Riot Games has unveiled the plans for the 2024 season of the Valorant Champions Tour. The system will grow to accommodate a fourth league, VCT China, include two Masters — Madrid and Shanghai — and increase Tier 2 competition now taking place year-round.
In a recent blog post, Global Head of Valorant Esports Leo Faria unveiled three changes for 2024: first, Challengers will run year-round. To accommodate for this, there will be three splits of Tier 2 competition. The first two will run in a similar timeframe to this year's splits but — after Challengers Ascension, which has been delayed to September for a less cramped schedule — a third split will be hosted in the final three months of the year, which will act as the start of the 2025 season.
That announcement also confirmed the introduction of the affiliate system that will increase “player flow” between the VCT, Challengers, and even GC. Today's blog post also reiterated the integration of Premier, which will now be used to promote teams to the Challengers Leagues according to the graphic below. More details are expected this year as the 2024 season nears.
The VCT will have near-constant action in 2024. (Image by Riot Games)
Next year's kick-off will draw inspiration from LOCK//IN. Each International League will host a two-week tournament, in all sending a total of eight teams internationally to participate in the first 2024 Masters, hosted in Madrid. This will make Masters Madrid the smallest Masters yet, hosting fewer teams than the first Masters Reykjavik, and will be the first international VCT LAN held in Europe since Turkey's Champions 2022.
Next year's two Masters events, as well as the International Leagues, will dish out Championship Points. While the use of these is not clear at the time of the announcement, Riot has detailed these will serve “as a measure to each teams' performance and the qualification mechanism for global events,” possibly hinting at a return to a system akin to the one used in 2021 and 2022.
VCT China will also be inducted as the fourth International League, but details are still scarce. The league had already been hinted at in recent weeks, with Whalen Rozelle confirming in July that Riot wanted to have China in the VCT by 2024. Discussions for the league started as early as February, according to a report from Bloomberg, between Tencent and “top Chinese esports players.”
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