Competitive League of Legends: Worlds, MSI and fifteen years of dynasties

Regional leagues feeding two global events

The season is played inside regional leagues — Korea, China, Europe and the Middle East, the Americas, and the Pacific — each with its own split structure and playoff format. Domestic titles matter for pride and for seeding, but international results are the currency of reputation.

There are two international events. The Mid-Season Invitational is the shorter, sharper one: fewer teams, played on a fresh patch, and historically the tournament where a region's second-best roster gets its moment. Worlds is the season finale, the tournament with the trophy that decides how a roster is remembered.

For our quiz, Worlds and MSI appearances are the only ones that count. A player who never reached either is not in the pool, however decorated they are domestically — otherwise every round would need regional expertise nobody outside that region has.

The dynasties

• 2011–2014, the open era: European and Chinese rosters trading titles while the game's professional structure was still being invented, with Fnatic winning the first world championship and Taiwanese and Korean teams following.
• 2013–2017, Korean supremacy: SK Telecom T1 turned a mid lane prodigy into the sport's defining figure and won three world titles, while Samsung's organisations built the rosters that eventually beat them.
• 2018–2021, China's rise: Invictus Gaming and FunPlus Phoenix broke the Korean grip, and European teams reached three consecutive finals without quite closing one out.
• 2022–2026, the modern balance: Korean and Chinese superteams dominate the final weekend, roster movement between the two regions became routine, and veterans from the 2015 era are still competing at the top.

Why League careers are long

Franchising changed how League careers work. With guaranteed league slots, organisations can rebuild around a star instead of dissolving, so a player can spend six years at the same team and appear at six consecutive Worlds. That gives the game a class of players whose careers are effectively public knowledge, which is why our easy tier is much larger in League than in VALORANT.

It also creates the opposite problem: a lot of internationally proven players had exactly one Worlds appearance, on a roster that no longer exists. Those are the hard-tier answers, and they are worth the most points in a round.

Reading a line-up

League line-ups are five specialists — top lane, jungle, mid lane, bot lane and support — and, unlike in VALORANT, those positions are stable across a career. We still do not display them in rounds, because a position label is close to giving the answer away for anyone who follows the game: knowing the jungler's name narrows a roster far more than knowing the year.

What we do show is the event and the year, which is usually enough. Worlds rosters are the most documented artefacts in esports, and once you place the year, the region normally follows from the names.

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