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Announcement LC Team Tournament Discussion

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I really like both Trawkan and Bub's ideas, both are great. No matter what gets picked though, I love the idea of a short USA vs The World tour to build hype for the coming teamtour. I hope we can make that happen
 

Comparison of the Two Proposed Winter Team Tour Formats​

Since both formats have now generated a fair amount of discussion, I wanted to put together a more structured comparison of them rather than simply arguing from personal preference.

For transparency, I also asked a specialist — cough cough ChatGPT — to compare both proposals from a tournament-design perspective, particularly looking at clarity, competitive structure, player engagement, administrative burden, and how easily the average player can understand what they are playing for.

The conclusion was broadly consistent with what has already been expressed by a significant part of the community.

My Format — Little Cup Master League / World Cup Format​

My proposal follows a structure that is immediately recognizable:

  • 16 teams
  • 4 groups of 4
  • seeded pots based initially on Power Rankings
  • three group-stage weeks
  • top teams advance
  • quarterfinals
  • semifinals
  • finals
The proposed lineups would also remain deliberately small, with either 5v5 or potentially 7v7 depending on what the community ultimately prefers.

The strongest aspect of my format is that the objective is obvious from the beginning.

Every week has an immediate consequence:

Win games → win the matchup → improve your position → qualify → survive the knockout stage → win the tournament.

There is very little explanation required before somebody understands what is happening.

The group stage also naturally creates storylines without requiring additional mechanics.

By Week 2 or Week 3 there are already:

  • qualification scenarios
  • elimination games
  • fights for first place
  • possible Groups of Death
  • upset opportunities
  • seeding discussions
  • knockout implications
The tournament therefore changes in character as it progresses.

The first three weeks are about qualification.

The quarterfinals onward are elimination games.

The semifinals feel different from the group stage.

The final feels different from everything before it.

That gives the event a natural sense of progression during a relatively short six-week schedule.

The odd-numbered lineup idea also has a very practical advantage: every weekly series produces a winner.

A 5v5 ends 3-2, 4-1, or 5-0.

There is no need to finish an entire week only to discover that everybody must wait for another tiebreaker to be scheduled before the tournament can move forward.

Whether the final number of slots should be five or seven is something that can still reasonably be discussed, but the underlying principle remains the same: avoid unnecessary dead time wherever possible.

Coconut’s Format — Recruitment / Army Format​

Coconut’s proposal is considerably more experimental.

Its central mechanic is that players who are not initially drafted are placed into an "Army." Teams earn points by winning games and completing other objectives, and those points can then be used to recruit players or potentially purchase other advantages.

As a side event or experimental tournament, this is undeniably creative.

The Army concept can produce funny storylines.

Recruiting a player after defeating them is memorable.

Having rosters evolve over time is novel.

The problem is that the tournament's actual objective is much less immediately clear.

Unless an entirely separate victory condition is introduced, the underlying competition still appears to be:

play a regular team tour → accumulate weekly results → eventually reach playoffs or determine a champion.

The recruitment economy is therefore an additional system layered on top of what is fundamentally still a league-style team tournament.

This creates an important design question:

What exactly is recruitment accomplishing?

If teams already begin with seven to ten useful players, most strong players will already be drafted.

That means the Army risks becoming composed primarily of players whom teams did not initially consider important enough to draft.

In that case:

Win games → earn points → recruit players you previously did not want enough to draft.

The mechanic only becomes strategically meaningful if the tournament intentionally creates roster scarcity.

Teams would need to begin with deliberately limited rosters while leaving a significant number of genuinely desirable players available for recruitment.

That would require additional decisions regarding:

  • player prices
  • recruitment priority
  • what happens when multiple teams want the same player
  • whether beating a player reduces their cost
  • roster limits
  • whether acquired players carry points
  • when recruitment becomes available
  • whether points can purchase anything besides players
  • how the Army itself interacts with the competitive standings
None of those issues are impossible to solve.

