Perhaps in the history of MSI, the tournament in 2022 faced the most “backstage turbulence”, especially regarding the organization by Riot Games. Allowing LPL representatives to play remotely and forcing all remaining teams to compete with a ping of 35 led to Riot receiving countless criticisms from viewers and numerous technical issues. Even before the tournament began, many criticized this decision from Riot.
Not stopping there, the format of the world’s second-largest professional League of Legends tournament has also frequently faced criticism. Recently, a well-known analyst from the LEC tournament, Caedrel, called for Riot to change the format of MSI as they “stuffed” 66 Bo1 matches into this year’s tournament. Even commentator HeyMunchables from the English LPL channel bluntly stated that MSI 2022 is like having a two-week qualifier just for a real tournament lasting three days.
Even when discussed on the Reddit forum of the League of Legends community, the format of MSI 2022 was viewed as a “joke” and Riot was said to be “organizing it like a comedy show”. Many gamers compared MSI 2022 to the Major tournaments of DOTA 2 and CS:GO (which took place close to MSI) and found that the Major events were organized significantly better.
The reason is that these tournaments have a balanced number of Bo1 (Bo2 with Major DOTA 2), Bo3, and Bo5 matches, making the matches exciting whether in qualification or playoffs. Meanwhile, the matches of the MSI 2022 Play-In stage were assessed as overly “bland” as weaker teams had too few matches to showcase their skills and learned very little from the Bo1 matches. As a result, viewers will almost forget teams like DFM, ORD… no matter how hard they try.
With MSI 2022 having determined the four teams advancing to the Semi-Finals, this tournament is gradually coming to an end. It can be said that this is the tournament that brings Riot the most lessons about how to organize a tournament as they have revealed too many issues. Hopefully, in the future, Riot Games will add more Bo3 or Bo2 matches in the group stage as well as the lower bracket for major tournaments to create a fairer and more engaging format for MSI or even Worlds.