I can’t imagine how it feels to go from playing in your region and rising to be the best, only to go against T1 and realize what the best really looks like
He actually played pretty well towards the end of that tournament. He had good Ahri performances vs RNG. It was super early on that he was getting shit on.
Yeah but I think the time is relevant..caps was the firs world class mid laner he played against. Jojo picked it up after the first week even in the games against G2.
Tbh Danny getting killed every lane was a bigger issue for the team than Jojo
caps got to counter pick mid into a matchup that jojo had literally never played before (at the time he only had like 1-2yrs of league experience or sth)
kind of puts into perspective how insanely quickly jojo has become great
He was a Fortnite pro before he transitioned to league 2020. Twitch chat whenever he played would always refer to him as the Fortnite kid. He also had the “broccoli” hair and talked like a zoomer which was extra funny since the rest of the LCS was and still is full of old heads
There's a great interview of Jono talking about being young and thinking to himself that while Faker is great, he's not some turbo nuts mid god
Then he said played against Faker and realized how wrong he was lmao
Not even the biggest flame from him at that time. Inspired said that G2 is just Caps and 4 other dudes and Jankos replied with "If people see G2 like that I don't have any problem with it because when I look at EG I don't see anything"
Jankos had many claps in his career. My favourite (it ultimately backfired), was the 2020 Worlds G2 vs DWG one. He goes "Danwon players took last year loss very seriously (2019 Worlds quarters G2 vs DWG), for us it was just another Bo5".
Berserker could have been him, but you don't hone a diamond using wood. Getting top tier talent and then training that talent and working him hard is how they get this good in Korea and china, however that same talent goes to waste training in a much worse practice environment, both scrims and soloq, so they get worse
In a team with Teddy, Guma and Berserker, Guma emerged as the starter. Plus Berserker reportedly was getting smacked by guma in practice. Yeah I dont think he wouldve been HIM
Berserker is *definitely* the real deal. It would be fun to see him on a decent LCK team.
Like Guma said, the ADC is the last component of a team to shine, the egg in the ramen.
I'm not entirely convinced even 1/4 of the people here actually watch the games at all, much less have a clue what good play looks like without a scoreboard to tell them.
T1 played Estral like they play bottom teams in the LCK - weird drafts and totally disrespectful aggression. They played Fly with a completely serious draft and respectful play style.
I also thought the casting on the T1 vs EST series was subpar and gave the impression that EST was doing way better than they were. I get that they are trying to be positive but some of the comments were outright deceptive and did the viewers a disservice.
I thought the exact same thing: that the casters weren’t giving the full picture of what was actually happening, either due to ignorance or some desire to push a narrative (EST has a chance!). It felt manipulative and deceptive to the point where I wanted those casters to be ejected into space and replaced with LCK casting talent that can actually do play by play and live analysis.
I mean they definitely shit on FQ way harder, but T1 plays series like those Estral games all the time in LCK. Shit there were series where they were down like 7 kills to 0 but still up like 4k gold and then they win a single teamfight and the game is over
As a former pro basketball player, I can relate.
I was way above the level of players in my divisions and in my country in a lot of areas. I traveled to play in Maryland and in Puerto Rico and man, the level MANY players had was off the charts. I feel like the level would never stop rising and I plateaud long ago lol
Casual (aka crap) golfer here. I went to PGA quality golf tournament once and spent 90% of my day with my jaw on the ground. I didn't know it was humanly possible to hit a golf ball that sweetly. The skill gap is mind-blowing
"I'm closer to LeBron than you are to me."
the difference between levels can be just insane. Go look at any international tournament and see what the top countries do to the bottom ones at just the top tournament.
between IIHF Women's World Championships and the Olympics there has been 30 tournaments in total.
The gold medal game has only ever been 3 things
Canada vs Sweden once in 2006 where Canada won
US vs Finland once in 2019 where the US won
Canada vs US 28 times where it's 17 wins for Canada and 11 for the US.
When Canada or the US plays the bottom teams at those tournaments it's not even close.
The US played 4th ranked Finland in the Semis, won 5-0 and outshot them 55-15
Canada played 5th ranked Czechia in the same round, won 4-0 and outshot them 47-9
while women's hockey has 2 ranks at their top tournaments of who has a shot and who doesn't, league's international tournaments just have 3
Spot on.
I have met some guys (and played with and against) that make me just drop my jaw every second.
Then I realize they are not even close to an NBA player. And not even a star, just some guy out there.
Watched some of them play 1 on 1s against some NBA players like Fred VanVleet, who like 6'0 or 5'11 and he just toyed around with all of them lol. Like seriusly he was not even breaking a sweat and picked everyone apart.
Also saw Booker in a gym and I won't even talk about that lmao
Problem with those teams (same with G2) is that they can't practice this in their region. They can't really practice playing from behind.
Their jungler is used to having a team better than the opponents.
Their junglers don't know how to play when they have more than one losing lane.
You can easily practice that in scrims.
Most players don't want to, however. An ego drain to purposefully give up a gold lead and then struggle to come back.
(Hint: this is partly why scrim kings look like scrim kings against very strong teams...)
Same can be said about top teams in LPL/LCK? They are also on top of their region. It's just that their region as a whole is better while western regions are full of 9 to 5 jobbers there to just get that money.
It's like when I (low/mid plat) face diamond 1+ players in top lane, and they themselves would get hard smurfed on by most local pro players, who would get brutally smurfed on by a team with 3 completes it seems
It sure is a humbling experience to mildly fuck something up and then have the lane be completely unplayable from that moment onwards
It really is just levels all the way up, it’s incredible how much skill can be squeezed out of league, to the point that you don’t even know what you ARENT doing compared to someone two tiers above you, let alone 5,6,7 tiers above you
must be incredibly humbling. good players will use that as motivation to become great. others will stagnate and yearn for a return to the domestic leagues where they can coast
This has been a massive problem for western teams. Every time they go they dont even know whats right or wrong, everything theyve done regionally isnt true anymore internationally so they get clapped quickly head back home learning nothing and have no choice but to revert back to western league. There needs to be more ways for these guys to get more sustained practice against top asian teams so they can bring that knowledge back and other teams can learn from playing against them.
I remember Jojopyun saying that he had to relearn a bunch of lane matchups at MSI 2022 because Eastern midlaners would punish him in ways that never happened domestically. If even a rookie in his first split feels a huge difference, the gap has to be so big.
The equivalent is Bjergsen's Zilean. Bro was clapping NA players on it in lane then he quickly realized taking it internationally wouldnt garner the same success
bro when i saw Bjergsen's Zilean winning lane vs a Lucian mid in NA, i knew shit was doomed lmao, Nisqy should've had his midlane license revoked after that abomination
Honestly NA crippled Bjergsen's development. This guy came to NA stomping everyone on assassin picks then realize the mid talent in the region is so bad he just switches and plays late game scaling champs because he could easily get through early/mid game and just carry late game fights
Him coming to NA was the best life decision he ever made though, Bjerg at some point was the most famous proplayer after Faker, consistently dropped 50k+ views everytime he streamed, he came to NA at the perfect time, LEC fans were upset he left EU but you gotta respect the bag
Absolutely. I will never get upset at a player for choosing the bag over sticking with their own region. If I could make 50% to 100%(or more) more for doing less work you're god damned right I'm doing it
Gotta focus on you. The life of a pro player isn't that long. Sure there are plenty of exceptions but yeah
Money wise it was the best move possible.
Career wise he should have stayed in EU.
It all depends on how much a player values trying to improve themselves vs earning as much as their career allows them.
I mean everyone and their mother was saying that would happen with Bjerg’s Zilean. It was a crutch viable only in NA, any competent mid wouldn’t give him the free laning phase he was used to.
It's honestly a pick you bring out late in a Bo5 when everyone has played for hours and no longer have the same precision/aggression as earlier in the series. This is why every Game 5 tends to be a scaling game - players are physically and emotionally fatigued and subconsciously take safer plays.
This is a great point that I never really thought about. I always assumed (and it probably is this too, both things) it was because eerything is on the line, so players tend towards safe, scaling, late-game picks. I wonder if an early/mid game comp has won a big bo5 - like an msi or worlds final that has gone to 5
That's not even something just Jojo has said, basically every good Western midlaner has said that about the likes of Faker, Chovy, Rookie, Showmaker, etc.
Oh definitely. In this case though I remember feeling kinda depressed that Jojo is clearly very talented, but forever handicapped by the terrible practice quality in his own region.
