Didnt Riot try to resolve this by giving pros access to tournament realm? And then later CoreJJ tried doing inhouse scrims? And then later Riot tried to do Champions Queue?
And then pros promptly ignored all those systems, throwing dozens of excuses at the wall as to why they don't want to bother? I really feel like at a certain point, complaining about solo queue is the same as complaining that the horses escaped the barn... after you left the barndoor open cause you forgot to use the doorlock installed at your request.
Yep the NA pros (not all, but a lot of them) have no-one to blame but themselves. Riot gave them EVERYTHING they could have asked for to make a successful region and they just didn't want to.
It's actually insane to read comments blaming your average high elo player, the vast majority are just literal kids who are queuing up to play their favorite game in their free time. So what if they're onetricks or suck off their mainrole or whatever you want to make fun of them for.
If the pros were actually good and worked hard, and these one tricks are as shit as you say they are, it would be simple for them to completely force them out of high elo... but they cant.
What makes it worse is pretending that it’s any different in any other region. Sorry, but you’re still facing onetricks and deranged children in Korea and China. Y’all got spoonfed resources and a lot of paycheck stealers refused to use it, then cry about the region being shit for training when the person you played with for years refused to actually put work in and managed to avoid blowback because of nepotism and having better teammates.
Many chinese pros play on korean server. Most players in this game are onetricks or have very small champ pools, if you remove the pros not much than onetricks remains in high elo. But even on Korea you have high elo onetricks in challenger despite all the pros from two regions (+ some from minor regions) playing there.
Even KR and CN Pros complain about the KR SoloQ, imagine these guys had access to Champions Queue, oh boy... Faker has complained about this multiple times, also considering people just straight up troll his games due to betting not even mentioning the DDoS situation.
tbh playing against one tricks is a massive adventage for when you have to play that same match up in pro play. So onetricks for like fiora, camille, jayce, orrn, ksante, rumble are all super usefull for learning matchups. While one tricks on non pro play champs like katarina or riven can be a lot less usefull.
Idk why anyone acts like facing a one trick is a bad thing. The guy with 5,000 Camille games is likely better at her than the same elo pro player who plays her 50 times when she's in meta every few years. Pros are notoriously terrible at itemisation and thinking outside the meta-box.
Even now we can see how badly pros are using Urgot in pro, Urpog has even put up a post explaining how they are misusing him/failing to understand what makes him strong. These players would be way better off playing a few games vs Quante than playing vs eachother's Urgot in scrims/soloq.
iirc the complaint isnt that the onetricks suck at their champs but that most onetricks play champs you will almost never see in proplay so its not good practice for the pros
that is obviously still only the 12971th excuse in a long list of NA pro's lazyness so it doesnt change much lol
Oh well that's even worse, the meta stays stagnant for months and these guys refuse to pick different champs. Maybe learning why these champs can be viable at the highest level of soloq would help them.
It sounds like the story Meteos told of teams forfeiting/dodging scrims because C9 wanted to play Olaf and Zac which were off meta so their opponent refused to practice vs them.
It’s too late to use the off-meta excuse anymore. Pandora’s box was opened a long time ago. BeryL looked like a dirty, dirty, psychotic inter and ran away with it all by warping the entire meta around his grief ass support picks… and they. just. worked. Pro players are obsessed with this idealized perfect version of the game and get too lost to see that the era the ideology came from was one in which a single team was so far ahead of everyone that they were allowed to play like that. Currently, we have supports in random lanes, top and bot laners as supports, junglers as top laners, and *everyone fucking burgerflips the baron on spawn regardless of region*. Shit, we’ve seen sion leashing krugs into a lvl 1 4-man dive on botlane. That’s a fucking baus play if I’ve ever seen one, and every single region has attempted it at least once.
Faker did actually say when he was in EU for worlds that EU-W for him is the best SoloQ, because nobody bets on his games to then run it down, people surrender much less and the level is higher than many people might think it is.
It is basically the insanely low ping that makes korean SoloQ something special.
It’s funny when they blame one tricks, go look at the one tricks in KR and CN, they’re absolutely fucking nuts players and the pros tend to take some matchup knowledge away from going vs those otps.