The issue is that every solution creates another rule that every player must understand.

The format therefore places substantially more administrative responsibility on the hosts while also making the tournament harder for spectators and casual participants to follow.

Immediate Stakes vs Delayed Stakes​

This may be the biggest difference between the two proposals.

My format creates immediate stakes.

A Week 3 matchup might simply mean:

Win and qualify. Lose and go home.

Anybody can understand that.

Coconut’s format often creates delayed stakes.

A result may instead mean:

Winning this game earns points, which may later allow the team to recruit another player, who may improve a future lineup, which may then improve the team's chances of winning the actual competition.

That can be strategically interesting, but it places several steps between the individual game and the ultimate objective.

For a tournament that is already being discussed partly because people are tired of long league formats, that distinction matters.

A league format can already become exhausting when several consecutive weeks feel structurally identical.

Adding a recruitment economy does not necessarily solve that problem.

It may actually create additional weeks of setup before the most interesting consequences of the gimmick are felt.

The World Cup format instead compresses the stakes.

Three weeks of groups.

Then elimination.

There is always something immediately understandable happening.

Administrative Burden​

My format requires the hosts to manage:

  • captain selection
  • roster rules
  • seeding
  • the draw
  • weekly scheduling
  • substitutions
  • ordinary tournament disputes
These are all systems with which the LC tournament community is already familiar.

Coconut’s format requires all of that plus an additional game economy.

Hosts would effectively have to act as both tournament directors and balance designers.

They would need to determine whether the cost of a player is fair, whether point generation is balanced, whether teams can snowball economically, and whether special advantages purchased through points distort the competitive integrity of weekly matchups.

This is not necessarily bad for an experimental event.

It is simply much more complicated than what appears necessary for the Winter Team Tour.

Competitive Snowballing​

There is another concern with using victories to generate resources.

If stronger teams win more games, they earn more points.

If more points allow them to recruit stronger players, then the system can potentially produce:

Winning → more resources → stronger roster → more winning.

That positive-feedback loop would have to be deliberately controlled.

Again, this can be balanced through pricing, acquisition restrictions, catch-up systems, roster limits, or other mechanics.

But every one of those solutions increases the complexity of the format.

My proposal does not require any of these balancing mechanisms.

The team you build is the team you must use to prove that you deserve to advance.

Spectator Experience​

The World Cup structure also has an advantage that should not be underestimated: people understand standings.

If the table says:

  • Team A: 2-0
  • Team B: 1-1
  • Team C: 1-1
  • Team D: 0-2
then everybody immediately understands why Team B vs Team C matters.

The structure itself creates discussion.

People can argue about the draw, the pots, the strongest group, possible knockout opponents, upsets, qualification scenarios, and so on.

The tournament creates content naturally.

Coconut’s format requires more explanation before an outside viewer understands why a specific result matters.

That makes it more suitable for an event where the experimental mechanics themselves are supposed to be the attraction.

What Coconut’s Format Could Still Be​

None of this means that the recruitment idea should disappear.

It could be an extremely entertaining side tournament.

In fact, it might work considerably better when marketed specifically as an experimental event rather than being asked to replace a more conventional competitive structure.

Its strongest selling point is novelty.

The Army, mercenaries, recruitment, team economies, and evolving rosters could make for a memorable standalone tournament.

But that is a different objective from selecting the primary Winter Team Tour format.

Community Preference​

This is also where the discussion should return to what players themselves have actually been expressing.

From the discussion so far, the strongest recurring support has not been for inventing an entirely new league structure.

The main preferences being expressed appear to be either:

  1. LCWC, or
  2. my proposed Cup / World Cup-style format.
Those are the two concepts around which most of the recognizable support has formed.

The specific details of my format are still completely open to discussion.

We can debate:

  • 5v5 or 7v7
  • manager selection
  • partial premades versus drafts
  • exact tier distribution
  • whether semifinals and finals should use larger lineups
  • the precise seeding method
  • what ranking system should eventually replace PR
  • how many substitutions should be allowed
Those are useful discussions because they improve a format that people already appear interested in playing.

What seems much less productive is restarting the entire conversation around another structure simply because another creative concept exists.

Conclusion​

The comparison between the two proposals ultimately comes down to what we want the Winter Team Tour to accomplish.

If the objective is to create an experimental event built around roster mechanics, recruitment, an Army, currencies, and unusual weekly effects, Coconut’s format can absolutely be developed into something fun.

If the objective is to create a competitive team tournament that players understand immediately, that generates stakes from Week 1, that finishes within a reasonable timeframe, that is easy to spectate, and that does not require an entire secondary economy to function, my Cup format is much better suited to that purpose.

More importantly, the community discussion already appears to have narrowed naturally toward two broadly supported alternatives: LCWC or my Cup format.

Therefore, in the end, any attempt to push Coconut’s format as the Winter Team Tour would risk ignoring the clearest preference that players have expressed so far.

The discussion should no longer be:

"Can we invent another format?"

It should be:

"Of the two formats that appear to have the strongest community support — LCWC and the Cup format — which one should we implement, and how should we refine it?"

That is a much more productive question.

Coconut’s format can still exist, and it may even deserve its own event.

But the Winter Team Tour does not need another layer of experimentation simply for the sake of being different.

If the community is already telling us what it wants, the next step should be to choose between those supported options and make the selected format as good as possible.
 
Trawkan said:

Comparison of the Two Proposed Winter Team Tour Formats​

Since both formats have now generated a fair amount of discussion, I wanted to put together a more structured comparison of them rather than simply arguing from personal preference.

For transparency, I also asked a specialist — cough cough ChatGPT — to compare both proposals from a tournament-design perspective, particularly looking at clarity, competitive structure, player engagement, administrative burden, and how easily the average player can understand what they are playing for.

The conclusion was broadly consistent with what has already been expressed by a significant part of the community.

My Format — Little Cup Master League / World Cup Format​

My proposal follows a structure that is immediately recognizable:

  • 16 teams
  • 4 groups of 4
  • seeded pots based initially on Power Rankings
  • three group-stage weeks
  • top teams advance
  • quarterfinals
  • semifinals
  • finals
The proposed lineups would also remain deliberately small, with either 5v5 or potentially 7v7 depending on what the community ultimately prefers.

The strongest aspect of my format is that the objective is obvious from the beginning.

Every week has an immediate consequence:

Win games → win the matchup → improve your position → qualify → survive the knockout stage → win the tournament.

There is very little explanation required before somebody understands what is happening.

The group stage also naturally creates storylines without requiring additional mechanics.

By Week 2 or Week 3 there are already:

  • qualification scenarios
  • elimination games
  • fights for first place
  • possible Groups of Death
  • upset opportunities
  • seeding discussions
  • knockout implications
The tournament therefore changes in character as it progresses.

The first three weeks are about qualification.

The quarterfinals onward are elimination games.

The semifinals feel different from the group stage.

The final feels different from everything before it.

That gives the event a natural sense of progression during a relatively short six-week schedule.

The odd-numbered lineup idea also has a very practical advantage: every weekly series produces a winner.

A 5v5 ends 3-2, 4-1, or 5-0.

There is no need to finish an entire week only to discover that everybody must wait for another tiebreaker to be scheduled before the tournament can move forward.

Whether the final number of slots should be five or seven is something that can still reasonably be discussed, but the underlying principle remains the same: avoid unnecessary dead time wherever possible.

Coconut’s Format — Recruitment / Army Format​

Coconut’s proposal is considerably more experimental.

Its central mechanic is that players who are not initially drafted are placed into an "Army." Teams earn points by winning games and completing other objectives, and those points can then be used to recruit players or potentially purchase other advantages.