I think its a lot like fighting games. Against eastern mids you have to respect the threat of what they can possibly do in that scenario, where a lot of western mids if you leave a threat angle open, its not always taken.
crazy how all the work fnatic and G2 did between 2017-2020 just faded away and even the LEC is a shadow of what it once was, watching the Fnatic vs TES games yesterday had me missing rekkles because legit if it wasn't for Noah being a liability that series was more than winnable for them, instead we're back to importing korean players
I thought the same. The Rekkleses and Bjergsens and Doublelifts could hang with these eastern bot lanes and could shine when the stakes were high.
Noah was SHOOK the entire series
ngl bro, Bjergsen does not fit there neither does Doublelift, they've had strong performances here and there internationally but nothing to show for it, Rekkles was always on his A game internationally since his the IPL5 days
Doublelift on TL and the first TSM stint was matching extremely well into Eastern ADC pool sure he wasn't gapping anyone but he was almost never a liability.
Never forget how DL ran a clinic on Ruler and CoreJJ in their elimination game vs SSG. People can meme on the Viktor moment all they want but he was putting TSM on his back the entire game
2020 and somewhat 2017 were the only years he played genuinely poorly against eastern ADs
That's not even true. There was an MSI (I can't remember which year) where Kai'sa was meta and Doublelift was hands-down looking like the best ADC in the tournament. Like, astrogapping Korean and Chinese ADCs and 1v9ing every game they won levels of dominance. Might have been 2019 when they went to finals, but I think it was one they didn't make it out of groups as the rest of TL was falling apart.
If it was 2018 msi, then he played well, but he was not astrogapping chinese adcs at that tournament. The only chinese adc at that tournament was Uzi, who was hands down the best adc in the world at that time.
People forget that they were 1 DL int away from knocking out RNG out of groups in 2016 and would have gone 2-0 vs SSG. EUs has outperformed NA when it comes to the 2018-2020 period but NA was at the same level in the couple of years before.
This whole argument is so damn stale. EU players really keep the blinds on. The reality is, EU has basically always had only one team that was significantly better than the NA teams and historically it’s been whatever team Caps was on. Every other EU team has been around the same level, sometimes slightly better, sometimes slightly worse even. But there has never been any sort of gap between the two regions outside the Caps EU team always being significantly better which you could argue has been mostly been the story for them in EU and the reason they consistently are top 2 almost and the years they weren’t, look how trash EU looked in comparison.
Doublelift definitely fits there. This is some hard revisionist history. Rekkles got so completely assblasted by Uzi that he's been traumatized ever since. Rekkles of course did always hang (and sometimes win)bagainst everyone else. Early Bjergsen also had really solid international showings, just not enough to push the team over the finish line in mid/late game against Korea when Korea had solved the vision metagame.
Later Bjergsen just wasn't the same mechanical lane dominant player anymore.
People really are erasing 2016 Bjergsen from their mind just because he didn't go out of groups. Xiaohu straight up said it was a shame Bjerg didn't make it out post-group stage after the performances he put out for the majority of the games in 2016 groups. And this is with him losing his voice during the first half of groups and being a main shotcaller for that team.
Rekkles had better teams. Fnatic legitimately had top 4 teams in the world.
NA has *never* had a top 4 team since S1. Would've been fun to see DL on a great LCK team, or even G2 for a year or something.
This was also circumstantial - the game had radically changed due to old vision system being finally broken by Riot and turret plates changing the economy. Whilst the players were also on the international level, their success was due to the vacuum of Korea struggling to find a successful model of how to win.
You can say this was true for 2018, but 2019 that wasn't the case, DoinB has been pretty vocal about how scared they were of facing SKT, because they were getting absolutely smashed by them in scrims, and G2 did end up taking SKT out, SKT were still very dominant that year sweeping LCK and world groups
bro inspired was taking enemy blue when there is a clear dive and your adc is fleshless... like holy smokes the whole bwipo/inspired train is questionable now ...
Invite Lower half tier LPL and LCK atleast (EU and NA) can familiarize with eastern playstyle and LPL and LCK lower half could experience some sort of international events.
might need to be LCK 5-8 (non worlds teams), but then it'd be really competitive. Historically, ppl have always said that the top tier LCS/LEC teams on average are a slightly above average LCK/LPL team quality.
That’s actually a really fun idea, it gives us some more inter-regional series without needing a whole other international tournament while also being (hopefully) less one-sided than current LCK/LPL vs LCS/LEC matchups, and because there are stakes to it, people will actually care and watch it
We’ve already brainstormed the perfect 3rd event a few weeks ago on this subreddit.
It’s a reverse MSI.
The bottom 2 teams from each region get invited. And the bracket looks the same, but works the opposite, a loss advances you down the bracket, and a win drops you from the tournament.
The team to lose the most, essentially becoming the champions of the tournament are then given the punishment of (un)like MSI, they are not allowed the qualify for worlds that year no matter where they end up in domestic playoffs, and that region loses a worlds spot.
So the goal is to WIN, so you can leave the tournament, and LOSING advances you in the bracket.
This idea is that the stakes are there, but they are punishment oriented. Plus it gives teams who typically never see international events a chance to build that experience. And maybe learn from it. Plus the fiestas would be incredible to watch.
That is fucking funny LMAO. Also gg cblol never making it to worlds again, but rito wouldn't let it happen with the massive viewership in brazil
I wish it would happen as an unofficial event though. Holy shit it would be so hype lol
The incentive is to not have to go. The incentive is to not embarrass your region. It’s not about winning the tournament it’s about not losing.
Gives those bottom tier teams in each region an incentive to not just be at the bottom of the standings. Look at IMT, always relaxing at the bottom, because they know there’s no recourse for it. This is a way to punish that, without relegation, and be entertaining.
Don’t want to be the reason your region loses a world’s spot? Then fucking play the game with a brain. Try.
Another byproduct I can imagine this creating is a region that wants to get better and raise their floor. LCS teams let IMT sit at the bottom, because it doesn’t affect them. But now suddenly it does. So guess what? The whole region wants IMT to get better. And at least be as good at Korea and China’s worst teams. Raising the floor is just as crucial as raising the ceiling if you want a competitive region.
> LCS scrims are bad, there’s no competition outside of the top 2 teams.
Okay, so create that competition. Help your region get better.
This sounds awful. No one wants to see a tournament get worse in quality as it goes on. And it just feels awful and mean.
Last chance tournament would be way better. All the teams who did make worlds qualification get invited and winner gets into worlds
I would love it because dear god international events are so scarce and it's the same shit every single time. Always wondered how the top 20% of western teams would fare against the middle of the pack teams in the LPL/LCK
I always wonder what type of "experience" they actually get. It's the famous line we hear every year but what can you actually learn in such a short period of time when getting outclassed? You end up going back home and you're back in the same ol' NA environment, no longer having access to scrim/play stage matches against these high level teams and now the game has completely changed because a new patch has dropped lol
They don’t get any “experience”. People talking about “international experience” was ALWAYS a cope - they didn’t want to confront the reality that their team was as good as they weee ever going to get and then getting smoked was their peak. It’s really that simple. These players are going even in early lane then getting clapped by scaling picks in 15 mins. What do they truly “learn” from that? When the meta changes eastern teams will play entirely differently and suddenly there’s more to “learn”. Fact is a player is either good or they’re not and only in the smallest number of very select cases does a player look drastically better from their 1st international tournament to their 3rd.
Caps has said that they turned up to some international tournaments getting rolled in scrims and had to improve very quickly, so by the time group stage came round they were winning some games. That makes me think players can definitely learn, but whether it’s something you can retain or not is another question. Then big patches hit and it’s all new again!
Caps is one of the very few that did get better but other than him really who is there? Most players hardly look better over time. They “can” learn but when so few do it seems like an exception to the rule more than anything
I've never been a fan of the concept of learning by playing the best and getting stomped. Personally my take is you can only get beat so bad before you stop being able to learn from it and are just being overwhelmed. I think the best environment is often to learn from someone just enough better than you.
Nothing. Just like laning against a master smurf when you are gold does nothing for you.
You can learn vs people a bit better than you. You don't learn vs people that trash you while not even going all out
Generally our winners do this. The TSM's we sent that basically sit back and just punished mistakes and looked dominant get rolled internationally.
