I got the idea for this rant from this: https://www.vlr.gg/508532/theres-no-point-in-winning-a-masters-anymore
The main context is from this image: https://imgur.com/a/0LSqI45 , where they call Master winners "WINNERS of Masters xyz", but they call Champs winners "World Champions"
In case you don't know, Riot has this game called League of Legends! You might've heard of it, and their esport is quite large. One of the biggest things that we see in LoL esports is this idea that the only win that really matters is Worlds, which you'll see permeate throughout the community.
For example, one of the recent players who got inducted into the "Hall of Legends", Uzi, has never actually won a Worlds trophy, but he has won an MSI, which you could compare to a Masters, as it's near the middle of the season, after one of the splits, and the top 3 teams from every region go to fight for the trophy. Even though you might say that he HAS won a trophy, and an international trophy, they still call him the "crownless king" on official pages, because the League community doesn't recognize wins other than Worlds as ACTUAL wins at Internationals. You can see a similar sentiment for T1 and GenG last year, where although GenG won the MSI, and looked like the most dominant team in the world for literally 90% of the year, they weren't the team that won Worlds, so they ended up having their year being extremely heavily downgraded by most everyone in the community. On the other hand, even though T1 looked alright for most of the year, and REALLY bad in the qualifiers to Worlds that year, they ended up being called the "best team" because they won Worlds. I am a T1 fan, and have a ton of bias for them, but GenG was absolutely the better team throughout the year. The reason that this attitude even exists in league is due to the fact that MSI was introduced fairly later on into the esport as a tourney, so people already viewed it as something new and not to aspire for, but that leads me to my complaint with how Riot is handling Valorant.
Valorant is NOT League of Legends, and I think Riot would do really well to understand that. The ecosystem around Prestige and the Meaning of winning an International is COMPLETELY different from League of Legends, and I think Riot is either trying to act like it isn't, or push the idea that it isn't so much that we end up treating Masters as a downgrade to Champs. Valorant, at the start of the game, came with Masters. Masters Reykjavik, Berlin, Reykjavik 2, Copenhagen, even the Regional Masters in 2020, were all there from the start of the game. Since these events and internationals were there from the start of the game, and also were our first ever taste at International competition, it's ended up becoming a really big honor to win a Masters trophy. Think back to 2021, if you were around, and remember how insane it was when Gambit won their trophy over Envy, or Sen winning the first ever international. The HONOR in lifting that trophy was something that is truly special to this game, and I think it is absolutely awesome that the community kept the same attitude to FPX winning Copenhagen as Loud winning Istanbul. When all of these trophies mean something, it really brings viewers in to every single international, and makes them want to stay in touch with the game, at least for internationals, and keeps viewers watching. When I compare this to watching MSI compared to Worlds, there's literally an idea that some League watchers are "just Worlds" watchers, and don't really care for the esport as a whole, but care about Worlds because it means something.
Imagine that in Valorant, for a second. Imagine a SIGNIFICANT portion of viewers coming to Valorant only for Champs, and not watching anything else in the sport for the rest of the year. Sen's win over GenG in Madrid, GenG's insane dominance at Shanghai going into champs, all means nothing. All that matters is that EDG won Champs, so they're the best team. Fnatic's literally GOD RUN through Tokyo and Sao Paolo? Means nothing, because they didn't win Champs so who really cares. T1's Cinderella run, and PRX's FIRST EVER TROPHY? Won't matter if they don't win at Champs. This idea is so unhealthy for the sport, not only in terms of viewer numbers decreasing as a whole, since no one would care about Masters, but also for the sport as a whole. We already saw Loud 2 years ago literally not try at all at Masters Tokyo and bomb out, because they were "saving strats for champs". Who would want to watch a product for 9 8 months of the year if it's meaningless?
Now this brings me to what Riot has been doing, and how they should FUCKING FIX IT, because you have a special kind of attitude here in Valorant, and you're slowly burning it away because you "want it to be like league!".
Dear Riot Games:
Why do you have an 8 team masters at the start of the year? Who is benefitting from this? Please explain to me why we can't have 2 Masters with 12 teams each, or even better, a Masters with 12 teams --> 16 teams --> Champs with 20 teams (I'll explain the format later). The only possible explanation for making Masters 1 feel like a tournament that means less is so that you artificially make Champs feel like more, which is just such a stupid way to approach this issue. Why the fuck would you intentionally degrade your own product, lose viewers because of it in the long run, likely, and make teams care less about a tournament so you can boost the other tournament. You are only hurting the game when you do this, and by not valuing the achievements of Masters winners and using language to act like Champs winners are some "incredible team" compared to them, when they both won an international with a double elim bracket, is just dishonest. Please, if you want events to "ramp up", instead of killing your own product, improve everything else!
Proposal:
Masters 1 is a 12 team bracket, same as Masters 2 right now and every "normal" masters we've had, and keep the Swiss stage, it's so good for viewership
Masters 2 is a 16 team bracket, with the Champs brackets instead as their format, and the same double elim bracket like normal.
Champs ends up becoming a 20 team event. You get more fans engaged in the sport, more revenue from skin sales, and a longer tournament for more viewers. For the format, if you want to be like League so bad, just steal it! Make a part of the Champs bracket be a Play-In bracket, and take the 4th and 5th seeds from each region and put them in a Play-In bracket to find the best 4 teams, then take the 16 teams you have, and fix your groups system. We already saw last year how horribly that can go with GenG, TH, SEN, and FPX being in the same group, so instead make it like League AGAIN!!!! Take their idea of having a 3 game swiss system, where you need 3 wins to progress, and end up with 8 teams to run a bracket with. If you end up with low time because of how long this might take, just have the Swiss stage be to 2 wins, and have it be the top 4 teams in a Double elim bracket to win it all, which would all be in the new venue.
Even if you disagree with the way that I've proposed a change in the system, I hope that we would all be in agreement that disvaluing Masters trophies to make Champs seem like a "premiere" event is a really bad thing for the scene as a whole in the long run, and I do hope Riot addresses this in the future, because it seems really easy to just revert back to 2 Masters with 12 teams if they wanted to, even if they don't want to change the Champs format at all.
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