Riot Games has announced the structure for the League of Legends Season Four World Championship earlier today, revealing the final will be played in Seoul’s Sangam Stadium, previously the host to the 2002 FIFA World Cup.
The finals tournament will take place in four different cities, Taipei, Singapore, Busan and Seoul. The tournament is scheduled to last five weeks. The group stages will be held in Taipei and Singapore, a round-robin will kick off the four groups.
The two winners of each group will advance to Busan, where they will play best of fives to try and reach the final. The final will be held in the Sangam Stadium, with a capacity of around 66,000 seats, the biggest venue in the history of League of Legends.
Three teams from Korea, China, Europe and North America, along with two teams from Taiwan and South East Asia and two wild cards will make up the championship teams. Korea are the favorites to win the championship, SKT T1K won last year and at an AllStar event in Paris, SKT T1K swept the competition.
SKT T1K are not the favorites in Korea either, in the South Korean OGN tournament, Samsung Galaxy Blue won the league, beating Najin White Shield in a best of five. SKT T1K were knocked out in the early stages of the tournament, but appear to be ramping up to become competitive again.
League of Legends has continued to grow at an exceptional rate since the finals and the eSports scene has grown as well, just last week the EU LCS held their weekly matches in Wembley Arena, with a sold out 12,500 seating capacity.
League of Legends might get the biggest numbers at the moment, but their rival, DoTA2, has the biggest prize pool. Valve opened up the DoTA2 Compendium for fans to fund the prize pool for the winners and this has reached over $8 million so far, four times the amount paid to last year’s League of Legends winners.
Source: League of Legends