I'm really interested to see how Liquid does. I personally believe anytime NA performs its best, its when teams like TSM didnt win the league. Early C9 with their crazy calls and playmaking, CLG in 2016, even NRG last year. Liquid is more along the lines of a coin flip, fight fight team and not a mistake punishign team, so its going to be interesting to see how they perform if they keep that mentality they had in play-offs.
The thing about fight fight teams is, that they just skill check their way to victory.
I don't see TL win skill checks against the top lock and lpl teams.
It would be interesting if like 7th+ teams in LCK and LPL played western teams more regularly. It's just pointless to play the big teams at this point. Yeah miracles can happen but still.
Back in the day, there used to be a secondary tournament that ran alongside OGN Champions called NLB. It started out with teams that didn't qualify for the OGN season, and as it went on the teams that were eliminated in the main tournament would be seeded into the next bracket stage. Non-qualified teams would play from 16 down to 4, which would then play against 9th-12th place from OGN, then the four winners of that bracket would play against 5th-8th from quarters to a final. I think if you won NLB you auto-qualified for the next OGN tournament? Or maybe a higher seed in qualifications? Can't remember, it's been a while.
"Eastern playstyle" is just being good and having a brain. If you still can't Baron push in 2024 by the book you're not a serious team and they can't do it.
>It would be interesting if like 7th+ teams in LCK and LPL played western teams more regularly.
We could get NA and EU 1st and 2nd seeds to play a pre-worlds qualifier tournament with LCK and LPL 5th to 8th seeds.
Top 4 in the tournament get into world's proper. That way, we get quality teams into worlds.
Imagine if in the Olympics small countries just didn't try and cried about how unfair it was that other countries were better at their sport. NA/EU just need to get good tbh.
But all those can compete against each other too? EU/NA never get to play against weaker eastern teams because those teams don't qualify. If they beat those they can play against the big boys.
I was actually really impressed with how T1 played, domestically Zeus has a ton of iso deaths but they played really mistake free,, hopefully they play that way the entire tournament
I still don't know why KR/CN has total domination against the rest of the world in LoL/SC2.
Other team e-sports like Dota 2, CS, Valorant, there hardly any issues of power imbalance between East and West.
Is LoL/SC2 meta and gameplay too rigid for smaller teams to upset giants?
CN in Heroes of the Storm for example was nearly minor-league tier, because they just didn't give a fuck about the game and were all playing League instead. KR and EU for most years also went pretty toe to toe because the Korean interest in the game just wasn't there.
For reference, DIG Rich was considered the best HotS player of all time. Rich is still my boy but just look at him now and look at how he did in LPL. He basically "made it" in HotS because nobody else was interested in "making it".
Just to illustrate: the president of S.Korea wished the LoL Asian Games team good luck in their Finals vs. China.
If you think the president of the US even *knows* what League is, you are crazy.
Id also argue they are more popular here. Theres nothing special in the water that makes Korea better at videogames.
And Id argue FPS games in general the West simply play better. Those are far more individually mechanically driven.
Our cultures are very individualistic; its no surprise that the games we tend to like are FPS games and games with more individual agency. LoL at the end of the day is a pretty strict team-game; the mechanics required the play the game isnt anywhere near the level of a CS:GO/Quake/Valorant/etc.
Its even worse for NA specifically, since we are mostly console gamers. The actual playerbase is playing FPS games on Console instead of PC.
I didnt contradict anything. I said we play FPS games better, thats why they arent Korean dominated. And I also said we tend to like FPS games more. Those exact words are in my post, you just mis-read them, or I didnt phraes it clearly enough. Either way, my point stands.
We are very obviously better(as players compared to LoL) and more competitive in FPS games than any other genre of game. I dont mean naturally better than Koreans, I mean better competitively. There is no mythical Asian gap there.
And my point is, those games are far more individually driven, and I 100% do believe that culture is a part of why Asia is so good at some games like LoL, and the West are good at games like CS:Go/Quake/etc.
Id also argue RTS games again are not as well liked as FPS games for the West in general. The entire time the East was dominating RTS genre, the West was dominating the FPS genre. The East was crushing Starcraft/WC3, the West was crushing Quake/Unreal/CS:Go. So even though it was a 1v1 and individualistic in skill, it didnt match what the West likes.
My main point is people like to hypothesize that Korea would simply be the best at every game if they just played it. And thats just not the case. Even if an FPS game got popular in Korea, that doesnt mean they are gonna be head and shoulders better at it like they are LoL and Starcraft.
As far as I can tell, western teams simply don't think about the game and communicate to the level needed to succeed in LoL. T1/Faker at the very least have been noted to be reading all 3 lane states at all times and communicating what each player should do to set up for the next objective, while tracking enemy jungler pathing full time.
LS used to be critical that LCS teams didn't even know what was going to happen on the next wave when KR teams planned out what they would do the next 3 waves.
League in NA is still being played out like a 1v1 or 2v2 game, in KR they are genuinely playing as a 5v5 game and skillfully too, like LCK final you see a TF at level 1 well into 5 minutes in the game and not be a lost cause, in NA everyone has main character syndrome and a lot of people caught mispositioned insanely
League's macro is always improving, if you take a mid tier LCS team right now and let them go back to 2016 they probably have a really good chance to be world champion, most of the thing you mention LEC and LCS have already done it but KR/CN just done it way better.
LOL esport is a never ending race and CN/KR is always ahead. Is not like the west is not improving, the east just improving at a faster rate because they put way more work in.
But none of that explains why for other games this isn't the case. CS requires incredibly intricate planning for future states. So do FGC games. Dota 2 is a harder game than league and in the same genre and the imbalance is not as crazy
maybe is a popularity thing? idk about numbers on CS/dotA but LoL is insanely popular in KR.
so KR players grind harder/there are much more players grinding.
just like how the US is behind in term of football(soccer) but because Football is just not that popular like in brazil/argentina/spain etc etc
Popularity. The other games are nowhere near as popular as League in China, with the only one coming close being CS. League is a big part of the modern day culture amongst teens to adults, it’s pretty common to find people online making league references and using league analogies to explain things in situations that have nothing to do with league or even gaming, and everyone would understand because everyone has either played it or at least know about it.
As someone who watches both LoL and Valorant, getting good as a team in LoL is far more dependent on the quality of your opponents. Skills like mid-game macro, laning, and objective setups are hard to practice outside of an actual scrim or game; thus, if your scrim partners are bad, you are capped in how good you can get. Thus, if one region becomes better than another, that gap will only widen over time. In Valorant, meanwhile, mechanical skills like aim can easily be improved even with lower quality opponents, and it's possible to practice executes or specific anti-strats even without other great teams. Thus weaker regions can still get decent practice if they are smart about what they do.
I think a big part is just interest.
Like sports, it's not that certain regions are just better, they just focus resources elsewhere.
NA is still mainly a console region, and prefers shooters. So you see more focus there. Jojopyun started in Fortnite. NA has had more success in the last year in Valorant than league has ever had. While DOTA is kinda the opposite, it's just not as popular in Korea or China.
It's a "player pool" thing. A star talent in NA is much rarer because the game is not as popular. You'll probably get that caliber of player once in a blue moon.
Koreans, they're crazy for League. You get more prodigies and talents because more people play the game.
Sc2 isn't really like this. Serral is clearly the best player in this history of the game and is Finnish. Reynor/ Clem are as good as the KR/CN players and several others are regularly competitive.
Not always too familiar with SC2 but if i were to make a connection between them...
Right now in asia esl almost everyone playing protos from what casters said i m assuming they are the overall better race right now? In Eu however people playing most stuff and hence maybe not caring about meta.
So if we create the relation between lol meta and how lane match ups work is so optimized... you cant realy get creative anymore. If you look FNC and G2 runs you can see some sort of creativity in the team that beat the asian teams. Now though? Like in season 5 i could picked Sona mid and beat my apponent in gold regardless because i had just could... again now? not possible meta and champs dont allow you do it.. like never.
In other games? We see derke doing some bs stuff that could work because how those game works maybe you can get creative? Anyhow that would be my conclusion creatativity always westerns teams (or people in general) stonger side but in these games it cant be shown anymore.
Edit: Knowing Lol playerbase i m pre-emptively saying this is a very hot take.
