Scouting Grounds 2020 to take place entirely online, starts November 9th

Oct 22, 2020

*▲ Photo of NASG 2019 by Parkes Ousley for Inven Global*

The following was provided to Inven Global as a press release.

2020 Honda Scouting Grounds - Format Updates

Back in June we announced the return of Honda Scouting Grounds, North America’s flagship League of Legends amateur competition. There are no changes to the event schedule -- but we wanted to share a couple of format details before the week of competition kicks off Monday, November 9 (with the main event broadcasted Saturday, November 14).

2020 Honda Scouting Grounds will be fully virtual.

We’ve continued to monitor the global health situation since our lolesports post in June. To ensure the health and safety of everyone involved, we wanted to confirm that 2020 Honda Scouting Grounds will be fully virtual.

The format will remain the same, apart from a few extra requirements to ensure competitive integrity in a fully virtual format:

All competitors will play on the same Tournament Realm server
Competitive play will be monitored via webcams provided to all players
All player comms will be facilitated through a Riot-hosted system and monitored by refs

All initial players who qualified for Scouting Grounds through Solo Queue have been notified by Riot. See our June post for more on the process of selecting players for the competition.

We will maintain the same draft format as in 2019.

We received great feedback on the 2019 draft format and the changes we’d made from previous years (see our 2019 post for more detail). So we’ll maintain the same core format for 2020.

The draft will take place shortly after the 1st-place match on Saturday, November 14.

Here’s how it works:

When a team chooses a player, they’re drafting exclusive negotiating rights with the player. The rights will last for 10 days, from November 15-24. Players are not required to sign with teams who have drafted them.
Each LCS team is granted 1 pick. Teams are allowed to trade and sell picks.
The pick order for teams is the reverse order of LCS standings from Summer Split. This allows teams who are potentially the most interested in top new talent to benefit the most from the event. The order will be as follows: