LCK changed extremely drastically
Recently, right before Worlds 2024 ended, LCK had an unexpected change. Specifically, according to the announcement from the official LCK fanpage, from 2025, this tournament will no longer be divided into Spring – Summer. Instead, the audience will welcome two other tournaments. A tournament called LCK Cup takes place in a short time, will fall around the beginning of the year and end before March to select teams to participate in Riot's international tournament. And the remaining tournament, called LCK Regular Season (lasting from April to September to find teams to attend MSI and Worlds.
The new format will divide the LCK Cup into a sub-tournament and has nothing to do with the LCK Regular Season afterward. In addition, LCK Regular Season will also have a stage called MSI Qualified for teams to compete for MSI spots after Rounds 1 – 2 of this tournament ends. Thus, for now, LCK has eliminated the familiar format of selecting representatives to go to MSI based on the results of the Spring tournament.
In addition, after MSI ends, teams will continue to compete from Round 3 – 5 to choose representatives for the Playoffs. LCK will be divided into two groups (named Legend and Rise) to determine the teams going on to the playoffs. The top 5 teams of Legend group and 3 teams of Rise group will continue to the knockout round to compete for the championship as well as 4 spots to attend Worlds.
Another change is that the LCK Cup will implement the Fearless Draft format that was introduced in the LPL as well as the LCK Challengers in 2024. The LCK organizers also admitted: if a match goes to BO5, there will be 50 champions. ban (including 10 champions per match, and 40 champions who were banned in the previous 4 matches). This is a new change, as the previous Fearless Draft often reset all previously banned champions to give teams more choices.
It is suspected that LCK's changes are influenced by Faker
It can be said that the new match schedule will be somewhat lighter, with only 1 main tournament remaining and the matches may be more spread out. According to some opinions, perhaps Faker's injuries also contributed to this big change in the LCK. Because, whether applying Fearless Draft (like LPL) or having long-standing secondary tournaments (LEC, LCS), no major region has dared to completely cancel the system of 2 Spring – Summer tournaments like LCK is doing.
It is true that the number of tournaments may increase (4 – 5) but some tournaments like the LCK Cup can be considered as warm-up tournaments and their nature will not be too stressful. After that, the winning team will participate in Riot's new international tournament. But even so, MSI and Worlds will still be the more focused targets. This can also be seen as an opportunity for teams to test new strategies, or bring young players to compete to gain experience.
In addition, Fearless Draft will also be able to bring positive effects. The audience is so fed up with watching the team compete that they always know which champions they will ban. Gen.G is the team that often has unexpected picks and bans, gradually losing the necessary boldness. Right in the loss to T1, the audience immediately knew that Gen.G would bring Canyon's Nidalee to compete well to counter Chovy, just ban Smolder + Yone and that's it.
In addition, with LCK teams also facing many financial difficulties, expanding a number of tournaments, both for testing and for teams to have more prize money, is also an effective solution. At the same time, the LCK organizers only need to arrange the schedule so that the players are not overloaded, then it can be considered a success.
The LCK in 2025 will be very different, but these are changes that the audience will look forward to seeing the results of when officially applied, with the expectation of completely changing the LCK in the future.