Riot Games sets competitive pathway for LoL: Wild Rift

MANILA, Philippines – Riot Games is aiming to revitalize the League of Legends: Wild Rift (LoL: WR) community by introducing a brand-new competitive pathway in a virtual press conference held on June 18.

The competitive circuit will focus heavily on the return of regional community tournaments with the Wild Rounds currently spanning the Philippines, Brazil, Vietnam, Türkiye, and South Korea.

The Philippine gateway to Smash 2026

The Wild Rounds Pilipinas Open 2026 will have two splits before culminating in the National Championships around September.

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The ongoing Split 1 of the tournament will run until the Playoff qualifiers on July 10-12.

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This will be followed by Split 2 running from August 6 to September 11, which leads to the tournament’s main Playoffs on September 25-27.

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The tournament will also feature two competitive tracks for players to choose from: the Community Track and the Creator Track.

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Community Track provides local grassroots teams a competitive shot at representing the Philippines, with a whopping PHP 1,000,000 prize pool up for grabs.

For the Creator Track, selected content creators will get to draft their respective teams towards the end of the Pilipinas Open.

From there, they will be selecting challenges via the ‘wheel of fate’, and compete in a single round-robin format to determine its playoff teams.

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The top creator teams will also banner the country in SMASH 2026, the game’s crowning event set to be hosted in South Korea in November.

Looking ahead for Wild Rift

WR offers an accessible pathway prioritizing creators and grassroots teams, moving away from traditional, rigid developer-isolated ecosystems.

Lara Antonio, the APAC Regional Community Lead for Wild Rift, said the APAC team closely collaborates with the global team to support creators in the region and involve them in these initiatives.

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“We’re fully committed to creators, and so we got to be a part of that for the global program, like Lara said that everybody is onboarded in,” WR Global Community Alice Labrecque shared.

“And so, that has rewards which are unlocked rewards, access to the Developer Team, access to opportunities like whenever there’s a creator we can send out for a flyout event, and as for ensuring sustainability, there’s me and as well as Blake, and that’s pretty much of our goals in 2026, as well as taking care of our creators, it’s a core part of our community strategy.”

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SMASH 2026 will take place in Seoul, South Korea in November, where the top teams from Wild Rounds Regionals compete in the biggest stage in the Rift. (By Clyde Jan Pascual, INQUIRER.net Intern)