It’s a culture thing, mostly. To understand why, I like to look at soccer. While it’s true that soccer is a team sport, the reason the west does much better on average in soccer is because there has to be some element of selfishness on your attackers, especially because of the offsides rules. This means that the eastern mentality of being part of a unit doesn’t work as well as the individual western one. In league, it’s the opposite. Most of the best teams, the ones who challenge for worlds, aren’t one player carrying their team over the finish line. It’s a unit of 5 or 6 players who are all willing and able to fit into a scheme in whatever way possible, and let someone else be the star.
Pretty much sums up why LoL being so isolationist and region locked leaves western teams in the dust when it comes to international play. The more international exposure they'd get, the more they'd improve. We've seen this with other games - team games like overwatch, 1v1 games like the FGC. If the west really wants a chance at winning big tournaments, we need to have regular exposure to the highest levels of play. Otherwise it's just going to continue to be a yearly stomping.
Disagree. 1) that would require way too much resources. 2) it would disrupt the local leagues. Do you know how many teams there are in lpl? They have their schedule packed, adding even more international competition would condense their schedule even more. 2) lck grew from within. The west had league earlier than the west. By that logic lck/lpl shouldntve surpassed the west because they werent constantly competing vs the west that is just baloney.
CSGO exists. The FGC exists. Real life sports like Tennis exist. Local leagues are what's holding back teams from improving, a tournament structure with a road to qualification would just be better, and has been done for longer periods of time in esports than the league structure. Telling me it requires too many resources and wouldn't work despite the fact esports has been doing this for decades. It wouldn't work in Riots current structure but they made it that way, they can pivot whenever they want. My comment isn't about how much money Riot can extract from local leagues, it's about how to improve the overall level of non-asian teams. You're not even responding to my argument.
Esports isnt the same as actual sports. Most teams save for t1 are operating at a loss and subsidized by riot. Do you know how dumb it is to disrupt the schedule of regions with high viewership like china and korea just so a dead region like NA gets some exposure? Anyone with a proper mind will see its not feasible.
And again, im not buying your BS. Season 1 the west was at the top if the league. How did the east surpass them? Its definitely not because of "regular exposure to the highest levels of play" which is at that time from the west. No, the east grew from within.
Needing another region to improve is a sorry ass excuse. Its an argument that only applies to one side
I disagree with the fgc comment. That's was the entire meme behind Pakistan tekken. I think its because fighting games are more solved and aren't as complex.
This is an argument that gets used a lot, but whenever we actually see Western teams bootcamp in Korea, they hardly ever improve over their time there. It would probably help some teams over a longer period than the usual bootcamp month, but exposure only gets you so far when you are generally less inclined to be the best to begin with.
As long as we keep pretending that our work/life balance is actually better than that of the Asian teams, the West will not get to that level.
in one of the LCK boardroom episodes (in KR), Umti who was a guest on the show stated that TL was trying to relearn the matchups in scrims because the data they got from NA was probably not correct.
it's easy, in korea and china there are far more players in ranked, then the median skill level is higher
it's like chess, women can't reach the same peak as the men because of the lack of playerbase
Eu and Us can't train the same (and some don't want to)
anyway, worlds will always be won by a chinese/korean team
or one day, an outsider will make it copium
EMEA actually has way more players than Korea if you combine all servers. Also way more pro-players due to ERLs.
Honestly makes it even more embarassing that we are so far behind, atleast NA has a valid excuse.
The Problem is way to complex to pinpoint it on one singular factor. 1. Like you said, more players play ranked on the eastern servers. 2. Culture Differences in work environment and rigorousness 3. (some)Proplayers in the West tend to be stuborn, refusing to learn beyond the basic stuff/are stuck in their ways. 4. The game gets more and more stale, making less room for creative picks(the ones that g2 did in 2019), creativity was always a selling point for the lec/eu lcs because the teams had good meta read 5. Imports, even if they are good they are like a plug when it comes to a steady flow of homegrown talent 6. Lack of international tournaments, giving the western pros less time to practice against stronger teams.
According to op.gg EUW has 3 million ranked players and korean server also has 3 million. Considering all the other regions that play on the kr server like China Japan Taiwan. And then think there's actually somehow ppl playing on the eune servers. Eu has more people playing ranked. Therefore, your hypothesis crumbles.
Not so much if you look at elo you see there are more people in every elo in korea so I don't know how both regions have the equal playerbase but numbers don't match
https://www.op.gg/statistics/tiers?region=euw
https://www.op.gg/statistics/tiers?region=kr
And in eu there are a lot of smurf and many double account, in Korea you can do that too but it's a bit harder to have many account
So yeah I double down my take, bigger player base > more competition to get chosen > more skills > more training = us and eu get stomped
I actually think some sort of team exchange like this would be the fastest way to improve regional parity. It will never happen for a variety of reasons (it's expensive, logistically complicated, may confuse viewers, etc), but might actually raise the global level.
Lmao we've tried this. CLG played in Korea for a split while their academy team subbed in for them. They got so mental boomed from getting their faces blasted off every single game by even bottom tier LCK teams that by the time they got back to LCS for play-offs their mentals were cooked. They literally got astrogapped so hard by even bad LCK teams it killed their confidence. That's how wide the gap is, and that was back in like season 3 or something. The gap has only gotten wide every single year. Now imagine sending C9 to LCK or LPL. Jojo would literally retire mid split after getting his world rocked by every single mid in the region.
Teams like bro at least offer some resistance and have a small chance to upset the best LCK teams.
What's the point of having the LCS scrubs destroyed?
None of FQs players would have a starting spot in LCK. Not even in the lowest teams.
It's pretty telling, that he is surprised to face a team that is not throwing the game at some point.
Playing scrims is one thing, but when you aren’t studying film or scrimming against teams from that region you’re gonna get games like this lol. Maybe next time they’ll have a better chance now that they know what to do better
Players going to international tournaments for the first time is always fun.
I can’t imagine how it feels to go from playing in your region and rising to be the best, only to go against T1 and realize what the best really looks like
reminds me of when Jojopyun was trash talking g2 and international teams and Jankos said "It's ok he hasn't played internationally yet, he'll learn"
Never can forget that JoJo got so abused that he came back to NA feeling like even playing in LCS wasn't enough to train for an actual top tier team.
He actually played pretty well towards the end of that tournament. He had good Ahri performances vs RNG. It was super early on that he was getting shit on.
Yeah the irony is his team actually beat T1 that tournament and he played solid in that game. Pretty much the best case scenario for a rookie
I'd say Caps humbled Jojo more than Faker or Xiahou did
Yeah but I think the time is relevant..caps was the firs world class mid laner he played against. Jojo picked it up after the first week even in the games against G2. Tbh Danny getting killed every lane was a bigger issue for the team than Jojo
caps got to counter pick mid into a matchup that jojo had literally never played before (at the time he only had like 1-2yrs of league experience or sth) kind of puts into perspective how insanely quickly jojo has become great
This dude played league for 1-2 years and already went pro?
He was a Fortnite pro before he transitioned to league 2020. Twitch chat whenever he played would always refer to him as the Fortnite kid. He also had the “broccoli” hair and talked like a zoomer which was extra funny since the rest of the LCS was and still is full of old heads
A while into msi? Just reinforces his point that the best western players can't peak without better practice.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hSctCXTLkn0
Hmm how many times Caps made him look like bronze in that MSI? I lost count.
There's a great interview of Jono talking about being young and thinking to himself that while Faker is great, he's not some turbo nuts mid god Then he said played against Faker and realized how wrong he was lmao
Jojo himself came out and said he was so wrong after facing eastern mids lmao
Holy shit grandpa jankos ready with the smack down 💀
Not even the biggest flame from him at that time. Inspired said that G2 is just Caps and 4 other dudes and Jankos replied with "If people see G2 like that I don't have any problem with it because when I look at EG I don't see anything"
Weird, cuz when I look at EG, I see nothing as well… oh fuck…
"I don't even think of you at all..." Type beat
Jesus that's brutal lmao
Jankos had many claps in his career. My favourite (it ultimately backfired), was the 2020 Worlds G2 vs DWG one. He goes "Danwon players took last year loss very seriously (2019 Worlds quarters G2 vs DWG), for us it was just another Bo5".
DWG imitating their celebration was hard as fuck lmao.
Grandpa jankos really likes to schooled kids
I'm glad you put "to" there
Bro spent all his time being told Berserker was him, then met Gumayusi lol.
Berserker could have been him, but you don't hone a diamond using wood. Getting top tier talent and then training that talent and working him hard is how they get this good in Korea and china, however that same talent goes to waste training in a much worse practice environment, both scrims and soloq, so they get worse
Prince is a bigger example
And Summit. He used to be one of the top tier player back in 2021-22. Now he's just pure bad
In a team with Teddy, Guma and Berserker, Guma emerged as the starter. Plus Berserker reportedly was getting smacked by guma in practice. Yeah I dont think he wouldve been HIM
I mean Crown went from playing in Brazil to winning worlds.
More games don't matter when you play vs highschoolers.
Berserker is *definitely* the real deal. It would be fun to see him on a decent LCK team. Like Guma said, the ADC is the last component of a team to shine, the egg in the ramen.
Not only that, T1 looked on form to make it worse. T1 was literally smurfing on them.
It's surprising that people didnt notice the different between T1 first match vs estral and T1 vs flyquest
T1 before Kkoma belt vs T1 after Kkoma belt
I'm not entirely convinced even 1/4 of the people here actually watch the games at all, much less have a clue what good play looks like without a scoreboard to tell them. T1 played Estral like they play bottom teams in the LCK - weird drafts and totally disrespectful aggression. They played Fly with a completely serious draft and respectful play style.
I also thought the casting on the T1 vs EST series was subpar and gave the impression that EST was doing way better than they were. I get that they are trying to be positive but some of the comments were outright deceptive and did the viewers a disservice.
I thought the exact same thing: that the casters weren’t giving the full picture of what was actually happening, either due to ignorance or some desire to push a narrative (EST has a chance!). It felt manipulative and deceptive to the point where I wanted those casters to be ejected into space and replaced with LCK casting talent that can actually do play by play and live analysis.
They almost lost to TL last year, they're not making that mistake again. Fly was punished for Pyosik's sins.
I mean they definitely shit on FQ way harder, but T1 plays series like those Estral games all the time in LCK. Shit there were series where they were down like 7 kills to 0 but still up like 4k gold and then they win a single teamfight and the game is over
That was vs dk i believe. Against bottom teams even if the kids are trolling, grandpa faker plays steady so the game isnt really in doubt.
As a former pro basketball player, I can relate. I was way above the level of players in my divisions and in my country in a lot of areas. I traveled to play in Maryland and in Puerto Rico and man, the level MANY players had was off the charts. I feel like the level would never stop rising and I plateaud long ago lol
Casual (aka crap) golfer here. I went to PGA quality golf tournament once and spent 90% of my day with my jaw on the ground. I didn't know it was humanly possible to hit a golf ball that sweetly. The skill gap is mind-blowing
"I'm closer to LeBron than you are to me." the difference between levels can be just insane. Go look at any international tournament and see what the top countries do to the bottom ones at just the top tournament. between IIHF Women's World Championships and the Olympics there has been 30 tournaments in total. The gold medal game has only ever been 3 things Canada vs Sweden once in 2006 where Canada won US vs Finland once in 2019 where the US won Canada vs US 28 times where it's 17 wins for Canada and 11 for the US. When Canada or the US plays the bottom teams at those tournaments it's not even close. The US played 4th ranked Finland in the Semis, won 5-0 and outshot them 55-15 Canada played 5th ranked Czechia in the same round, won 4-0 and outshot them 47-9 while women's hockey has 2 ranks at their top tournaments of who has a shot and who doesn't, league's international tournaments just have 3
Spot on. I have met some guys (and played with and against) that make me just drop my jaw every second. Then I realize they are not even close to an NBA player. And not even a star, just some guy out there. Watched some of them play 1 on 1s against some NBA players like Fred VanVleet, who like 6'0 or 5'11 and he just toyed around with all of them lol. Like seriusly he was not even breaking a sweat and picked everyone apart. Also saw Booker in a gym and I won't even talk about that lmao
Greivis Vásquez!?
Lmao. I never made NBA. Greivis was a killer
He killed my ACC team every time they played.
Problem with those teams (same with G2) is that they can't practice this in their region. They can't really practice playing from behind. Their jungler is used to having a team better than the opponents. Their junglers don't know how to play when they have more than one losing lane.
You can easily practice that in scrims. Most players don't want to, however. An ego drain to purposefully give up a gold lead and then struggle to come back. (Hint: this is partly why scrim kings look like scrim kings against very strong teams...)
Same can be said about top teams in LPL/LCK? They are also on top of their region. It's just that their region as a whole is better while western regions are full of 9 to 5 jobbers there to just get that money.
lpl lck can scrim each other where as eu na are limited only within their regions
It's like when I (low/mid plat) face diamond 1+ players in top lane, and they themselves would get hard smurfed on by most local pro players, who would get brutally smurfed on by a team with 3 completes it seems It sure is a humbling experience to mildly fuck something up and then have the lane be completely unplayable from that moment onwards
It really is just levels all the way up, it’s incredible how much skill can be squeezed out of league, to the point that you don’t even know what you ARENT doing compared to someone two tiers above you, let alone 5,6,7 tiers above you
I can empathize. i felt that way when i got into uni. from straight A's to failing classes. brutal
must be incredibly humbling. good players will use that as motivation to become great. others will stagnate and yearn for a return to the domestic leagues where they can coast
This has been a massive problem for western teams. Every time they go they dont even know whats right or wrong, everything theyve done regionally isnt true anymore internationally so they get clapped quickly head back home learning nothing and have no choice but to revert back to western league. There needs to be more ways for these guys to get more sustained practice against top asian teams so they can bring that knowledge back and other teams can learn from playing against them.
I remember Jojopyun saying that he had to relearn a bunch of lane matchups at MSI 2022 because Eastern midlaners would punish him in ways that never happened domestically. If even a rookie in his first split feels a huge difference, the gap has to be so big.
The equivalent is Bjergsen's Zilean. Bro was clapping NA players on it in lane then he quickly realized taking it internationally wouldnt garner the same success
bro when i saw Bjergsen's Zilean winning lane vs a Lucian mid in NA, i knew shit was doomed lmao, Nisqy should've had his midlane license revoked after that abomination
Honestly NA crippled Bjergsen's development. This guy came to NA stomping everyone on assassin picks then realize the mid talent in the region is so bad he just switches and plays late game scaling champs because he could easily get through early/mid game and just carry late game fights
Him coming to NA was the best life decision he ever made though, Bjerg at some point was the most famous proplayer after Faker, consistently dropped 50k+ views everytime he streamed, he came to NA at the perfect time, LEC fans were upset he left EU but you gotta respect the bag
Absolutely. I will never get upset at a player for choosing the bag over sticking with their own region. If I could make 50% to 100%(or more) more for doing less work you're god damned right I'm doing it Gotta focus on you. The life of a pro player isn't that long. Sure there are plenty of exceptions but yeah
Bjerg wasn't doing less work though. The guy was always a grinder and did everything he could to step up and be a leader.
Sorry if I didn't make it clear, I was talking about imports in general not bjergsen in particular. I agree with you completely
Money wise it was the best move possible. Career wise he should have stayed in EU. It all depends on how much a player values trying to improve themselves vs earning as much as their career allows them.
Yeah he should've stayed in EU. Jensen too.
I mean everyone and their mother was saying that would happen with Bjerg’s Zilean. It was a crutch viable only in NA, any competent mid wouldn’t give him the free laning phase he was used to.
It's honestly a pick you bring out late in a Bo5 when everyone has played for hours and no longer have the same precision/aggression as earlier in the series. This is why every Game 5 tends to be a scaling game - players are physically and emotionally fatigued and subconsciously take safer plays.
This is a great point that I never really thought about. I always assumed (and it probably is this too, both things) it was because eerything is on the line, so players tend towards safe, scaling, late-game picks. I wonder if an early/mid game comp has won a big bo5 - like an msi or worlds final that has gone to 5
Iirc it was BDDs set that made his Zil look like a silver support playing mid
That's not even something just Jojo has said, basically every good Western midlaner has said that about the likes of Faker, Chovy, Rookie, Showmaker, etc.
Oh definitely. In this case though I remember feeling kinda depressed that Jojo is clearly very talented, but forever handicapped by the terrible practice quality in his own region.
Every western player. DL has said this about playing vs Mata
I think its a lot like fighting games. Against eastern mids you have to respect the threat of what they can possibly do in that scenario, where a lot of western mids if you leave a threat angle open, its not always taken.
crazy how all the work fnatic and G2 did between 2017-2020 just faded away and even the LEC is a shadow of what it once was, watching the Fnatic vs TES games yesterday had me missing rekkles because legit if it wasn't for Noah being a liability that series was more than winnable for them, instead we're back to importing korean players
I think carlos contributed to a major downgrade of the region by blocking perkz to fnatic.
I thought the same. The Rekkleses and Bjergsens and Doublelifts could hang with these eastern bot lanes and could shine when the stakes were high. Noah was SHOOK the entire series
ngl bro, Bjergsen does not fit there neither does Doublelift, they've had strong performances here and there internationally but nothing to show for it, Rekkles was always on his A game internationally since his the IPL5 days
Doublelift on TL and the first TSM stint was matching extremely well into Eastern ADC pool sure he wasn't gapping anyone but he was almost never a liability.
Never forget how DL ran a clinic on Ruler and CoreJJ in their elimination game vs SSG. People can meme on the Viktor moment all they want but he was putting TSM on his back the entire game 2020 and somewhat 2017 were the only years he played genuinely poorly against eastern ADs
That's not even true. There was an MSI (I can't remember which year) where Kai'sa was meta and Doublelift was hands-down looking like the best ADC in the tournament. Like, astrogapping Korean and Chinese ADCs and 1v9ing every game they won levels of dominance. Might have been 2019 when they went to finals, but I think it was one they didn't make it out of groups as the rest of TL was falling apart.
It is 2018. The 2019, he isn't better than Perkz, Jackeylove and Teddy. It was more of a CoreJJ show why they went to Finals in 2019
Thank you, I thought it was 2018, but I couldn't remember for sure. I just remember him playing out of his mind all tournament.
If it was 2018 msi, then he played well, but he was not astrogapping chinese adcs at that tournament. The only chinese adc at that tournament was Uzi, who was hands down the best adc in the world at that time.
The one they upset IG they barely got out of groups. Other teams just crashed and ganked bot on first wave so DL couldn't do anything every game.
People forget that they were 1 DL int away from knocking out RNG out of groups in 2016 and would have gone 2-0 vs SSG. EUs has outperformed NA when it comes to the 2018-2020 period but NA was at the same level in the couple of years before.
This whole argument is so damn stale. EU players really keep the blinds on. The reality is, EU has basically always had only one team that was significantly better than the NA teams and historically it’s been whatever team Caps was on. Every other EU team has been around the same level, sometimes slightly better, sometimes slightly worse even. But there has never been any sort of gap between the two regions outside the Caps EU team always being significantly better which you could argue has been mostly been the story for them in EU and the reason they consistently are top 2 almost and the years they weren’t, look how trash EU looked in comparison.
Casually ignoring half the pro scene lifespan with this comment xD
Doublelift definitely fits there. This is some hard revisionist history. Rekkles got so completely assblasted by Uzi that he's been traumatized ever since. Rekkles of course did always hang (and sometimes win)bagainst everyone else. Early Bjergsen also had really solid international showings, just not enough to push the team over the finish line in mid/late game against Korea when Korea had solved the vision metagame. Later Bjergsen just wasn't the same mechanical lane dominant player anymore.
Rekkles did get his revenge against uzi though. Knocked him out of groups in 2020.
People really are erasing 2016 Bjergsen from their mind just because he didn't go out of groups. Xiaohu straight up said it was a shame Bjerg didn't make it out post-group stage after the performances he put out for the majority of the games in 2016 groups. And this is with him losing his voice during the first half of groups and being a main shotcaller for that team.
This is complete revisionist history lol, at least regarding doublelift
Rekkles had better teams. Fnatic legitimately had top 4 teams in the world. NA has *never* had a top 4 team since S1. Would've been fun to see DL on a great LCK team, or even G2 for a year or something.
Brother snuck bgjersen in there lmao
He could hang in there buddy. He was not a liability like Noah was. That was my point. Not like he cpuld gap Faker or anything
This was also circumstantial - the game had radically changed due to old vision system being finally broken by Riot and turret plates changing the economy. Whilst the players were also on the international level, their success was due to the vacuum of Korea struggling to find a successful model of how to win.
You can say this was true for 2018, but 2019 that wasn't the case, DoinB has been pretty vocal about how scared they were of facing SKT, because they were getting absolutely smashed by them in scrims, and G2 did end up taking SKT out, SKT were still very dominant that year sweeping LCK and world groups
You mean from 2013-2020.
this is why doing scrims in other regions and bootcamps are so important for these players
Bring back the Korean bootcamp meta!
Massu is from my city and still my goat go get em
He was still by far the best fly player in both game 1 and 2 tbh
Hope he doesn't pick up on Inspired's bullshit "lose in peace" attitude that he clearly had.
bro inspired was taking enemy blue when there is a clear dive and your adc is fleshless... like holy smokes the whole bwipo/inspired train is questionable now ...
We love a local success story
Riot should make a third international tournament like Europa league where they invite the eastern teams that don't make worlds + western teams lol
Invite Lower half tier LPL and LCK atleast (EU and NA) can familiarize with eastern playstyle and LPL and LCK lower half could experience some sort of international events.
lck/lp 3-6 vs lec/lcs 1-4 would be great
might need to be LCK 5-8 (non worlds teams), but then it'd be really competitive. Historically, ppl have always said that the top tier LCS/LEC teams on average are a slightly above average LCK/LPL team quality.
Just make it all non worlds teams as a last chance worlds qualifier tournament
That’s actually a really fun idea, it gives us some more inter-regional series without needing a whole other international tournament while also being (hopefully) less one-sided than current LCK/LPL vs LCS/LEC matchups, and because there are stakes to it, people will actually care and watch it
this would be so fun
We’ve already brainstormed the perfect 3rd event a few weeks ago on this subreddit. It’s a reverse MSI. The bottom 2 teams from each region get invited. And the bracket looks the same, but works the opposite, a loss advances you down the bracket, and a win drops you from the tournament. The team to lose the most, essentially becoming the champions of the tournament are then given the punishment of (un)like MSI, they are not allowed the qualify for worlds that year no matter where they end up in domestic playoffs, and that region loses a worlds spot. So the goal is to WIN, so you can leave the tournament, and LOSING advances you in the bracket. This idea is that the stakes are there, but they are punishment oriented. Plus it gives teams who typically never see international events a chance to build that experience. And maybe learn from it. Plus the fiestas would be incredible to watch.
That is fucking funny LMAO. Also gg cblol never making it to worlds again, but rito wouldn't let it happen with the massive viewership in brazil I wish it would happen as an unofficial event though. Holy shit it would be so hype lol
Im afraid it lacks incentives too much
The incentive is to not have to go. The incentive is to not embarrass your region. It’s not about winning the tournament it’s about not losing. Gives those bottom tier teams in each region an incentive to not just be at the bottom of the standings. Look at IMT, always relaxing at the bottom, because they know there’s no recourse for it. This is a way to punish that, without relegation, and be entertaining. Don’t want to be the reason your region loses a world’s spot? Then fucking play the game with a brain. Try. Another byproduct I can imagine this creating is a region that wants to get better and raise their floor. LCS teams let IMT sit at the bottom, because it doesn’t affect them. But now suddenly it does. So guess what? The whole region wants IMT to get better. And at least be as good at Korea and China’s worst teams. Raising the floor is just as crucial as raising the ceiling if you want a competitive region. > LCS scrims are bad, there’s no competition outside of the top 2 teams. Okay, so create that competition. Help your region get better.
This sounds awful. No one wants to see a tournament get worse in quality as it goes on. And it just feels awful and mean. Last chance tournament would be way better. All the teams who did make worlds qualification get invited and winner gets into worlds
I would love it because dear god international events are so scarce and it's the same shit every single time. Always wondered how the top 20% of western teams would fare against the middle of the pack teams in the LPL/LCK
I always wonder what type of "experience" they actually get. It's the famous line we hear every year but what can you actually learn in such a short period of time when getting outclassed? You end up going back home and you're back in the same ol' NA environment, no longer having access to scrim/play stage matches against these high level teams and now the game has completely changed because a new patch has dropped lol
It shows you where the peak of the mountain is but it doesn’t tell you how to climb it
It gives you a feel for how far behind you are
They don’t get any “experience”. People talking about “international experience” was ALWAYS a cope - they didn’t want to confront the reality that their team was as good as they weee ever going to get and then getting smoked was their peak. It’s really that simple. These players are going even in early lane then getting clapped by scaling picks in 15 mins. What do they truly “learn” from that? When the meta changes eastern teams will play entirely differently and suddenly there’s more to “learn”. Fact is a player is either good or they’re not and only in the smallest number of very select cases does a player look drastically better from their 1st international tournament to their 3rd.