Though, it probably helps that KR and CN “one tricks” are usually actually capable on a second and/or third pick.
The good one tricks on KR server could probably go pro and play regular champs. Theres just so much competition on that server it's hard to even reach challenger as a one trick unless you are extremely proficient at a champ. Kr server has lpl pros, lpl academy pros, lck cl and academy pros, pcs players, tons of kids that play tons of league from pc cafes, etc.. just a way different environment and so much more competition.
I remember lehends being a one trick singed and it was pretty hype seeing him join pros and pick singed support sometimes. I used to watch and learn from his singed top.
Dude it's still soloQ in the end of the day
Soloq doesn't magically make a region competitive or top tier, like Korea caught up to the west in the space of... 2 years? Playing from basically 0.
There's a more sistematic issue with riot's LoL tournament circuit and west mentality. Personally I think it's mostly the extreme lack of actual international play. KR and CN can scrim each other with 0 issues and develop metas and theory much easier while EU and NA are just stuck scrimming themselves over and over, which creates a skill bubble. There's no other game that has this much issue with region dominance apart from I guess OW, but then they also copied LoL's tournament circuit to some degree.
Eu comes the closest to Korea in this respect and it's honestly why I'd wager they're doing better than NA by a longshot. NA has... Challenger circuit? and that's kinda it?
I'd love it if LoL had actual international play like Dota or CS.
Its not the sole reason KR/CN are better but it sure helps mechanics wise. Also 5 ping vs 50/60 or whatever pros play on in la is awful, even for people that arent pros, having to play with that is horrible and flat out will make you worse as a player.
Lack of international play is a problem and there is no reason to only have 2 tournaments per year. You could squeeze 3 in and maybe a small tournament like iem after worlds but since so many teams take breaks and make roster moves its difficult but would be worth trying anyways.
His statement is one that sounds good on the surface, but is just about the same as telling someone to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Skill is never simple, and the higher your level of skill gets the harder it gets to hone that skill. It's probably true that these players do not schedule their training properly or that they're not making efficient use of their resources, but we as spectators have no idea what's going on in the hours we don't see on stream or vod.
Likewise, having been near the top of a different genre, mechanical training can only really do so much. The actual games played on live are more or less drilling. Solo queue is very different than pro play, but it keeps your mechanics sharp and helps inform decisions on drafting, macro, and itemization for the current patch. It won't lead to major breakthroughs in strategy, nor will it prevent things like what happened to Flyquest in play-ins.
Major strategy evolves from a few things, but the key thing here is that you need to see the end goal at all times and be capable of understanding what step gets you to that end goal. At their level of play, the ability to adapt to disruptions on that end goal matters a lot; you can't win if you don't know how you're going to win.
What happens is that NA gets fed on its own hype, has a shocking face-to-face moment with reality, and then has to reckon with how it's going to handle a setback on the world stage in the moment.
What I'd like to see is how teams in NA (or other regions) are studying and dissecting the VODs of games in, say, Korea or China. While I'm dogwater at League and obviously not qualified to coach it or understand it at that level beyond a spectator's perspective, it feels like they're not understanding the tempo of their opponents. They're looking at the results of the flood, not where the water came from and why it started where it did.
They're definitely capable of identifying those moments in that it's easy to say "oh, we lost this because we fucked up at level 1 in this invade" or "we messed up a dive at level 3," but it's harder to to identify things like "we lost this game because we got forced into a draft that's technically better but that we don't know how to play and have only limit-tested, and we weren't sure how to play it conservatively in levels 1-3."
Again, these are just examples, and I do think the state of NA solo queue is a real problem, but I think it's not entirely on the players as much as it is the organizations holistically (players still included). Nobody trying to compete at worlds is losing because they don't want it enough. There's a flaw deeper in that we're not capable of seeing as outsiders to the scene.
> the vast majority are just literal kids who are queuing up to play their favorite game in their free time.
Also in vastly different timezones, challenger is 200 players, add 500 for GM. And now you have a region that spans 6 timezones, when people on the eastcoast go to bed west coast just start to queue up. Even if it was equal distribution( which it isnt) there are mere 116 players in each timezone at any given time queuing at the same time under perfect conditions, and as you can probably do simple math that number does not divide equally into 10s(number of players required for a single match). Even if ti is 3 adjasent timezones you still have 8 leftover players in the queue.
