The LoL All-Star event is one of the highlights of the competitive calendar. It is an event that lets fans vote on which players are going to be taking part. The event might no be the most competitive, but it is definitely a fun side event.
The tournament hasn’t looked the best going into 2021 though. There have been years of diminishing viewership and popularity for the event. After a rough 2020, things are looking even worse for the LoL All-Star 2021 event. In short, it has been cancelled.
LOL ALL-STAR 2021 CANCELLED
Riot has announced this week, that the League of Legends 2021 All-Star has been cancelled. The official reasoning behind the cancellation has been the travel restrictions. Travel restrictions loosened over the course of 2021, which meant a lot more in-person events were taking place again. However, a new variant of the coronavirus has meant more travel restrictions have once again been imposed.
The LoL All-Star event is international. Fans vote for the players who they most want to see represented. This essentially means an awful lot of people coming in from random places for a short running tournament. The All-Star 2021 event is a more casual tournament with unconventional game modes, so it does have a lengthy run time that you’d get with a normal event.
This would have made for a bit of a mess with travel restrictions. The event would have run for three days, with quarantines running far beyond that and making organization very difficult. Because of this, the LoL All-Star 2021 event has been cancelled. Something similar happened last year but the event did still go ahead.
WHY WAS THE ALL-STAR 2021 NOT HELD ONLINE?
The All-Star event is 2021 is cancelled, but last season’s event faced similar problems that it dealt with pretty differently. Riot then moved the event to online only. This was a compromise, but it allowed the event to still be played. That does raise the question of why the LoL All-Star 2021 event wasn’t just moved online like last year.
Riot did address this when they cancelled this year’s event. They said that the previous year’s event didn’t ‘capture the spirit of ASE, which is to bring pros, influencers, and fans together to celebrate the LoL Esports season with cross-regional competition.’ Rather than going online-only, Riot have chosen to just close stuff down.
DIPPING VIEWERS FOR THE ALL-STAR EVENT
The LoL All-Star 2021 event will be skipped entirely this year. However, it might not be the biggest loss for LoL esports. The viewership for the event has been in a downward trend. This got bad in 2019, where viewership dropped to only to a third of 2017. In 2020, the viewership dropped by another 20%. Clearly, viewership for the All-Star event had been reduced to a level nowhere near what it was at in only 2017. This likely played a bit of a role in cancelling things for the 2021 season.
LoL is one of the most consistently popular esports around. However, unique events like the All-Star tournament might not always stay popular. With diminishing viewers and problems scheduling the event, we’ll have to see if it returns in 2022. However, fans don’t have a long wait until main LoL events kick back off in January, even without the All-Star 2021 event taking place.