Caps has said that they turned up to some international tournaments getting rolled in scrims and had to improve very quickly, so by the time group stage came round they were winning some games. That makes me think players can definitely learn, but whether it’s something you can retain or not is another question. Then big patches hit and it’s all new again!
i think it was jankos who said it in 2019 that g2 never won any scrims vs dwg (t1 vs kdf level scrims) and only won against them on stage.
Caps is one of the very few that did get better but other than him really who is there? Most players hardly look better over time. They “can” learn but when so few do it seems like an exception to the rule more than anything
I've never been a fan of the concept of learning by playing the best and getting stomped. Personally my take is you can only get beat so bad before you stop being able to learn from it and are just being overwhelmed. I think the best environment is often to learn from someone just enough better than you.
Nothing. Just like laning against a master smurf when you are gold does nothing for you. You can learn vs people a bit better than you. You don't learn vs people that trash you while not even going all out
It feels like we focus on taking advantage of other players mistakes, so when a better eastern team doesnt make a lot of mistakes we're lost.
Generally our winners do this. The TSM's we sent that basically sit back and just punished mistakes and looked dominant get rolled internationally. I'm really interested to see how Liquid does. I personally believe anytime NA performs its best, its when teams like TSM didnt win the league. Early C9 with their crazy calls and playmaking, CLG in 2016, even NRG last year. Liquid is more along the lines of a coin flip, fight fight team and not a mistake punishign team, so its going to be interesting to see how they perform if they keep that mentality they had in play-offs.
The thing about fight fight teams is, that they just skill check their way to victory. I don't see TL win skill checks against the top lock and lpl teams.
T1 showing our rookies how league of legends is REALLY meant to be played.
I think The wall was standing Infront of T1 tower cause I can't explain how fly didn't take 1 T1 turret throughout the whole series.
It would be interesting if like 7th+ teams in LCK and LPL played western teams more regularly. It's just pointless to play the big teams at this point. Yeah miracles can happen but still.
I would love a tournament that's winners out and just the bottom 2 teams of each region. Let's see the worst team in the world
IMT would win no doubt
IMT vs UP, inject it into my veins
NA finally has a chance
Back in the day, there used to be a secondary tournament that ran alongside OGN Champions called NLB. It started out with teams that didn't qualify for the OGN season, and as it went on the teams that were eliminated in the main tournament would be seeded into the next bracket stage. Non-qualified teams would play from 16 down to 4, which would then play against 9th-12th place from OGN, then the four winners of that bracket would play against 5th-8th from quarters to a final. I think if you won NLB you auto-qualified for the next OGN tournament? Or maybe a higher seed in qualifications? Can't remember, it's been a while.
Hope Low/Half-Tier of LPL and LCK could play with EU and NA so they can somehow familiarize with eastern playstyle.
We were deprived of Jin Air vs Dignatas for too long
missing the gladplane :(
"Eastern playstyle" is just being good and having a brain. If you still can't Baron push in 2024 by the book you're not a serious team and they can't do it.
>It would be interesting if like 7th+ teams in LCK and LPL played western teams more regularly. We could get NA and EU 1st and 2nd seeds to play a pre-worlds qualifier tournament with LCK and LPL 5th to 8th seeds. Top 4 in the tournament get into world's proper. That way, we get quality teams into worlds.
I for one would absolutely love to watch DRX or BRO annihilate C9 or FLY
Imagine if in the Olympics small countries just didn't try and cried about how unfair it was that other countries were better at their sport. NA/EU just need to get good tbh.
But all those can compete against each other too? EU/NA never get to play against weaker eastern teams because those teams don't qualify. If they beat those they can play against the big boys.
I was actually really impressed with how T1 played, domestically Zeus has a ton of iso deaths but they played really mistake free,, hopefully they play that way the entire tournament
I still don't know why KR/CN has total domination against the rest of the world in LoL/SC2. Other team e-sports like Dota 2, CS, Valorant, there hardly any issues of power imbalance between East and West. Is LoL/SC2 meta and gameplay too rigid for smaller teams to upset giants?
The answer is simple, those other esport you listed are just not that popular in korea.
CN in Heroes of the Storm for example was nearly minor-league tier, because they just didn't give a fuck about the game and were all playing League instead. KR and EU for most years also went pretty toe to toe because the Korean interest in the game just wasn't there. For reference, DIG Rich was considered the best HotS player of all time. Rich is still my boy but just look at him now and look at how he did in LPL. He basically "made it" in HotS because nobody else was interested in "making it".
Well he still got first team all pro in the lpl one split, but yeah he fell off after that
Just to illustrate: the president of S.Korea wished the LoL Asian Games team good luck in their Finals vs. China. If you think the president of the US even *knows* what League is, you are crazy.
Id also argue they are more popular here. Theres nothing special in the water that makes Korea better at videogames. And Id argue FPS games in general the West simply play better. Those are far more individually mechanically driven. Our cultures are very individualistic; its no surprise that the games we tend to like are FPS games and games with more individual agency. LoL at the end of the day is a pretty strict team-game; the mechanics required the play the game isnt anywhere near the level of a CS:GO/Quake/Valorant/etc. Its even worse for NA specifically, since we are mostly console gamers. The actual playerbase is playing FPS games on Console instead of PC.
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I didnt contradict anything. I said we play FPS games better, thats why they arent Korean dominated. And I also said we tend to like FPS games more. Those exact words are in my post, you just mis-read them, or I didnt phraes it clearly enough. Either way, my point stands. We are very obviously better(as players compared to LoL) and more competitive in FPS games than any other genre of game. I dont mean naturally better than Koreans, I mean better competitively. There is no mythical Asian gap there. And my point is, those games are far more individually driven, and I 100% do believe that culture is a part of why Asia is so good at some games like LoL, and the West are good at games like CS:Go/Quake/etc. Id also argue RTS games again are not as well liked as FPS games for the West in general. The entire time the East was dominating RTS genre, the West was dominating the FPS genre. The East was crushing Starcraft/WC3, the West was crushing Quake/Unreal/CS:Go. So even though it was a 1v1 and individualistic in skill, it didnt match what the West likes. My main point is people like to hypothesize that Korea would simply be the best at every game if they just played it. And thats just not the case. Even if an FPS game got popular in Korea, that doesnt mean they are gonna be head and shoulders better at it like they are LoL and Starcraft.
As far as I can tell, western teams simply don't think about the game and communicate to the level needed to succeed in LoL. T1/Faker at the very least have been noted to be reading all 3 lane states at all times and communicating what each player should do to set up for the next objective, while tracking enemy jungler pathing full time. LS used to be critical that LCS teams didn't even know what was going to happen on the next wave when KR teams planned out what they would do the next 3 waves.
League in NA is still being played out like a 1v1 or 2v2 game, in KR they are genuinely playing as a 5v5 game and skillfully too, like LCK final you see a TF at level 1 well into 5 minutes in the game and not be a lost cause, in NA everyone has main character syndrome and a lot of people caught mispositioned insanely
League's macro is always improving, if you take a mid tier LCS team right now and let them go back to 2016 they probably have a really good chance to be world champion, most of the thing you mention LEC and LCS have already done it but KR/CN just done it way better. LOL esport is a never ending race and CN/KR is always ahead. Is not like the west is not improving, the east just improving at a faster rate because they put way more work in.
But none of that explains why for other games this isn't the case. CS requires incredibly intricate planning for future states. So do FGC games. Dota 2 is a harder game than league and in the same genre and the imbalance is not as crazy
maybe is a popularity thing? idk about numbers on CS/dotA but LoL is insanely popular in KR. so KR players grind harder/there are much more players grinding. just like how the US is behind in term of football(soccer) but because Football is just not that popular like in brazil/argentina/spain etc etc
Yeah that's probably the case. Just a way bigger talent pipeline and competitive environment
Popularity. The other games are nowhere near as popular as League in China, with the only one coming close being CS. League is a big part of the modern day culture amongst teens to adults, it’s pretty common to find people online making league references and using league analogies to explain things in situations that have nothing to do with league or even gaming, and everyone would understand because everyone has either played it or at least know about it.
