Updating an Old Formula

Season 1 of the Reality Championship Series went about as expected. A medium-sized group of teams came in and competed in a standard Bo3 single round-robin style tournament. There were the teams that seemed too good for gold, and the teams that seemed far from reaching it. These are common occurrences in all leagues that are open for teams to join. You get a melting pot of different styles and that’s what makes these leagues so amazing.

Many of us can relate to the uncertainty of facing a team early on in the season while you’re still finding your footing and being outclassed. Be it because they have been together longer or the caliber of player on that team is just higher. It’s hard to tell in a traditional single round-robin league, whether teams are actually better than you or were just having a better day. We spent some time brainstorming and asking players in the scene what they would like to see from an amateur League of Legends league.

Here were some of the things we wanted to address when making this new format:

• Total time commitment by teams
• Amount of teams being streamed
• Second chances
• Competitive feeling playoffs
• Getting stomped
• Scalability
• Stream viewership

That’s a hefty list, but let’s start at the top.

Total time commitment by teams

We know that many players have more going on than just League of Legends and that some players may be interested in playing in multiple leagues at the same time, or even that some of us have work or school in the morning and can’t be up very late playing video games. Either way, we want to be cognizant of how much of your night our league is occupying and ensure it is well-spent.

Amount of teams being streamed

We all know of times when you’re playing in a league and it feels like your team never gets streamed. To be fair, it’s hard with the standard Bo3 format when one series often takes up the entire night. We also know how exciting it can be to see what casters are saying about your play, or how they’re saying your Rammus support isn’t viable (even though it is). Our goal with this was to enable more teams to be streamed every game night and to make streams more accessible to watch live for those competing in the league (more on this later).

Second chances

Like we said before, facing teams once in a season makes it hard to gauge how much you have improved as a team or even as an individual player. We felt that the commonly-used single round-robin style was restrictive and made it hard to recognize if you are truly where you belong in the standings. This essentially eliminated the option of doing a single round-robin from our perspective.

Competitive feeling playoffs

The playoffs of many leagues simply just mimic more weeks of regular play. Especially if the matches are in the same format as the regular season. We felt it was important to have a distinction between the regular season and playoffs. It is playoffs, after all, this is when you know you made it with the top dogs and are playing for the grand prize. It is not the regular season anymore. We wanted to make sure teams feel the difference in the style of games once they’ve reached this point.

Getting stomped

It’s never fun to be completely obliterated by your opponent. Sure, you may get better down the line and take the victory then, but now it is miserable. We wanted to avoid this feeling of hopelessness as much as possible. It was clear that forcing teams to waste their night getting demolished isn’t fun for either side, so we elected to change that.

Scalability

Now we are onto the part where we talk about the business side of the league and how we can make the decisions that also benefit the players. We wanted to make sure that RCS is scalable regardless of how many teams enter. If we are only able to get 10 teams or less, that’s fine; on the other hand, if we get 20 or more applying, then we can scale to that too. This scalability within each division will lead to better prizing, more lively streams, and more community engagement, which is a positive for everyone involved.

Stream viewership

It’s common in many leagues for the stream of each respective division is at the same time as when other teams within that division are playing. Of course, this makes sense when games are expected to be played at a specific time. To be clear, we think having games set at a specific time is a good thing. It gives people a chance to plan their schedule much farther in advance than if the games were scheduled individually for each week at a different time. But we also would like to give teams a chance to see what they are up against.

Now with all that out of the way, what is the format for season 2 of RCS going to look like?

Here’s what we’ve decided on:

League Structure

10 team groups

Regular Season

2 best of 1 matches per week on a set night

9 week double round-robin season

Playoffs

Top 6 from the regular season advance to the playoffs

1st and 2nd seeds get a first-round bye

Each group plays a single-elimination Bo5 bracket among themselves

1st place seed chooses which quarter-finals winner to face

(If two groups) Winners of single-elimination brackets face off for the 1st place prize

Let’s first talk about the regular season format. Now we know how some people feel about Bo1s. We hope it’s clear from our goals outlined earlier why we felt this was the best course of action. To summarize, Bo1 matches will allow for a standard length double round robin season, and the opportunity for more teams to be streamed. It also reduces the mental strain of getting stomped because it only lasts for a game rather than a whole series.

We considered Bo3s and Bo2s here, but those weren’t feasible options for our goals. A big concern is that a team might surprise you early on in a Bo1 format, and while that is true, you get to face each team twice. So, it is essentially a tradeoff of short-term adaptability with long-term adaptability for teams.

We also plan on having each group play on a different day. This is so other teams from the division are available to watch the streams to see how others in their division are playing.

While our playoffs are fairly standard for a multi-group division, we hope that the sharp contrast between the Bo1 regular season and the Bo5 playoffs will lend itself to a more competitive atmosphere around playoffs. This change of pace should help teams show whether they truly are where they belong in the standings as well as showcase which teams can adapt to their opponents in the short term as opposed to the long term in the regular season.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that we’ve been using the words “groups” and “divisions” very carefully so far. That is because, in the interest of scalability, we will be organizing each division (related to league ranks) into 10-team groups. In theory, we could have an infinite number of groups in each division, but realistically we would aim to cap it at 2–4 groups in each division so that playoffs don’t last the length of another season.

And there it is, the new RCS league format. We hope you are as excited to play in it as we are to host it. This is just one part of the overhaul of our league that we will be discussing here. Feel free to hop on over to our Twitter @RCSLoL or our Discord server at https://discord.gg/J6JycgwCfn for updates, to ask us any questions you may have, or to just hang out!