

Hi! I'm Riot RottenKandy, Product Lead for the competitive content team, based in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Last year we had a unique opportunity to start building up the foundations of a competitive scene within LoR through Ranked, Seasonal Tournaments, and more! I’d like to take some time to provide a little insight on the history of our team’s goals, and provide a peek into the future of what’s to come.

Really? Building a Scene from “Scratch?”

Ok, so the title is deliberately clickbait. We’re building the competitive systems from scratch within the game, but none of this could come into place without the huge community-building efforts being made by our players. When LoR was first released there was zero in-game support for tournaments, but this didn’t stop the community from pushing ahead, experimenting with all sorts of formats to see what was best suited for LoR, for both players and viewers. Our primary goal is to build upon that initial effort, through delivering the foundational systems, and then expanding with new formats and rules to compete with.

Delivering Seasonal Tournaments last year was the culmination of multiple teams working together to bring features like automated tournaments, the Best of 3 lobby, and round timers into LoR. However, we as a team believe that keeping these features locked into official tournaments would be a missed opportunity, and our goal is to ultimately provide support for competitive play whether it’s a Riot-owned event or community-run. Bear with us for a bit while we investigate the best ways to get these features into your hands. With all that in mind, please let us know what you think about these features so far, and what else you’d want to see in the future!

Seasonal Tournaments: The Dream

As an organization, Riot has a laser focus on bringing players together through competition, and we wanted to bring this spirit of camaraderie into LoR by introducing tournaments.

When exploring what it would mean to add tournaments there were a number of key goals that bubbled to the top: we wanted to ensure that these tournaments would be available to as many people as possible, and we wanted to reduce annoying frustrations that can mire the experience.

These goals drove a lot of the decisions that lead into Seasonal Tournaments: we knew we wanted lots of players, clear time management systems in and around matches were nigh on essential, and having alternative entry points means the opportunity to compete is an achievable aspiration.

Seasonal Tournaments: The Reality

On the day of our first Seasonal Tournament we had planned for the worst with a combined team of people on call for nearly 24 hours, but on the day itself we experienced the best. There were no technical difficulties, no servers blew up, and we had the opportunity to share in the excitement. I personally had about 4 different Twitch streams running at the same time - partly to keep an eye out for any problems that could occur, but also to get some first hand reactions to the event.

During the development of Seasonal Tournaments we had anticipated that Ranked qualifiers would have been less likely to participate when compared to Gauntlet qualifiers, but this assumption was turned on its head when we saw that over 90% of the American and European Ranked qualifiers had signed in for the Open Rounds.That wasn’t the only surprise, as when looking into the game history of the player we saw that on average 250 games had been played over the last 30 days!

The Future of Seasonal Tournaments

Are Seasonal Tournaments in their final form? Absolutely not, and we'll be iterating on them over the course of the year based on player feedback, as well as our own observations and data.

After the Monuments of Power tournament we’ve heard the concerns from players about requiring a perfect streak to progress through the tournament. There’s really only two solutions to this problem: either we decrease the number of players or we increase the number of rounds.

We’re going to go with increasing the number of rounds, upping the Open Rounds from 5 to 9. This increase will grant a little breathing room, where losing a match will no longer prevent players from progressing into the Playoffs. With 1024 competitors, we would promote everyone with 8+ wins, and the top 12 seeded players with 7 wins.

Since we’re increasing the overall duration, we’re also planning a few changes to account for this. First up, the round time will be reduced from 75 minutes to 60 minutes. We’ll keep an eye on this, but we’re confident that this will not significantly increase the number of matches hitting the hard stop. Also, to help out the timezone spread we see on some shards we’re going to move both stages of the tournament from Sunday to Saturday.

TLDR: the upcoming changes for April’s Seasonal Tournament are:

• In the Open Rounds we will increase the number of rounds from 5 to 9
• All match times will be reduced from 75 minutes to 60 minutes
• Both the Open Rounds and Playoffs will be moved to Saturday

The Future of Gauntlets

We want to double down on Gauntlets as a tournament-lite mode. This means it's unlikely that you'll find crazy or experimental changes here, as Labs are proving to be an excellent alternative mode for that style of gameplay. Instead we’d like to provide players an avenue to practice with the competitive ruleset and to experience alternative competitive modes and formats to prepare for their next foray in a tournament.

The first major change coming in patch 2.4.0 is that the Pick and Ban, Best of 3 format will be back, and this will be the primary format for Gauntlets going forward. This does mean that Singleton will be unavailable for the time being, and we’re exploring options for how we can bring this back later on.

There are also a number of changes coming to the Last Chance Gauntlet. It too will be run with the Pick and Ban, Best of 3 format, where players will need 5 wins to complete the run (down from 7). We will also reduce the maximum number of Prime Glories that can be collected from 5 down to 4.

Finally, the Last Chance Gauntlet will now be held on the weekend before the Open Rounds, and we’ll also start the Gauntlet on Saturday morning to make this entry into Seasonal Tournaments a little bit more convenient.

TLDR: the upcoming changes for the April’s Gauntlets:

• Standard, Pick and Ban, Best of 3 will be the only format for the time being
• Gauntlet runs will be reduced to 4 wins (down from 7)
• The maximum number of Prime Glories that can be collected will be reduced to 4 (down from 5)
• The Last Chance Gauntlet run will be reduced to 5 wins (down from 7)
• The Last Chance Gauntlet will be held a week earlier, starting on Saturday and running for the whole weekend

The Competitive Path

Our goals for LoR’s competitive scene are built around providing a path to becoming a competitive player. We’re still working on developing this structure, but the idea we’re building towards is that a player’s competitive journey enters through Ranked, experiments within Gauntlets, engages in Seasonal Tournaments, establishes themselves in community events, and excels at the World Championship.

World Championship!?!

That’s right - World Championship, the pinnacle of competitive play. We’re still hammering out the details for LoR’s first World Championship and while I can’t share much on this yet, I can say that we’ll be bringing together the very best Ranked and Seasonal Tournament players from around the world for a high-stakes competition. For those on your own path, please don’t forget to sign in to the Cosmic Creation Seasonal Tournament!

Conclusion

I sincerely want to thank everyone who took part in the Monuments of Power Seasonal Tournament and I’m keenly anticipating the upcoming tournament for Cosmic Creation - it’s amazing to watch people streaming their matches and feel their excitement for competing. Please, keep your feedback coming as we hope that Seasonal Tournaments can build further into a true celebration for each season, and a chance to introduce many new players into Legends of Runeterra and the tournament scene.