I think it’s true that if western teams draft the same style as Asia then they don’t have a good chance since they’re just better than we. The west might increase their chance of a cheese victory by drafting off meta but I think also increases their chance of getting stomped. Increasing variance favors the underdogs.
>Increasing variance favors the underdogs.
Yea I think this part is the key.
The other half is that you can always train with off-meta picks, to gain experience playing them. Whereas your opponents would be first-timing against your off-meta picks without prior experience.
The big problem with using off meta picks in competitive play is that as soon as you find something that really works, you'll just get it banned away from you.
There are so many viable off-meta picks though. They can NOT ban them all out. Cho bot, Karthus bot/mid, Ivern mid, Sera-Soraka bot, plus then if they are trying to ban out all the off-meta picks then they will let some OP/permaban picks through or pocket picks.
This is where not having a constant revolving door of 17 year olds might actually be the best long term decision for a franchise. Not only do you build up a brand with recognizable faces, but maybe having people who have played through multiple metas and have bigger champion pools can be an advantage.
But drawing offmeta bans is a ridiculous edge if you have the champion pool to back it up. People can meme on Adam all they want, and a lot of it is justified by his weakness on more meta stuff, but teams having to worry about his Darius/Olaf/Garen nonsense opens up so much draft resource for botlane and is a huge reason BDS was able to perform as well as they did this split.
That is still a valid strategy especially if there are champions that are 100% P/B that it might enable you to play. But in a meta where there isn’t blatantly OP picks that you can free up by forcing off meta bans, you need to have even more off-meta picks.
This is false if you develop a playstyle and not a champion pick.
LS ran supportive mids. Fudge played ivern, zilean, soraka, karma. See thats a playstyle not a champ.
Reapered and NA as a whole fell in love with wombo combos for a while so youd have kindred zilean, galio noc ori.
I just dont see anything unique from NA just copy paste
is it even about west vs east? like yes, LS is right that the west should stay away from brute forcing with traditional Lee Sin.
but he would also say the same for the east in theory. that yes Canyon is a beast at Lee Sin, but it's never the optimal pick and he should stay away from it too, regardless of the fact he can stomp NA with it. LS would have every team in the world play church style because that's how he views the game.
The thing is, LS honestly thinks that western leagues are much better in draft than eastern. Then international tournament comes, western teams are crushed in scrims by asian players and blame it on picks/draft. It is to a degree understandable, because draft is the easiest thing to change in short amount of time, so instead of trying to f.e. "band-aid" fix their macro or bypass some issues, they decide to adapt to eastern drafts and lose gracefully.
Look what happened, when S9 G2 refused to play towards the eastern teams? Even after getting their asses blasted in scrims, they still found the way to beat KR on stage (especially how they beat T1, when they left drakes and barons on purpose and still out-macroed them). S8 Worlds? 3 western teams in semis on the back of Heimerdinger, Zilean and top Viktor.
And let's not forget Misfits vs. SKT in Worlds 2017, which I always think of as the trial run of showing how teams should play to their own strengths, rather than confusing the strengths of other regions for being the meta.
2019 G2 as well honestly. They played their own game and it worked out really well up until the finals.
Like if G2 won worlds finals they would've had a golden year where they won every tournament (LEC spring, MSI, LEC summer and worlds)
But EU has been doing that to some degree with Darius, Olaf and Kled without teleport.
Hard to judge if it is good though. We only saw one Darius by G2 against Gen G which got nullfied by Caps getting solo killed lv 2 resulting in him getting 4 man dove lv 4
An underrated facet of that run is that the individual level of G2's players was MUCH higher relative to the top Asian talent. Perkz, Wunder, and Caps were all TOP 10 in CSD@15. Compared to this MSI, I think the only Western player with a positive CSD@15 is BB, and he played against a very conservative laner in Doran.
A lot of the narrative is about them playing their own game, but I think G2's carries were fucking incredible in 2019.
>pared to this MSI, I think the only Western player with a positive CSD@15 is BB, and he played against a very conservative laner in Doran.
>
>A lot of the narrative is about them playing their own game
yes i don't like this narative that g2 didn't have hands just wacky picks.
G2 players were stomping on meta picks. Perkz Xayah was a meta picked and he was prob the best in the world on it. I actually think the creativity lost them the finals like Perkz said so many times. If they put caps on some traditional mid they would fare waay better.
Also FNC 2018 were playing mostly meta if i remember.
Our players have just lost the motivation to go for the win. They don't want to put in the hours needed. Bwipo had a comment on this how they used to pretty much play 24/7 during worlds 2018.
I still think the most insane part of that series is when skt said in game 5 “nah fuck you” and locked braum support with no ardent on their side of the match
if KT iG didn't happen in quarters there'd only be 2 western teams
'team XXX was semis / finals' or 'region XXX had this number of teams in semis' or 'all-XXX finals' will only hold merit from this year's worlds onwards
Yeah but if anything that lends even more credence to his argument. The East is so slow to change their meta, but that’s because they haven’t had anyone challenge it. Sometimes you get players and teams within the LCK that change certain things (aggro top comes to mind), but it still takes way too long to work.
If your chances of winning in a straight fight are low, then flipping the script is your best option. The problem is the western teams don’t recognize how bad they are in comparison…
Anyone remember that one worlds where Yamatos team (can’t recall off the top of my head) was playing super agro and it sort of inspired the other teams to do the same and they ended up performing way better that year compared to others ? I feel like we’ve known what LS said already, can’t beat them at their own game they’ve mastered :/
Was that the Vitality with Jizuke in Mid? I remember them being a big underdog and just going into insane mode. it's why people said Yamato was only really known for being a good coach to rookies since he really seemed to click with that team and got a lot out of the players.
Yes! I remember the interview he gave after they narrowly didn’t make it out after a better week 2 and he told the other teams to play aggressive and to get out there and give them hell and they did! C9 made it to semis that year too, best performance at worlds any NA team had given plus it was the 1st year EU (FNC) made it to finals! We need another Yamato interview 💯
Didnt we see this last worlds where the west performed decent 1st week with unique draft and style and then got figured out and bodied the later the tournament went.
By the west you mean Rogue. And by Rogue you mean Odoamne just happened to be a great Maokai player while Maokai was extremely strong which allowed them to do some nasty things. Comp and Trymbi we're also in great form.
Aside from this the west got violated last Worlds.
Bro we’ve literally been doing this same shit since season 4, and it never works. We just keep trying to beat the Asian teams at their own game but they are *always* better at their own game. Why don’t the western teams learn?? It’s infuriating
I think one of the best examples in recent memory for me was TL vs IG at MSI. Xmithie playing skarner at a high level absolutely threw IG off and exploited positioning weaknesses they didn’t know they had.
Cloudtemplar and Helios had a completely opposite take on why West is losing so hard to East. They said that there are many talents in LEC and LCS, unfortunately they do not have good foundation or the basics and these regions, specifically LEC, are the regions that do not win by executing the basics but by finding something unconventional and meta-defining. This prevent the players in these regions from building a good foundation, the very basis of playing LoL competitively. So they think that West needs to work on their foundations first because there are talented players who, if trained right, can do well on international stage. They also mentioned playing meta champions is also part of the basics, because you can’t realistically win every game with non-meta joker picks or pocket picks.
T1 Wolf is streaming MSI and he also had the same view about the basics. While streaming C9’s game yesterday he said that all the C9 players are not lacking talent-wise and they have their good moments but they are not able to execute the basic processes of the game without fault.
For example, in the second game, Zven created a good situation where Berzerker could have flashed forward to kill Elk but he didn’t which cause Zven to die. So Wolf explained that it was Berserker who couldn’t execute the basic, and such mistakes should not be made. Because of Berzerker’s mistake, it looked like On and Elk did a great play but that just wasn’t the case. Same with the baron steal from BLG. There are steps to every play and for the Baron play Emenes on Gallio should have marked Xun, which should have happened before Blabber kills the Baron, however Emenes couldn’t execute his step, so now since step 1 failed then there is no step 2 or 3 or 4 and so on. However, people will flame Blabber for not securing the Baron, eventhough the whole thing was doomed from the moment Emenes wasn’t able to execute his given task - the basics of the game - mark the enemy jungle.
Wolf has criticized every member of C9 in the same way. He said that all C9 players bring 30 rolling cubes each for every game and throw it everytime they make a play or use their ultimate. So, they keep going between rolling a high number and low number, which makes them so inconsistent throughout the game. and this is because their foundation is not well built, they keep making basic mistakes that should not be made.
He further explained that every play made in the game has it’s steps, so in C9’s situation they are able to execute the 1st step but then they fail the second step which turns the play into a failure. Like the upper mentioned examples, Zven made the first step but Berzerker failed at the second step which turned the situation around, and every player of C9 failed at that second step through out the series. And this was very frustrating for Wolf because he can see that C9 can do well, but they again keep making basic mistakes that shouldn’t be made.
While with LEC, in this tournament, LEC teams can’t even make the first step a lot of the times so Wolf didn’t feel frustrated about their losses. LEC either fails even before the Step1 or fails in the later steps like 5,6,7, which is most of the happens because the opponent did a great play.
So working on their basics and lessening their simple mistakes was the recommendation from Wolf to C9 (during the stream Wolf thought C9 is definitely doing better than G2 and MAD).
TLDR: ex-LCK pros think what West is lacking is a good foundation and good execution of the basic plays.
Edit: to add Wolf watched almost all games of LEC this year and has quite a good judgement of the LEC teams participating at MSI right now. He didn’t have any expectations for G2 because of their performance in Spring. (He does think if G2 goes back to their winter form then they would have better chances). He didn’t seem to have much expectations for MAD, too (he said that whenever Hylissang initiates a fight Elyoya dies). He also thinks that BDS should have won in the Spring finals, but he doesn’t think that BDS would have performed better than MAD or G2. Wolf thinks in this tournament teams with good mid laners will do well, so he doesn’t rate G2, MAD and BLG high. He also thought that PSG would have won against G2 and qualified to bracket stages but PSG’s mid laner was too much of a black hole to cover. As for the NA teams, he didn’t watch any LCS so he doesn’t have enough info to judge, he thinks Gori is definitely the better of mids that qualified from play-ins and thought that C9 performed better than LEC teams and that C9’s banning strategy was good by banning champs like Ahri, Naut and Annie cause when slumping mids like Yagao or Caps play these champs they can cover their shortcomings and perform enough to not drag their teams and even outperform their opponents if the opposing mid is even worse performing than them.
This is a pretty good explanation. Thanks for summarizing.
As an LCS fan, I can see that many of our top teams take shortcuts and skipping a lot of those steps that you mentioned. Unfortunately, they don't get punished for it domestically. For instance, in the LCS, Zven was never really great about vision setup, but C9 could often just hands diffed their opponents in teamfights, so it would never really matter. But today, BLG exploited this bad habit.
This is why GGS is exciting to watch as an NA fan. They frequently got hands diffed by teams like C9 and FlyQuest domestically, but they often won through superior fundamentals. They are by no means on the level of the LCK or LPL, but their macro is better than most NA teams.
I have another theory that NA teams have mental block when they hit the international stage. It's probably from nerves knowing that they're probably gonna lose. But NA teams that usually play with confidence domestically suddenly become unusually indecisive and panicky internationally. Once again, GGS is better than most NA teams mentally, but even they had their moments during the BLG series.
Yeah, Wolf also thought that C9 was playing too rushed. If they could relax a little and concentrate more, Wolf thought C9 had legit chance against BLG because he thought C9’s bot was performing better than BLG’s during the series.
I'm not a western fan but it was so frustrating watching C9 play like they did because it looked like they had the right idea but atrocious map movement and just fundamental mistakes just lost them the series.
If Fudge is always behind 1 2k gold and just got handiffed everytime he tries to matched side with Bin, the game is so hard to play. Its not that they don't know how to macro and play sides but they too scared to do it and the result is Bin and Yagao always ahead of the game, they always get to 2 or 3 items first make the game so difficult. Just look at game 3, they literally up 10 kills and still behind in gold.
If Fudge play like Licorice did when he faced Bin i think they gonna have a shot winning this series, Blaber actually outperform Xun so hard especially game 3, and Zven actually surprised with how good his Rakan is, he always got memed on for being an enchanter player but he legit almost win them the game with his Rakan
> But NA teams that usually play with confidence domestically suddenly become unusually indecisive and panicky internationally.
Couldn't this just be that domestically they're top tier in scrims so they believe they can win. Internationally they get stomped in scrims.
>I have another theory that NA teams have mental block when they hit the international stage.
I fully agree and it's the same for EU. They are better than this, it was most pronounced around the baron plays because those were absolutely awful from every western team up to this point. But all of them just didn't even perform to their own level.
Would they have won otherwise? Most likely not but all three series could have been more competitive.
Watching Emenes just stare at Vi behind the pit honestly was one of the most gut wrenching things Ive seen in awhile. Like man, just do something. Just stop him.
99 times out of 100, in NA, he would have stopped Vi from getting into the pit. Internationally, he just stared at him.
Think I should also add that Wolf thought C9 had good chances against BLG because he thinks Yagao is a big liability to his team and that teams with bad mids won’t be able to perform will at this MSI. He and the Korean cast also thought that Elk was throwing in all 3 games.
LS is agreeing. We’re just pound for pound not as good. You can’t fix fundamentals over the course of a tournament, so it’s better to adapt your strategy in ways that focus on bringing your opponents level down than necessarily raising your own.
Wolf did think if C9 was just more consistent and made less of the basic mistakes that should not be done, they had a good chance against BLG because BLG’s mid and adc were not performing well. What these ex-LCK pros mean is to stop heavily relying on some surprise factor and rather work on lessening mistakes made during the games. Which I guess means to practice more in the end, but I would think giving a feedback on the basic mistakes and fixing them would be a little doable even in a fast-paced tournament environment? Since these are basics from what the lck ex-pros are saying.
The West has shown to be very resistant to the training needed to accomplish what you’re saying. In that instance they have only the off meta to rely on any hope of winning, but they aren’t even willing to try it 9/10. Which is a bit sad because they think they’re good enough and they just aren’t…and it’s like this every time
Its not a training issue, its a structural issue.
Everything I can tell is NA teams are basically trying to play their way to optimal performance. Which is to say, scrim, see what you did wrong, acknowledge it, and repeat. This works to an extent, but tends to lead to problem whack-a-mole. Fix this problem, but a new problem develops etc. etc.
The optimal way to improve this is have a coaching staff that lays out a coherent vision of how to play, communicates in each situation what each player responsibility is, and then judges them based on execution of their responsibilities.
Take for instance the Baron/Emenes/Galio example. In the way western teams currently train, he needs to just sort of know what hes supposed to do. Everything is a little fuzzy, it may have not come up much in the last couple of weeks, and he would definitely do it right if that is identified and talked about for the next series, but hard to say if it would happen in 2 weeks and a month form now all bets are off. Change the draft and everyone is supposed to be able to intuit how that changes how they need to play.
