Why Riot thinks Kickoff + 8-team Masters is a good idea? They are just stupid. Valorant competitive season is a fucking joke
IMO 8 team masters atp is decent for the start of the season. The tough kickoff bracket makes sure only a few good teams per region make it through (i.e. teams that don't have glaring holes and inconsistencies in their play). Because of this every game is a much watch and after the first round the Swiss stage makes all of the other games pretty important as well as they are all advance or elim games. Ideally you would want more tournaments with more teams invited but with the current investment from riot into esports this is kind of the best we can hope. The scene hasn't developed enough either yet for more teams at the start of the year without making masters 1 look competitively worse than masters 2 because of the massive gap between the top and mid table teams in each region at the start of the year.