League of Legends players and viewers around the world seem to be unhappy with the format adopted by Riot for the 2024 LoL World Championship. A humorous post on Reddit received a lot of attention when it suggested that, given the way the pairings are made, even a team made up of “animals” would be able to advance to the quarterfinals of the competition.
This joke made by a user raised some questions about the effectiveness of the Swiss format in selecting the best teams for the most important stage of the competition, reigniting the debate about the fairness and competitiveness of the system due to the way it was implemented by Riot Games.
The Swiss mode
The Swiss format, which is currently being used at the LoL World Championship for the second time, organizes teams into successive clashes, in which teams with the same number of wins and losses end up facing each other. In chess and card game tournaments, this is one of the most popular systems, however, in League of Legends, its implementation has been controversial.
What happens in practice is that teams start by facing random opponents in the first round. And as they win or lose, they are paired with teams that had similar results. For example, a team that is defeated in the first game will face another that was also defeated. The concept is that, over the course of five rounds, the best teams advance and the weakest are eliminated.
However, criticism ends up appearing about how the format deals with the variation in strength between teams and the chances of weak teams advancing, depending on the enemies that are drawn, since two teams cannot face each other twice in this phase.
“A team of animals could advance to the next phase”
The post, which was widely commented on Reddit, brought a rather funny analogy to criticize the format adopted by Riot. The author suggests that if eight professional teams played against eight teams made up of zoo animals, the teams made up of the animals could benefit from the system and, by probability, one of the teams would end up making it through the Swiss phase and qualifying for the next phase: the playoffs.
In the sense that if the animal teams lost their first matches, they would end up facing each other, ensuring that at least one of them would advance to the next phase. The creator of the publication also mentions that, with the rule of “not being able to play against the same opponent” there is a 53% chance of a team with a lower level of advancing to the next phase, reinforcing the entire point of the criticism.