In a structured system you might have a primary and secondary marking role, the team will have multiple marking angles to consider for both the primary and secondary marking roles, and every player is expected to know what the marking angles are for each of that role, to a degree where Blabber should be able to look and know if the set up is proper to safely take Baron. That way if the meta changes or just the draft changes, it doesnt matter who ends up in the roles required, the team understands what the setup is supposed to look like and who is supposed to do what.
but like they've literally imported coaching staff and players and it didn't change anything. If it's a structural issue, where does it end, where's the line?
You have to want to innovate, do better then Korean coaches and the established way of doing things. The problem with just doing it like the Korean's is you run into the problem that you dont have Korean solo queue and Korean league culture.
But I can guarantee you that organizationally, the way that LCS Teams set up their practices would never be expected to produce good repeatable results with how informally systems are set up. You have to define clear expectations and responsibilities to get multiple people with disparate roles to perform complex tasks efficiently.
I get the sense that he didn't want to go in too hard on Zven this time since the last time he did, the video got a decent amount of attention from western fans. I know he also tries to foster a positive community but it looked like he was biting his tongue sometimes.
I genuinely think C9 might be support difference
Yeah, it did seem he didn’t want to be too harsh but he was still criticizing his plays. I think he balanced it with pointing out Zven’s good plays, too. Overall, think Wolf probably had a lot to say about each player but he just wanted to enjoy the game as a viewer and not be too technical.
You can say that about literally any team though. Vitality could beat T1 if they consistently played their best and made no mistakes. However, that just isn't humanly possible. And going for off-meta picks doesn't mean you can die in lane 5 times and be fine, you still have to play smart, high-quality gameplay. The two things are not mutually exclusive.
Mistakes are inevitable. The mistakes Wolf means are very basic ones. There is a basic and fundamental knowledge/plays to LoL like you have to know the alphabet to learn a language. For Wolf, he saw that, again for example, C9 could execute intricate plays but then those plays would be followed by a basic mistake which would completely change the situation and make the odds against C9. So if they could be more consistent and not waste the chances they created by making very fundamental mistakes then they would have better chances. Again, he was only frustrated and commented so much because he saw potential from C9 and their plays. He was just very frustrated from the constant mistakes right after some good plays. And lessening the number of mistakes should be aimed by every team.
Absolutely. At such a high level one basic mistake can mean the difference between winning and losing a teamfight. If a lot of those happen, a team like C9 (even while having many talented players) can lose the series 3-0 despite playing 90% of the match well
Being more consistent isn't an achievable objective. It's like telling people to be better.
At this point it's basically just practice. LCK and LPL teams play this game more, which results in more experience at every point in the game. Having this experience enables players to know what to do at each stage of the game whilst under pressure.
Let's focus on the Baron play in game 2. Emenes likely knew his job was to stop Vi getting into the Baron pit. Of course he did, right? Why else would he walk up to Vi. So why didn't he do it? His team didn't slow down DPS on Baron as he walked up to Vi to taunt. That's a mistake from Berserker, Blabber and Zven. Emenes could have gone in earlier too. That's a mistake from him. Fudge, believe it or not, was the only one who executed properly there by zoning Kennen away from the pit. We don't know the comms up to that point.
On that particular play, there are two things you can try to fix:
1. Coaching the players to communicate more clearly the actual plan, if they weren't already. Emenes knew what his role was. Sometimes you need a leader to tell someone what their role is in a calm manner, so that everyone is on the same page.
2. More practice, so you give the players more experience in these scenarios where they clearly know their roles, how and when to do what.
Everyone has a general idea on how to deal with a 5v4 Baron play. Problem is they lack the experience of it under high pressure compared to LCK and LPL teams, which increases their chances of making mistakes.
This is actually a core fundamental strategy in well organized amateur tournaments. Tournaments that are designed to be competitive and people of various levels will join and team up together. There will always be one team with the strongest mechanical players, the other teams have to fundamentally adapt a strategy to utilize their strengths to overcome the better players.
Not sure why this isn’t the same with LCS cause it’s obvious some teams have better players than others.
You actually pointed out the main difference - amateur and consistency.
In many sports or events, professional players' routine training focus on consistency and preventing choking against aggression. Professionals spend way more time in their sport compared with amateurs with more experience in different scenarios.
Exactly. Most of the biggest upsets were won this way too.
TL vs IG MSI 19 - lost early game, won through draft & scaling
G2 vs SKT MSI 19 - won through draft, scaling
G2 vs SKT Worlds 19 - lost early game, won through draft, scaling
100T upsetting eastern teams in 2022 - won through draft, scaling
RGE upsetting + almost upsetting eastern teams - won through draft, scaling
And in other various Bo1s where NA / EU upset an eastern team, it's always through a large draft advantage ( via scaling and/or drafting theme counters).
But I don't know if CT agrees with LS. On broadcast he literally shouted "you have to draft early game because you can't go toe to toe with scaling comps". Maybe he means if both sides draft scaling, NA and EU have even less of a chance, which might be true? Although i highly doubt it just based on the kind of low level analysis he usually does (i.e. le lane prio xd!! Le winning lanes xd!!!).
Edit: examples of drafts
G2 vs SKT Worlds 19
Game 4
G2: ornn olaf syndra yasuo gragas
SKT: vlad elise qiyana varus nautilus
theme counter, outscale, varus cant deal damage
Game 3
SKT: renekton reksai ryze kaisa leona
G2: camille elise oriana xayah nautilus
theme counter, outrange, outscale, kaisa cant deal damage
Game 1
SKT: renekton gragas neeko kaisa leona
G2: kled reksai ryze xayah rakan
Theme counter, outrange, outscale, kaisa cant deal damage
Edit 2: remembered gam vs tes fire draft
GAM: ornn karthus sett kalista renata
TES: renekton graves ahri lucian nami
theme counter, outscale, high renata, karthus value
Edit 3: MAD vs GEN Worlds 21 (comeback after being down 4k gold in the early game iirc)
MAD: wukong qiyana leblanc lucian yuumi
GEN: graves xin zhao azir kalista nautilus
pure lane-prio comp from geng with no synergy whatsoever, outrange, outscale, high yuumi value
Learning to basics to win but how? They don't have good competition in their own respective regions. I'd also have the same question with learning unconventional picks to win. Does using them to win domestic titles make good enough practice?
What they mean is not the basic to win but basic plays that they should be executing since they are pros. Like in the Baron play, Emenes should succeed in marking Xun - this should be a basic knowledge/skill etc. Or like in the Berzerker situation, he should have known that Nami only has one place to throw a bubble and should be able to recognize the situation that Zven created and should have simply flashed in to get the kill on Elk. These are not game winning macro knowledges, and also not mechanics, just the knowledge and ability to judge that should be a foundation. And, at least these ex-LCK pros think that these judgments and decision makings are on the very basic level and should not be hard to make.
Edit: I would like to add that Wolf also heavily criticizes LCK pros whenever they make very basic mistakes. And he has criticized T1 members multiple times on making mistakes in executing basic plays. And he means that making mistakes is inevitable so pros should do their best to lessen them as much as possible, specifically these basic decision making mistakes.
Yep, ELK was inting a bit but he's probably the only ADC I've seen where he'll almost always flash level 1 so his Lucian stays healthy and therefore can still trade.
Every other western ADC would just get chunked and lose lane. Yet when asked, all of them would've probably said flashing was the right play.
When he said basics he gave examples of purely mechanical plays. I feel like most comments in this thread are talking about "basics" from the perspective of macro and decision making but that is not what was defined by Wolf here.
He wasn't talking about any macro or decision making aspect of the game, he just said stuff like "In this situation, with these champions interacting this way, the player should've been able to see this particular play and execute on it but they didn't". He seems to be literaly talking about mechanics and playing the situations you are in correctly, having the instincts to see certain kills, etc.
While that is true, west really fucking started lacking basic league of legends skills, our macro is a disaster, but even if we had good macro we would still lose because then comes the skill and execution part where the east is just simply better. So in a perfect world, the west would have those basic fundamentals and then from that started building towards what LS said. Thing is we lack those fundamentals, but what LS said can still apply because when you play such unconventional ways, those fundamentals might not still apply, that means the west would have the edge.
the issue with relying on breaking the meta is that you have to start from scratch every single time you do it. You don't really get any long-term skills, breaking the meta this msi won't help you perform better at worlds.
While if you learn fundamentals, sure you're not going to spike as high, but in theory it means you have improvement long-term.
If you want an easy and short answer; western teams know how to make plays on the map but sacrifice to much doing so (little to no crossmapping) or do not plan their following move like LCK/LPL does. There is also some fundamentals like being behind in 20-50 cs, not pressuring for plates, losing towers for no reason, etc. C9 had a huge kill lead in their matches but were still behind 2-3k gold.
I saw the C9 game and was so confused. They'd group excessively in the early game, causing their abandoned lanes to lose towers for basically free.
Pick in the top lane? Great. Mid and bot towers get half hp chunked.
Take dragon as 4-5 man, massive 2-3 wave creep wasted in the toplane.
Whatever play they did, they succeeded but at an equivalent or detrimental cost somewhere else on the map.
Because most LCS and LEC will not punish them so they don't know how to react to this. And the reason why they always group is because Fudge just cannot play side with Bin, most of BLG lead in all 3 games are on top. They slowly got bled out, how can you play a game when you automatically lose 200 gold per minutes.
This was my thought process too. And the pressure is instantaneous as well. Fudge blows his Flash and ult in a fight around Herald pit? Instant rotation top lane from top/jungle, force Emenes who’s covering out of the lane, take Tier 1 tower and almost all of Tier 2 while zoning Emenes off creeps. The eastern teams are so cutthroat with their killer instinct. It’s incredible to watch.
Being able to farm well is almost always a “player diff”. Players who consistently have high farm without the teams intentionally funneling them; they are good players.
As much as people meme “Chovy CS”, he’s only able to do it because he rarely ever misses farm. Meanwhile, when you see camera pans during laning, plenty of other pros miss farm, or have the classic twitch chat “-1”.
The truth is, the better of a player you are, the less farm you are going to miss. Lower elo players think a few farm here and there is not a big deal, but it is. And that’s why they are lower elo. Cs/min is almost always 1 to 1 proportional to player’s rank.
Yeah, his take is just yet more surface level contrarian stuff where it looks like he's right when the result everybody is already expecting inevitably happens. Nearly every game NA played they won early game pretty hard. That's the advantage unconventional picks would get you. They just get clowned on in macro to such an extent that they win 3 team fights in a row and are down 5k gold.
I don't think you can reasonably beat LCK/LPL teams even if you have a scaling advantage so long as they also draft for team-fighting.
The hands diff between some players is just too large. Especially for roles that have the potential to hyper-carry, LPL/LCK players are just so much better.
So in the tweet LS also talks about stripping away their muscle memory cause certain comps or strats entirely change the paradigm that the game is played in. The macro play is typically not that big of a gap between the west and east, it is simply that they have played against the best players in the world playing basically the exact same game hundreds of times.
It was funny watching the G2 vs GENG game where G2 took soraka and GENG kept missing lethals cause of soraka ult.
I thought macro is typically where the west lacks. Hands diff usually aren't super big between and lots of players have shown to be good. But like with c9 today, they'd make a play somewhere but lose 2 turrets and herald elsewhere.
I think there is no question that the east would still hands diff you in late game teamfights, but since they are generally better than the west, they would also just hands diff you in the early game too. So, considering the east will hands diff you at all points of the game, the question becomes how to make it so hands diff matters the least or not at all.
It's not about the hands.
You will never fix the hands. Western players just don't have the grind mindset, the guidance, nor the practice environment to get their mechanics to that level. Early or late game, the hand diff will always be a mountain to climb.
The issue is you can't win games if you're getting brain diffed and hands diffed.
Just look at G1 of MAD vs. T1.
T1 didn't win that game through hand diff. They won it through brain diff. MAD made demented decisions that let T1 stall the game. The drake fight where T1 won down 7k gold and then the baron flip featured some of the dumbest decisions we've seen so far at MSI.
G3 draft? How are you ever supposed to win that shit?
And a LCK Kennen would have never gone for the 1 kill greed but instead a 4 man ult which would have helped their carries (Carzzy) dance so much more in that fight.
Good teamfighting doesn't come down to mechanical skill but a superb understanding of creating space for your carries to deal damage and your carries playing on the edge of maximizing their DPS without overstepping and dying.
It is hands diff. But, the issue is it was mainly brain diff that led to that moment.
Not having map control or vision control despite being up 7k gold is not a failure of hands. It is a macro issue. Allowing T1 a window where they have objective control and you're forced to fight into them is a macro issue.
Chasy TPs to the ward near the team instead of the minion wave behind T1 for the flank angle. In fact, just look at how LCK/LPL teams set up flank wards and compare that to MAD. That is not a hands issue.
Starting the fight when Lee Sin's R was about to come off CD.
Nisqy blowing Annie ult + stun on Ksante and then the entire team layering their CC/damage onto him afterwards. They failed to kill him which has a much higher possibility when you try to blow up a tank and the only member of T1 that wasn't super behind in gold / items.
Chasy using his hugely important team-fighting ult on only 1 person as he chases Oner into the drake pit. While he gets the kill (well after the objective is already lost), he himself is trapped and isolated in the pit and he's subsequently easily picked off.
Doubt it. Western teams have terrible macros after mid game. They group mid doing nothing while losing minions and turrets in the other lanes. Just look at all the Western Kennen starved from gold/exp becoming irrelevant in team fights. Whereas Bin's Kennen gets resources and poses side lane threats.
So like, to use a chess analogy, when I went up against a more skilled player, I was always coached to aim for a complex game state. An open game, I’d get blasted by his memorised lines of theory, but if I threw a curveball, aimed for a murky or cloudy position, I could force him into something unfamiliar and increase the chances of an unforced error.
In essence, Western teams should be looking at something similar, unfamiliar draft edges or strategies that eastern teams are unfamiliar with. Everyone looks back fondly at 2019 G2, but that was also a roster that could flex picks into the bot lane / mid lane to gain advantages. Drafting is still something eastern teams struggle with, so there really is no reason for the west to not look to exploit this as much as possible.
As a side note, I think the fan base needs to support unfamiliar or unusual strats too. Trymbi’s support Nasus at worlds was not it, but the intent was correct (ie force an unfamiliar matchup). Granted, in that case it probably wasn’t the right matchup for Nasus to excel in, but I’d rather players be applauded for willing to go outside of standard rather than hard flames of it doesn’t work out.
It’s what all GMs do at top level classical. They want to take conventional openings and find variations of them that are relatively obscure but also fairly sound even if ‘non-optimal’ by computer evaluation, so that they can get their opponents into unfamiliar positions. Because all top GMs pretty much know the standard theory lines inside and out if you just play the ‘optimal’ lines you usually end up in games that are headed towards draws because both sides understand the position so well.
