Apex Legends Esports Commissioner John Nelson: “Events like the Championship here this week, highlight the very best of the best, the 40 best professional teams from around the world. But it’s always been important to us to also maintain a really healthy amateur and semi-pro scene. Giving players frequent opportunities to compete. To see if they can rise up to the professional level.”
At the Apex Legends Global Series Championship in Sapporo, I had the chance to talk to John Nelson, the commissioner of Apex Legends Esports. Often credited for inventing the beloved Match Point format, we look back on how the ALGS has evolved over the past 5 years, and what it’s like to balance the competitive roadmap.
So starting off for our interview, I’d like to start with introducing you for the readers who might not be familiar with you or your role as the Commisioner for the ALGS. What exactly does your role entail for Apex Legends Esports?
Yeah. So, I lead the team that has put on this amazing show at the ALGS Championship.
I lead the strategy for the ALGS across a lot of different vectors, including the design of the ecosystem. So it’s a very fulfilling and enjoyable role.
So delving deeper, I want to go back to the early years of the ALGS from 2019–2020. Because the roadmap for what would have been Year 1 for Apex is very different from what we have today in 2024. Back then there were supposed to be Opens, Premiers, and Majors, and the roadmap felt very MLG-inspired with open team passes signup. Then COVID hit which halted the roadmap, and since then the ALGS has changed quite a bit. How’s it been developing and changing the competitive roadmap over these years?
It’s a daily job. It was certainly intense in the early days of COVID because we announced ALGS Year 1, and I can’t remember the exact number, but it was a double-digit amount of LANS. And COVID changed the entire landscape of the world and certainly esports. So we came out on the other side of that with a very different ALGS. We spent years where we were only online. And now we’ve settled into a really nice place where we have these three large ALGS LANs each year.
That’s interesting, I think compared to the first Major, I believe there was also a bit of difference in how the first year’s format was appreciated by different groups, having a large amount of players and teams coming over from different esports scenes. What’s it been like managing these different expectations and viewpoints of esports?
I would say that we’ve always tried to strike a balance. Events like the Championship here this week, highlight the very best of the best, the 40 best professional teams from around the world. But it’s always been important to us to also maintain a really healthy amateur and semi-pro scene. Giving players frequent opportunities to compete. To see if they can rise up to the professional level, whether that’s the Preseason Qualifiers or the Challenger Circuit, or most recently when we had a fairly large gap between the Split 2 Playoffs and the Championship, the insertion of the BLGS. So we’re always wanting to keep that amateur and semi-pro community engaged and fighting to get here.
Also touching on this, how do you streamline the experience from getting people who grind ranked and play the game, to get them to try and enter the competitive scene? Is it perhaps hard to balance the difficulty curve where people might drop into competitive and get discouraged after a first try?
What we’ve found is that players are often encouraged when playing in competitions like the Preseason Qualifiers and Challenger Circuit. We’ve actually increased participation in those competitions year over year for something like three years in a row now. It’s pretty incredible that players continue to come back and that we continue to add new players to that experience. They just really enjoy it. They enjoy the competition. And we’ve got some cool things planned for ALGS Year 5 as well to continue to foster the growth of that competitive community. That’s all I’ll say.
Jumping onto the format changes. Over this year especially, the regions sort of changed. South America lowering down in not having a pro league. The introduction of China as a slot. And in earlier years regions merged to sort of create a larger player pool. What goes into identifying these changes for regions
It’s something that we look at every single year. when we’re planning the next year of the ALGS, how can we best represent the population of Apex Legends? It’s the Apex Legends Global Series, and Apex Legends is very much a global game with participation from everywhere around the world. And beyond that, the ALGS very much also has fans everywhere in the world. And so it’s been important to us to maintain representation at these LANs from all of these places in the world that have millions of players and ALGS fans.
With the current format, you also reward regional performances through the slot distribution Are you satisfied with the balance that’s been struck here in regards to keeping the regional representation and rewarding performance?
Never satisfied. We’re always looking, we’re always trying to reach perfection. So we’re always looking at the balance. I think we’ve been in a good place for ALGS Year 4 where we have that global representation. And there is that acknowledgment of what regions have been performing the best or just very well. And like a lot of things, we’ve looked at those things, and we’ll tweak them a little bit for ALGS Year 5.
On format changes actually, this year we’ve seen the introduction of for example the POI Drafts, introductions of new maps and more. But often from a player perspective, I feel that there’s quite a lot of pushback whenever changes are made. How do you deal with this pushback?
I think part of it is just understanding that there’s going to be pushback and that’s okay. Because players, you know, they want to settle in, to understand all the variables, and then compete. And I think just by nature they perhaps don’t want to see frequent change because it introduces another variable, a new thing to learn and to master, and it upsets the flow and where they’ve sort of perfected their gameplay in the current meta with the current ALGS rules. And so there’s nothing wrong with getting that sort of pushback. It’s expected.
And it’s our responsibility to explain the change and the benefits that come with it. And so when we do that right, like with the POI drafting, that pushback quickly turns into understanding and acceptance of how this improves the ALGS and their experience in it as well.
Quickly touching on another topic that I’ve been curious about. Matchpoint What’s been a wonderful addition to the Battle Royale Genre. I’ve been a big fan of the format myself. But I’ve always wondered, were you ever afraid that you might just have a three-game series where a team sweeps the tournament at your LAN Finals?
Of course. I don’t think I’m alone in that fear. I think everybody who was in Birmingham last year felt it, I’m sure. Thousands of fans who were watching from home felt it as well. OpTic Gaming almost won the Year 3 Championship in four matches. And as that game on Storm Point continued to go on, they continued to be alive in a very good position on the map. And the team count started to go down and down and down. Then all of a sudden it was a 3v3. I think everybody in the crowd was like, oh my God, are we gonna be going out a lot earlier tonight than we thought we were?
But it’s gonna happen. It’s inevitable. The recent change of actually implementing the POI draft and as a result, feeling as though we no longer needed advanced starting points, because now you had your winner’s bracket advantage through the POI draft, has sort of lessened the probability of a very short match point finals, but it’ll happen. It could happen here this weekend.
Finally, more of a closing question for our Liquipedia Contributors who work on our wikis, often the direct impact from players, teams, etc is directly heard. But I actually wanted to ask how their work in the space impacts something like EA and the ALGS
Gosh, the impact is immeasurable. You guys are some of the unsung heroes of esports. The ALGS has recently within Year 4 debuted its own website, a very slick-looking website that’s got a lot of good, stats, and information on it. But for years, it didn’t exist. And the primary place to get that fan information that everyone yearns for was Liquipedia. And I think that’s a common thing across esports.
Especially early on in Apex Legends esports, even before the ALGS, like the contributions that you guys made had an unbelievable impact on growing the fandom of the ALGS. How can you, you know, how can you be a fan to the fullest extent if you can’t dig back into the history of Apex Legends Esports and consume that wealth of information on players and teams and the history of finishing placement in various tournaments and all those things? So folks like myself, we have a tremendous debt of gratitude for Liquipedia.
