Chris “Riot Commish” Greeley here—I am the Commissioner of the NA LCS. I’m here to continue our Quick Notes series where we deep dive into topics the community wants to know more about, discuss work in progress, and break down how we make decisions.

So far in Quick Notes, we’ve covered where NA LCS Spring Finals will be, our start time move on Sundays, and updates to the NA LCS Lounge. 

For this post, I wanted to explain what the League Ops team does, then dive into how and why we made changes to tiebreakers in the NA LCS. If you have a burning question for us or a League Ops topic that you want to know more about, let us know in the comments.

League Ops very happily works in the background, but that background work makes the workings of the League less transparent than we would like. In searching for a way to pull the curtain back and provide some visibility, we are going to be trying some stuff out. This is the first shot at that.

WHAT IS LEAGUE OPERATIONS?

The NA LCS League Ops team manages the day-to-day back-office operations and maintains competitive integrity of our professional League of Legends leagues including:

• Reviews, approves, and manages rosters and NA’s portion of the Global Contract Database
• Writes rulesets and policies
• Investigates potential rule violations and issues penalties as appropriate
• Game day tasks such as overseeing the referees and the instances in which Chronobreak can and should be used

At its heart, League Ops is about solving problems. When you are firing on all cylinders, the job is about anticipating the problems and creating the rules and policies to make sure those problems don’t come up. When the world has gone to shit, teams and pro players expect that you will figure out a resolution to an issue that is fair for everyone involved.

BREAKING TIES

With a new season comes a new rulebook. As we were drafting our rulebooks, NA and EU decided to go in different directions on some aspects of tiebreaker rules. I wanted to talk a little bit about why and hopefully get some feedback on the two systems as well as get folks thinking about what other League topics they have questions about.

When we deal with tiebreakers, our first question is always “what kind of limitations are we dealing with?” For example, if we are at an international event there are often caps on the amount of games we can play on a day because of restrictions at the venue or from local police or fire departments. At the NA LCS studio, we worry about burning out pros or having a broadcast day that runs into the wee hours of the morning. Those limitations, coupled with our overarching need to do something that upholds competitive integrity, help frame our thinking around how we should deal with ties.  

For two-way ties, the tiebreaker is always pretty simple—if one team won all of their games against the other, they win the tiebreaker. If they split their games, then the two teams play a best of one with the winner advancing.  

Three-way ties have always been the hard case to deal with. In the past, we’ve shied away from playing a round-robin between those three teams because the result wouldn’t necessarily be conclusive (i.e. they all go 1-1 against each other). When you run the possible outcomes, 75% of the time you will get one team that is 2-0, one that is 1-1 and one that is 0-2. Easy and clean. But in 25% of the cases you get three 1-1 teams, and when we don’t have the ability to play more than 3 games, that leaves us in an impossible situation (and in some cases, even 3 games can be too many).

To combat that, we’ve searched for an in-game metric that we can use to rank the teams so that we can have the two lowest teams play each other, with the winner of that game playing the third team. In other words, we give one team a “bye” in the first round. We’ve looked at a lot of different ways to fairly assign this bye, including gold, gold differential, number of kills and kill differential. None of these felt good to us because they can be farmed and would likely have a big effect on the way teams approach games. We have focused instead on how fast one team wins the game (the game victory time).

Because we don’t love the solution we have, we’ve spent a lot of time looking for fixes. This year, we are trying some new things for the NA LCS. We’ve incorporated a strength of schedule component to our tiebreakers to determine who gets the “bye” in three-way ties, as well as for assigning side-selection where we would otherwise have used a coin flip. To figure out strength of schedule, we look at every team’s wins at the end of the season—if you beat the first place team, that win is worth 5 points. If you beat the last place team, that win is worth a half point (and it scales in between). This system provides teams a benefit for winning the tough games. The strength of schedule system also gives us a better way to decide side selection in tiebreaker games (rather than game victory time or coin flips).

Understanding that people tend to compare NA and EU, it is important to note that the EU LCS League Ops team went in a different direction. Their rulebook says that in a three-team tie, they are going to play all the additional games. If the teams are all tied after the round robin, the three teams are drawn into a single-elimination bracket where the team with the lowest game victory time from the single round-robin tiebreaker games has a bye into the finals.

We’re not sure which tiebreaker system is going to feel like the right decision at the end of the season, but we intend to spend a lot of time talking to pros and fans about whether the system in NA feels fair and meaningful.

What do you think? I’d love to hear from fans what feels good and bad about these tiebreakers systems or about any other NA LCS League Ops topics that you’d like to hear about. Let me know in the comments below and I’ll also be monitoring over on reddit.

Chris “Riot Commish” Greeley is the Commissioner of the NA LCS and ran League Operations for MSI and Worlds in 2017. He is a recovering lawyer from New York City who can’t write a rulebook in less than 50 pages. He channeled years of raiding on his Resto Druid into life in the bottom lane dropping wards and shooting glitterlances. You can find him on Twitter and Reddit as @IAmGrza.