The group stage featured ten teams, which were drawn into two groups of five according to their seeding. Teams from the same region could not be placed in the same group, with the exception of Europe’s third seed, Gambit Gaming. The competition was played in a double round-robin format, with all matches contested as best-of-one. When teams finished with identical win–loss and head-to-head records, a tiebreaker match was held to determine second place. The top two teams from each group advanced to the playoff stage, while the bottom three were eliminated.
The playoff stage consisted of eight teams drawn into a single-elimination bracket. The quarterfinals were played as best-of-three series, while both the semifinals and the final were contested as best-of-five. The auto-qualified team was matched against an opponent from the group stage, and teams that had advanced from the same group were placed on opposite sides of the bracket, ensuring that they could not meet until the final.
The 2013 World Championship final was watched over Twitch by over 32 million people, with a peak of 8.5 million concurrent views, a large increase from the 2012 finals of 8.2 million viewers, with 1.1 millions peak concurrent ones. The numbers shattered the previous records for any eSports event. These numbers were much higher than those of other competitor eSports events for Dota 2 and Starcraft 2, the former of which only reached one million concurrent viewers.[4]
Riot's 8.5 million concurrent viewers is on a par with the "more than 8 million" people that watched Felix Baumgartner's jump from the edge of space. Exact figures for streaming events are difficult to ascertain, but All Things D reports that Baumgartner's jump was "web video's biggest event ever."
League of Legends is by far the biggest entity in the pro-gaming sector, regularly outstripping the stream viewer numbers of its major competitors, including Valve's Dota 2 and Blizzard's StarCraft II. In context, Valve's flagship Dota 2 tournament — The International 3 — took place two months before the League of Legends Season 3 World Championship finals and reached one million concurrent viewers.
References
↑ Although TW/HK/MO All-stars team in All-star Event also represented for Southeast Asia region (both regions are organized by Garena), but Playoff spot was decided for team of TW/HK/MO Regional Winner without competition in GPL because of the championship of Taipei Assassins in last year.
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