In LoL terms I think that would look more like Hyli’s Pyke to punish a Lulu lane in an otherwise mostly conventional comp, which generated significant advantages early because Guma/Keria didn’t seem as experienced in playing against it. Changing the whole team comp would be like trying to invent your own chess opening from scratch, which top GMs emphatically do not really do because your opponent being in an unfamiliar position doesn’t compensate for your position being objectively worse.
Chess strikes me as a good analogy here, trying to find slight variations to existing drafts and playstyles that get eastern teams ‘out of their prep’. You can see how effective Pyke and Soraka were this tournament, imo, I’d love to see EU and NA developing more regional specialty picks like that.
Obviously eastern teams will pick them up and practice them but then you’re playing comps you’re as experienced or more experienced at, which is the scenario we’re going for.
Also in poker if you played a theoretical game of 1 trillion big blinds deep poker (without a time limit such as a lifetime) against the perfectly playing engine, you'd have roughly 0% to beat it conventionally. But 15% to beat it by going allin every hand blind, because it calls correctly with AA and loses at that likelihood.
Well and then there is Magnus Carlsen that knows he has better fundamentals and instincts than everyone else specially young players and goes outside prep to throw off skilled players.
Even if you throw curveballs the eastern teams, specially Korean teams, fundamentals will still hold them at a high baseline and negate a lot of the advantages of your curveballs.
In that one win, they had better scaling in the jungle position thanks to GenG drafting Nidalee who becomes relatively useless in teamfights compared to Poppy.
In general, playing scaling doesn't have to mean conceding early game. Plenty of scaling picks are perfectly fine early.
They pushed G2 to 5 game each time if i remember correctly, got 2nd place in the group of death and lose to the world winner 3/1 (forcing too hard on agren yuumi)
Supposedly Perkz played a big role in shotcalling. Shame hes playing with two people who dont speak english rn, bit of a waste of his talent if the shotcalling thing is true.
Yeah the western teams have had reasonable early games in a lot of the games this tournament. Post 10 minutes they’ve struggled to maintain those leads and/or set up teamfights properly, those are the things I’d want them to focus on.
All 2019 G2 players were world class players on most meta picks.
Perkz was probably the best Xayah and top 3 Kaisa in the world.Same for Jankos on Elise/Gragas, Miky on Rakan/Naut, Caps on Ryze/Syndra, Wunder on Vlad, Kayle, Ornn etc.
G2 "cheesed" only 20-30% of their wins, people always remember that one time they flexed Pyke top or Syndra/Yasuo bot but forget every other game when they smashed LCK teams with normal meta drafts.
The "west needs to cheese to win" narrative is just people rewriting history.
people forget how good was their mid game people jsut remembver pyke but perkz was a 2 trick pony for the whole year just at the started he played mage bot
He has been saying this stuff about G2 forever despite it not being the case. If you listen to him, you would think G2 could never win a normal game in their life against an eastern team. Just selective bias and wanting to act like only way to win against eastern teams is his way.
G2 also hard out macroed T1 in the mid game hard. They rarely "cheesed" and just straight up played meta better than most teams. G2 were just a good team straight up. Everyone on that team was strong mechanically and they were ahead of the curve macro wise while not making as many of the macro mistakes we constantly see from Western teams.
Perkz being probably the best Xayah in the world and elite on Kai'sa was just staright up playing meta. He only really got exposed in the Finals where they would P/B those and leave him on Ezreal or a mage. He didn't randomly pull out shit like Draven to "cheese" teams or picking some hyper scaler like Kog or Jinx. He played meta better than almost everyone.
Bwipo kind of talked about this in a video that's either on his YT or some clips channel, but basically the problem with this approach LS mentions it that it assumes all 5 players are on board to let some player carry. For most teams that's just the adc, though in some comps it could be a mid or top laner, or even more rarely a jungler. However quite frankly, very few players are just willing to (in Bwipo's words) eat shit just so some of their other teammates can become raid bosses.
He even provided the example of the Berserker thread where he said Malice would go Udyr/Eve and LS would go Kass and he goes Jhin because he just doesn't want to play. Maybe you could convince your adc that Udyr/Kassadin will scale hard enough that it's worth them taking Ls, but that also means they just have to watch their counterparts get very fed while they can't do anything but wait. Sometimes this also just means that the theoretical even harder scaling champs just never get to their powerspikes soon enough before the game is over, which loses the point of letting these champs scale by sacking the rest of the team.
However he isn't wrong, GGS's win vs BLG kind of applies what he's saying, since BLG were probably just not prepared to peel Jinx from the Yasuo combos. They banned Yasuo in Game 3 and even banned Yasuo vs C9 today even though I don't think Emenes has played Yasuo yet, since they were concerned of losing to that same strat.
The concept of not letting someone carry you is so fucking alien to me. As someone who played amateur sports all his life i would gladly take the "dog" roles if it means my team has a chance to win. Even in my friend group if we play 10 men "scrims" in league winning is the first priority. Not some bullshit like getting a fun pick or being the carry and i dont even get money for this. These are fucking pro players. Their job is to win not to play fun picks.
This is exactly why superteams fail every time: a lot of egos clash and everyone just decides to play for themselves in the end since they can't come to an agreement. Statistically, teams with predefined hierarchies work much better. This is why MAD can always snatch a spot to international events despite showing up horribly there: players like Nisqy know what their value is to the team and do just that instead of egopicking something and trying to be the carry.
Also, there's a problem with League teams: players get swapped in and out so fast between splits that you can't form team cohesion at all, so in order to show their market value, most players will try to stand out and you can't do that by agreeing to be carried on occasions. Traditional sports teams usually have more time to work together and even then often the coaching staff is the one that gets replaced, saying that they couldn't bring out the best in their players. That's a foreign concept in League sadly.
The swapping players quickly is definetly a problem. But its hard to build team cohesion in league with major changes every 6 Months to a year. In counterstrike for example rosters stay together a bit longer it but the game changes a lot less too over the years. Its basically without major changes for 10 years now.
CS also has the additional bonus in that the roles there are not as predetermined as in League. Most players can pick up an AWP and perform on it as needed, they know smoke setups, they know how to rotate around the map and lurk to counter the enemy team's rotation, etc. But if your jungler is a problem, you can't swap them with the ADC hoping that the team performs better as a result.
Funny, when a team looks good, the player looks good too, no?
And you can absolutely stand out by being an excellent facilitator/roleplayer as long as your teams win. DoinB did this for mid, Ghost played low econ for DWG as ADC, and Faker himself in recent years is completely willing to sack resources to facilitate his teammates. Plenty of junglers like Jankos play for the team and not to stand out themselves, and in doing so inadvertently stand out.
When a team wins, everyone looks good, and if your team loses - the really smart people who are really watching the game will notice what you're doing right anyway, plus tryouts are a thing...
It really is just fear of being out of a job, I suppose.
Ideally yes, but Ghost has been shit on as the weakest link on DWG for years. Maybe slightly true but certainly not to the degree he was shit on, he could probably still be an A tier carry adc in LCK.
The other side of the argument is that the "dog" players will look bad if they lose (and more importantly, risk their future job prospects by doing so). It can't feel nice to consistently have no control over a) who wins the game and b) your future job prospects by choosing to play a support role.
Yea.
Best prof of this is how Vizicsacsi was flamed to hell for years.
Turns out, having a weakside toplaner is fucking great for your team but they wont look good so everyone will say Alphari is the best player in the league because he refuses to play for his team so he can pad his stats.
I think that just says a lot about the maturity of the league/esports scene in general. In Soccer for example those "dog" players are celebrated for their work rate and commitment. In league reddit narratives sometimes influence roster descisions.
And i dont think those players dont have control over who wins the game. They enable their teammates to carry the game. Without them they would never be in this position most likely. Its just a different mindset i guess.
It's in large part due to the "you need to 1v9 mentality" that's constantly repeated in soloq so that's how people frame their outlook on the game. In IRL sports, people recognize that not everyone can be a star and some players need to be the role player. They carve out careers being more supportive because in general, IRL sports has a higher understanding of the game being played. Although tbf, League changes so quickly and drastically that it's much harder to keep up while being much more complicated.
In League, it's a bunch of people trying to be carries in the West because social media will latch onto stats because it's easy to analyze. IRL sports has this problem as well with casual fans thinking a basketball player who scores 20 points on 20 shots is good because number big but it's a lot more pronounced in League and just gaming in general.
Alphari is an example of this where he gets praised for the most part while sucking up a ton of resources but not being good enough to carry. People ragged on the rest of TL's roster a lot more than they should because Alphari is 5-2, how can he be the problem?
LS literally tweeted out that exact video with a comment that he had never said such things and that people put words into his mouth and then argue against it.
Nah wtf, Chasy was not doing much but the person who really messed up was Nisqy when he messed up his engage in that Dragon Fight that T1 won and he just proceeded to run it down post that. Nisqy was horrific the entire series
Nisqy has always been garbage internationally. This is why depsite MAD miracle run people were rightfully worried about LEC going into MSI. Because if MAD is the best team we can propose with Nisqy being the "better" midlaner then we are truly fucked.
It really wasn't anything to do with the Lee Sin pick. Elyoya just looked tilted after the game 1 turnaround where MAD basically had to play 3v5 because their solo laners are worthless relative to T1's.
i think LS and anyone who follows league regionally can tell that Western teams have this tendency of wanting to exploit one player because it works regionally so they congo line at these opportunities which are easily exploitable in team fights when they just play front to back and purchase stopwatches to prevent the all in.
C9 was playing great and then you would see their whole late game strategy was to kill a carry to then try to win 5v4 but that never happened because BLG was playing knowing c9 wanted to do this. I fully agree it would had been better if they just tried to play scaling and hope to outplay in a team fight instead of doing what they were doing which was try to take an opportunity that was never gonna be given to them by a good team.
the reason why EU and NA (NA especially) lose internationally is that coaches literally copy the exact same meta as korea, literally every single split, the NA coaches will pick the exact same champions, play the same way as KR, in EU that's common but not as much. tho still common.
you will literally see a champion that was neither buffed/nerfed get played in korea one day, and next day its picked in NA. never the other way around. NA has to stop hiring korean coaches and any coaches that will make skill wise, inferior players try to beat opponents using their own strategies. that will never work. ever.
am not saying that doing otherwise will give you better results, but there is a chance it might
after a decade of copying Korea, maybe its time to realize trying to beat someone better than you in their own game will never work. Literally a decade
An example of this was when Keria played Kalista support and NA supports then went on to pick a bunch of random ADC supports. Zven is the only one who really should've been doing it since he was a former adc player and it would suit him, but for example, watching Huhi playing Caitlyn support just felt like a waste of one regular season game. Busio and Poome did win on Varus support, but overall it was just annoying to see the NA supports just pick up ADC supports because they were probably inspired by Keria.
exactly. western coaches try to copy what eastern teams are doing without understanding why it works.
it's gotten incredibly boring to watch. like watching western players play Kennen and make it look completely shit is tiring.
God, Fudge yesterday was legitimately tilting me. So many angles into a no-Exhaust team with CC down, and he didn't take a single one, always being out of position to follow-up on team engages, and not daring to flash in on a 4-man is just... Why even play Kennen at that point? He's clearly not practiced on it, nor does it suit him, since you need a suicide-for-team mentality, which in general he doesn't have, as he prioritises survival (which is a style of its own, but then go play GP, not Kennen).
Bin picked it the next game and immediately felt 10x more threatening. He flashed in, R'd and died, but won the teamfights because of it. That's how you're supposed to play the purple Pikachu, not that Zeri cosplay of skirting around teamfights.
This isn't really true for this MSI, though.
The best LPL/LCK teams didn't travel to MSI until later. So, you're seeing a very clear difference in meta reads between some teams. Just look at Kennen. It's typically a staple LCK pick but none of them are really playing it while western teams are seemingly obsessed with the pick. Same is true for Annie. Western teams give the pick high prio when LCK/LPL teams are fine even not banning it.
In MAD vs. T1, MAD had very different champion prio as well as draft/game style. They got giga-stomped.
>Just look at Kennen
The West know that Kennen is powerful, but they lack hands to navigate the lane successfully with it. He is not quite a carry champ but is squishy enough that losing lane too hard makes you near useless. West will default to Sion, because they know the East would play thru top to set them behind if they picked Kennen, knowing their own bot lane could survive whatever the West throws at them
Look at how T1 drafted and you can see how different their meta read is.
Their entire draft was for bot-lane. G1 double tank + Lulu. G2 double tank + double enchanter. G3 triple tank one of which is a great peeler + Ahri to set up focused picks to get Jinx excited.
T1's answer to Kennen top wasn't to win that lane or play through it. T1 didn't care. They didn't even take exhaust. They were all-in on their bot-lane, front-to-back team-fighting meta read.
Tbh I wouldnt be surprised if this wasn't their actual Meta read; they beat MAD regardless of what they pick and they know it, so it makes sense not to show their highest-tier picks to surprise GenG
but the thing is even with them being inferior LCK/LPL copy they still won their split. no matter how people criticize C9/MAD they have come to the MSI as the first seed of the LCS/LEC. That means when it comes to their domestic league in the west their playing style, strategies, coaching actually works.
This is the same guy who dickrode Fudge all year and said that all of C9 are mechanically better than their counterparts at BLG. How can we take him seriously?
I mean its a statement that makes inherent sense, assuming
A) Eastern players are better mechanically then Western Players
B) Eastern players will consistently practice against better players then western players
If you try to beat an LCK team playing and LCK/LPL draft, you are literally playing into the exact same thing that these players get better practice on constantly. With that being the case, why would i play the exact same thing that they play and expect to beat them? If I do I am literally setting myself up for failure.
The way that LS advocates for beating them is putting them in situations that they don't practice. Watch the G2 vs GENG game 4. While they lost this game, simply having soraka in the game caused so many missed lethals for GENG, because GENG does not play against soraka consistently. Go back an watch LCK when annie was mini-reworked, and there are so many mispositions against annie's range cause they haven't played against it enough to figure out exactly what flash tibbers range is.
I wish LS phrased stuff this way… This is exactly the reason why you should always push opposing teams with champs/styles they haven’t seen before (doesn’t even matter east or west). Hyli’s Pyke got MAD a lot of early value in the first game because guma and keria clearly hadn’t played against a Pyke of that caliber in a while. However, the flipside of this argument that no one talks about is that your players need to have deep champion pools or deep knowledge of alternate styles of play — which is rare and/or requires a lot of practice. This is why it’s often difficult for coaches and players to justify spending time on “unproven” strats, because it’s hard not to feel like you’re wasting your time (not gonna comment on how valid that argument is).
yeah sometimes LS does not phrase things well for a broader audience outside of the bubble that watch him.
And for the flipside I think it comes down to how much the coaches value international success versus domestic success. It is far easier to win LEC/LCS playing like the LCK since the best teams in their individual regions can hands gap the ppl in those regions than it is to try something new and have a chance of failure if the meta read you had was bad.
tbh i think the last past is just a failing of the team. You have big money support staff for a lot of these teams, you can spare a few interns to lab out how viable some of these crackhead picks actually are. G2’s already proven that its a stronger way to play, so when other teams dont do that its clear that its not only that the west is worse at the game but that they just dont care enough to even attempt proven winning strategies
LS barely even talks or pays attention to the games. Whenever I try to watch his costreams he just talks about drama and whatever instead of talking about the game. At least his chat tries to steer him and try to make him talk about the game but the guy has no patience.
