League of Legends tries to change up the World Championship format, accidentally causes 5-way "Civil War" through astoundingly bad RNG

Immediately after implementing a new tournament structure intended to, among other things, create more cross-regional match-ups, the League of Legends World Championships suffered a legendarily bad draw that turned - at least for one day - what was meant to be an international competition into what fans have taken to calling Worlds: Civil War.

This year's Worlds competition has swapped to a Swiss format that leads into the single-elimination knockout rounds which will determine the final winner of the event. In the most basic terms, the Swiss stage is a sort of truncated round-robin tournament where teams with matching win-loss records face each other according to random draws. So the stage starts with all the teams facing off against their drawn opponents, then 1-0 teams face each other in randomly-drawn matchups as the 0-1 teams do the same. Teams that win three matches move on to the knockout round, while teams that suffer three losses are eliminated.

It's all a bit complicated, but organizers explained in a blog post that this format was "focused on creating more best-of match play and more opportunities for cross-regional competition." We may get all that in the end, but it only took one day for the competition to suffer some absolute nightmare RNG and accidentally put together five straight local competitions.

Once the field split out to 1-0 and 0-1 pools and the matchups were assigned, we ended up with five local matchups. North American LCS competitors NRG and Team Liquid faced off, EMEA's LEC saw MAD Lions and Team BDS go against each other, and China's LPL had JD Gaming and Bilibili Gaming going at it. South Korea's LCK got it even worse with two matchups: T1 versus Gen G and KT Rolster versus Dplus KIA.

With five out of the eight matchups for the day turning regional teams against each other, fans and pundits pretty quickly started making the Captain America: Civil War memes.

The Swiss stage continues through October 28 while the World Championship itself is set to conclude on November 19, so we'll see how much more cross-regional competition we get in the weeks to come.

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