How To Make Worlds More Sucessful

So its no secret that Legends of Runterra only received 15,000 views on its worlds tournament on twitch.

By Riot standards this is an exceptionally low viewer count.

And it has a lot to do with the way Legends plays as a spectator game as of right now.

It prioritizes efficiency, go wide strategies, infinite value engines, all of which aren't particularly interesting to watch.

Meanwhile the "cool" cards ie mono shurima, champions with interesting level up mechanics/quests are generally relegated to meme territory.

This is the one area where hearthstone and and magic when at its best is infinitely more interesting to watch.

Whether it be old school quest warrior, or a magic player going off with some insane combo these things were actually viable competitively.

It wasn't just play a thing that tutors for another thing, do it again, play poppy swing. Or play a thing, tutor for darkness do it again, play Senna.

It really is just watching paint dry in most respects.

So the big advice for the devs make the cool stuff playable, and competitive, this will up the presentation value of your tournaments and make them more exciting to watch. 

Or to put it in simpler terms. The things that make competitive sports interesting, are the same things that make e-sports interesting.

Big swings, underdogs, out of left field plays, nobody wants to watch competitive autism unless we're literally talking about chess.

No... this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you think the meta isn't as fun or how the games play out wasn't up to your tastes.

First of all, I don't think it's a "failure" as you say it is. They had compiled the biggest amount of viewers for Legends of Runeterra since beta. You also say it's 15k but it's definitely more than that as I wasn't even watching the main stream but rather the watch parties of it. Not to mention they had split the streams into multiple different languages, and into different platforms as well. It was more around 40k at its peak.

Also, Legends of Runeterra just doesn't have as much marketing power compared to its predecessor League of Legends. League of Legends had music videos, they had animations, fuck they got a stadium to rent so players can play in them and not just online. Their budget is just simply not the same. 200k USD prize pool while a lot by itself is nothing compared to LoL Worlds which had at least 10x the amount. I would say that 40k peak viewers for the tournament itself is already pretty good. They also don't have as much players compared to LoL which is much more well known by the public, so the total amount of viewers would have been different.

Finally, the meta in tournaments and what you experience in ladder is vastly different. The powerhouse decks may still exist but it's not like no one made 0 changes to them. No, the players tried to predict what the others are bringing and they brought curated decks to the tournament to maximize their odds of winning. That's why tournament decks are really strange sometimes. They run 1x copy of X to counter popular Y deck or bring decks with similar strategies while banning out the decks that counter them. Alan brought an Ezreal Shellfolk deck that literally got 1 game because everyone banned it every time. Szychu brought out of meta control decks like Feel The Rush and Heimer/Zoe. They picked those decks not because "well they're fun to play" but because they thought they can win with them. No matter what the meta is, most of the players will bring the decks they're comfortable with, not a complete meme deck. Not only that but players would often ban decks they're not familiar with, so even if a player brings something super spicy, it's unlikely that it will not see play.

Also those "big swings" "underdogs" "out of left field plays"? All of them happened. If you didn't pay attention to them that's fine, but don't discredit the players from playing their best.

You can't compare  Runeterra numbers to League, MOBA's are way more popular than card games and are always going to bring bigger numbers. It's like expecting a drama to have the same box office numbers of summer blockbuster just because they are produced by the same company.

Stat wise the event peaked at a 44k during the finals with an average of 23k viewers, so not only is the game growing in popularity but it's already surpassed both Magic and Gwent in term of views with only Hearthstone being more popular.

https://escharts.com/tournaments/lor/legends-runeterra-world-championship-2021

The tournament featured lot's of deck diversity and most matches were pretty close. Like Fenrir said they was lot's of underdog stories going on Yamato Darkness control deck went undefeated in the tournament even beating it's worst match up in Akshan/Sivir. Szychu managed to secure 3 rd place even thought he wasn't playing a single meta deck, the guy was playing a Heimerdinger control deck for God's sake, if that wasn't out of the left field I don't know what is. 

This thread doesn't seem biased.

That’s good