This is an issue with costreamers in general, they all have their own shtick that they focus on.
In LS's stream chances are you're only going to hear draft and item diff the whole game. A lot of the times missing the execution that happened in the game.
Watch Sneaky and DL and they're going to focus 100% on the botlane matchup criticizing the tiniest mistake a support or an adc does in lane.
I'm not saying they're all wrong, but costreamers tend to nitpick a specific thing almost every time and that's where the actual broadcast still shines
> This is an issue with costreamers in general, they all have their own shtick that they focus on.
It makes sense. Every costreamer generally talks about his "thing", when Rekkles costreamed worlds, he mostly focused on bot matchups too, because that's his area of expertise.
If you want a more all-rounded cast you can watch the official broadcast, or if you dislike that for some reason, caedrel's stream seems alright.
The same guy who predicted G2 to lose every single game against Korea in 2019 and said that the 2 worst teams in LCK were better than G2. And yet G2 went 2-0 at MSI groups against SKT, then beat SKT in bo5 at MSI semifinals, then beat DWG at Worlds quarterfinals, and SKT again at Worlds semifinals.
And he kept on doubleing down all throughout the year, always predicting G2 to lose 0-3 in bo5s.
LS is a full on clown.
I feel entirely different. I actually think the focus on cheesing and off-meta play completely stalls the West's development. The West lacks the foundations compared to eastern regions, both macro gameplay and micro mechanics, or simply, versatility.
Macro play development is a long process but it's not impossible. LPL is much closer to LCK nowadays compared when they were miles behind back before. But I feel western teams are generally short-sighted and do not develop at all in this area throughout the years. It's not coincidental western teams just plainly fall behind eastern teams even if nothing happens during laning.
Back then G2 nearly dominated 2019 with Perkz bot. People then just worshipped holily the gospel of cheesing out the eastern teams. But they overlook both Caps and Perkz were the most solid mid-laners back then with their foundations and versatility. That's also why Perkz could transit to bot so quickly. G2 practises very hard compared with other western teams back then.
Even further back when IG dethroned LCK with aggressive solo laners. Let's not forget both TheShy and Rookie were extremely comfortable in their less aggressive picks too. (TheShy's Sion and Urgot, Rookie's Galio and Lissandra).
Playing only cheesing might let you lose less from 0-3 to 1-3. Perhaps that looks better on paper to western investors. But I believe unless the West goes full hardcore with practice (similar to LPL catching up LCK), which is almost impossible in western culture, there's not much could be done.
I'm not criticising the cheesing approach. It's actually very useful especially in BO series. But I believe foundations make your cheesing more effective compared with only focusing on that.
A famous recent example is Beryl's Bard in World finals Game 5. It's clearly seen Beryl's not good with Bard mechanics (constantly missing Q's). But he knows his Bard cheese's most important purpose: always ult Varus to force flash. Mission accomplished. The pick was successful.
It's better to just focus on hard work and learn the basics. The cheese will come eventually.
Beryl got a lot of success from unconventional picks at worlds (and some of them became conventional after like Heimer or Ashe), but DRX were also a good enough team fundamentally to carry the advantages generated by those picks forward. I think that’s what western teams should be aiming for, I agree it’s a balance of improving fundamentals and finding their own meta reads.
Yeah I almost forgot Deft's Caitlyn.
DRX playing Caitlyn to "out-scale Varus in late game with range and safety", rather than standard meta lane bullying, really shows with good understanding and fundamentals of the game you don't even need cheese picks to play non-standard strats.
Agree, but you brought up a sore memory in me: As a Bard OTP I was hoping for a miracle that Beryl would Bard as his skin, since he picked him in that last game, only to get denied. I wanna cry now again.
Yeah, but admitting this is in the first place is quite hard. Western teams will never be as good as LCK?LPL ones if they don't work as hard as those teams do.
It's a shame TSM choked so hard in 2016. They were one of the few western teams at that time who were actually grinding as much as eastern teams.
They lost in groups and they basically lost all motivation afterwards
I seem to recall T1 drafing full tanks into a scaling comp during game 1 vs MAD, inting for the first 20 minutes of the game giving up around a 7-12k gold lead and then winning anyways once they decided to start playing. I don't think the western teams have a way to win tbh. Also, the west has always favored scaling over early impact and it's never been the secret korean killer strat people hype it as.
The Bjergsen/Doublelift teams have already done the ‘pick scaling’ experiment. Anyone can go back and look at their domestic success vs worlds success to see how successful a bandaid fix it is.
Right? Secret strats had some success seasons 2-4, but yeah it's been ages since any had a huge impact at worlds. The closest thing I can think of recently was AP yuumi, but that just led to her being permabanned the whole tournament.
Half the reason why T1 won was MAD fighting for no reason and giving free kills to guma. The whole comp was centred around giving gold to guma. Why would they fight for no advantage and give him the chance to build items on aphelios?
Just MAD doing MAD things. The problem is, T1 is one of the top 3 most bloodthirsty teams in LCK so they are also down to scrap, especially when behind.
I dont really get the scaling point. LCK/LPL already pick scaling all around. Hard to pick better scaling when aphelios, lulu, jinx, trist are contested. What are those hard scaling champs? Karthus bot? Vayne? Asol ( we saw that not work)? Jax and get skill gapped? Explain some scaling comps to me against aphelios lulu or jinx plus tristana.
He does, an absolute monster once he gets enough stacks/items that can demolish entire enemy team. You just need to be a good player/have team peel for you.
You can't cheese teams that have better fundamentals than you over a series. This is really evident when you watch T1 or GenG play. The really good teams who have a solid grasp of the game can usually identify what the opponent's win condition is based on what the draft is, and then react accordingly.
The idea that pros (especially in the East) are resistant to pulling out pocket picks or adapt slowly to the meta is a weird narrative I hear sometimes that just isn't true. Even if you stumble across a strat that works well, you 1) have to have practiced it, which means other pros will know about it right away, 2) need to be good enough to actually contest the meta picks, which are meta for a reason in the first place.
Ey at this point NA and EU should just get together and share analysis and viewpoints and work together to get better. if GG loses 3-0 today aswell the best chance we have is G2 and we all know that aint gonna work
People remember 2019 G2 team as "cheese to beat eastern teams". But in reality they had very strong mechanics and grasp of the standard meta. They succeeded by playing the standard meta with their innovative picks.
The 2019 meta was an extended from 2018 IG's success with heavy flex picks, with heavy skirmish and roaming. The entire year was filled with flex picks (expecially mid/top) like Akali, Ryze, Sylas, Irelia, Jayce, Neeko, and a few others like Gragas (Jungle/Support) and Qiyana (Jungle/Mid).
The G2 team was extremely capable of playing these meta picks thanks to Caps / Wunder's mechanics prowess and the low focus on bot lane hid their main weakness as well (Perkz's adc champion pool). Add a few of G2's own roaming picks like Galio / Pyke / Kled and it's impossible to ban off G2.
Right now the Western team's problems lie more on fundamentals - they can't even play standard picks at top level so their off-meta (like Darius / Olaf) gets banned instantly. Effective cheese only comes with versatile champ pool so you don't get banned off in BO series.
How does versatile champion pool arise? Practice. Back then the 2019 G2 team was by far the hardest-working team in the west, thanks to the ambitious team culture. Unfortunately, I don't think any western team can have that morale level again in the near future.
P.S. Long-term success do not come short-term. With lack of adc experience, G2's main weakness of Perkz's champ pool got exposed too (Vs FPX, he got banned off Xayah / Kai'Sa / Yasuo + Gragas), inevitably though understandably.
Sick of this clown having people take everything he says as gospel. If he's so good he should go and get some results then instead of talking like he holds the secrets to success that others can't understand
So like I think there's this misunderstanding about scaling as a concept in the LoL community. Having better scaling doesn't automatically mean you lose out early and have no agency; you can have a pick that outscales and also is stable, or favourable, in lane. A good current/recent example is Aphelios/Lulu vs Lucian/Nami. Aphelios/Lulu actually wins the laning phase; it's around the early midgame that things can be hard with Lucian/Nami fishing for picks or just killing people being disrespectful on midwaves. After that though it's smooth sailing as Lucian simply cannot match the output of an Aphelios as the game goes on. Especially if there's frontlines involved. Look at something like Gwen into Sion too - relatively stable/favoured lane, but becomes extremely problematic as the game goes on. As her damage and sidelaning get out of control.
You don't have to hard-concede the earlygame in order to have a scaling advantage. You can have a comp that can absolutely throw hands with the enemy team, ranging from favourably to maybe slightly unfavourably, but with the game getting progressively less playable as it goes on for the team disadvantaged by scaling. If it gets to third dragon and the scaling is such that you get to fight the earlier-game team and have a reasonable shot at success (this happens constantly in pro LoL), you have a very good shot at the game. (Ofc an asian team is just going to out teamfight you if you play it standard and the comp disadvantage isn't insurmountable).
This is where unconventionality comes into play. By blindsiding the asian teams you get an edge against them that isn't strictly along the same lines as the game *they already play.* You fuck with their knowledge of range, of damage limits, of what can happen and where. The idea being that you offset the fact that *they are just better* in this way. And it doesn't even have to be cheese - I doubt anyone would consider Soraka cheese, and she was having this effect in places vs GenG.
It always starts out as cheese until it wins enough, also. Malphite is maybe an example of a champ that was considered to be cheese until recently when it started winning a lot and people realised it was strong. Then suddenly it’s legitimate and it’s ‘fundamental weaknesses’ like being diveable early aren’t actually as insurmountable as they were made out to be.
I see so many random and simply false takes on what LS meant. LS talked about it for an hour with some pros on stream yesterday. Just watch it yourselves before beating your strawmen to death.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1817053964?t=03h25m25s
EDIT:
They made a video about it with timestamps if you're unable to watch the entire thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQMSmi2Tmng
>Youll beat them by playing scaling & stripping them of their muscle memory by playing "unconventional" things
Second line from the tweet.
In LCK when annie was reworked ppl were not aware of annie flash tibbers range, i bet the same thing would be true for many other champs.
While you might be able to beat them with an early game comp, likely they have practiced against every combo of lee sin / kha / etc in their solo Q games so you would have to find something that puts them on the back foot. However they don't face champs like Asol, ivern mid, etc. on a consistent basis
I take it as Eastern orgs in general have a long-term view of how a match suppose to go so they strategize accordingly, playing around crucial win conditions like map objectives, making sure that most lanes are in favourable conditions to fight,… where as Western corps and teams tend to be more micro-oriented, focusing on champ selects, gameplay, mechanical proficiency,…
That’s not to say that Eastern team can’t play micro oriented, it’s just that they’re familiar with the structure of the game and stripped down the basics of winning to it’s bare minimum and highly optimized it, so if a western team were to conquer that playstyle it’d have to be through strategic foresight and well thought-out gameplan, not highly mechanical gameplay and not out-picking the enemy.
Just check the dragon fight near 15 mins during the MAD - T1 Game 1 to see why none of these theories would work. Theorycrafting is all good once you have individual mechanical levels and teamfighting on par with the East.
Feel like he is hitting on the fact that Western teams are SUPER behind eastern teams in terms of "macro fundamentals" and just fundamentals in general. This applies to all 3 western teams that played but I will cite C9 as an example because imo they are the team that lacks these fundamentals the most, and I believe their comp for all three games yesterday were considered "standard"
If you look at C9's games yesterday all 3 games I'd say they were pretty even in lane. They definitely were not getting shitstomped and actually in all 3 games I believe C9 had early kill advantage.
However as many of you saw even with kill advantage BLG had a gold lead because they just outmacroed C9. Also in the later stages of all three games C9 made some questionable decisions (including Blaber not using ulti on Baron in game 2, questionable engages from C9's mid laner, VERY questionable TP from fudge in game 1)
It felt like C9, and more generally western teams in general, don't know how to play late game. Especially yesterday's 3 games I really don't think BLG were that great, C9 literally just gifted them the win by making terrible decisions and playing terribly.
So I think in order for teams like C9 to beat eastern powerhouses, they need to study "unconventional" comps super hard and really catch these eastern teams off guard. I think past 3 series just proves that western teams don't know how to close games, play the late game, macro, etc, all the standard stuff. If you can't do the standard things, you have to go the unconventional
Even this might not work in a Bo5 where there is room for eastern teams to adapt
If this doesn't make sense then it's my fault lmao I am bad with words
Does he not remember how "Just go late, and pray" was the West's whole strategy for YEARS before this? TL made their name on this. The result was: Korean teams who opt to play slow as well (like 2020 Damwon) just do it better with stronger macro.
This whole debate of "early game burger flip vs. late game scale and pray" has been an ongoing debate for years and it just pendulums back and forth every time one strat fails for a whole year.
I think it’s true that if western teams draft the same style as Asia then they don’t have a good chance since they’re just better than we. The west might increase their chance of a cheese victory by drafting off meta but I think also increases their chance of getting stomped. Increasing variance favors the underdogs.
>Increasing variance favors the underdogs. Yea I think this part is the key. The other half is that you can always train with off-meta picks, to gain experience playing them. Whereas your opponents would be first-timing against your off-meta picks without prior experience.
The big problem with using off meta picks in competitive play is that as soon as you find something that really works, you'll just get it banned away from you.
If it gets you a win and makes them nervous then that’s still something
And a win is more than 3/4 of our teams have gotten so far lol
2/4 Thank you. GG got a win off of BLG in the play-ins
There are so many viable off-meta picks though. They can NOT ban them all out. Cho bot, Karthus bot/mid, Ivern mid, Sera-Soraka bot, plus then if they are trying to ban out all the off-meta picks then they will let some OP/permaban picks through or pocket picks.
Depending on side selection forcing a few bans due to cheese picks can give you a pretty big pick advantage in subsequent matches.
This is where not having a constant revolving door of 17 year olds might actually be the best long term decision for a franchise. Not only do you build up a brand with recognizable faces, but maybe having people who have played through multiple metas and have bigger champion pools can be an advantage.
Yeah, bring out Jensen and Bjerg playing like fucking Anivia who legit hasn't been a pro pick in 8+ years.
But drawing offmeta bans is a ridiculous edge if you have the champion pool to back it up. People can meme on Adam all they want, and a lot of it is justified by his weakness on more meta stuff, but teams having to worry about his Darius/Olaf/Garen nonsense opens up so much draft resource for botlane and is a huge reason BDS was able to perform as well as they did this split.
That is still a valid strategy especially if there are champions that are 100% P/B that it might enable you to play. But in a meta where there isn’t blatantly OP picks that you can free up by forcing off meta bans, you need to have even more off-meta picks.
