2024 LPL season | |
League: | LPL |
Sport: | League of Legends |
No Of Teams: | 17 |
Season: | Spring Split |
Season Champ Name: | Champions |
Season Champs: | Bilibili Gaming |
Second Place: | Top Esports |
Mvp: | Zhuo "knight" Ding (Bilibili Gaming) |
Season2: | Summer Split |
Season Champ2 Name: | Champions |
Seasonslistnames: | LPL |
Prevseason Link: | 2023 LPL season |
Prevseason Year: | 2023 |
Nextseason Link: | 2025 LPL season |
Nextseason Year: | 2025 |
The 2024 LPL season is the 12th and ongoing season of the League of Legends Pro League (LPL), a Chinese professional esports league for the video game League of Legends. Similar to its previous yearly splits, the 2024 LPL season will be divided into two splits: Spring and Summer. The Spring Split began on 22 January and will end on 20 April 2024 for the Grand Finals. Meanwhile, the Summer Split will begin in the latter part of 2024 following the conclusion of the Mid-Season Invitational (MSI) 2024.
Bilibili Gaming was crowned the 2024 Spring Champions after defeating Top Esports 3–1 in the Grand Finals rematch of the Upper Bracket Finals. This was Bilibili Gaming's first organizational title under the name Bilibili Gaming in the LPL.[1] The team previously defeated Top Esports in the Upper Bracket Finals 3-2[2] and Top Esports defeating defending MSI champions JD Gaming 3–1 in the Lower Bracket Finals.[3] Bilibili Gaming is set to qualify for MSI 2024's Group Stage alongside the champions of the LCS, LCK and LEC, while Top Esports will be pooled with the runner-up teams to qualify for the play-in tournament as per the new MSI rules.
The Spring Split will have seventeen (17) competing teams during the Regular Season. Each team will participate in the single Round-robin tournament where all matches will be played in best-of-threes. Similarly to its previous seasons, the top ten (10) teams will advance to the playoff bracket with the Top 2 seeded teams advancing to the four-team Double-elimination tournament bracket while the remaining eight (8) teams will be competing in a single-elimination king-of-the hill tournament with only the top two teams from these competitions advancing to complete the four-team double elimination bracket.[4] The champion for Spring 2024 will qualify for the 2024 Mid-Season Invitational's group stage while the runner-up will qualify for the 2024 Mid-Season Invitational's play-in stage.[5]
The Summer split's format is split into three stages. The first stage will consist of a double round-robin group stage where all seventeen (17) teams are split into three groups of 4 and a group of 5. This first stage will implement the "Fearless Draft", a drafting format seen in China's LDL developmental league where Champions from previous games in the best-of-three series are banned from the remaining games. The top two teams in each group and the third place team in the five-team group qualify for the "ascend" group in the second stage, while the rest qualify for the "nirvana" group. The second stage will see the teams in each of the groups face each other in single round-robin regular draft competition in best-of-threes. The top two seeded teams in the ascend group advance to the four-team double elimination tournament bracket as usual, while the remaining ascend group teams and the top four nirvana group teams advance to the single-elimination, king-of-the hill tournament. The bottom two ascend group teams and the top four nirvana group teams will have to contest an additional match.[6] As per usual, the champion for Summer 2024 will qualify for the 2024 World Championship as China's number one seed.
Spring 2024 is the second-consecutive season where the Top seed only lost one game during the entirety of the regular season. Moreover, Bilibili Gaming is the first organization thus far to go back-to-back 15-1 records in two different splits. BLG went 15–1 in the Summer Split and finished Spring 2024 with another 15–1 record.[7] [8]
Defending Mid-Season Invitational champions JD Gaming was eliminated during the Lower Bracket Finals over Top Esports and will not be able to defend their title in London.[9] However, two of their former players, 369 and knight, will defend their title when MSI comes to Chengdu. Furthermore, Bilibili Gaming will return to MSI 2024 as one of the four group-stage qualifying teams. Top Esports' defeat means their qualification to MSI 2024 will be through the Play-In stage where they are group alongside the 2023 League of Legends World Champions T1.[10]