The 10-team Pacific Championship series is set to begin on February 11. Teams from Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau will battle it over two splits. At stake is the opportunity to represent their region at the 2022 World Championships.

In addition to the four strong teams – Beyond Gaming, Impunity, J-Team and PSG Talon – the competition will see six new outfits make their debuts. Four of them – Flying Oyster, Deep Cross Gaming, Hurricane Gaming and Meta Falcon – are Taiwan-based, while Frank Esports and SEM9 are from Hong Kong and Malaysia respectively.

The rosters are not fully set as of yet, as teams are still finalizing their deals and making last minute moves.

Expanding PCS partnerships

The significant interest around the competition is well explained by CTBC Bank extending their association this time around too. In what is another sign of increasing popularity of League of Legends, as well as the tournament, the bank started issuing game-branded credit and debit cards, along with cash backs and rewards for gaming, video, anime & comics, ticket booking, and cloud storage.

Carry Live, the company running the competition, is looking at strengthening their base further. “Carry Live is in our second year running PCS, and we have a greater vision this year,” said Jerry Yan, the organisation’s CEO.

“Our ultimate goal is to establish a complete esports environment with Riot, for more teams that love League of Legends to join in, more talents to get into this industry, more businesses and government entities that want to support. We also want to bring the best gaming watching experience to our fans.”

Lack of regional representation at the PCS

As much as this is a Pacific Championship, it has only two teams representing the Pacific region outside of Taiwan. That is quite unique to this season because of the lack of representation from the region. Plenty of teams disbanded or simply gave up on the PCS this season. Hong Kong Attitude disbanded back in November, while BOOM Esports, Liyab Esports, and Machi Esports gave up on the competition entirely.

The current PCS teams are:

• CTBC Flying Oyster (Taipei)
• Deep Cross Gaming (Taipei)
• Frank Esports (Hong Kong)
• Hurricane Gaming (Taipei)
• Impunity Esports (Singapore)
• Mega Bank Beyond Gaming (Taipei)
• Meta Falcon Team (Taipei)
• PSG Talon (PSG) (Hong Kong)
• SEM9 (Malaysia)
• Taipei J Team (Taipei)

Granted it is better to have some competition than none at all, but the lack of interest on both parties to expand and deepend the region is somewhat worrying. By my estimate the entire PCS region can easily hold 16-18 teams with adequate representation from the entire region and still maintain competitive equality and integrity in terms of relative strength. Yet, this season we are faced with a Taiwan heavy lot of teams with only marginal representation from the rest of the region.

The regular season will be in a best-of-one, double round-robin format. This may not be the most holistic league in terms of Pacific representation but considering the uncertainty of Covid-19, we’re at least getting some League of Legends. No reason to complain.