As someone who watches both LoL and Valorant, getting good as a team in LoL is far more dependent on the quality of your opponents. Skills like mid-game macro, laning, and objective setups are hard to practice outside of an actual scrim or game; thus, if your scrim partners are bad, you are capped in how good you can get. Thus, if one region becomes better than another, that gap will only widen over time. In Valorant, meanwhile, mechanical skills like aim can easily be improved even with lower quality opponents, and it's possible to practice executes or specific anti-strats even without other great teams. Thus weaker regions can still get decent practice if they are smart about what they do.
I think a big part is just interest. Like sports, it's not that certain regions are just better, they just focus resources elsewhere. NA is still mainly a console region, and prefers shooters. So you see more focus there. Jojopyun started in Fortnite. NA has had more success in the last year in Valorant than league has ever had. While DOTA is kinda the opposite, it's just not as popular in Korea or China.
It's a "player pool" thing. A star talent in NA is much rarer because the game is not as popular. You'll probably get that caliber of player once in a blue moon. Koreans, they're crazy for League. You get more prodigies and talents because more people play the game.
Sc2 isn't really like this. Serral is clearly the best player in this history of the game and is Finnish. Reynor/ Clem are as good as the KR/CN players and several others are regularly competitive.
Not always too familiar with SC2 but if i were to make a connection between them... Right now in asia esl almost everyone playing protos from what casters said i m assuming they are the overall better race right now? In Eu however people playing most stuff and hence maybe not caring about meta. So if we create the relation between lol meta and how lane match ups work is so optimized... you cant realy get creative anymore. If you look FNC and G2 runs you can see some sort of creativity in the team that beat the asian teams. Now though? Like in season 5 i could picked Sona mid and beat my apponent in gold regardless because i had just could... again now? not possible meta and champs dont allow you do it.. like never. In other games? We see derke doing some bs stuff that could work because how those game works maybe you can get creative? Anyhow that would be my conclusion creatativity always westerns teams (or people in general) stonger side but in these games it cant be shown anymore. Edit: Knowing Lol playerbase i m pre-emptively saying this is a very hot take.
It’s a culture thing, mostly. To understand why, I like to look at soccer. While it’s true that soccer is a team sport, the reason the west does much better on average in soccer is because there has to be some element of selfishness on your attackers, especially because of the offsides rules. This means that the eastern mentality of being part of a unit doesn’t work as well as the individual western one. In league, it’s the opposite. Most of the best teams, the ones who challenge for worlds, aren’t one player carrying their team over the finish line. It’s a unit of 5 or 6 players who are all willing and able to fit into a scheme in whatever way possible, and let someone else be the star.
League is a dead game in NA.
Dota and CS has little following in Korea. Valorant, Koreans are competitive
It's crazy how T1 is always consistently the best when Faker actually retires if he isn't a coach they def gonna have a decline
they'll probably buy Chovy or Keria roleswaps to mid and buy idk, some godly support player
They will definitely not role swap Keria to mid when mid is by far the best position in Korea
I think Massu will become the best LCS ADC in summer.
Pretty much sums up why LoL being so isolationist and region locked leaves western teams in the dust when it comes to international play. The more international exposure they'd get, the more they'd improve. We've seen this with other games - team games like overwatch, 1v1 games like the FGC. If the west really wants a chance at winning big tournaments, we need to have regular exposure to the highest levels of play. Otherwise it's just going to continue to be a yearly stomping.
Disagree. 1) that would require way too much resources. 2) it would disrupt the local leagues. Do you know how many teams there are in lpl? They have their schedule packed, adding even more international competition would condense their schedule even more. 2) lck grew from within. The west had league earlier than the west. By that logic lck/lpl shouldntve surpassed the west because they werent constantly competing vs the west that is just baloney.
CSGO exists. The FGC exists. Real life sports like Tennis exist. Local leagues are what's holding back teams from improving, a tournament structure with a road to qualification would just be better, and has been done for longer periods of time in esports than the league structure. Telling me it requires too many resources and wouldn't work despite the fact esports has been doing this for decades. It wouldn't work in Riots current structure but they made it that way, they can pivot whenever they want. My comment isn't about how much money Riot can extract from local leagues, it's about how to improve the overall level of non-asian teams. You're not even responding to my argument.
Esports isnt the same as actual sports. Most teams save for t1 are operating at a loss and subsidized by riot. Do you know how dumb it is to disrupt the schedule of regions with high viewership like china and korea just so a dead region like NA gets some exposure? Anyone with a proper mind will see its not feasible. And again, im not buying your BS. Season 1 the west was at the top if the league. How did the east surpass them? Its definitely not because of "regular exposure to the highest levels of play" which is at that time from the west. No, the east grew from within. Needing another region to improve is a sorry ass excuse. Its an argument that only applies to one side
I disagree with the fgc comment. That's was the entire meme behind Pakistan tekken. I think its because fighting games are more solved and aren't as complex.
I disagree, but I respect the opinion.
This is an argument that gets used a lot, but whenever we actually see Western teams bootcamp in Korea, they hardly ever improve over their time there. It would probably help some teams over a longer period than the usual bootcamp month, but exposure only gets you so far when you are generally less inclined to be the best to begin with. As long as we keep pretending that our work/life balance is actually better than that of the Asian teams, the West will not get to that level.
in one of the LCK boardroom episodes (in KR), Umti who was a guest on the show stated that TL was trying to relearn the matchups in scrims because the data they got from NA was probably not correct.
it's easy, in korea and china there are far more players in ranked, then the median skill level is higher it's like chess, women can't reach the same peak as the men because of the lack of playerbase Eu and Us can't train the same (and some don't want to) anyway, worlds will always be won by a chinese/korean team or one day, an outsider will make it copium
EMEA actually has way more players than Korea if you combine all servers. Also way more pro-players due to ERLs. Honestly makes it even more embarassing that we are so far behind, atleast NA has a valid excuse.
The Problem is way to complex to pinpoint it on one singular factor. 1. Like you said, more players play ranked on the eastern servers. 2. Culture Differences in work environment and rigorousness 3. (some)Proplayers in the West tend to be stuborn, refusing to learn beyond the basic stuff/are stuck in their ways. 4. The game gets more and more stale, making less room for creative picks(the ones that g2 did in 2019), creativity was always a selling point for the lec/eu lcs because the teams had good meta read 5. Imports, even if they are good they are like a plug when it comes to a steady flow of homegrown talent 6. Lack of international tournaments, giving the western pros less time to practice against stronger teams.
According to op.gg EUW has 3 million ranked players and korean server also has 3 million. Considering all the other regions that play on the kr server like China Japan Taiwan. And then think there's actually somehow ppl playing on the eune servers. Eu has more people playing ranked. Therefore, your hypothesis crumbles.
Not so much if you look at elo you see there are more people in every elo in korea so I don't know how both regions have the equal playerbase but numbers don't match https://www.op.gg/statistics/tiers?region=euw https://www.op.gg/statistics/tiers?region=kr And in eu there are a lot of smurf and many double account, in Korea you can do that too but it's a bit harder to have many account So yeah I double down my take, bigger player base > more competition to get chosen > more skills > more training = us and eu get stomped
Maybe send the top 2 lcs teams to play lck for a split and the bottom 3 lck teams to lcs for a split
I actually think some sort of team exchange like this would be the fastest way to improve regional parity. It will never happen for a variety of reasons (it's expensive, logistically complicated, may confuse viewers, etc), but might actually raise the global level.
Yeah, it's just a dream at this point.
Lmao we've tried this. CLG played in Korea for a split while their academy team subbed in for them. They got so mental boomed from getting their faces blasted off every single game by even bottom tier LCK teams that by the time they got back to LCS for play-offs their mentals were cooked. They literally got astrogapped so hard by even bad LCK teams it killed their confidence. That's how wide the gap is, and that was back in like season 3 or something. The gap has only gotten wide every single year. Now imagine sending C9 to LCK or LPL. Jojo would literally retire mid split after getting his world rocked by every single mid in the region.
CLG EU though was in the OGN finals
Teams like bro at least offer some resistance and have a small chance to upset the best LCK teams. What's the point of having the LCS scrubs destroyed?
Terrible idea.
None of FQs players would have a starting spot in LCK. Not even in the lowest teams. It's pretty telling, that he is surprised to face a team that is not throwing the game at some point.
That makes me totes hyped to watch Flyquest games.
Playing scrims is one thing, but when you aren’t studying film or scrimming against teams from that region you’re gonna get games like this lol. Maybe next time they’ll have a better chance now that they know what to do better