As a side event or experimental tournament, this is undeniably creative.

The Army concept can produce funny storylines.

Recruiting a player after defeating them is memorable.

Having rosters evolve over time is novel.

The problem is that the tournament's actual objective is much less immediately clear.

Unless an entirely separate victory condition is introduced, the underlying competition still appears to be:

play a regular team tour → accumulate weekly results → eventually reach playoffs or determine a champion.

The recruitment economy is therefore an additional system layered on top of what is fundamentally still a league-style team tournament.

This creates an important design question:

What exactly is recruitment accomplishing?

If teams already begin with seven to ten useful players, most strong players will already be drafted.

That means the Army risks becoming composed primarily of players whom teams did not initially consider important enough to draft.

In that case:

Win games → earn points → recruit players you previously did not want enough to draft.

The mechanic only becomes strategically meaningful if the tournament intentionally creates roster scarcity.

Teams would need to begin with deliberately limited rosters while leaving a significant number of genuinely desirable players available for recruitment.

That would require additional decisions regarding:

  • player prices
  • recruitment priority
  • what happens when multiple teams want the same player
  • whether beating a player reduces their cost
  • roster limits
  • whether acquired players carry points
  • when recruitment becomes available
  • whether points can purchase anything besides players
  • how the Army itself interacts with the competitive standings
None of those issues are impossible to solve.

The issue is that every solution creates another rule that every player must understand.

The format therefore places substantially more administrative responsibility on the hosts while also making the tournament harder for spectators and casual participants to follow.

Immediate Stakes vs Delayed Stakes​

This may be the biggest difference between the two proposals.

My format creates immediate stakes.

A Week 3 matchup might simply mean:

Win and qualify. Lose and go home.

Anybody can understand that.

Coconut’s format often creates delayed stakes.

A result may instead mean:

Winning this game earns points, which may later allow the team to recruit another player, who may improve a future lineup, which may then improve the team's chances of winning the actual competition.

That can be strategically interesting, but it places several steps between the individual game and the ultimate objective.

For a tournament that is already being discussed partly because people are tired of long league formats, that distinction matters.

A league format can already become exhausting when several consecutive weeks feel structurally identical.

Adding a recruitment economy does not necessarily solve that problem.

It may actually create additional weeks of setup before the most interesting consequences of the gimmick are felt.

The World Cup format instead compresses the stakes.

Three weeks of groups.

Then elimination.

There is always something immediately understandable happening.

Administrative Burden​

My format requires the hosts to manage:

  • captain selection
  • roster rules
  • seeding
  • the draw
  • weekly scheduling
  • substitutions
  • ordinary tournament disputes
These are all systems with which the LC tournament community is already familiar.

Coconut’s format requires all of that plus an additional game economy.

Hosts would effectively have to act as both tournament directors and balance designers.

They would need to determine whether the cost of a player is fair, whether point generation is balanced, whether teams can snowball economically, and whether special advantages purchased through points distort the competitive integrity of weekly matchups.

This is not necessarily bad for an experimental event.

It is simply much more complicated than what appears necessary for the Winter Team Tour.

Competitive Snowballing​

There is another concern with using victories to generate resources.

If stronger teams win more games, they earn more points.

If more points allow them to recruit stronger players, then the system can potentially produce:

Winning → more resources → stronger roster → more winning.

That positive-feedback loop would have to be deliberately controlled.

Again, this can be balanced through pricing, acquisition restrictions, catch-up systems, roster limits, or other mechanics.

But every one of those solutions increases the complexity of the format.

My proposal does not require any of these balancing mechanisms.

The team you build is the team you must use to prove that you deserve to advance.

Spectator Experience​

The World Cup structure also has an advantage that should not be underestimated: people understand standings.

If the table says:

  • Team A: 2-0
  • Team B: 1-1
  • Team C: 1-1
  • Team D: 0-2
then everybody immediately understands why Team B vs Team C matters.