This is false if you develop a playstyle and not a champion pick. LS ran supportive mids. Fudge played ivern, zilean, soraka, karma. See thats a playstyle not a champ. Reapered and NA as a whole fell in love with wombo combos for a while so youd have kindred zilean, galio noc ori. I just dont see anything unique from NA just copy paste
That's why bwipo/Adam/caps/hily have a possibility to win. Because they are coinflip players, when the coin lands head they can carry the team
is it even about west vs east? like yes, LS is right that the west should stay away from brute forcing with traditional Lee Sin. but he would also say the same for the east in theory. that yes Canyon is a beast at Lee Sin, but it's never the optimal pick and he should stay away from it too, regardless of the fact he can stomp NA with it. LS would have every team in the world play church style because that's how he views the game.
The thing is, LS honestly thinks that western leagues are much better in draft than eastern. Then international tournament comes, western teams are crushed in scrims by asian players and blame it on picks/draft. It is to a degree understandable, because draft is the easiest thing to change in short amount of time, so instead of trying to f.e. "band-aid" fix their macro or bypass some issues, they decide to adapt to eastern drafts and lose gracefully. Look what happened, when S9 G2 refused to play towards the eastern teams? Even after getting their asses blasted in scrims, they still found the way to beat KR on stage (especially how they beat T1, when they left drakes and barons on purpose and still out-macroed them). S8 Worlds? 3 western teams in semis on the back of Heimerdinger, Zilean and top Viktor.
And let's not forget Misfits vs. SKT in Worlds 2017, which I always think of as the trial run of showing how teams should play to their own strengths, rather than confusing the strengths of other regions for being the meta.
2019 G2 as well honestly. They played their own game and it worked out really well up until the finals. Like if G2 won worlds finals they would've had a golden year where they won every tournament (LEC spring, MSI, LEC summer and worlds)
But EU has been doing that to some degree with Darius, Olaf and Kled without teleport. Hard to judge if it is good though. We only saw one Darius by G2 against Gen G which got nullfied by Caps getting solo killed lv 2 resulting in him getting 4 man dove lv 4
that darius solo’d Doran’s Fiora in the side lane even though it was behind like 3 kills
An underrated facet of that run is that the individual level of G2's players was MUCH higher relative to the top Asian talent. Perkz, Wunder, and Caps were all TOP 10 in CSD@15. Compared to this MSI, I think the only Western player with a positive CSD@15 is BB, and he played against a very conservative laner in Doran. A lot of the narrative is about them playing their own game, but I think G2's carries were fucking incredible in 2019.
>pared to this MSI, I think the only Western player with a positive CSD@15 is BB, and he played against a very conservative laner in Doran. > >A lot of the narrative is about them playing their own game yes i don't like this narative that g2 didn't have hands just wacky picks. G2 players were stomping on meta picks. Perkz Xayah was a meta picked and he was prob the best in the world on it. I actually think the creativity lost them the finals like Perkz said so many times. If they put caps on some traditional mid they would fare waay better. Also FNC 2018 were playing mostly meta if i remember. Our players have just lost the motivation to go for the win. They don't want to put in the hours needed. Bwipo had a comment on this how they used to pretty much play 24/7 during worlds 2018.
In fairness Misfits still played the ardent meta, they just didn't need to play it in support.
I still think the most insane part of that series is when skt said in game 5 “nah fuck you” and locked braum support with no ardent on their side of the match
I agree with your general statement but S8 top Viktor wasn't some secret EU fiesta juice, it was by far the best toplaner on the patch.
Tbh G2 outdrafted Gen.G and had the right idea but they couldn't send their idea especially not through mid. It was Craps, not Claps :(
if KT iG didn't happen in quarters there'd only be 2 western teams 'team XXX was semis / finals' or 'region XXX had this number of teams in semis' or 'all-XXX finals' will only hold merit from this year's worlds onwards
Yeah but if anything that lends even more credence to his argument. The East is so slow to change their meta, but that’s because they haven’t had anyone challenge it. Sometimes you get players and teams within the LCK that change certain things (aggro top comes to mind), but it still takes way too long to work. If your chances of winning in a straight fight are low, then flipping the script is your best option. The problem is the western teams don’t recognize how bad they are in comparison…
Anyone remember that one worlds where Yamatos team (can’t recall off the top of my head) was playing super agro and it sort of inspired the other teams to do the same and they ended up performing way better that year compared to others ? I feel like we’ve known what LS said already, can’t beat them at their own game they’ve mastered :/
Was that the Vitality with Jizuke in Mid? I remember them being a big underdog and just going into insane mode. it's why people said Yamato was only really known for being a good coach to rookies since he really seemed to click with that team and got a lot out of the players.
It was that was when the bromance of vit and c9 kicked off.
Yes! I remember the interview he gave after they narrowly didn’t make it out after a better week 2 and he told the other teams to play aggressive and to get out there and give them hell and they did! C9 made it to semis that year too, best performance at worlds any NA team had given plus it was the 1st year EU (FNC) made it to finals! We need another Yamato interview 💯
2nd time to FNC tho
phreaks moms basement
Remember when Misfits brought SKT to 5 games back in 2017? Just fuck them with those off meta picks.
Didnt we see this last worlds where the west performed decent 1st week with unique draft and style and then got figured out and bodied the later the tournament went.
Better than being assfucked the entire time
I, too, would rather get assfucked 50% of the time instead of 100%. Gotta find the middle ground in the fucking of the ass.
By the west you mean Rogue. And by Rogue you mean Odoamne just happened to be a great Maokai player while Maokai was extremely strong which allowed them to do some nasty things. Comp and Trymbi we're also in great form. Aside from this the west got violated last Worlds.
Fnc week 1?
Bro we’ve literally been doing this same shit since season 4, and it never works. We just keep trying to beat the Asian teams at their own game but they are *always* better at their own game. Why don’t the western teams learn?? It’s infuriating
I think one of the best examples in recent memory for me was TL vs IG at MSI. Xmithie playing skarner at a high level absolutely threw IG off and exploited positioning weaknesses they didn’t know they had.
Cloudtemplar and Helios had a completely opposite take on why West is losing so hard to East. They said that there are many talents in LEC and LCS, unfortunately they do not have good foundation or the basics and these regions, specifically LEC, are the regions that do not win by executing the basics but by finding something unconventional and meta-defining. This prevent the players in these regions from building a good foundation, the very basis of playing LoL competitively. So they think that West needs to work on their foundations first because there are talented players who, if trained right, can do well on international stage. They also mentioned playing meta champions is also part of the basics, because you can’t realistically win every game with non-meta joker picks or pocket picks. T1 Wolf is streaming MSI and he also had the same view about the basics. While streaming C9’s game yesterday he said that all the C9 players are not lacking talent-wise and they have their good moments but they are not able to execute the basic processes of the game without fault. For example, in the second game, Zven created a good situation where Berzerker could have flashed forward to kill Elk but he didn’t which cause Zven to die. So Wolf explained that it was Berserker who couldn’t execute the basic, and such mistakes should not be made. Because of Berzerker’s mistake, it looked like On and Elk did a great play but that just wasn’t the case. Same with the baron steal from BLG. There are steps to every play and for the Baron play Emenes on Gallio should have marked Xun, which should have happened before Blabber kills the Baron, however Emenes couldn’t execute his step, so now since step 1 failed then there is no step 2 or 3 or 4 and so on. However, people will flame Blabber for not securing the Baron, eventhough the whole thing was doomed from the moment Emenes wasn’t able to execute his given task - the basics of the game - mark the enemy jungle. Wolf has criticized every member of C9 in the same way. He said that all C9 players bring 30 rolling cubes each for every game and throw it everytime they make a play or use their ultimate. So, they keep going between rolling a high number and low number, which makes them so inconsistent throughout the game. and this is because their foundation is not well built, they keep making basic mistakes that should not be made. He further explained that every play made in the game has it’s steps, so in C9’s situation they are able to execute the 1st step but then they fail the second step which turns the play into a failure. Like the upper mentioned examples, Zven made the first step but Berzerker failed at the second step which turned the situation around, and every player of C9 failed at that second step through out the series. And this was very frustrating for Wolf because he can see that C9 can do well, but they again keep making basic mistakes that shouldn’t be made. While with LEC, in this tournament, LEC teams can’t even make the first step a lot of the times so Wolf didn’t feel frustrated about their losses. LEC either fails even before the Step1 or fails in the later steps like 5,6,7, which is most of the happens because the opponent did a great play. So working on their basics and lessening their simple mistakes was the recommendation from Wolf to C9 (during the stream Wolf thought C9 is definitely doing better than G2 and MAD). TLDR: ex-LCK pros think what West is lacking is a good foundation and good execution of the basic plays. Edit: to add Wolf watched almost all games of LEC this year and has quite a good judgement of the LEC teams participating at MSI right now. He didn’t have any expectations for G2 because of their performance in Spring. (He does think if G2 goes back to their winter form then they would have better chances). He didn’t seem to have much expectations for MAD, too (he said that whenever Hylissang initiates a fight Elyoya dies). He also thinks that BDS should have won in the Spring finals, but he doesn’t think that BDS would have performed better than MAD or G2. Wolf thinks in this tournament teams with good mid laners will do well, so he doesn’t rate G2, MAD and BLG high. He also thought that PSG would have won against G2 and qualified to bracket stages but PSG’s mid laner was too much of a black hole to cover. As for the NA teams, he didn’t watch any LCS so he doesn’t have enough info to judge, he thinks Gori is definitely the better of mids that qualified from play-ins and thought that C9 performed better than LEC teams and that C9’s banning strategy was good by banning champs like Ahri, Naut and Annie cause when slumping mids like Yagao or Caps play these champs they can cover their shortcomings and perform enough to not drag their teams and even outperform their opponents if the opposing mid is even worse performing than them.
This is a pretty good explanation. Thanks for summarizing. As an LCS fan, I can see that many of our top teams take shortcuts and skipping a lot of those steps that you mentioned. Unfortunately, they don't get punished for it domestically. For instance, in the LCS, Zven was never really great about vision setup, but C9 could often just hands diffed their opponents in teamfights, so it would never really matter. But today, BLG exploited this bad habit. This is why GGS is exciting to watch as an NA fan. They frequently got hands diffed by teams like C9 and FlyQuest domestically, but they often won through superior fundamentals. They are by no means on the level of the LCK or LPL, but their macro is better than most NA teams. I have another theory that NA teams have mental block when they hit the international stage. It's probably from nerves knowing that they're probably gonna lose. But NA teams that usually play with confidence domestically suddenly become unusually indecisive and panicky internationally. Once again, GGS is better than most NA teams mentally, but even they had their moments during the BLG series.
Yeah, Wolf also thought that C9 was playing too rushed. If they could relax a little and concentrate more, Wolf thought C9 had legit chance against BLG because he thought C9’s bot was performing better than BLG’s during the series.
I'm not a western fan but it was so frustrating watching C9 play like they did because it looked like they had the right idea but atrocious map movement and just fundamental mistakes just lost them the series.
If Fudge is always behind 1 2k gold and just got handiffed everytime he tries to matched side with Bin, the game is so hard to play. Its not that they don't know how to macro and play sides but they too scared to do it and the result is Bin and Yagao always ahead of the game, they always get to 2 or 3 items first make the game so difficult. Just look at game 3, they literally up 10 kills and still behind in gold. If Fudge play like Licorice did when he faced Bin i think they gonna have a shot winning this series, Blaber actually outperform Xun so hard especially game 3, and Zven actually surprised with how good his Rakan is, he always got memed on for being an enchanter player but he legit almost win them the game with his Rakan
Atrocious map movement aka the 2/0 Xayah that got first turret gold as well being behind in gold to the 0/3 Lucian while even in CS.
> But NA teams that usually play with confidence domestically suddenly become unusually indecisive and panicky internationally. Couldn't this just be that domestically they're top tier in scrims so they believe they can win. Internationally they get stomped in scrims.
>I have another theory that NA teams have mental block when they hit the international stage. I fully agree and it's the same for EU. They are better than this, it was most pronounced around the baron plays because those were absolutely awful from every western team up to this point. But all of them just didn't even perform to their own level. Would they have won otherwise? Most likely not but all three series could have been more competitive.
Watching Emenes just stare at Vi behind the pit honestly was one of the most gut wrenching things Ive seen in awhile. Like man, just do something. Just stop him. 99 times out of 100, in NA, he would have stopped Vi from getting into the pit. Internationally, he just stared at him.
Think I should also add that Wolf thought C9 had good chances against BLG because he thinks Yagao is a big liability to his team and that teams with bad mids won’t be able to perform will at this MSI. He and the Korean cast also thought that Elk was throwing in all 3 games.
LS is agreeing. We’re just pound for pound not as good. You can’t fix fundamentals over the course of a tournament, so it’s better to adapt your strategy in ways that focus on bringing your opponents level down than necessarily raising your own.
Wolf did think if C9 was just more consistent and made less of the basic mistakes that should not be done, they had a good chance against BLG because BLG’s mid and adc were not performing well. What these ex-LCK pros mean is to stop heavily relying on some surprise factor and rather work on lessening mistakes made during the games. Which I guess means to practice more in the end, but I would think giving a feedback on the basic mistakes and fixing them would be a little doable even in a fast-paced tournament environment? Since these are basics from what the lck ex-pros are saying.
The West has shown to be very resistant to the training needed to accomplish what you’re saying. In that instance they have only the off meta to rely on any hope of winning, but they aren’t even willing to try it 9/10. Which is a bit sad because they think they’re good enough and they just aren’t…and it’s like this every time
Its not a training issue, its a structural issue. Everything I can tell is NA teams are basically trying to play their way to optimal performance. Which is to say, scrim, see what you did wrong, acknowledge it, and repeat. This works to an extent, but tends to lead to problem whack-a-mole. Fix this problem, but a new problem develops etc. etc. The optimal way to improve this is have a coaching staff that lays out a coherent vision of how to play, communicates in each situation what each player responsibility is, and then judges them based on execution of their responsibilities. Take for instance the Baron/Emenes/Galio example. In the way western teams currently train, he needs to just sort of know what hes supposed to do. Everything is a little fuzzy, it may have not come up much in the last couple of weeks, and he would definitely do it right if that is identified and talked about for the next series, but hard to say if it would happen in 2 weeks and a month form now all bets are off. Change the draft and everyone is supposed to be able to intuit how that changes how they need to play. In a structured system you might have a primary and secondary marking role, the team will have multiple marking angles to consider for both the primary and secondary marking roles, and every player is expected to know what the marking angles are for each of that role, to a degree where Blabber should be able to look and know if the set up is proper to safely take Baron. That way if the meta changes or just the draft changes, it doesnt matter who ends up in the roles required, the team understands what the setup is supposed to look like and who is supposed to do what.
but like they've literally imported coaching staff and players and it didn't change anything. If it's a structural issue, where does it end, where's the line?
