Future of VPL

Who Deserves to be in the VPL?

We have been patiently waiting for announcements about the future of Vainglory Esports. Not only from the teams, but how the format will work out. We finally received the news about the future of the Vainglory Premiere League and how it will play out. Below are a few images from the announcement.

These graphics give a good overview of what 2018 will look like. While the purpose of this article isn’t to break down the new format, I will just quickly review it. Preseason will start in April and last a full five weeks. I am very thrilled to have a long preseason to allow teams to truly scrim at the top level while keeping fans involved. It will be a round robin with teams playing on the weekends. A total of three matches will be played per day. They will be a best of one so the days won’t be to long. This is another great opportunity for the production team to settle in and get the stream polished. You know the Vainglory community loves to roast production off of little mistakes.

The season officially starts in the summer with two, eight week long splits. In the past, we were used to tournament style weekends, where teams played through a bracket. It was point based, but some teams were left with a disadvantage if they were knocked out day one. This new format makes more sense in my opinion with teams playing two full round robins. Each series is a best of two with matches worth one point. This will allow teams their equal chance at gaining points each weekend. Here are some important dates to remember.

The last big piece was that we say goodbye to the Unified Championships and hello to a Season Championships. This is along with the mid and end season playoffs, I believe. All the points will be accumulated throughout the year and will lead to invites to worlds. It will be interesting to see the rest of the info released and clear up any questions off of the original article that you can find here.

In the article, it does say there will be 8 teams in the VPL. We just received the first 5v5 on VISleague, which you can catch up with here if you missed it. We got a good look at a lot of potential teams heading into the VPL. I would imagine teams will be named differently with Child’s Play changing to TSM (Fingers crossed). The big question is, who deserves these eight spots? Tribe Gaming obviously has one of the strongest rosters with the addition of the old Cloud9 team. Child’s Play actually beat them in the championship of VIS after they lost to them earlier in the tournament. We know they are 1/2 interchangeably and deserve spots. If we look at the rest of the old VG8 teams, who deserves to be in the VPL? With teams changing so much during this off season, a team who secured a spot 6 months ago is not the same team today. Two big examples would be the challenger teams.

Vision and Hazard/From Mars were really strong teams at the end of Autumn 2017, BUT are they the same team today? Vision literally lost all their members to TSM. PvPWarrior is the only one that did not go that route, but seems to be playing with some of the Hazard members now called Finesse Gods (possibly). So should these two teams just be allowed into the VPL? Are they truly two of the eight best teams? I’m not sure if they are. Would it be better to see some sort of a play in to get into the VPL? Misfits has a really strong roster and are making a strong case for themselves this offseason. In the VISleague tournament, they actually preformed pretty well. I get a lot of players like to troll them and say they aren’t legit, but they do keep beating Nova. Misfits did not have the best draw in VIS and played Child’s Play first, which knocked them into the losers bracket. It is worth noting that they did not get rolled by Child’s either. They do end up falling to Iraqi’s team of Vainglory veterans and other “retired” players. That is another team to look at heading into the VPL. Could they be a serious contender for the VPL? I know I would rather start the VPL with the best teams possible. I do not want to have the clear better teams sitting in challengers while certain teams get destroyed by “TSM” and Tribe.

Do I know exactly what the answer is for this? No. I do think it is an interesting conversation to have. Maybe have more than 8 teams in the preseason to see who truly comes out with more points. Then those teams actually secure the top 8 spots heading into summer 2018. Another question is where is Rogue? I know they haven’t shown anything during this offseason. Are they at a disadvantage to teams like Misfits who have been scrimming and actually playing together this offseason? Possibly.

This has been a big question for me going into the VPL. How the esports team at SEMC will look at this situation heading into April. Maybe Misfits just fills Cloud9’s spot but who says this new team of long time Vainglory players do not deserve it. I hope the teams that are in the VPL are the ones that take it seriously. No skipping out on nights to play. Limit the amount of trolling during competitive and have players who actually appreciate that they get the chance to be in the top competitive scene of Vainglory.

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