This year’s champs vs 2023 champs

Warning : I will try to not shame any games that happened (and the one that will happens) in this long message, I’ll try to keep my focus towards champs and maybe this year and last year.

This stage champs is lacking something, I do not say that it’s bad but just not fitting for play-offs matches, it’s ok for group stage but for more important game it’s kinda annoying, they reused the COEX article of VCT pacific instead of buying another slightly bigger stage just for play-offs or just let the 8 teams play in Inspire arena (but I can understand why they want the top 4 only to play inside this one). To compare with 2023, I’m pretty sure they had another arena for the group stage and first part of play-offs to the NA one they used for regular season, the whole of 2023 had great arenas (the colosseum in EU, APAC had an insane one for the grand finals, Americas was fine, São Paulo was nice, Tokyo was incredible and LA insane). 2024 (imo) had slitghtly worse ones (except the Mercedes Benz one), they reused 2 regional areas overall (For champs and Shanghai). The format of this year is also not great, multiple single elimination game to decide wether or not you get into an international event, bad scheduling overall (5 months for 10+ games for 7 months off season), like 2023 but just bad formats as a bonus.
Quickly raising a question, are riot just trying to end this season by rushing everything so they can « start trying » in 2025 ?
The main reason I’m asking is well :

• stages
• formats
• unchanged price pool
• odd number of teams
• Chinese teams not having a banner in their bundle (could be heavily unrelated)
  If it was not clear for you, write up a comment under and I’ll try to explain into other terms
  Thoughts ?

Riot seems intent to let this esports plateau. It's actually quite amazing that despite Riot's best efforts, the esports continues to grow. Maybe they'll pull out the stops for Finals, but the production has been seriously lackluster. The games have been great tho imo.

Chinese teams not having a banner in their bundle

They're coming. Just no date as to when I believe.

I'm conflicted about the stage, like on one hand I think it's way less hype and brings the quality down a ton, I think on the other hand that they simply don't have the demand, if you think back to Tokyo, or even LA, the stadium was relatively empty before they went to the final arena. So part of me defo gets it, a empty large arena is worse than a full small one (imo), but I really wish they did more, you can still do things like individual walkouts here but they simply didn't.

I think what they should do:
Small regional style for groups
Slightly larger, like maybe 2-3x larger place for playoffs
then the largest feasible for the top 4 games

I knew this was coming the moment we had 11 teams per region. It's an odd number of teams and of course the formats and stuff will be bad. Even then, I think they did a tremendous job this year.