The League of Legends World Series is currently going on with teams from around the world face off to claim the title of The Best LoL Team in The World. This got me thinking, what could the CSGO community learn from this to improve our own tournaments?

Regionals

In League of Legends you have regions who participate in regionals to find the best team in that part of the world who then carry on to play in the worlds. In CSGO we have two regions that should be split down and then pit against each other for a tournament between the best teams in the world. For example we would have multiple different regions such as East Europe, West Europe, Nordic, Africa, North America, The Americas, Asia and Austrailia. Obviously different regions will be skilled differently as we saw with VoX Eminor from Austrialia when they came over to play in ESL One. This would give the option to have an upper and lower bracket finals and give the less skilled regions and smaller teams something to work towards.

Week Long Tournaments

Every tournament we have at the moment whether it be ESL One, DreamHack, Gfinity, even online tournaments such as Game Show and Fragbite Masters have a LAN tournament that doesn’t last longer than a weekend. The League of Legends World Series lasts for weeks! I feel tournaments are moving towards this with some games being played on Thursdays and Fridays. These games shouldn’t be played in the morning, at least play them starting at 5pm UK time, 6pm EU time. But a week long tournament would be good to see, everyone knows the stream link, they know the teams, they know the schedule and best of all, the more advertising you will get from word of mouth throughout the week ready for the finals on the weekend.

Face Cams

These are great for both LoL and CS, LoL have implemented this but CS hasn’t yet. Why?! It’s simple enough and brings a great angle for reactions after rounds and for pistol rounds. For example, when Ex6tenz goes AFK in spawn to talk about strats with his team this is the perfect time for a face cam. It’s a simple idea and can bring in great depth and insight in to the games as they play out.

Minimovies

Now I don’t mean minimovies as in frag movies, I mean minimovies such as pieces to camera with the route to the tournament, their recent form or their day to day life as a player for dignitas for example. This brings an insight in to a team and will allow teams to build more of a fan base around them. Another great reason to have these minimovies is that if/when a tournament gets Ddossed, which is sadly becoming the norm, you can run these minimovies to fill time instead of going to an adbreak or having a dance party, genius as that may be from DreamHack.

Conclusion

There’s many things we can add to tournaments to improve the production quality and grow the community, regionals, week long tournaments, face cams, minimovies and obviously reduce swap out times, pauses etc. I’m sure there’s a lot more improvements that we can make, if you have a great idea you would like to share, sign up and post a comment below, we’d love to hear your thoughts. I don’t think we’re lacking in tournaments, there’s many online games that are overlapping or teams playing three different tournaments on the same night. We just need to slightly improve or rethink things to make growth easier and more sustainable, like LoL has. As a final thought I think with the idea of an International for CSGO these points are very much relevant. I think Valve should think about Regionals for CSGO as it has worked incredibly well for LoL (our focus would be on Europe instead of Korea/China like LoL) and I think that regardless The CSGO International needs to have all these points included.