In an exclusive interview with Dot Esports, Chris Greeley, Global Head of League of Legends Esports at Riot Games, dove into the transformative changes coming in the 2025 season. From the new three-split format to details on Fearless Draft, Greeley shared more on the ambitious changes designed to captivate fans worldwide.
The 2025 season of League esports is packed with transformative changes, marking one of the biggest shifts in competitive play to date. The new competitive ecosystem features a revamped league structure for most major regions—including the LTA and LCP—new regional splits, and a third international tournament.
And then there’s Fearless Draft, which will bring a twist to team strategies by limiting champion picks across games. Though the official details haven’t been revealed on which type of Fearless Draft will be used, Greeley’s comments clearly indicate the format that will be adopted by all leagues in the first Split of the season. But that’s not all; the Global Head also teased the possibility of LoL Esports making an Olympic debut in future years.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Earlier this year we got exciting news about the International Olympic Committee recognizing esports, and they also announced that 2025 is going to be hosting the inaugural Olympic esports event. Can we expect League of Legends to be one of the featured games?
Maybe. I think we have had some discussions with them. I don’t know whether or not we’ll be there in 2025. Our calendar is pretty locked at this point, so finding time that might fit, assuming everything else worked out, is just difficult. Maybe 2027 is a better shot, but quite candidly there’s still a lot of conversations going on, so I don’t have a definitive answer for you one way or the other.
Connected to this topic, it’s true that we have a really packed schedule for next year with three Splits for every region and three international tournaments. What was the creative process behind this restructuring of the ecosystem? How did you get to this solution as the new format for competitive League?
We started this process back in February of 2023, so we’ve been working on it for quite a long time. And the real genesis of the process was getting all of our regional teams into a room with us to talk about what our long-term goals were for the ecosystem and how we looked at sustainability, how we looked at viewership, how we looked at entertainment, and how do we continue to surprise and delight fans who have been around for almost 15 years at this point. But also how do we do it in a way that feels really good for fans in each region?
I don’t know European fans the way the LEC team does, I don’t know Korean fans the way that Aiden and his team do in the LCK. So finding the way to bring that home, I think, was really important for us. And we have so many other teams at Riot, from our publishing and marketing team to live events to our partnerships folks, a lot of people who want to be at least around the process as we figure out what things are going to look like. So it’s matured over that period.
We knew the game was going to be three seasons [in one year] and we really wanted to find more ways to integrate the sport with the game. So we did start with one region. One of the reasons I think it was so easy for the LEC to kind of step into three Splits is because we were looking down the road to see if this would work and the LEC team was really excited to be able to try it out.
So once we got that process going, it was a matter of “how do we line up the game schedule better with the esports schedule, how do we make the regional play field exciting? How do we create stakes going all the way through?” And then for the international events, we settled really early on wanting to create this through line where each event got bigger. So one team from each region for the first [international tournament] and then two and then three. We thought “how do we make that feel like it’s scaling up? How do we create a really natural storyline that fans can jump into in January and follow all the way through November?” So a really long process, lots and lots of people involved but all to the better. I think we got a really good outcome from it.
I’m really excited about a lot of the regional formats that we’re going to see next year. Excited about the new event. We talked about 2024 as our year of building, we spent a lot of time making decks and giving presentations to each other and talking through problems and how we solve those problems. 2025 is the year of getting to execute and show fans what we’ve been working on and hopefully bring them on the journey and get the reactions that we want and get the excitement that we’re hoping and really at the end of the day, it’s all about the fans. So hopefully we’re able to deliver on all the promises we made to ourselves that we can deliver on.
I want to dive more into the new format firsthand because you revealed First Stand today and Fearless Draft together with it. But something that you haven’t talked about is the format of the tournament.
We’re going to talk a lot more about it at season start, so that’ll be part of those announcements. But I’ll tell you two things.
One is that the goal for the event is to have every team play every other team. The idea is that we can start to gauge regional strength before MSI and get an understanding of how the regions rank against each other, as well as getting some guaranteed LTA vs. LEC matches, making sure we see that great LCK vs. LPL match giving everyone some exposure to the east and the west.
And then Fearless Draft is the other piece. I think when we look at the first Split and we look at the first international event, it’s a great opportunity for us to play with competitive formats a little bit. We’ve talked about what if 2026 had a completely different rather than fearless draft, what if we looked at something different? So we’ve got folks deep in the lab on what could that be; what would be exciting and not feel gimmicky? That’s always the trap. You don’t want to do events where people show up and they watch two games and they’re like, “this is stupid, I’m going to tune out.” Then you’ve not only lost a bunch of fans, but you’ve done the opposite of what you wanted to do, which is find something that is entertaining and really keeps people involved.
We spent a lot of time talking to pros and teams about Fearless Draft. We wanted to make sure we landed on the right version of it. We’ve had a year and a half worth of T2 leagues in the LPL last summer who tried out versions of Fearless. So we could say “hey, our hypothesis was that this would be the best or this would be the most exciting, but fans didn’t like it,” or pro teams didn’t like it, or it didn’t give us the result we wanted. So we’re really happy with where the event is landing.
I think it’s really hard to launch a new event. You never know how fans are going to react. I think Rift Rivals was an amazing event for year one, and after that people were like “why am I still watching this?” We don’t just don’t want to fall into that trap. So we’re trying to be really careful trying to take a lot of feedback along the way so that we can pivot and keep making things fans want to watch.