The structure itself creates discussion.

People can argue about the draw, the pots, the strongest group, possible knockout opponents, upsets, qualification scenarios, and so on.

The tournament creates content naturally.

Coconut’s format requires more explanation before an outside viewer understands why a specific result matters.

That makes it more suitable for an event where the experimental mechanics themselves are supposed to be the attraction.

What Coconut’s Format Could Still Be​

None of this means that the recruitment idea should disappear.

It could be an extremely entertaining side tournament.

In fact, it might work considerably better when marketed specifically as an experimental event rather than being asked to replace a more conventional competitive structure.

Its strongest selling point is novelty.

The Army, mercenaries, recruitment, team economies, and evolving rosters could make for a memorable standalone tournament.

But that is a different objective from selecting the primary Winter Team Tour format.

Community Preference​

This is also where the discussion should return to what players themselves have actually been expressing.

From the discussion so far, the strongest recurring support has not been for inventing an entirely new league structure.

The main preferences being expressed appear to be either:

  1. LCWC, or
  2. my proposed Cup / World Cup-style format.
Those are the two concepts around which most of the recognizable support has formed.

The specific details of my format are still completely open to discussion.

We can debate:

  • 5v5 or 7v7
  • manager selection
  • partial premades versus drafts
  • exact tier distribution
  • whether semifinals and finals should use larger lineups
  • the precise seeding method
  • what ranking system should eventually replace PR
  • how many substitutions should be allowed
Those are useful discussions because they improve a format that people already appear interested in playing.

What seems much less productive is restarting the entire conversation around another structure simply because another creative concept exists.

Conclusion​

The comparison between the two proposals ultimately comes down to what we want the Winter Team Tour to accomplish.

If the objective is to create an experimental event built around roster mechanics, recruitment, an Army, currencies, and unusual weekly effects, Coconut’s format can absolutely be developed into something fun.

If the objective is to create a competitive team tournament that players understand immediately, that generates stakes from Week 1, that finishes within a reasonable timeframe, that is easy to spectate, and that does not require an entire secondary economy to function, my Cup format is much better suited to that purpose.

More importantly, the community discussion already appears to have narrowed naturally toward two broadly supported alternatives: LCWC or my Cup format.

Therefore, in the end, any attempt to push Coconut’s format as the Winter Team Tour would risk ignoring the clearest preference that players have expressed so far.

The discussion should no longer be:

"Can we invent another format?"

It should be:

"Of the two formats that appear to have the strongest community support — LCWC and the Cup format — which one should we implement, and how should we refine it?"

That is a much more productive question.

Coconut’s format can still exist, and it may even deserve its own event.

But the Winter Team Tour does not need another layer of experimentation simply for the sake of being different.

If the community is already telling us what it wants, the next step should be to choose between those supported options and make the selected format as good as possible.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse...
"ChatGPT explain why my idea is good and why theirs sucks"
 
Earlier this week on Monday, I sent out a vote to the most recent players in LC team tours from this past LCPL and the currently ongoing offsite LPL. The options on it were either a standard team tour or the alternative proposals mentioned here either in Coconut or Trawkans posts. Here are the results of said vote
1791605036686.png


Just barely over 50% of people who voted all prefer the standard format. This means that even though a second vote was brought up and even if everyone who voted for the Trawkan format voted for the Coconut format, it would still be slightly below the standard format in terms of preference. With this in mind, the winter tournament will be a standard team tour with the following slots

SV
SV
SV
SS
SM
ORAS
BW
DPP
ADV
DLC
UU
Homefield (Bo3 SV, Team Pick, Opp Pick)

And to close this off, me and other staff members are very well aware of people wanting LCWC. I think it is exceedingly likely it will be ran over the next year. Discussions on whether it will be ran over this tournament or LCCL will be had after this tournament. Expect manager signups probably on finals week of LPL
 
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