Riot’s announcement about MSI and CKTG lacked the element that the LoL community was expecting.
MSI and CKTG will be more severe than before
Recently, Riot has officially announced the rules of MSI 2025 and CKTG 2025. Besides the information about the connection between First Stand 2025 and MSI 2025 that has appeared for a long time (the champion of First Stand will bring their region an additional spot to the MSI group stage), the rules of CKTG 2025 are somewhat more severe.
Specifically, although they are still the 4th seeds of the 2 largest regions in the League of Legends world (LCK, LPL), this Worlds will be more difficult even if the teams from these 2 regions win MSI 2025. According to Riot’s regulations, the region with the MSI champion team and the region with the second best performance will be given a 4th spot. However, the 4th seeds of the 2 regions with the best and second best performance at MSI will have to play 1 more match before entering the Swiss Stage. Meanwhile, the traditional Playin stage has been eliminated.
This means that even if LPL – LCK dominate MSI (as they have done since 2020), there will still be 1 representative from these 2 regions “disappearing” before the important Swiss round begins. This will likely bring a lot of controversy. In the last 3 World Championships, there has always been at least 1 seed 4 team participating in the World Championship final (DRX 2022, WBG 2023 and T1 2024).
Meanwhile, after being merged into the APAC region, VCS teams will have to compete fiercely with PCS, LJL… to get a spot at World Championship. If we consider the recent LCP 2025, the possibility of only 1 VCS team reaching World Championship 2025 is very high. The worst case scenario is that VCS will be completely absent before World Championship 2025 begins.
The element that audiences are most looking forward to at MSI or CKTG may not appear
Despite showing many interesting points, Riot did not mention Fearless Draft at MSI 2025 or the upcoming CKTG 2025, which made many audiences wonder. However, this is understandable. It was only in 2025 that Riot actually put this mode into testing in many tournaments. Therefore, it is normal that this publisher needs more time to evaluate.
Furthermore, some regions such as LCK or APAC have just undergone changes. Forcing teams to adapt to too many changes could cause the quality of matches to decline. Furthermore, if Fearless Draft is applied in a context where the power gap between champions is large or the lane-swapping meta has not really been eliminated, matches like the HLE – Gen.G pair in the LCK Cup 2025 final, with a situation that can be said to be quite boring, could happen again in the future.
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