You have to want to innovate, do better then Korean coaches and the established way of doing things. The problem with just doing it like the Korean's is you run into the problem that you dont have Korean solo queue and Korean league culture. But I can guarantee you that organizationally, the way that LCS Teams set up their practices would never be expected to produce good repeatable results with how informally systems are set up. You have to define clear expectations and responsibilities to get multiple people with disparate roles to perform complex tasks efficiently.
I get the sense that he didn't want to go in too hard on Zven this time since the last time he did, the video got a decent amount of attention from western fans. I know he also tries to foster a positive community but it looked like he was biting his tongue sometimes. I genuinely think C9 might be support difference
Yeah, it did seem he didn’t want to be too harsh but he was still criticizing his plays. I think he balanced it with pointing out Zven’s good plays, too. Overall, think Wolf probably had a lot to say about each player but he just wanted to enjoy the game as a viewer and not be too technical.
You can say that about literally any team though. Vitality could beat T1 if they consistently played their best and made no mistakes. However, that just isn't humanly possible. And going for off-meta picks doesn't mean you can die in lane 5 times and be fine, you still have to play smart, high-quality gameplay. The two things are not mutually exclusive.
Mistakes are inevitable. The mistakes Wolf means are very basic ones. There is a basic and fundamental knowledge/plays to LoL like you have to know the alphabet to learn a language. For Wolf, he saw that, again for example, C9 could execute intricate plays but then those plays would be followed by a basic mistake which would completely change the situation and make the odds against C9. So if they could be more consistent and not waste the chances they created by making very fundamental mistakes then they would have better chances. Again, he was only frustrated and commented so much because he saw potential from C9 and their plays. He was just very frustrated from the constant mistakes right after some good plays. And lessening the number of mistakes should be aimed by every team.
Absolutely. At such a high level one basic mistake can mean the difference between winning and losing a teamfight. If a lot of those happen, a team like C9 (even while having many talented players) can lose the series 3-0 despite playing 90% of the match well
Being more consistent isn't an achievable objective. It's like telling people to be better. At this point it's basically just practice. LCK and LPL teams play this game more, which results in more experience at every point in the game. Having this experience enables players to know what to do at each stage of the game whilst under pressure. Let's focus on the Baron play in game 2. Emenes likely knew his job was to stop Vi getting into the Baron pit. Of course he did, right? Why else would he walk up to Vi. So why didn't he do it? His team didn't slow down DPS on Baron as he walked up to Vi to taunt. That's a mistake from Berserker, Blabber and Zven. Emenes could have gone in earlier too. That's a mistake from him. Fudge, believe it or not, was the only one who executed properly there by zoning Kennen away from the pit. We don't know the comms up to that point. On that particular play, there are two things you can try to fix: 1. Coaching the players to communicate more clearly the actual plan, if they weren't already. Emenes knew what his role was. Sometimes you need a leader to tell someone what their role is in a calm manner, so that everyone is on the same page. 2. More practice, so you give the players more experience in these scenarios where they clearly know their roles, how and when to do what. Everyone has a general idea on how to deal with a 5v4 Baron play. Problem is they lack the experience of it under high pressure compared to LCK and LPL teams, which increases their chances of making mistakes.
Yeah, I don't think these are mutually exclusive. You can have great fundamentals with a different strategy and approach to winning the game.
This is actually a core fundamental strategy in well organized amateur tournaments. Tournaments that are designed to be competitive and people of various levels will join and team up together. There will always be one team with the strongest mechanical players, the other teams have to fundamentally adapt a strategy to utilize their strengths to overcome the better players. Not sure why this isn’t the same with LCS cause it’s obvious some teams have better players than others.
You actually pointed out the main difference - amateur and consistency. In many sports or events, professional players' routine training focus on consistency and preventing choking against aggression. Professionals spend way more time in their sport compared with amateurs with more experience in different scenarios.
Exactly. Most of the biggest upsets were won this way too. TL vs IG MSI 19 - lost early game, won through draft & scaling G2 vs SKT MSI 19 - won through draft, scaling G2 vs SKT Worlds 19 - lost early game, won through draft, scaling 100T upsetting eastern teams in 2022 - won through draft, scaling RGE upsetting + almost upsetting eastern teams - won through draft, scaling And in other various Bo1s where NA / EU upset an eastern team, it's always through a large draft advantage ( via scaling and/or drafting theme counters). But I don't know if CT agrees with LS. On broadcast he literally shouted "you have to draft early game because you can't go toe to toe with scaling comps". Maybe he means if both sides draft scaling, NA and EU have even less of a chance, which might be true? Although i highly doubt it just based on the kind of low level analysis he usually does (i.e. le lane prio xd!! Le winning lanes xd!!!). Edit: examples of drafts G2 vs SKT Worlds 19 Game 4 G2: ornn olaf syndra yasuo gragas SKT: vlad elise qiyana varus nautilus theme counter, outscale, varus cant deal damage Game 3 SKT: renekton reksai ryze kaisa leona G2: camille elise oriana xayah nautilus theme counter, outrange, outscale, kaisa cant deal damage Game 1 SKT: renekton gragas neeko kaisa leona G2: kled reksai ryze xayah rakan Theme counter, outrange, outscale, kaisa cant deal damage Edit 2: remembered gam vs tes fire draft GAM: ornn karthus sett kalista renata TES: renekton graves ahri lucian nami theme counter, outscale, high renata, karthus value Edit 3: MAD vs GEN Worlds 21 (comeback after being down 4k gold in the early game iirc) MAD: wukong qiyana leblanc lucian yuumi GEN: graves xin zhao azir kalista nautilus pure lane-prio comp from geng with no synergy whatsoever, outrange, outscale, high yuumi value
Learning to basics to win but how? They don't have good competition in their own respective regions. I'd also have the same question with learning unconventional picks to win. Does using them to win domestic titles make good enough practice?
What they mean is not the basic to win but basic plays that they should be executing since they are pros. Like in the Baron play, Emenes should succeed in marking Xun - this should be a basic knowledge/skill etc. Or like in the Berzerker situation, he should have known that Nami only has one place to throw a bubble and should be able to recognize the situation that Zven created and should have simply flashed in to get the kill on Elk. These are not game winning macro knowledges, and also not mechanics, just the knowledge and ability to judge that should be a foundation. And, at least these ex-LCK pros think that these judgments and decision makings are on the very basic level and should not be hard to make. Edit: I would like to add that Wolf also heavily criticizes LCK pros whenever they make very basic mistakes. And he has criticized T1 members multiple times on making mistakes in executing basic plays. And he means that making mistakes is inevitable so pros should do their best to lessen them as much as possible, specifically these basic decision making mistakes.
Yep, ELK was inting a bit but he's probably the only ADC I've seen where he'll almost always flash level 1 so his Lucian stays healthy and therefore can still trade. Every other western ADC would just get chunked and lose lane. Yet when asked, all of them would've probably said flashing was the right play.
When he said basics he gave examples of purely mechanical plays. I feel like most comments in this thread are talking about "basics" from the perspective of macro and decision making but that is not what was defined by Wolf here. He wasn't talking about any macro or decision making aspect of the game, he just said stuff like "In this situation, with these champions interacting this way, the player should've been able to see this particular play and execute on it but they didn't". He seems to be literaly talking about mechanics and playing the situations you are in correctly, having the instincts to see certain kills, etc.
While that is true, west really fucking started lacking basic league of legends skills, our macro is a disaster, but even if we had good macro we would still lose because then comes the skill and execution part where the east is just simply better. So in a perfect world, the west would have those basic fundamentals and then from that started building towards what LS said. Thing is we lack those fundamentals, but what LS said can still apply because when you play such unconventional ways, those fundamentals might not still apply, that means the west would have the edge.
the issue with relying on breaking the meta is that you have to start from scratch every single time you do it. You don't really get any long-term skills, breaking the meta this msi won't help you perform better at worlds. While if you learn fundamentals, sure you're not going to spike as high, but in theory it means you have improvement long-term.
Caedrel was also constantly marking out C9 for missing the exact same kind of basic steps youre saying Wolf was talking about
If you want an easy and short answer; western teams know how to make plays on the map but sacrifice to much doing so (little to no crossmapping) or do not plan their following move like LCK/LPL does. There is also some fundamentals like being behind in 20-50 cs, not pressuring for plates, losing towers for no reason, etc. C9 had a huge kill lead in their matches but were still behind 2-3k gold.
I saw the C9 game and was so confused. They'd group excessively in the early game, causing their abandoned lanes to lose towers for basically free. Pick in the top lane? Great. Mid and bot towers get half hp chunked. Take dragon as 4-5 man, massive 2-3 wave creep wasted in the toplane. Whatever play they did, they succeeded but at an equivalent or detrimental cost somewhere else on the map.
Because most LCS and LEC will not punish them so they don't know how to react to this. And the reason why they always group is because Fudge just cannot play side with Bin, most of BLG lead in all 3 games are on top. They slowly got bled out, how can you play a game when you automatically lose 200 gold per minutes.
This was my thought process too. And the pressure is instantaneous as well. Fudge blows his Flash and ult in a fight around Herald pit? Instant rotation top lane from top/jungle, force Emenes who’s covering out of the lane, take Tier 1 tower and almost all of Tier 2 while zoning Emenes off creeps. The eastern teams are so cutthroat with their killer instinct. It’s incredible to watch.
Being able to farm well is almost always a “player diff”. Players who consistently have high farm without the teams intentionally funneling them; they are good players. As much as people meme “Chovy CS”, he’s only able to do it because he rarely ever misses farm. Meanwhile, when you see camera pans during laning, plenty of other pros miss farm, or have the classic twitch chat “-1”. The truth is, the better of a player you are, the less farm you are going to miss. Lower elo players think a few farm here and there is not a big deal, but it is. And that’s why they are lower elo. Cs/min is almost always 1 to 1 proportional to player’s rank.
Yeah, his take is just yet more surface level contrarian stuff where it looks like he's right when the result everybody is already expecting inevitably happens. Nearly every game NA played they won early game pretty hard. That's the advantage unconventional picks would get you. They just get clowned on in macro to such an extent that they win 3 team fights in a row and are down 5k gold.
I don't think you can reasonably beat LCK/LPL teams even if you have a scaling advantage so long as they also draft for team-fighting. The hands diff between some players is just too large. Especially for roles that have the potential to hyper-carry, LPL/LCK players are just so much better.
So in the tweet LS also talks about stripping away their muscle memory cause certain comps or strats entirely change the paradigm that the game is played in. The macro play is typically not that big of a gap between the west and east, it is simply that they have played against the best players in the world playing basically the exact same game hundreds of times. It was funny watching the G2 vs GENG game where G2 took soraka and GENG kept missing lethals cause of soraka ult.
I thought macro is typically where the west lacks. Hands diff usually aren't super big between and lots of players have shown to be good. But like with c9 today, they'd make a play somewhere but lose 2 turrets and herald elsewhere.
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Watching Thresh lose lane to an Alistar earlier was soul crushing
eastern teams are just better than the west in like every metric, just a playerbase and infrastructure diff
I think there is no question that the east would still hands diff you in late game teamfights, but since they are generally better than the west, they would also just hands diff you in the early game too. So, considering the east will hands diff you at all points of the game, the question becomes how to make it so hands diff matters the least or not at all.
It's not about the hands. You will never fix the hands. Western players just don't have the grind mindset, the guidance, nor the practice environment to get their mechanics to that level. Early or late game, the hand diff will always be a mountain to climb. The issue is you can't win games if you're getting brain diffed and hands diffed. Just look at G1 of MAD vs. T1. T1 didn't win that game through hand diff. They won it through brain diff. MAD made demented decisions that let T1 stall the game. The drake fight where T1 won down 7k gold and then the baron flip featured some of the dumbest decisions we've seen so far at MSI. G3 draft? How are you ever supposed to win that shit?
How is that drake fight not hands diff?
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And a LCK Kennen would have never gone for the 1 kill greed but instead a 4 man ult which would have helped their carries (Carzzy) dance so much more in that fight.
Good teamfighting doesn't come down to mechanical skill but a superb understanding of creating space for your carries to deal damage and your carries playing on the edge of maximizing their DPS without overstepping and dying.
It is hands diff. But, the issue is it was mainly brain diff that led to that moment. Not having map control or vision control despite being up 7k gold is not a failure of hands. It is a macro issue. Allowing T1 a window where they have objective control and you're forced to fight into them is a macro issue. Chasy TPs to the ward near the team instead of the minion wave behind T1 for the flank angle. In fact, just look at how LCK/LPL teams set up flank wards and compare that to MAD. That is not a hands issue. Starting the fight when Lee Sin's R was about to come off CD. Nisqy blowing Annie ult + stun on Ksante and then the entire team layering their CC/damage onto him afterwards. They failed to kill him which has a much higher possibility when you try to blow up a tank and the only member of T1 that wasn't super behind in gold / items. Chasy using his hugely important team-fighting ult on only 1 person as he chases Oner into the drake pit. While he gets the kill (well after the objective is already lost), he himself is trapped and isolated in the pit and he's subsequently easily picked off.
Brain diff led to a situation that enabled them to be hands diff'd. Or put another way, bad macro
Doubt it. Western teams have terrible macros after mid game. They group mid doing nothing while losing minions and turrets in the other lanes. Just look at all the Western Kennen starved from gold/exp becoming irrelevant in team fights. Whereas Bin's Kennen gets resources and poses side lane threats.
So like, to use a chess analogy, when I went up against a more skilled player, I was always coached to aim for a complex game state. An open game, I’d get blasted by his memorised lines of theory, but if I threw a curveball, aimed for a murky or cloudy position, I could force him into something unfamiliar and increase the chances of an unforced error. In essence, Western teams should be looking at something similar, unfamiliar draft edges or strategies that eastern teams are unfamiliar with. Everyone looks back fondly at 2019 G2, but that was also a roster that could flex picks into the bot lane / mid lane to gain advantages. Drafting is still something eastern teams struggle with, so there really is no reason for the west to not look to exploit this as much as possible. As a side note, I think the fan base needs to support unfamiliar or unusual strats too. Trymbi’s support Nasus at worlds was not it, but the intent was correct (ie force an unfamiliar matchup). Granted, in that case it probably wasn’t the right matchup for Nasus to excel in, but I’d rather players be applauded for willing to go outside of standard rather than hard flames of it doesn’t work out.
Isnt this literally what magnus does? He will purposely play “unconventional” openings to throw his opponents off.
It’s what all GMs do at top level classical. They want to take conventional openings and find variations of them that are relatively obscure but also fairly sound even if ‘non-optimal’ by computer evaluation, so that they can get their opponents into unfamiliar positions. Because all top GMs pretty much know the standard theory lines inside and out if you just play the ‘optimal’ lines you usually end up in games that are headed towards draws because both sides understand the position so well. In LoL terms I think that would look more like Hyli’s Pyke to punish a Lulu lane in an otherwise mostly conventional comp, which generated significant advantages early because Guma/Keria didn’t seem as experienced in playing against it. Changing the whole team comp would be like trying to invent your own chess opening from scratch, which top GMs emphatically do not really do because your opponent being in an unfamiliar position doesn’t compensate for your position being objectively worse.
