VCS's interesting mechanism is applauded by the international League of Legends community
In recent seasons, the tournament and the entire VCS region have received more attention from the international community. In particular, after the tumultuous Spring 2024 season, the world audience is looking forward to what VCS can do to recover and develop again. Up to now, this expectation has been partly met when recently, GAM continued to add MAD Lions KOI to the list of defeated champions at Worlds. However, many viewers also got more information about the VCS tournament format from here.
Specifically, the VCS tournament, as is known, has long used the 1v1 Showdown format to divide the right to choose sides for the teams if the match goes to a deciding game (game 3 of BO3 and game 5 of BO5). According to many opinions, this is considered a perfect and suitable format to be applied to all professional League of Legends tournaments in the world. Not only VCS but PCS also apply this form. This not only helps to legitimize a game mode of League of Legends, but also to diversify competition in an intense match.
The format of VCS and PCS is perfect thanks to Riot “inadvertently assisting”
In fact, one of the reasons this format has been well received by the international community is largely due to the obvious power difference between the Blue and Red teams. Although up to now, the Blue team's win rate is only about 60%, most of the matches the Red team wins are because this side has a huge difference in strength. The rare match that the Red team won with almost equal strength on both sides, perhaps only the match Gen.G – Hanwha Life Esports or recently GAM Esports – MAD Lions KOI.
It was Riot's creation of champion odds that were too unbalanced, causing one side's win rate to deviate significantly from the other side. On the Blue team, the players will easily choose their strong champions and force the opponent to come up with a counter-match. In matches between two teams of almost equal strength, the fact that one side can control their forte champions and ban champions that can affect them in the match is considered to have a huge advantage. .
Maybe in the future, if Riot is still struggling with how to balance its champions, applying a format similar to the current VCS or PCS to other tournaments around the world is also a viable option, especially when this solution has many more benefits than just creating fairness for both teams.