Chris “Riot Commish” Greeley here—I’m the Commissioner of the NA LCS. With the NA LCS Summer Split regular season schedule now available, I’m sharing the process we go through to put together our match schedule for this Quick Notes.

THE METHOD BEHIND THE MADNESS

Generally, making a match schedule shouldn’t be hard. There are websites and programs you can use where you plug in the teams, the game times/days and some other basic info and it spits out a schedule. Those tools are great for your local softball or frisbee golf league (do people still play that?), but terrible when you’re trying to create a compelling narrative for the split. That’s the ultimate goal of the schedule – to provide consistent storytelling points for the NA LCS and the teams. We take the desire to provide great story beats every week and balance it against our competitive integrity rules which create a fair experience for all teams.

The ultimate questions for us on building narratives are: Which games are interesting and why? These answers provide us with a good base for broadcast, and is a nice compliment to the stories and narratives that teams create on their own from winning, losing, moving players around, vying for the playoffs, and on the road at our events (Finals, MSI 2018, etc). Ultimately, the schedule helps create that feeling that in the middle of the split you cannot miss a day or a game, and catching the VOD is just not going to cut it – because you have to see the story and the game unfold while it happens (Twitch chat assemble!).

THE COMPETITIVE RULES

While storytelling is important, competitive balance is the king. When we put our schedule together, we enforce rules against the process to make sure we’re balancing our desire to tell a good story with the overarching idea that we must provide teams with a fair and level playing field (The Rift). We started making the Summer Split schedule with the following rules:

• Every team plays every other team once before any team plays any other team a second time (i.e. we finish the round robin);
• The second game of each round robin is at least 3 weeks after the first game;
• Every team has side selection in one game per weekend, and no side selection in one game per weekend in 7 weeks. In the other two weeks each team will have double side selection once, and no side selection once (there was no way to balance side selection in all 9 weeks);
• We use balanced (1:1) side selection in every week in which a new patch drops (weeks 2, 4, 6 and 8);
• No team plays in game 5 of Saturday and game 1 of Sunday (logistically, that’s just really hard for teams).

SPACING OUT THE ROUND ROBIN (RULE 2)

On two occasions during the Spring Split, teams played each other in back to back weeks, and on five other occasions, teams played with only one week in between games. Although teams didn’t complain about this, it seemed to us that we needed to make sure that there was more space between games to make sure that teams had ample time to prepare for games, and that no one was having an easier time preparing because of the close proximity of playing the same team.

ASSIGNING AND BALANCING SIDE SELECTION (RULES 3 AND 4)

Coming into Spring Split, we had discussions with teams about changes they’d like to see around the schedule. Teams requested changes to the way in which side selection was determined for each game. In prior seasons, teams were assigned their side (Blue or Red) in advance, and there was no decision making to be done by the teams. This year, teams requested that they be given the opportunity to select their side in one of their two games against each team.

We put this into effect when we put the Spring Schedule together, but we didn’t make any attempt to balance how often a team has a weekend where they have side selection in both games, or no games or in one of the games. For example, 100 Thieves, Echo Fox, and FlyQuest all had one week where they had both picks, one week where they had no picks, and seven weeks where they were balanced. On the other end, Counter Logic Gaming had only one balanced week and 4 weeks each of no picks and both picks.

How important is side selection? While it’s hard to decouple the advantages of blue side versus red side and first pick versus last pick, the team with side selection won 60% of all regular season games (including tie-breakers). This, coupled with some complaints from teams about the imbalances, made us realize the importance of prioritizing a more balanced schedule.

We initially tried to balance the schedule so that every team would have a balanced schedule for side selection every week, but in conjunction with the other rules, we couldn’t find a viable schedule, thus the change to every team having two unbalanced weeks. We made sure that in any week where we expected to introduce a new patch to competitive play, teams had a balanced week so that everyone could get a read on a new meta.

WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS

To get the schedule rolling, we look for stories in historic rivalries (TSM/CLG, TSM/C9, C9/CLG), potential rivalries (TL/TSM, CG/FOX), rivalries from other esports (OPT/100T), and basketball or other sport matchups (GGS/CG/100T/CLG). We also look at player movements from one team to another and question whether there are stories to be told when they play their old teams (Doublelift to TL, Mickey to GGS, Aphro to 100T, etc). We add to this to the expected flow of a season to find matches that might present big moments in the season (potential first place battles or fights for playoff spots). Once we have some ideas, we start to put matchups down on paper to see what the season will look like.

We wanted to start Summer Split with a bang and there’s no better way to do that than to open with our Finals teams: Team Liquid and 100 Thieves. It gives 100 a chance to avenge their 2nd place finish, and TL a chance to celebrate their Finals victory and their MSI 2018 trophy (fingers crossed). In every game of pickup basketball (and beer pong) I’ve ever played, losers take the ball, so 100 will start with side selection. After that, we move right into one of our oldest rivalries and former champions – CLG v. TSM. We set up the Spring Schedule with the hope that the CLG/TSM match in Week 9 would be a huge match with playoff implications – CLG did their best to give that to us, but now we’re going in the other direction, jumping the season off with this great match. On Sunday of week 1, we revisit Spring’s 3rd/4th place matchup between CG and FOX, with CG taking side selection for the first matchup. Mickey, Golden Guardians’ new mid laner, also gets his first shot at his former team when GGS plays TL on Sunday of Week 1.

As you look through the schedule, you’ll see that we try to build every week around some big matchups. We also pay special attention to the end of season where we check the script and see what matches could have huge impacts on the Playoffs race and seeding going into weeks 8 and 9. In Week 8, we revisit last split’s fight at the top between 100T and FOX, check in on the CLG/TSM rivalry, potential first place showdowns with TSM/100T and TL/C9, and FLY’s fight for the playoffs with matches against CG and CLG. Week 9 gives us a Saturday where all 5 games may have real playoff implications, and a Sunday where the final game of the split between TSM and TL may have playoff and Worlds implications for several teams.

SCHEDULE FIESTA

Ultimately, the schedule is a labor of love for our entire NA LCS team. Once the league operations crew has the the schedule in a pretty good place, it is shared out with several groups, including our player management and broadcast teams, as well as several folks on the broader NA LCS team. Lots of folks jump in to spot any issues with the schedule, discuss any particularly weak points in the schedule, and challenge some of the assumptions that the schedule is built on. For summer, we spent more than 25 hours getting the schedule to a place where we could share it internally, and countless hours after that working through the schedule to make sure it felt fair and that enabled some great storytelling for the year.

A few weeks into the season we will take another look at the schedule for Weeks 5-9 and may move some games around within each day – we call this flex scheduling. We have some time slots that are generally better for viewing than others (our version of “prime time”), and we want to make sure that as storylines develop, that we are highlighting the best or most impactful matches for viewers. In this way, the schedule can adapt to season.

All that’s left for us now is to see how the season plays out, celebrate our great storytelling points, and take notes on our misses to try to make Spring 2019 even better. Inspired by @FionnOnFire, if you were in charge of scheduling, what would be your Opening Day? Did we get it right or what would you change up? Let us know in the comments below or over on Twitter.

Quick Notes is a NA esports series similar to Meddler’s where we’ll deep dive into topics that the community wants to know more about, discuss work in progress, and share our decision-making process. For more Quick Notes, check out:

• Showmatch Showdown
• Breaking Ties
• NA LCS Lounge
• Where NA LCS Finals will be
• Moving the NA LCS start time

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.