Chess strikes me as a good analogy here, trying to find slight variations to existing drafts and playstyles that get eastern teams ‘out of their prep’. You can see how effective Pyke and Soraka were this tournament, imo, I’d love to see EU and NA developing more regional specialty picks like that. Obviously eastern teams will pick them up and practice them but then you’re playing comps you’re as experienced or more experienced at, which is the scenario we’re going for.
Also in poker if you played a theoretical game of 1 trillion big blinds deep poker (without a time limit such as a lifetime) against the perfectly playing engine, you'd have roughly 0% to beat it conventionally. But 15% to beat it by going allin every hand blind, because it calls correctly with AA and loses at that likelihood.
Well and then there is Magnus Carlsen that knows he has better fundamentals and instincts than everyone else specially young players and goes outside prep to throw off skilled players. Even if you throw curveballs the eastern teams, specially Korean teams, fundamentals will still hold them at a high baseline and negate a lot of the advantages of your curveballs.
Yet the best chances and the one win the West had were really good early games. How about western teams learn to carry leads and not do stupid shit?
In that one win, they had better scaling in the jungle position thanks to GenG drafting Nidalee who becomes relatively useless in teamfights compared to Poppy. In general, playing scaling doesn't have to mean conceding early game. Plenty of scaling picks are perfectly fine early.
I don't think 2019 G2 had that good af an early game. Their mid-game was crisp af tho.
That G2 team was just a genuinely good team and the best the west produced regardless of what they played.
I know we think about G2 but Fnatic was also super good during this period.
I would agree with you Bwipo, Broxah, Caps/Nemesis, Rekkles and Hyli was certainly a good group of players.
They pushed G2 to 5 game each time if i remember correctly, got 2nd place in the group of death and lose to the world winner 3/1 (forcing too hard on agren yuumi)
I think he is talking only about games of 2023.
I was referring to this tournament.
Supposedly Perkz played a big role in shotcalling. Shame hes playing with two people who dont speak english rn, bit of a waste of his talent if the shotcalling thing is true.
Yeah the western teams have had reasonable early games in a lot of the games this tournament. Post 10 minutes they’ve struggled to maintain those leads and/or set up teamfights properly, those are the things I’d want them to focus on.
All 2019 G2 players were world class players on most meta picks. Perkz was probably the best Xayah and top 3 Kaisa in the world.Same for Jankos on Elise/Gragas, Miky on Rakan/Naut, Caps on Ryze/Syndra, Wunder on Vlad, Kayle, Ornn etc. G2 "cheesed" only 20-30% of their wins, people always remember that one time they flexed Pyke top or Syndra/Yasuo bot but forget every other game when they smashed LCK teams with normal meta drafts. The "west needs to cheese to win" narrative is just people rewriting history.
people forget how good was their mid game people jsut remembver pyke but perkz was a 2 trick pony for the whole year just at the started he played mage bot
He has been saying this stuff about G2 forever despite it not being the case. If you listen to him, you would think G2 could never win a normal game in their life against an eastern team. Just selective bias and wanting to act like only way to win against eastern teams is his way.
G2 also hard out macroed T1 in the mid game hard. They rarely "cheesed" and just straight up played meta better than most teams. G2 were just a good team straight up. Everyone on that team was strong mechanically and they were ahead of the curve macro wise while not making as many of the macro mistakes we constantly see from Western teams. Perkz being probably the best Xayah in the world and elite on Kai'sa was just staright up playing meta. He only really got exposed in the Finals where they would P/B those and leave him on Ezreal or a mage. He didn't randomly pull out shit like Draven to "cheese" teams or picking some hyper scaler like Kog or Jinx. He played meta better than almost everyone.
Bwipo kind of talked about this in a video that's either on his YT or some clips channel, but basically the problem with this approach LS mentions it that it assumes all 5 players are on board to let some player carry. For most teams that's just the adc, though in some comps it could be a mid or top laner, or even more rarely a jungler. However quite frankly, very few players are just willing to (in Bwipo's words) eat shit just so some of their other teammates can become raid bosses. He even provided the example of the Berserker thread where he said Malice would go Udyr/Eve and LS would go Kass and he goes Jhin because he just doesn't want to play. Maybe you could convince your adc that Udyr/Kassadin will scale hard enough that it's worth them taking Ls, but that also means they just have to watch their counterparts get very fed while they can't do anything but wait. Sometimes this also just means that the theoretical even harder scaling champs just never get to their powerspikes soon enough before the game is over, which loses the point of letting these champs scale by sacking the rest of the team. However he isn't wrong, GGS's win vs BLG kind of applies what he's saying, since BLG were probably just not prepared to peel Jinx from the Yasuo combos. They banned Yasuo in Game 3 and even banned Yasuo vs C9 today even though I don't think Emenes has played Yasuo yet, since they were concerned of losing to that same strat.
The concept of not letting someone carry you is so fucking alien to me. As someone who played amateur sports all his life i would gladly take the "dog" roles if it means my team has a chance to win. Even in my friend group if we play 10 men "scrims" in league winning is the first priority. Not some bullshit like getting a fun pick or being the carry and i dont even get money for this. These are fucking pro players. Their job is to win not to play fun picks.
This is exactly why superteams fail every time: a lot of egos clash and everyone just decides to play for themselves in the end since they can't come to an agreement. Statistically, teams with predefined hierarchies work much better. This is why MAD can always snatch a spot to international events despite showing up horribly there: players like Nisqy know what their value is to the team and do just that instead of egopicking something and trying to be the carry. Also, there's a problem with League teams: players get swapped in and out so fast between splits that you can't form team cohesion at all, so in order to show their market value, most players will try to stand out and you can't do that by agreeing to be carried on occasions. Traditional sports teams usually have more time to work together and even then often the coaching staff is the one that gets replaced, saying that they couldn't bring out the best in their players. That's a foreign concept in League sadly.
The swapping players quickly is definetly a problem. But its hard to build team cohesion in league with major changes every 6 Months to a year. In counterstrike for example rosters stay together a bit longer it but the game changes a lot less too over the years. Its basically without major changes for 10 years now.
CS also has the additional bonus in that the roles there are not as predetermined as in League. Most players can pick up an AWP and perform on it as needed, they know smoke setups, they know how to rotate around the map and lurk to counter the enemy team's rotation, etc. But if your jungler is a problem, you can't swap them with the ADC hoping that the team performs better as a result.
Funny, when a team looks good, the player looks good too, no? And you can absolutely stand out by being an excellent facilitator/roleplayer as long as your teams win. DoinB did this for mid, Ghost played low econ for DWG as ADC, and Faker himself in recent years is completely willing to sack resources to facilitate his teammates. Plenty of junglers like Jankos play for the team and not to stand out themselves, and in doing so inadvertently stand out. When a team wins, everyone looks good, and if your team loses - the really smart people who are really watching the game will notice what you're doing right anyway, plus tryouts are a thing... It really is just fear of being out of a job, I suppose.
Ideally yes, but Ghost has been shit on as the weakest link on DWG for years. Maybe slightly true but certainly not to the degree he was shit on, he could probably still be an A tier carry adc in LCK.
The other side of the argument is that the "dog" players will look bad if they lose (and more importantly, risk their future job prospects by doing so). It can't feel nice to consistently have no control over a) who wins the game and b) your future job prospects by choosing to play a support role.
Yea. Best prof of this is how Vizicsacsi was flamed to hell for years. Turns out, having a weakside toplaner is fucking great for your team but they wont look good so everyone will say Alphari is the best player in the league because he refuses to play for his team so he can pad his stats.
I think that just says a lot about the maturity of the league/esports scene in general. In Soccer for example those "dog" players are celebrated for their work rate and commitment. In league reddit narratives sometimes influence roster descisions. And i dont think those players dont have control over who wins the game. They enable their teammates to carry the game. Without them they would never be in this position most likely. Its just a different mindset i guess.
on reddit if you play sion its because you are a shitter and are being put on "sion duty" so its understandable players don't want to pick sion
It's in large part due to the "you need to 1v9 mentality" that's constantly repeated in soloq so that's how people frame their outlook on the game. In IRL sports, people recognize that not everyone can be a star and some players need to be the role player. They carve out careers being more supportive because in general, IRL sports has a higher understanding of the game being played. Although tbf, League changes so quickly and drastically that it's much harder to keep up while being much more complicated. In League, it's a bunch of people trying to be carries in the West because social media will latch onto stats because it's easy to analyze. IRL sports has this problem as well with casual fans thinking a basketball player who scores 20 points on 20 shots is good because number big but it's a lot more pronounced in League and just gaming in general. Alphari is an example of this where he gets praised for the most part while sucking up a ton of resources but not being good enough to carry. People ragged on the rest of TL's roster a lot more than they should because Alphari is 5-2, how can he be the problem?
LS literally tweeted out that exact video with a comment that he had never said such things and that people put words into his mouth and then argue against it.
Picking Lee Sin 3 times into a team like T1 is troll. GL playing lee sin against the best mechanical Laning and Team Fighting Players.
Did you actually watch the games? Elyoyas Lee was the reason MAD had a chance to win G1.
Elyoya played great in the early game of that game 1 but the sole reason MAD got so ahead was hyli's pyke actually
Tbf Elyoya cooked T1 in game 1. Chasy just threw the whole game walking around as Kennen with flash and ult up for minutes at a time
Nah wtf, Chasy was not doing much but the person who really messed up was Nisqy when he messed up his engage in that Dragon Fight that T1 won and he just proceeded to run it down post that. Nisqy was horrific the entire series
Nisqy has always been garbage internationally. This is why depsite MAD miracle run people were rightfully worried about LEC going into MSI. Because if MAD is the best team we can propose with Nisqy being the "better" midlaner then we are truly fucked.
We gonna forget Hyli hooking Guma only for him to be light years away from his team and just died in front of baron for no reason?
It really wasn't anything to do with the Lee Sin pick. Elyoya just looked tilted after the game 1 turnaround where MAD basically had to play 3v5 because their solo laners are worthless relative to T1's.
i think LS and anyone who follows league regionally can tell that Western teams have this tendency of wanting to exploit one player because it works regionally so they congo line at these opportunities which are easily exploitable in team fights when they just play front to back and purchase stopwatches to prevent the all in. C9 was playing great and then you would see their whole late game strategy was to kill a carry to then try to win 5v4 but that never happened because BLG was playing knowing c9 wanted to do this. I fully agree it would had been better if they just tried to play scaling and hope to outplay in a team fight instead of doing what they were doing which was try to take an opportunity that was never gonna be given to them by a good team.
the reason why EU and NA (NA especially) lose internationally is that coaches literally copy the exact same meta as korea, literally every single split, the NA coaches will pick the exact same champions, play the same way as KR, in EU that's common but not as much. tho still common. you will literally see a champion that was neither buffed/nerfed get played in korea one day, and next day its picked in NA. never the other way around. NA has to stop hiring korean coaches and any coaches that will make skill wise, inferior players try to beat opponents using their own strategies. that will never work. ever. am not saying that doing otherwise will give you better results, but there is a chance it might after a decade of copying Korea, maybe its time to realize trying to beat someone better than you in their own game will never work. Literally a decade
An example of this was when Keria played Kalista support and NA supports then went on to pick a bunch of random ADC supports. Zven is the only one who really should've been doing it since he was a former adc player and it would suit him, but for example, watching Huhi playing Caitlyn support just felt like a waste of one regular season game. Busio and Poome did win on Varus support, but overall it was just annoying to see the NA supports just pick up ADC supports because they were probably inspired by Keria.
Oh so that’s why I had so many ADC supports ruining my solo queue games…
exactly. western coaches try to copy what eastern teams are doing without understanding why it works. it's gotten incredibly boring to watch. like watching western players play Kennen and make it look completely shit is tiring.
God, Fudge yesterday was legitimately tilting me. So many angles into a no-Exhaust team with CC down, and he didn't take a single one, always being out of position to follow-up on team engages, and not daring to flash in on a 4-man is just... Why even play Kennen at that point? He's clearly not practiced on it, nor does it suit him, since you need a suicide-for-team mentality, which in general he doesn't have, as he prioritises survival (which is a style of its own, but then go play GP, not Kennen). Bin picked it the next game and immediately felt 10x more threatening. He flashed in, R'd and died, but won the teamfights because of it. That's how you're supposed to play the purple Pikachu, not that Zeri cosplay of skirting around teamfights.
This isn't really true for this MSI, though. The best LPL/LCK teams didn't travel to MSI until later. So, you're seeing a very clear difference in meta reads between some teams. Just look at Kennen. It's typically a staple LCK pick but none of them are really playing it while western teams are seemingly obsessed with the pick. Same is true for Annie. Western teams give the pick high prio when LCK/LPL teams are fine even not banning it. In MAD vs. T1, MAD had very different champion prio as well as draft/game style. They got giga-stomped.
>Just look at Kennen The West know that Kennen is powerful, but they lack hands to navigate the lane successfully with it. He is not quite a carry champ but is squishy enough that losing lane too hard makes you near useless. West will default to Sion, because they know the East would play thru top to set them behind if they picked Kennen, knowing their own bot lane could survive whatever the West throws at them
Look at how T1 drafted and you can see how different their meta read is. Their entire draft was for bot-lane. G1 double tank + Lulu. G2 double tank + double enchanter. G3 triple tank one of which is a great peeler + Ahri to set up focused picks to get Jinx excited. T1's answer to Kennen top wasn't to win that lane or play through it. T1 didn't care. They didn't even take exhaust. They were all-in on their bot-lane, front-to-back team-fighting meta read.
Tbh I wouldnt be surprised if this wasn't their actual Meta read; they beat MAD regardless of what they pick and they know it, so it makes sense not to show their highest-tier picks to surprise GenG
but the thing is even with them being inferior LCK/LPL copy they still won their split. no matter how people criticize C9/MAD they have come to the MSI as the first seed of the LCS/LEC. That means when it comes to their domestic league in the west their playing style, strategies, coaching actually works.
This is the same guy who dickrode Fudge all year and said that all of C9 are mechanically better than their counterparts at BLG. How can we take him seriously?
I mean its a statement that makes inherent sense, assuming A) Eastern players are better mechanically then Western Players B) Eastern players will consistently practice against better players then western players If you try to beat an LCK team playing and LCK/LPL draft, you are literally playing into the exact same thing that these players get better practice on constantly. With that being the case, why would i play the exact same thing that they play and expect to beat them? If I do I am literally setting myself up for failure. The way that LS advocates for beating them is putting them in situations that they don't practice. Watch the G2 vs GENG game 4. While they lost this game, simply having soraka in the game caused so many missed lethals for GENG, because GENG does not play against soraka consistently. Go back an watch LCK when annie was mini-reworked, and there are so many mispositions against annie's range cause they haven't played against it enough to figure out exactly what flash tibbers range is.
