2nd year of franchising (4th year of VCT) and the scene is already starting to be dominated by Korean and Chinese teams.
If this trend continues and East Asians keep improving I'm afraid Americas and EMEA won't win another trophy for a long time...
nah maybe top 6 but winning? LEV was not consistent enough nor had a good mid-rounding in international stages. CN didn't beat GENG, FNC and G2 (yet, EDG has a really good chance tho). pretty good chance of future domination is a stretch considering valorant has constant map rotation and meta changes.
But the west is improivng quite a bit? G2 while not changing their core roster have changed a lot from the guard that was getting 2-0ed by PRX and 2-1ed by Optic 2 years ago. Fnatic went from playing second fiddle to running the league for a year. Every year every region is improving and if the last two days have taught us anything its that the gaps aren't as big as they once were for anyone.
I agree with your take
What I'm trying to say, though, is that the gap between the west (emea & Americas) and the east (pacific & China) has closed a lot in favor of the last.
Btw probably I shouldn't have said "dominate" in the op, since a lot of you guys misunderstood my main point (which is that the Asian teams are not underdogs anymore but equal to the western ones and in the future possibly even better)
Also ain't no way you compare a superteam (Geng in LoL) that has only lost a single official circuit match this year, has broken the record for most wins in a row and has won 10/10 of their last matches against the most goated team in LoL's history (T1) with their Valorant division, which at the start of 2024 almost nobody even had them making an international tournament
First of all I'm talking about Champs, since only lately have the other Asian teams aside from GENG found a good form:
DRX 2-0 EMEA's 1st seed (I'm a fnatic fan btw)
FPX almost won vs Heretics who are possibly top 3 itw
Trace demolished America's 1st seed LEV
EDG incredibly close match vs G2 (another favorite to win the entire tourney)
And you are telling me it's just GENG who are good???
You cannot deny that the other east asian teams haven't stepped up lately...
I mean that's fair, but a large reason is because teams like Trace copied a lot from top teams in other regions. In fact, they copied the most out of pretty much any Chinese team. It is always easier to climb up to the top than to stay at the top and continue improving, and I don't expect Chinese teams to continue improving at the same rate.
Also, a large reason why Korea/China is so dominant in LoL is because the game is not only way more popular there, and has been for such a long time, but Riot also heavily catered to them and basically let the competitive EU/NA scene for LoL rot and die out with terrible T2 and franchising decisions and now there is no money in the scene at all. That's probably not happening with Valorant since the FPS genre is much more prevalent in EU/NA and Valorant's competitive scene seems to be structured much better.