The gap will also probably close somewhat, over the next 20 years, across all esports. Esports is extremely young and unrecognized by normies. Male focus marketing has kept women out of video games from the beginning. Counter-Strike is the only other real tactical FPS, and ain't nobody gonna argue that it wasn't so toxic that women could barely consider playing casually, much less professionally.

And don't discount the insane change in general male/female relations over the last 10 years. Cancel culture was awful, but things overall have gotten way better since GamerGate in 2014 and Weinstein in 2017. It'll take a looong time for those changes to really take effect. The future T1 women are probably like 5 years old right now. Valorant and Riot are generally ahead of the industry. Chess is still extremely male-dominated for no apparent reason.

50/50 split is unlikely (the genders are indeed different), but 25% women in T1 seems possible. Riot is doing good, it'll just take time.

Why do I write on this site, noones gonna read this lol

Fun fact, Ascent has not had meaningful changes (even just boxes) since patch 1.02, June 2020.

ELEVEN IS ALL THEY GET

Just to be clear:

• During the on-season
• In between/during main events
• Riot sponsored tournaments
• Optional/invitational for t1 and t2 teams, likely the bad t1 teams.

But... on LAN? I feel like the budget to pay for lots of in-person tournaments must not be that big. But regional t1/t2 online might be okay. I guess I'm not picturing how Riot sells this, like, "Hey, come watch the bad teams do bad!" If it's optional, I can't see the bad t1 teams wanting to go.

Are all those played on LAN? It's one thing to play 1 pro match a week from your own house, but another from hotel rooms in LA, Berlin or Seoul for weeks straight, fly home, then fly across the world for international. To make it work like pro sports would be if every team had their own esports arena and they play at home every other week, so basically 2 weeks at home, 3 days out somewhere, back home.

i love the internet

While babysauske is being rude, I think what they mean is that rating players is kinda its own entire industry, separate from watching the game. No one who rates players does so by just watching matches, since you don't even see every player's POV. They look at statistics and a bunch of math. The stats page here on VLR is a good entry to that, but the VLR "rating" stat can also be misleading and not everyone approves of it. This video goes nuts into more complex stats and makes it clear why rating players is hard https://youtu.be/FrLtJSpaSLI

Every one of the players you mentioned is good, and honestly probably more fun to watch than other players. But giving them numerical ratings like that seems odd if other people think you're comparing them to calculated ratings. Many of those players are nowhere near the top 10.

All regions have 11 teams this year, it's really hard to build tournaments with 11 teams. Giving 1 team a bye round makes it much more reasonable.