From what I know, there are three different main types of Fearless Draft. Is there one specifically that has done better than the other in these types of tests, or is every region going to be preferring one over another?
Every region will be on the same version of Fearless just as the international event will be.
I think that what we found is that there are like two primary differences. One is what I, at least internally, was calling “full fucking fearless,” which is just like, let’s go all in, no resets, no nothing. You play a champ and they’re gone.
The other version is if you play the champion, it’s only gone for your team, but the other team can still select it. It’s the version the LPL used in this past Summer Split. We just saw teams trading comps and it absolutely does not hit the goal we had in mind. At the end of a best of three you have not seen 30 unique champions, you’ve probably seen 15 to 20. So it’s not that exciting.
I don’t think fans reacted to it the way we had hoped and we saw some of that across T2 as well. So our biggest fear was that we didn’t want to wind up in a game five situation where you had really weird comps and we were deciding our first international tournament with weird comps. We went and talked to pro teams about it in all of the regions, and a lot of them favored [the first] format or favored safer versions that we had sort of already thrown out. So we felt really good that some teams thought this would be okay. We’re really excited to see how it works out.
Author’s note: If, as Greeley said, all regions will use the same version of Fearless Draft as the international event, then it’s confirmed we’ll be seeing the same format the LCK revealed on Oct. 29. In this format, any champions picked in the previous game are automatically banned in the next. This means that in a best-of-five series, up to 50 champions could be banned—10 regular bans plus 40 from prior games.
A few days ago you also revealed the new format and participating teams for the Americas league. Can you tell me a bit more on the LTA specifically, and how did you land on this name?
All of that work was done by our Americas regional team and a branding agency. They spend a lot of time going through finding a new name, as it is hard. I have very rarely seen a new league, a new logo that everyone is like “that’s amazing” the first time they see it, and when you think about the size of the Americas region, there are a lot of intellectual property concerns. You can write a three-letter acronym that may work in Argentina, but doesn’t work in Brazil or you don’t own the IP rights in all of the regions. Those things make naming sometimes difficult in a region like the Americas. But the team worked with an agency, did a lot of work, and I think the logos are super cool. I love the fact that they separate for two different conferences and come together into a single LTA logo.
And I think League of the Americas is a really good name for it, I think the acronym works, but reasonable minds could differ I guess. But look, I’m super excited for that league.
I think with the teams we’ve kept the heart of CBLOL, I think we’ve kept the heart of the LCS, and I think we’ve managed to take LATAM and put them into both regions in a way that makes a lot of sense. If you’re an Argentinian fan of the LLA, you still have a Latin American team that is playing in the LTA southern conference you can follow. If you are a Mexican fan of the LLA, you have a team from the north conference you can follow.
Overall, I think promotion and relegation is going to be really interesting. I’m super excited to see it. I’m a really big fan of where we landed and think it’s better than a lot of the alternatives that could have come out of this merger. So I just hope fans halfway through the first season are really as excited by the rivalries that we think will be created as we are.
Is there something about next year, specifically on the international stage, that you are most excited about when thinking of the format that you have created for the ecosystem?
I’m really excited to see how the first event goes. Like I said before, I think starting a new event is scary, but I’ve got a lot of faith in the team at LoL Park to kind of put an event together for what is roughly six months notice, which is not a ton of time for international events.
I’m excited to see the way the three events scale into each other. I think our MSI in Canada next year is going to be great, and I’m super excited to get back to Worlds in China, as it’s one of our biggest markets. Really, really rabid fan base, really excited to be able to bring that event back to them.
We’ll spend a bunch of time after this season looking at MSI and Worlds to see if there’s any draw changes, role changes, anything else that makes sense, but we’re really, really happy where the events landed this year, viewership has been way up in all of them. Fan sentiment feels really good when you come out of MSI and people are like “that’s the best League of Legends tournament I’ve ever seen,” it’s like, “cool, I hope we beat that for Worlds, but cool, I’m glad we got there for MSI.” So we just feel like we’re in such a good spot, and we’re so grateful to the community for all of the support and all the attention.
I know that you work really closely with teams and players, so what, if any, were the concerns that teams and players raised when looking at such a packed schedule for next year? They also have potentially other third-party events during the year, so I would assume someone raised concerns about the players’ wellbeing
We always think about that, especially for our top teams. When you look at T1, they have played in almost every game from January to November. That’s a rough schedule. But we also have teams that haven’t made the playoffs in their region in either Split, maybe they’ve played 18 weeks all year. It’s a rough balance.
I think one of the ways to start to fill that balance is with more third-party events that are not just looking for the top team or top two teams in each region. People have talked about such events all the time. Wouldn’t it be awesome to see the fourth place team from Europe and the fourth place team from LTA north playing each other? Could be a fun rivalry, really start to understand some strengths. So we’re trying to explore the third party ecosystem for some of those pieces for the packed calendar.
Overall, we are going to keep in contact with teams, kind of understand what this three-Split format does for pros.
I think regional teams have done a good job of building in some breaks and building in some of those pieces, and I think that overall the calendar hasn’t gotten longer. Teams that don’t make it to first stand—and that’ll be almost the entire ecosystem minus five teams—will certainly get some time off during that period as well. So we’ll find some time to give teams breathers and then work with the teams who are the T1s of the world, who are playing every tournament, to make sure that their players feel healthy and supported, and that the teams feel supported as we continue forward.
Published: Nov 5, 2024 02:58 pm