steIIaaaa [#20]
ill be honest my frame of reference was just cs + people i know who are mainly valorant watchers thinking china being a seperate region is weird so i assumed it wasn't the case in other esports. i kinda just think its a bit weird that with a preset amount of spots for each region a country that isn't particularly competitive gets one over, say, brazil/latam or na, or even seperating eu into 2 regions
CS in China is specifically different; CS is one of the most heavily modified clients and only got MM relatively recently, has very heavy anti-addiction measures linked to your birth certificate (for instance, if you're under 18 you only get to play 2h on the weekdays or it kicks you off the game), and Valve hasn't invested as much into the CN scene until recently (might be related to anti-addiction measures relating to skins/crates), as well as Valve's very strict performance only focus on bringing teams to Majors. The result is really slow progress to get really good CN teams.
Riot's esports philosophy is different from Valve's, that's why they have regional leagues for games like LoL; they really want to see a worldwide audience at major events. Even then, CN teams already scrim APAC teams (EDG/PRX are scrim partners for instance) and also only got a MM release last year I believe, most players were playing APAC servers off of a VPN before that.