From Samsung Galaxy’s historic revenge over SK Telecom T1 in 2017 to Damwon Gaming’s flashy triumph over Suning in 2020—the League of Legends World Championship has given viewers plenty of unforgettable finals over the years.
Now, Riot Games is aiming to elevate its MOBA’s competitive ecosystem further by ramping up the stakes from the very start of the season.
To that end, the publisher recently announced some major changes meant to radically shake up the League of Legends competitive landscape beyond just Worlds, starting in 2025.
What’s Changing in LoL Esports in 2025?
The upcoming LoL esports revamp includes a regional league restructuring, new drafting system, and a unified split schedule with a third international event.
New regional leagues: Americas and APAC
In a major reshuffle, the North American LCS will merge with South America’s LLA and CBLoL to form a unified Americas league, split into North and South conferences. Each conference will consist of eight teams, with six current partner teams, one additional team from the LLA. The final guest spot in both conferences will be reserved for promotion and relegation.
Likewise, Japan’s LJL, Oceania’s LCO, Southeast Asia’s PCS, Vietnam’s VCS, will merge into a unified Asia-Pacific league. This competition will also have eight teams, and its first lineup of guest spots was determined by the results of the 2024 Summer Split of VCS, PCS, LJL, and LCO. From the second season onward, the Asia-Pacific league will have a multi-tier model, allowing guest teams to get promoted from their domestic competitions, but also relegated back to them.
The EMEA region’s LEC, China’s LPL, and South Korea’s LCK will continue as is in 2025, leaving League of Legends with five regional leagues in total.
Revamped split structure with a new international event
For the first time, 2025 will see League of Legends featuring three international events. In addition to the Mid-Season Invitational (MSI) and the World Championship, Riot will host a new international competition in March 2025. This event will bring together the top teams from the initial split in each of the five regions. The new event’s official name is yet to be announced.
The 2025 season will begin with an opening split where teams compete to qualify for the March international event. The second split will then determine the two teams from each of the five regions that will compete at MSI, which has been moved from May to July. The third and final split in each participating region will lead up to a Regional Championship.
The idea behind this change is to raise the stakes for regular season matches and make splits feel more interconnected through a unified schedule. Riot hopes that doing so will help develop new rivalries and build anticipation for Worlds.
New drafting system promising more variety
The third international event and the LCK Cup 2025 pre-season tournament will both be used to test a new drafting system. Called Fearless Draft, the rule set will prevent teams from picking champions drafted in the previous games of a given best-of series.
This diversifies team compositions over the course of each series, which should deliver more varied matches. By forcing teams to use a wider selection of champions, the Fearless Draft format could also raise the skill floor for playing League of Legends competitively, as mastering as many characters as possible will now be more important than ever.
How these changes will impact LoL Worlds 2025
The shift to five just five regional leagues will reduce the total number of teams at Worlds from 20 in 2024 to 17 in 2025. Specifically, each region will get at least three spots, with two more being reserved for the MSI champions and second-best region.
This 15% reduction in top-tier teams will see the winnings condensed to a smaller number of recipients. Riot says this is by design, claiming that there are currently “too many teams in Tier-1 to support sustainably.”
The new international event is not expected to directly impact Worlds 2025. Due to its experimental drafting system, the team that wins the March 2025 event won’t auto-qualify for MSI like the MSI winner will for Worlds. But if Fearless Draft is well-received, there’s a chance that Riot will adopt it more widely in the future, so this could very well be a preview of things to come.
In the long run, all of these changes are meant to continue Riot’s efforts to make the League of Legends esports scene even more competitive and entertaining, all with the goal of sustainably growing its popularity. And while time will tell whether they work as intended, the early social media chatter from fans appears to be fairly positive.
