The idea of esports is that when it actually hits it big, these investments will pay off 10000%. Especially in America, it's like buying into a pro sports league 50 years ago. The people who did that and were able to stick around through the winters came out billionaires.

Can we just pretend that V1 is the next step of C9W? They're pretty much the same team, in spirit at least.

Yeah, but George Geddes told me she's bad at her job.

You can't count the Loud guys and call it NA. They play in the AMERICAS league.

TenZ is unable to flex, that's why Sentinels has been having problems. He's a Jett one-trick.

Will to C9?

He's the best player on that team (by quite a lot). Must be team chemistry problems?

TenZ is a one-trick Jett and it makes it hard for this team to work when it has another duelist to try to fit into a comp.

Almost every IGL is mechanically weak. So that typically balances out between the teams, and it really comes down to the 4v4 comparison.

50/50 angles are peeks where you have to look either left or right to clear, but can't do both. Like C Long on Haven

50/50 duels are just dry-peeked fights.

Ethan?

MIBR and Furia are going to be down there too. One of the NA teams is going to wind up below-average as well. (Probably SEN)

Will NaVi sign Russian players?
(Are those players even Russian I guess?)

C9 crashies + victor

G2 should've gotten an EMEA slot over one of the Turkish teams.

Stay out of NA.

But G2 definitely should have gotten a slot.

It's not there either though.

That didn't stop Riot from trying to drop G2 into the Americas League.

Crazy how Riot said that team success didn't actually matter in the franchising decision, but still gave LOUD the spot over NiP...

So their criteria had nothing to do with roster success, but LOUD still made it in over NiP? That seems like a bogus excuse they made just to keep OpTic and FPX out of the leagues.

The only problem with that is that the "Tier 2 scene" now includes the other 7 teams that used to be Tier 1 under the old system. Tier 1 is now less than half the size it used to be.

There will definitely be players willing to push through the VRL. But with only one spot a year, there won't be many orgs willing to pay for it. We'll see a ton of orgless teams, and that's not a sustainable system.

-Everyone
+XSET

Isn't he though?

The Guard is letting their team look for other options, I don't think they'll really be looking to sign a tier 2 team. Same with XSET, TSM, ex-Ghost, and Optic. Obviously, nothing is confirmed for now, but it looks like only a few of the (much) smaller orgs will be sticking around.

Stellar
Bang
Asuna
Derrek
and Yay.

I wish they were replacing Stellar with yay though, because then:

Asuna Will Bang Derrek, Yay!

Except that now there are half as many Tier-One spots available. Challengers had 12 teams each, the new Americas league only has 5 NA. Selling players will be incredibly difficult with so few slots available. It's just not feasible to have such a small pool of teams to begin with. There should have been separate South and North American leagues.

I don't really know... 6-man rosters are really tough to use effectively, because it usually turns into a 4-man roster with two alternating subs. Until one of the subs gets cut and you're back to a 5-man.

The biggest question mark right now is what happens to all of the T2 teams that were previously getting paid to play Valorant.

I can't imagine that many NA orgs will stick around paying salaries unless they immediately win through Ascension. It sucks that there will only be around 30 North American players getting paid to play Valorant. The scene as a whole is going to shrink massively.

Shoutout to all of the League orgs that wound up with Franchising spots though without ever really trying in this game (Immo/MIBR, T1, GenG, all of EMEA, etc.)

[Also, it's crazy how anyone complaining about NA franchising just gets downvoted to hell]

Too bad only 25 of these players will even make it in (probably fewer depending on how SEN's roster shapes up)

Riot is killing the NA scene. Once the next big shooter comes out (whether it's OW2 or something else), viewership will tank in NA.
Better shooters are already followed by EMEA and APAC viewers, so Valorant will probably die soon enough sadly.

Giving slots to League Orgs over ones that are actually devoted to Valo (in EMEA).
Filling up the APAC league with Korean teams only.
And giving too many slots to one-team regions in the Americas.

RIP Valorant, may you rest in peace.

Having a good CSGO team was clearly not an issue for any other orgs. Liquid, NaVi, Vitality, Cloud 9, and Furia all made it in.

They can only play the teams that they match up against. It's not like they chose to avoid playing EMEA. 3rd is not subpar.

3 NA on one side and 3 SA on the other...

Only for a DRX-TL grand final...

"they did well in reykjavik"

Oh, you mean like the NA team that won it?

Champion Slots by region:
3 NA
3 EU
4 SA/LATAM
6 ASIA

Eliminated in Groups:
1 SA
5 ASIA

But yeah, BOOM Esports was a more deserving team than TGRD or M3C...

You know what, fair enough! (Optic or LOUD could still win it too)

I guess it's really just EMEA getting screwed.

That actually makes it look way better when organized like that I guess, but this would be even better:
2 APAC
3 EA
3 LATAM/BRAZIL + SA LCQ
4 NA
4 EMEA

APAC loses one (and let's be real, is BOOM not making it really going to make Champs play any different?)
South America loses one (RIP KRU, you will be missed [not by me, but...])
and we get Cloud 9, The Guard, Liquid, and M3C instead of just two of the four.

And it would be NA vs NA or EMEA vs EMEA, but Riot messes with the brackets to make sure they all face each other in the opening rounds.

I'm looking over the Champ slots and realizing something. Here's a breakdown of slots by region.

Asia: 6 slots
1 Japan, 1 Korea
1 "East Asia", and 3 APAC

South America: 4 slots
1 Brazil, 1 LATAM, 2 SA

NA and Europe have 3 slots each.

Hmmmmm...
All I'm saying is, with over 60% of the slots at Champs, an Asian or South American team had better win. (History says that's unlikely though.)

Mad respect to the dude though.
He realized he was wrong after your message, and then doubled down on it.
That takes guts!

I mean, -Will
+any of the great duelists that are going to be left out of franchising

FaZe, TSM, T1, C9, 100T, OpTic, NRG, EG. That's 8 large orgs, and it's not even counting the ones that have tons of money or OW League teams under different names. (V1, TGRD, CoL)

NA keeps flexing about being the best region, but let's be honest, it's only because they have a whole ass continent to pool players from 💀💀💀. Riot has put no national barriers when it comes to picking players unlike every other region. Besides Canada, every single theoretical national team from NA will get slaughtered internationally

I get that they want to try to grow the LATAM and Brazil scenes, but doing it at the cost of NA is a bad idea. Valorant struck gold by becoming a huge American Esport, but as soon as the next big game comes out, the game is going to die, and some of that is because they're already giving up on NA.

I think he's talking about this guy. He's constantly throwing in my lobbies too.

They should have just had the 4 auto-seeded teams play a mini group for playoff seeding. They wouldn't be elimination games (which is kind of unfair, but whatever), but they would still get some practice, and set up storylines for later in the tournament.

If you discount pancada because loud had a rough event, you can't praise Sugarz3ro for being in an even worse situation.

Don't worry, it was a "random draw"

Tarik is staying as a free agent so that once franchising comes out, he can sign a big contract to play with RUSH and Stewie2k. It's all a big brain move.

Sentinels and Ghost both made the playoffs once, and Ghost failed to qualify to one of the VCT's. Anyone complaining is just stuck with recency bias.

Nivera and ScreaM will stick together for a while I think, and Jammpi is CS bound I thought