After the VALORANT Champions Tour’s first season of the partnership era, next season is set to be even busier with an additional team in each of the three international leagues and the debut of the official China league.
But even though players and others in the VCT expressed concern about burnout and an overpacked schedule, it seems those concerns won’t be addressed until after this upcoming season. In an interview with Asia Today, the head of VALORANT Esports for the APAC region, Jake “RiotJaker” Sin, spoke about the busier 2024 schedule.
“Next year, the overall schedule will increase,” Sin said via machine translation. “But there will be more competitions, so there won’t be a significant increase in the amount of time between competitions. From 2025 onwards, we will consider planning ahead and distributing rest time appropriately.”
Even if Sin is just referring to VCT Pacific competition and not the entire VCT ecosystem, the notion that league officials didn’t plan for adequate player rest might be alarming to some players. Player burnout was a big talking point at the end of the season last year, affecting several prolific teams that made deep runs like Fnatic and Evil Geniuses, and it looks it might be worse in 2024.
Back in July, former Liquid coach Connor “Sliggy” Blomfield predicted this reality when he spoke about the stacked 2024 VCT schedule, while also predicting that fans would hear about player burnout almost 10 times as much as last year. On today’s Nov. 14 episode of Plat Chat, Sliggy and the other participants reacted to Sin’s with great concern.
“Everything I’ve heard about 2024 is that it’s going to be a brutal schedule for teams involved,” said VCT caster Brennon “Bren” Hook. “It’s 11 teams [per league], there’s more matches…from my perspective, [the schedule] is going to be horrifically packed for next year.”
The 2024 season is also expected to start earlier this year than last year, with each league hosting its own kickoff event that will determine which teams qualify for the Masters Madrid event in March.