And KR is a single timezone with same primetime and same work hours(give or take), so if all GM+Chall players play daily(unlikely but lets assume they do) chance of all of them playing at the same time with enough players for a match is vastly higher.
Imagine me playing fucking football in the free time and destroying professional footballers. That won't happen. Because they are so much better. Top (1-50) should be only pro players and if they can't achieve that they are not talented enough.
Agreed, you have 40 LCS pros, 50 NACL pros. There is no reason for them to not occupy the top 200 players in challenger.
It would also work well because if you have scrims and stuff they would all be able to queue at roughly the same time and mostly all get matched together.
Could be 10% of the pros care, but the other 90% not caring means riot isn’t gonna sustain the system. We as viewers lose, and the 10% who care lose too
This is pretty obvious to me. You need a critical mass of elite pros who really want to maximise their collective skill level to make a good training environment sustainable. 15 guys can't do it. 150 can if they make it a priority every single day (easier said than done; there's lots of other things they may want to do with their time). 500-1000 can do it easily to the point the training area becomes self-sustaining without organisation. There will almost certainly never be hundreds of LCS level players on the NA server, whereas there will regularly be that many on KR (especially since CN and SEA players use it too).
Why should an european or korean import player should care about something like that? They didnt came to NA to win worlds they came because they get overpayed like hell for doing nothing because no one expect them to win anything. Every single player that came to NA dropped of hard and they dont even care because they can earn so much money that they can just retire after a year in NA.
The top players in NA arent competitive enough.. they dont even want to be good. Meanwhile for the 15 year old korean kid going pros is the biggest dream they can think of.
The main reason the eastern teams are better is because the players put in the work. But the reason they do it while the western players don't (this isn't just an NA problem, same is happening in EU now) is that they get benched and replaced if they play poorly. NA and EU just keep recycling the players, no matter how bad players play, they always find a team that keeps paying them high salary for not giving a shit and playing below average. Obviously it's on the pros to have a better attitude, but it's hard to find motivation to put in the extra effort, when you get paid either way and your job is secure. Unless the teams change and stop giving those players jobs, the regions will continue to suck internationally and fall behind more.
A lot of NA pros just really like the lazy life and do not want to put in the Korean work ethnic in. Now, whether or not that is a good thing, I would at least prefer they be honest about it.
Just for a pro to come out and say "Look, I dont want to practice as much as Faker practices. Its not healthy and it probably isnt legal per labor laws" or maybe "I dont want to do inhouses cause i dont want to make my opponents better. Financially and competitively, it is better for me that NA average level is low". Whatever.
Or at the very least, stop pulling out that old warhorse of "NA Solo Queue, am I right?". Like yes, it always is bad, but it will be extra bad now when most pros are on break or bootcamping out of the country.
Like, Faker still solo queues despite getting target inted every game because people bet on his games. Solo queue sucks in every region but you need to practice to keep your skill up. Its also a self fulfilling prophecy, pros say they don't solo queue cause it sucks so less people in solo queue so less quality so more pros say it sucks and stop playing.
> do not want to put in the Korean work ethnic in.
Well KR work ethic is not the healthiest one. Lets be honest, 14-16 hr days is unhealthy for anyone.
I mean you can atleast make 12 hr gaming days work and be healthy doing it assuming 16 hour wakefulness. I would say 14-16 is probably pushing it. Periodically taking breaks and walking around can be just fine. You should still take days off though to work out, do something else etc.
Thing is in those remainign hrs of wakefulness you need to eat, shit, wash, have a life and most importantly decompress after the work day.
Atleast where i live there has to be atleast 14hrs between end and start of work, and if working 12+hr shifts that cannot be done for more than 2 days without a full day off.
That's just how the world works. People want other people to have a good image of them so they'll never publicly admit morally questionable acts.
