LPL overhauls Summer Stage with Fearless Draft and new group system
The Chinese League of Legends franchise league LPL has announced an overhaul of its competitive model. The new format features an initial Seeding Stage, a Group Stage, and a Playoff Bracket. Moreover, Fearless Draft will be making a debut in the competition after the format has already been tried in the LDL.
What’s the new LPL system about?
LPL's new format takes effect for the Summer Split and uses a Seeding Stage to determine the strength of each individual team to place into the Group Stage in the next round. Crucially, the initial stage will pressure test the teams on their flexibility, introducing Fearless Draft.
Across the globe, the majority of LoL franchise leagues are using a pick-ban draft model, allowing teams to both pick and ban champions against each other before each game. Drafts have become a pivotal point of interest for the series outcome.
Still, meta strategies around the strongest picks regularly entrench themselves across the board, with teams figuring out which champions are not allowed to be let onto the server and which others are priority picks to snag away from the opponent.
Fearless Draft takes a different approach, getting rid of the stereotypical ban model and allowing every hero to be drafted at the start of a match. However, for every game within a match after the first one, the champions that have been played in the previous games within a series are no longer available.
The draft model enforces variety across the board and allows incredibly strong champions to be played accessible, requiring a rather different approach to both drafting and even practice.
Notably, matches during the Seeding Stage during which Fearless draft is active are only set to a best-of-three model, limiting the number of champions that will be locked out by the last game of the series to a maximum of 20. After the Seeding Stage, play will commence to Standard Draft once more.
How does the overall format work?
The Seeding Stage is a new introduction to the format and serves to evaluate teams to be sorted into the Group Stage. Unlike in previous stages, the Summer Split will see teams be put into four different groups during the Seeding Stage, face off against each other in a double round-robin format.
Those outcomes determine the seeding into the next stage, during which teams will be put into two different groups. Due to LPL's awkwardly uneven 17 teams, one seeding group will naturally be forced to take on an additional team, increasing the number of matches for teams in the said group to eight while all other teams only have to play six matches.
Interestingly (and perhaps controversially) the way how teams will be seeded into the Group Stage is not done with a parity of groups in mind. Instead, the second stage will differentiate between a High and Low Group, meaning that the top 2 teams from each group will be sorted into the High and the bottom two into the low group.
For High Group teams, this means that they are automatically qualified for the Playoffs and will merely be played for their respective spot in the knockout bracket. For the Low Group, elimination is on the line with the bottom four teams not receiving an invite to the Playoffs.
During the most recent Spring Group Stage, 25 out of the 40 matches (62.5%) resulted in a 2-0 victory, with many of those games feeling rather one-sided. The new High and Low Group model promises more parity between teams within each group, hopefully producing more close matches in the process.
The LPL is currently on its mid-season break, with the international LoL circuits converging for MSI in China and will take up active play once on June 24.