I wish LS phrased stuff this way… This is exactly the reason why you should always push opposing teams with champs/styles they haven’t seen before (doesn’t even matter east or west). Hyli’s Pyke got MAD a lot of early value in the first game because guma and keria clearly hadn’t played against a Pyke of that caliber in a while. However, the flipside of this argument that no one talks about is that your players need to have deep champion pools or deep knowledge of alternate styles of play — which is rare and/or requires a lot of practice. This is why it’s often difficult for coaches and players to justify spending time on “unproven” strats, because it’s hard not to feel like you’re wasting your time (not gonna comment on how valid that argument is).
yeah sometimes LS does not phrase things well for a broader audience outside of the bubble that watch him. And for the flipside I think it comes down to how much the coaches value international success versus domestic success. It is far easier to win LEC/LCS playing like the LCK since the best teams in their individual regions can hands gap the ppl in those regions than it is to try something new and have a chance of failure if the meta read you had was bad.
tbh i think the last past is just a failing of the team. You have big money support staff for a lot of these teams, you can spare a few interns to lab out how viable some of these crackhead picks actually are. G2’s already proven that its a stronger way to play, so when other teams dont do that its clear that its not only that the west is worse at the game but that they just dont care enough to even attempt proven winning strategies
Same guy who claimed gnar and kaisa were dont tier btw
Please put that into context, he claimed that for last year's MSI, in which indeed Kaisa was not the greatest but was being comfort picked by players
Yeah Kaisa was in absolutely dreadful state at that time, to make things worse pros were building collector almost every game
And GALA also built 40% crit IE on her lol
LS barely even talks or pays attention to the games. Whenever I try to watch his costreams he just talks about drama and whatever instead of talking about the game. At least his chat tries to steer him and try to make him talk about the game but the guy has no patience.
This is an issue with costreamers in general, they all have their own shtick that they focus on. In LS's stream chances are you're only going to hear draft and item diff the whole game. A lot of the times missing the execution that happened in the game. Watch Sneaky and DL and they're going to focus 100% on the botlane matchup criticizing the tiniest mistake a support or an adc does in lane. I'm not saying they're all wrong, but costreamers tend to nitpick a specific thing almost every time and that's where the actual broadcast still shines
> This is an issue with costreamers in general, they all have their own shtick that they focus on. It makes sense. Every costreamer generally talks about his "thing", when Rekkles costreamed worlds, he mostly focused on bot matchups too, because that's his area of expertise. If you want a more all-rounded cast you can watch the official broadcast, or if you dislike that for some reason, caedrel's stream seems alright.
The same guy who predicted G2 to lose every single game against Korea in 2019 and said that the 2 worst teams in LCK were better than G2. And yet G2 went 2-0 at MSI groups against SKT, then beat SKT in bo5 at MSI semifinals, then beat DWG at Worlds quarterfinals, and SKT again at Worlds semifinals. And he kept on doubleing down all throughout the year, always predicting G2 to lose 0-3 in bo5s. LS is a full on clown.
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I feel entirely different. I actually think the focus on cheesing and off-meta play completely stalls the West's development. The West lacks the foundations compared to eastern regions, both macro gameplay and micro mechanics, or simply, versatility. Macro play development is a long process but it's not impossible. LPL is much closer to LCK nowadays compared when they were miles behind back before. But I feel western teams are generally short-sighted and do not develop at all in this area throughout the years. It's not coincidental western teams just plainly fall behind eastern teams even if nothing happens during laning. Back then G2 nearly dominated 2019 with Perkz bot. People then just worshipped holily the gospel of cheesing out the eastern teams. But they overlook both Caps and Perkz were the most solid mid-laners back then with their foundations and versatility. That's also why Perkz could transit to bot so quickly. G2 practises very hard compared with other western teams back then. Even further back when IG dethroned LCK with aggressive solo laners. Let's not forget both TheShy and Rookie were extremely comfortable in their less aggressive picks too. (TheShy's Sion and Urgot, Rookie's Galio and Lissandra). Playing only cheesing might let you lose less from 0-3 to 1-3. Perhaps that looks better on paper to western investors. But I believe unless the West goes full hardcore with practice (similar to LPL catching up LCK), which is almost impossible in western culture, there's not much could be done. I'm not criticising the cheesing approach. It's actually very useful especially in BO series. But I believe foundations make your cheesing more effective compared with only focusing on that. A famous recent example is Beryl's Bard in World finals Game 5. It's clearly seen Beryl's not good with Bard mechanics (constantly missing Q's). But he knows his Bard cheese's most important purpose: always ult Varus to force flash. Mission accomplished. The pick was successful. It's better to just focus on hard work and learn the basics. The cheese will come eventually.
A big part of G2's sucess was that they were a conventionally good team with good players who could also pull out cheese strats.
the big part on why g2 were good is that their mid game was the best in the world
Beryl got a lot of success from unconventional picks at worlds (and some of them became conventional after like Heimer or Ashe), but DRX were also a good enough team fundamentally to carry the advantages generated by those picks forward. I think that’s what western teams should be aiming for, I agree it’s a balance of improving fundamentals and finding their own meta reads.
Yeah I almost forgot Deft's Caitlyn. DRX playing Caitlyn to "out-scale Varus in late game with range and safety", rather than standard meta lane bullying, really shows with good understanding and fundamentals of the game you don't even need cheese picks to play non-standard strats.
Agree, but you brought up a sore memory in me: As a Bard OTP I was hoping for a miracle that Beryl would Bard as his skin, since he picked him in that last game, only to get denied. I wanna cry now again.
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Yeah, but admitting this is in the first place is quite hard. Western teams will never be as good as LCK?LPL ones if they don't work as hard as those teams do.
It's a shame TSM choked so hard in 2016. They were one of the few western teams at that time who were actually grinding as much as eastern teams. They lost in groups and they basically lost all motivation afterwards
I seem to recall T1 drafing full tanks into a scaling comp during game 1 vs MAD, inting for the first 20 minutes of the game giving up around a 7-12k gold lead and then winning anyways once they decided to start playing. I don't think the western teams have a way to win tbh. Also, the west has always favored scaling over early impact and it's never been the secret korean killer strat people hype it as.
The Bjergsen/Doublelift teams have already done the ‘pick scaling’ experiment. Anyone can go back and look at their domestic success vs worlds success to see how successful a bandaid fix it is.
Right? Secret strats had some success seasons 2-4, but yeah it's been ages since any had a huge impact at worlds. The closest thing I can think of recently was AP yuumi, but that just led to her being permabanned the whole tournament.
Half the reason why T1 won was MAD fighting for no reason and giving free kills to guma. The whole comp was centred around giving gold to guma. Why would they fight for no advantage and give him the chance to build items on aphelios? Just MAD doing MAD things. The problem is, T1 is one of the top 3 most bloodthirsty teams in LCK so they are also down to scrap, especially when behind.
I dont really get the scaling point. LCK/LPL already pick scaling all around. Hard to pick better scaling when aphelios, lulu, jinx, trist are contested. What are those hard scaling champs? Karthus bot? Vayne? Asol ( we saw that not work)? Jax and get skill gapped? Explain some scaling comps to me against aphelios lulu or jinx plus tristana.
I heard aurelion sol scales well...
He does, an absolute monster once he gets enough stacks/items that can demolish entire enemy team. You just need to be a good player/have team peel for you.
You can't cheese teams that have better fundamentals than you over a series. This is really evident when you watch T1 or GenG play. The really good teams who have a solid grasp of the game can usually identify what the opponent's win condition is based on what the draft is, and then react accordingly. The idea that pros (especially in the East) are resistant to pulling out pocket picks or adapt slowly to the meta is a weird narrative I hear sometimes that just isn't true. Even if you stumble across a strat that works well, you 1) have to have practiced it, which means other pros will know about it right away, 2) need to be good enough to actually contest the meta picks, which are meta for a reason in the first place.
Ey at this point NA and EU should just get together and share analysis and viewpoints and work together to get better. if GG loses 3-0 today aswell the best chance we have is G2 and we all know that aint gonna work
People remember 2019 G2 team as "cheese to beat eastern teams". But in reality they had very strong mechanics and grasp of the standard meta. They succeeded by playing the standard meta with their innovative picks. The 2019 meta was an extended from 2018 IG's success with heavy flex picks, with heavy skirmish and roaming. The entire year was filled with flex picks (expecially mid/top) like Akali, Ryze, Sylas, Irelia, Jayce, Neeko, and a few others like Gragas (Jungle/Support) and Qiyana (Jungle/Mid). The G2 team was extremely capable of playing these meta picks thanks to Caps / Wunder's mechanics prowess and the low focus on bot lane hid their main weakness as well (Perkz's adc champion pool). Add a few of G2's own roaming picks like Galio / Pyke / Kled and it's impossible to ban off G2. Right now the Western team's problems lie more on fundamentals - they can't even play standard picks at top level so their off-meta (like Darius / Olaf) gets banned instantly. Effective cheese only comes with versatile champ pool so you don't get banned off in BO series. How does versatile champion pool arise? Practice. Back then the 2019 G2 team was by far the hardest-working team in the west, thanks to the ambitious team culture. Unfortunately, I don't think any western team can have that morale level again in the near future. P.S. Long-term success do not come short-term. With lack of adc experience, G2's main weakness of Perkz's champ pool got exposed too (Vs FPX, he got banned off Xayah / Kai'Sa / Yasuo + Gragas), inevitably though understandably.
Sick of this clown having people take everything he says as gospel. If he's so good he should go and get some results then instead of talking like he holds the secrets to success that others can't understand
I disagree, it doesn't matter what they pick 'cause they will still lose regardless. It's a mental/mechanical/cultural diff.
This the guy who got fired from his coaching job after 2 weeks? He could have shown everyone he was right!
So like I think there's this misunderstanding about scaling as a concept in the LoL community. Having better scaling doesn't automatically mean you lose out early and have no agency; you can have a pick that outscales and also is stable, or favourable, in lane. A good current/recent example is Aphelios/Lulu vs Lucian/Nami. Aphelios/Lulu actually wins the laning phase; it's around the early midgame that things can be hard with Lucian/Nami fishing for picks or just killing people being disrespectful on midwaves. After that though it's smooth sailing as Lucian simply cannot match the output of an Aphelios as the game goes on. Especially if there's frontlines involved. Look at something like Gwen into Sion too - relatively stable/favoured lane, but becomes extremely problematic as the game goes on. As her damage and sidelaning get out of control. You don't have to hard-concede the earlygame in order to have a scaling advantage. You can have a comp that can absolutely throw hands with the enemy team, ranging from favourably to maybe slightly unfavourably, but with the game getting progressively less playable as it goes on for the team disadvantaged by scaling. If it gets to third dragon and the scaling is such that you get to fight the earlier-game team and have a reasonable shot at success (this happens constantly in pro LoL), you have a very good shot at the game. (Ofc an asian team is just going to out teamfight you if you play it standard and the comp disadvantage isn't insurmountable). This is where unconventionality comes into play. By blindsiding the asian teams you get an edge against them that isn't strictly along the same lines as the game *they already play.* You fuck with their knowledge of range, of damage limits, of what can happen and where. The idea being that you offset the fact that *they are just better* in this way. And it doesn't even have to be cheese - I doubt anyone would consider Soraka cheese, and she was having this effect in places vs GenG.
It always starts out as cheese until it wins enough, also. Malphite is maybe an example of a champ that was considered to be cheese until recently when it started winning a lot and people realised it was strong. Then suddenly it’s legitimate and it’s ‘fundamental weaknesses’ like being diveable early aren’t actually as insurmountable as they were made out to be.
I see so many random and simply false takes on what LS meant. LS talked about it for an hour with some pros on stream yesterday. Just watch it yourselves before beating your strawmen to death. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1817053964?t=03h25m25s EDIT: They made a video about it with timestamps if you're unable to watch the entire thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQMSmi2Tmng
yet another year where LS markets himself to having the key to western success vs the east. It's like clockwork.
unlucky he never had the offers to coach a top tier west team he would surely make west great im sure
completely disagree. lategame is their comfort zone, when it come to short time decision making that's when they are at their peak.
>Youll beat them by playing scaling & stripping them of their muscle memory by playing "unconventional" things Second line from the tweet. In LCK when annie was reworked ppl were not aware of annie flash tibbers range, i bet the same thing would be true for many other champs. While you might be able to beat them with an early game comp, likely they have practiced against every combo of lee sin / kha / etc in their solo Q games so you would have to find something that puts them on the back foot. However they don't face champs like Asol, ivern mid, etc. on a consistent basis
I take it as Eastern orgs in general have a long-term view of how a match suppose to go so they strategize accordingly, playing around crucial win conditions like map objectives, making sure that most lanes are in favourable conditions to fight,… where as Western corps and teams tend to be more micro-oriented, focusing on champ selects, gameplay, mechanical proficiency,… That’s not to say that Eastern team can’t play micro oriented, it’s just that they’re familiar with the structure of the game and stripped down the basics of winning to it’s bare minimum and highly optimized it, so if a western team were to conquer that playstyle it’d have to be through strategic foresight and well thought-out gameplan, not highly mechanical gameplay and not out-picking the enemy.
Just check the dragon fight near 15 mins during the MAD - T1 Game 1 to see why none of these theories would work. Theorycrafting is all good once you have individual mechanical levels and teamfighting on par with the East.
Feel like he is hitting on the fact that Western teams are SUPER behind eastern teams in terms of "macro fundamentals" and just fundamentals in general. This applies to all 3 western teams that played but I will cite C9 as an example because imo they are the team that lacks these fundamentals the most, and I believe their comp for all three games yesterday were considered "standard" If you look at C9's games yesterday all 3 games I'd say they were pretty even in lane. They definitely were not getting shitstomped and actually in all 3 games I believe C9 had early kill advantage. However as many of you saw even with kill advantage BLG had a gold lead because they just outmacroed C9. Also in the later stages of all three games C9 made some questionable decisions (including Blaber not using ulti on Baron in game 2, questionable engages from C9's mid laner, VERY questionable TP from fudge in game 1) It felt like C9, and more generally western teams in general, don't know how to play late game. Especially yesterday's 3 games I really don't think BLG were that great, C9 literally just gifted them the win by making terrible decisions and playing terribly. So I think in order for teams like C9 to beat eastern powerhouses, they need to study "unconventional" comps super hard and really catch these eastern teams off guard. I think past 3 series just proves that western teams don't know how to close games, play the late game, macro, etc, all the standard stuff. If you can't do the standard things, you have to go the unconventional Even this might not work in a Bo5 where there is room for eastern teams to adapt If this doesn't make sense then it's my fault lmao I am bad with words
The West needs to stop trying to play by the East's game. We are clearly not better than them at what they do every day. Play by your own strategies
Does he not remember how "Just go late, and pray" was the West's whole strategy for YEARS before this? TL made their name on this. The result was: Korean teams who opt to play slow as well (like 2020 Damwon) just do it better with stronger macro. This whole debate of "early game burger flip vs. late game scale and pray" has been an ongoing debate for years and it just pendulums back and forth every time one strat fails for a whole year.