For what its worth, I understand the people who genuinely like playing lesser champions and getting rewarded for it and have practiced a lot for the tournament will get stiffed but this was definitely a move for the better. I truly feel for those who made travel plans and testing regimes based on what they had known. Sure it could have been announced a long time ago but its an ever changing landscape where rules have to change on little notice to combat undesireable things (whether it be farming prize wall metals or otherwise)
First of; the best of system or at least the intention behind it is fantastic. It creates diversity and fixes the 2-5 meta deck problem a lot of TCG's have. The problem is the price tag on the secondary market completly warping the dynamics where you are now incentivised to win those as opposed to trying to win the whole tournament, or as its designed, to play a lesser champion for genuine fun.
RQ's are already in an awkward position where the best EV play is often to not even play the main event and do a combination of ODE's, Pre-Reg, Super Saturday, Rebound Sunday and farm prize wall items. The Best-Of System further exacerbates this by making players steer away from winning the main because you can play the best deck come some high spot and walk away with less than someone who got 257th by playing a champ that 7 people were playing.
Furthermore Best-Of, would be fantastic if it was genuinely given to the people that were Best-Of by way of authentically winning genuine games of Riftbound. Unfortunately that is not the case. The system is plagued by syndicates forming 12 way handshakes, calculated match fixing, bribery and other forms of collusion.
Without this change, the RC would likely have been 400 players of which 80 of them are playing Ahri and 50 of them have a secret handshake where they all walk away with a sum of money, another 40 playing Akali etc and like 7 players playing Renata or something and its really just not a good representation of the game and terrible for optics. RQ's continuing to have Best-Of's as is should be fine but RC is a higher level of competition and should be a more accurate representation of the meta with the playerbase attempting to win the event, not a car/house worth of money on the secondary market. RC's should absolutely be about who is the best RB player in the room, not a best-of farm.
Ultimately, the success of the game is that people are entering to play for fun or to win; not ideally for financial gain. For competitive players who want to win, this realistically changes nothing for you. For those wanting money; this is not owed to you and shouldn't be your incentive for playing the game. If that's your incentive to turn up to events; you may want to reconsider your hobbies or why you're playing the game. I get that there isn't a single solution that would appease everyone but something had to be done about it
If anything Riot is a production company primarily and a gaming company secondarily. This is generally why they have lighter infraction penalties, as well as allowing takebacks in many scenarios. They want events to be a spectacle that everyone can enjoy and have something to do and want to go back to. They emphasise player experience and unfortunately the whole Best-Of system brought out the worst in a handful of people which effectively robs other players' tournament experience. Yes they're stuck between a rock and a hard place with the promise they made and fixing a system which is fundamentally broken
To further cascading issues; it creates logistical nightmares with staffing. Generally speaking, in TCG's you have about 1 judge per 50 players for coverage. For Day2 of RQLA, there was 60 judges for just over 400 players. Thats 1 per 7. And half of these judges were solely assigned to float near people in contention of best-of to reduce the opportunity of collusion/matchfixing to occur. That's insanity for staff resource allocation and not what judges should be doing.
It creates a lot of feel bad situations. Consider a player just missing out on top 8 playing the perceived best deck. They walk away with not a lot despite an incredibly good and often topping record. How do they feel compared to someone who say 50th who walked away with a 4-5 digit sum of money with 4 secret handshakes, someone who came 130th who walked away with a 5 digit sum of money then had to pay people half of it and someone who came 330th who barely scraped in playing a deck that 4 other people were playing? Yes I get top 4 with a deck that didn't have Best-Of also sucks, but that person knew that going into the tournament.
For optics; sure I can get by this. I understand a lot of people like to follow the narrative of underdog decks and see variety and not the 7th Kennen mirror of the day. But its the RC, one of the supposed pinnacles of gaming. To me it kind of sounds like watching like the F1 but also there's a minigame where the highest performing person on a pedal bike also gets a $10,000 prize and so does the fastest unicyclist and while the second fastest Mercedes gets nothing.
Overall, the people vocally mad about this are very few of the genuine people wanting to play their pet deck and mostly from people who don't even have their invite to this RC.
TLDR: See title.
