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The North American League of Legends Championship Series (NA LCS) has announced a return to the double best-of-one format for its regular season format.
Riot switched from best-of-one to a best-of-three series in 2016, claiming that it would give fans more chances to watch their favourites compete. However, Riot have said that holding best-of-threes didn’t see fans watching more games, with viewership actually declining due to a switch to simultaneous dual streams to accommodate all of the additional games that were played.
The experiment was put into motion by a desire to ape international events using the format, which including Korea’s LCK. However, the viewership decline and extra work involved has meant that the short-lived Bo3 experiment is over and in 2018 the NA LCS will return to a Bo1 format.
This means that teams will be playing 18 games per split, as opposed to, well, triple that number with 54.Whether this will lead to better rested teams remains to be seen although the community have aired concerns on reddit about the low number of games being played and the way this will devalue subscriptions, but we’ll see if it has any genuine effect in the 2018 Spring Split, which kicks off on January 20.
