Upsets galore in Play-Ins and Swiss killed off any perfect Pick’Ems chances.
Not a single League of Legends player will record a perfect Pick'Ems guess following the end of the Swiss Stage at the 2024 World Championship, with the Berlin-hosted group bracket dishing up enough shocks and upsets to leave the crystal ball predictions in disarray.
Pick'Ems selections need a whole pile of LoL knowledge, ranging from who the best esports stars attending the year-end event are, which champions are strongest heading into the Worlds metagame, and how well attending rosters will matchup. The more players get right in their crystal ball picks, the more (in-game) rewards Riot Games hands out for them at the end of the tournament.
Not everything always goes accordingly to plan, however, with bracket upsets and early eliminations — like 100 Thieves not even escaping Play-Ins last week — throwing everything into chaos and denying fans their perfect selections.
Every Pick'Ems scrubbed out now
That's exactly what's happened through the event's opening two weeks as upsets reigned: With the Pick'Ems page for Worlds 2024 now updated, it's confirmed the super popular LoL guessing game won't have an out-and-out winner through this championship edition.
This means no LoL player will walk away with the full Ultimate Skin bundle Riot Games offers to anyone who can record a series of "perfect picks" through the entire event.
This is a particularly early stage for the Pick'Ems to fall apart, with 2023's edition surviving through to after quarterfinals. A year earlier, the perfect run was still alive heading into the 2022 Grand Finals. The 2021 tournament wrapped up with no perfect guesses after EDward Gaming beat DWG KIA, while in 2020 eight lucky LoL players chose the right selections.
Today, there is still one "perfectly imperfect pick" alive heading into the Knockout Stage, according to the developers, though Riot hasn't shared exactly what their guesses were and what needs to happen for them to fail through finals.
A whole horde of LoL players who participated will still collect prizes for having their guesses be among the 5,000 best, with this year's Worlds variant skin designed for Viego the top prize there. Guesses decent enough to make the top 5% will net fans capsules and event tokens.
Finishing in the top 20% will get you two in-game LoL emotes themed around Teemo and Galio, while top 40% guesses just gets you the Galio emote.
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Disappointed LoL fans want Pick'Ems changes
While the adage about something being better than nothing holds true, most LoL fans have taken a look at this year's Pick'Ems and voiced calls for a rework. The outcry, which boiled to the surface across social media on Monday, is focused around one thing in particular — how poor the prizing is considering one or two upsets can deny a perfect Pick'Ems bracket.
While some fans said they'd be happy to collect the Ultimate Skins package, the majority called for Riot to instead offer something cooler for the perfect selection. "All Ultimate skins as a reward is a such a minor reward for something this billion dollar company would only ever give out to one to three people a year," one fan wrote. Many opined the fact rewards had plunged from a point where the LoL devs were giving out real-life merch and PCs for winners.
Other disgruntled players said they didn't care about perfect or imperfect Pick'Ems, but just wanted "drops [for watching] to actually return to a reasonable level."
Riot has yet to respond to the backlash today after the Pick'Ems pile dropped to zero perfect choices, and esports.gg doesn't expect them to. The organizers would make any changes to the current guessing system before the 2025 World Championship in October next year.
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