Every Play-In team has one objective at the start of the season: to make it to Worlds. That goes the same for any team from a major region too, but the road to Worlds has always been fraught with difficulties for a minor region.

To be counted as among the play-in teams is to be relegated to a lesser tier, where most have not watched your team play the entire year, and could not care less about your fate. To be a team from a minor region means having to face other teams from minor regions just to qualify for Worlds.

Now that third seeds from major regions are joining the fray, there is finally interest in these smaller teams -- but only insofar as they are able to threaten the fan favourites. Gambit, Fenerbahce -- these are teams with known players, and are favoured to make it out based on that.

Realistically, however? It’ll still be an uphill task. These major region teams have better scrim partners, more fan support, more money, and got to face better competition throughout the year. Gambit’s main rivals were M19, whose claim to fame is that two of their players were in Albus Nox Luna. They are otherwise a very different team and almost certainly lower in skill than 2016’s ANX.

As for Fenerbahce? One of the other TCL teams, Crew eSports, had Naehyun, a Korean with a curious EU following for the wrong reasons, as he was part of the disastrous Origen team which got relegated while only winning two games (games, not series!) the entire split. The same Naehyun was the second best mid laner in the TCL, with Frozen being first. Let that sink in for a moment.

The chances progressively diminish as we go down the list of minor regional teams. Team One? Dire Wolves? Young Generation? Kaos Latin Gamers? Who are they? Who cares?

Even Gigabyte Marines, the Vietnamese guerrilla fighters who made a splash at MSI, have been largely dismissed, since few bothered to follow the team after MSI and based all of their opinions on the team on how they played in May. Their brethren, Young Generation, are a talented but raw squad that doesn’t even have a strategic coach. Unlike the Marines who are likely to have a few tricks up their sleeve, it is more likely that YG will take Worlds as a fruitful learning experience.

The problem worsens when we get ‘analysts’ who have ‘watched these teams play’. They tend to have little to no basis for their predictions or base them off ‘regional strength’ (also known as a lazy and dismissive form of analysis), considering we can’t have had many English-speaking people in the community actually follow these regions over the past year. No head-to-head comparisons. No analysis on how the teams play and if these playstyles can stack up against top teams. Nothing, because it’s not worth the time unless they are legitimately good.

And we don’t know if they are good, because few bothered to watch them. The community seems to have come to a strange consensus based of a few recognisable players, and that is the life of a minor region team with players that no one knows about.

This situation is inevitable. Even the EULCS struggles for viewers, after all. Teams from minor regions aren’t going to be popular, and there is little attachment to these players. Even Gambit struggled for a following until they won the LCL summer split with an all-star crew of CIS favourites. That Gambit had been reformed was even news to some, even though they’d been kicking around in the LCL circuit for over a year.

The LMS has it just as bad as the EULCS. Despite the largely good performances of Flash Wolves over the years, the LMS itself is not watched by many. If anyone even tried, they’d find that the play itself. with few exceptions seems to revolve around very few skirmishes before the 30 minute mark, and then gathering for 5v5 teamfights around objectives. The LMS is not the most exciting spectacle for most fans.

And these are major regions we’re talking about.

People liked the Marines because they had unrelenting aggression from the first minute -- now that that's mostly gone aside from an early dive or two, fans may not be as enthused.

Come Worlds, there is only one way to leave their mark in the minds of viewers -- topple the big teams. Strong individual performances -- and some hamming it up for the cameras -- will leave an indelible mark. Lose, however, and all is forgotten. All that will be remembered is a memory of reaching the world stage and failing. Life in the minor regions can be pretty tough.

It makes sense, of course, to segregate the good regions from the lesser ones via seeding and Play-Ins. Wildcard teams never did well at Worlds, and there had to be an assurance that these teams could at least beat a good team in a Best of 5 series before they could advance. It would be a waste of time if a wildcard team weren’t good enough, yet at the same time there have been disappointing performances from major regions too. Riot’s solution fixes both problems and theoretically makes the groups more competitive, by ensuring better teams qualify.

It also rewards performances of regions more heavily, and punish regions that consistently perform poorly on the international stage. For example, this year, Korean seeds are exempted from the Play-In stage and head straight to the group stage. Yet for these minor regional teams, just being accorded the privilege of getting to say “we attended Worlds” rather than having to play in a so-called International Wildcard Qualifier makes a world of difference. Investments increase, and so does prestige.

Maybe the community doesn’t care, but the players do. Worlds is a spectacle, after all, and a chance for the world to watch an underdog rise. Hopefully in the future, some of these minor regions can make the step up and go major, although it will take a lot of time for perceptions to change. The likes of Brazil and Turkey are close, with competitive teams and large fan support. All they need now are results.

Show that you can compete, and you can play with the big boys more often. Pretty meritocratic, I would say. Maybe the likes of Team One and Gambit have playstyles that can potentially stand up to top teams, and perhaps even take some games off them. Whether they can last in a Best of 5 series is another matter, however.