RSAA Summer Preview – Fall Competition, 2022 Dates, Big Changes in 2023

School’s out for summer, but we’re hard at work on the future of College League of Legends.  We have a lot of announcements of what’s to come for the upcoming school year and beyond, so strap in. Most of these projects are still in early phases, but we want to do a better job of giving you all more notice and more information earlier in the year.

If you haven’t already seen it, be sure to check out last week’s announcement about open applications to join the RSAA Board of Advisors.

tl;dr

• A bigger and better open fall LoL competition is coming
• Dates for the 2022 College LoL Season
• We’re making big changes for the 2023 College LoL Season
• Sign up to give us early feedback on the 2023 format, as well as the chance to be selected for small group feedback discussions
• Our 2022-24 operations partner will be announced next month
• Quick update on scholastic VALORANT

2021 Fall Competition

Last fall, we did a test run of a limited-size Fall Invitational in response to community feedback around fall competition. This year, we’re happy to announce a new fall competition for College League of Legends will be held online with no limits on participation or competition size. As with last year, fall will not be connected to the main College Season, but we want to give schools an opportunity to play a bunch of games

• Open to all schools, regardless of past participation, conference alignment, or skill level
• No limit on the number of participating schools
• Free to enter
• Automatic upper- and lower-division split based on rostered player ranks
• Group-based round robins with flexible schedules over two weeks
• Best-of-5 playoffs for top teams in each division
• Competition runs early October-early November

We’re still working on the finer details and will have a more detailed announcement post in the coming months, but mark your calendars for October!

2022 College LoL Season: Important Dates

After another great year, we’re ready to share some preliminary dates for the 2022 College Season. 2022 will keep the same overall structure and format as the 2021 Season, with some quality-of-life improvements to the rules and schedule. Here are the need-to-know dates for the upcoming season:

• Registration: November 1-30, 2021
• Season starts: Week of January 17
• End of conference play: April 10
• College Championship: TBD, mid-May – early-June

Big Changes for 2023 and Beyond

As the college esports ecosystem continues to evolve, our competitions need to keep up with the times. As such, we’re cooking up some big changes to how the College Season works. As part of this process, we want to include voices from across the scholastic esports community to work with us, directly influencing our work process and the final product. Today, we’re sharing some of our key goals for the 2023 changes, as well as putting out an open call to those who want to get a sneak peek of what’s to come and share feedback.

While not an exclusive list, these are the top priorities we’re tackling with the new format:

• Lower matchup disparity. Lopsided matches aren’t fun for anyone. We want to give schools of all levels of skill and investment higher quality matches more often and sooner in the season.
• More reliable scheduling. We want to increase the amount of time schools have to scout their opponents, reschedule around conflicts, and plan streams, watch parties, and other cool events.
• Easier to follow. We want to do our best to make the season easy to quickly understand, even if you aren’t keeping up with regular competition. Some of this is about how we display and share season info, but we want to be sure that the format itself doesn’t make people shake their heads.
• More partner conference support. We want to continue to support the growth of esports within athletic conferences, giving them more flexibility to run bespoke competitions during and outside the season. Additionally, we want a transparent and stable pathway for athletic, nontraditional, and esports conferences to join up with the College Season.

Open Feedback Request

Interested in sharing your feedback about the current College LoL Season and future changes? We’re interested in hearing from everyone – students, faculty, administrators, and third parties – who cares about esports in college. Sign up below to receive a future survey to share your thoughts about College League of Legends. We will be selecting groups of individuals from this list to get a preview of the in-progress 2023 College Season format and the chance to share your feedback directly with the team working on it. Your feedback will directly impact how we shape the College LoL Season in 2023 and beyond.

Interested? Put yourself on the interest list here by clicking this link and filling out the form. The form will remain open for at least a few months, but the sooner you apply, the more likely you are to be selected for in-depth feedback!

Privacy note: your name and email address will be associated with your feedback submissions, but we will not share that information with anyone outside of the team directly working on this project. Any feedback shared beyond the team will be anonymized, and we will be discarding all personal information once we finish gathering feedback.

2022-24 Operations RFP Progress

We are in the final stages of interviewing potential operations partners for the 2022-24 College LoL Seasons. This is similar to the process we conducted in the summer of 2017 for the 2018-21 seasons, and is standard operating procedure. We are expecting to make a decision by the end of the month and will announce the results before registration opens in November.

Scholastic VALORANT Update

In the interest of keeping administrators and students up-to-date, we want to confirm there are no immediate plans to roll out an official scholastic VALORANT season for the 2021-22 academic year. We are actively speaking with and listening to the scholastic community, and are exploring a number of ways to support VALORANT in college in the near future. We intend to have more to share at a later date.

As we’ve written before, scholastic organizers interested in VALORANT are able to operate “Small Tournaments” as outlined in the VALORANT Community Competition Guidelines.

Club Program Registration

Back to school is coming up, and that means club registration for the 2021-2022 school year is open! Riot’s college club program offers support for clubs that play any of Riot’s games. We provide monthly community prizes for tournaments through the Riot Grand Prix, swag for special events, and more. Join us on Discord at https://discord.gg/CollegeLoLOfficers for more information.

What’s Next?

Thanks for sticking with us! There will be future announcements about the upcoming fall competition, the 2022 Season, how things will be changing in 2023, and how to provide us with more feedback. Stay tuned to the RSAA news page for more updates as we get closer to the school year!