After an initial postponement from May to July due to the COVID-19 epidemic, Riot Games officials have confirmed that the League of Legends Mid Season Invitational 2020 will not take place this year.
"The Global League of Legends Esports team has been working hard over the past few months to react to these changes, support our regional leagues as they have successfully pivoted to online competition, and try to preserve our next big international competition, Mid-Season Invitational. One outcome of this hard work was the decision to delay MSI from May to July with the hope that the crisis would be waning, travel restrictions would come down, and we could deliver an exceptional MSI," said John Needham, Global Head of Esports, in a statement.
"Based on the modeling of our external risk advisors, however, it appears highly unlikely that either the global spread/impact of COVID-19 or the restrictive travel and public gathering policies responding to the crisis will abate significantly by the time of MSI’s current planned dates (July 3-19). With this model plus input from health authorities, local governments, regional leagues and teams, travel experts, and other stakeholders, we have made the difficult decision to not hold MSI in 2020. We believe this decision was necessary to ensure the health and safety of the players, teams, crew, partners, media, and fans."
Impact on the World Championship
Riot also spoke about the impact this decision would have on the 2020 World Championship in a further statement.
"Both the LPL (China) and LEC (Europe) will qualify four teams for the World Championship, as they are currently ranked first and second based on their performance in international competitions over the past two years.
Additionally, we’ll be allocating the VCS (Vietnam) a second seed to the event, as of the leagues who receive a single seed for the World Championship, they have had the strongest performance in international competition. The VCS has received this additional seed for the past two years due to their performances at previous Mid-Season Invitationals."
Riot Games announced changes to the distribution of seeds for Worlds according to teams' results. The LPL and LEC being the best performing regions for the last two years means they will each earn four seeds this season.
Seeding distribution for the 2020 World Championship will be as follows:
- LPL & LEC: 4 teams each
- LCK & LCS: 3 teams each
- PCS & VCS: 2 teams each
- CBLOL, TCL, LJL, LLA, OPL, LCL: 1 team each
More information on the World 2020 Championship and the impact of the MSI cancelation will follow as we get closer to the event.
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