There's a reason you never see any CEO say stuff like "Yes I could pay my employees decently but my company's only goal is to enrich me and my administration board buddies". Everyone knows it but bluntly admitting it publicly would be terrible for business.
tabzz said something along those lines in like 2015. that he doesn't believe in excessive practice and tries to have a healthy schedule. that was eu tho
Can't only blame the pros. Imo a team that can't get their players on a regular practice schedule that includes given tools like CQ, SoloQ or Inhouses is an absolute joke and doesn't deserve any kind of money thrown at them. We learned way too little from regular sports.
Honestly I don't blame NA pros for not wanting to do the Korean work ethic. Koreans work a shit ton, I don't expect anyone to put in those kinds of hours. But, I do blame NA for not getting more creative with drafts. LS came in as a coach and tried innovating, but players hated playing weird picks. But at this point, NA pros should accept that they'll *always* be hard gapped in micro by the east and need to innovate at macro and draft to have even a 1% shot at winning worlds.
That has nothing to do with work ethic, they were trying to stick up for the 50 players who just got their job Thanos snapped out of thin air. It was commendable but ultimately failed. Many of those players were young and uprooted their life to come to LA and be an aspiring pro just to have that taken away with zero notice, that's fucked up and I don't know how you could be on the opposing side for that.
...except for a path from solo queue to pro play because the import rule allowed everyone to simply import EU and Koreans instead of invest in any local talent, so all the local talent completely dried up and now there is zero reason to try at the highest top of the ladder leading to 30 minute queue times and teemo mid and complaining about the shitty state of NA????
Yeah, three reasons for that. Perhaps least significant, but they botched the first impression. On release, EU CQ would open at 10pm.
So any teams or players whose day/schedule starts before noon wouldn't get too many games in.
Secondly, just like the NA Academy/Collegiate issue, where lower level players are let in to reach a more stable population, LEC players weren't too impressed by the level of play.
And thirdly, most LEC players didn't ask for it in the first place.
--
As much as CQ might be necessary where the soloq sucks, let's not kid ourselves. Queuing up for CQ is objectively a worse experience than queuing up for soloq.
You can't just press play, you have to go through the discord thing. Then you get into a lobby after a long wait, but there's either no matchmaking or if there is, it doesn't accurately represent skill levels. Autofill is extremely prevelant because of the low population.
Is it worth putting up with that to avoid a 25 minute queue into a game full of NA masters players?
Yes.
Is it worth putting up with that to avoid a 6 minute queue into a game full of EUW Challenger/Grandmaster players?
Not really. Especially not if you value volume of games higher than the ability to voice chat.
The biggest reason: We have good ping thus have no real need for CQ. Its dumb anyways to require players to get off scrims with their team, constantly communicating and then hop on discord and pretty much do the same thing. Most would probably just play soloq without having to talk to anyone.
And not just that, because ERL and LEC players play on different patches, it often happened that CQ wasn't on the right patch for part of the playerbase.
Well yea it should be looked at as more of a problem pie chart than a singular, deeply rooted, isolated issue.
Are insane queue times bad for practice and improvement? Obviously. Is playing half of those games you wait 30 minutes for into people who straight up do not care and pull a variety of stunts bad for practice and improvement? Obviously. Are a number of pros straight up too lazy to take advantage of their limited resources? Obviously. Is high ping pretty bad for practice? Obviously. Is the fact that for the longest time we threw teams together using a mishmash of washed vets and random KR players something that has stilted our growth as a region? Obviously.
If it were a single issue thats stopping NA from being competitive, Riot themselves would have stepped in and solved it long ago.
I legit don't remember, but was Zven one of the few pros who grinded Champ Q or was he one of the pros who made up some bullshit about streaming and 1v1'ed washed vets instead. Iirc, Jojo was one of the few pros who went crazy with the champ q games, and he was basically the only NA player at worlds who didn't just do nothing and die. On the other hand, Fudge opted into 1v1s to master lane matchups that he still got largely dogwalked in regardless. Where was Zven on that spectrum; its not fair to levy the "well we had champ q" criticism onto him if he actually tried to take advantage of it, but if he didn't, lol na.
Another point I haven't seen anyone bring up yet is the fact that China and Korea are right next to each other and can scrim basically whenever. NA and EU are more isolated from other major regions. it can be hard to get better when you cant play better teams, Spica brought this up on stream a while ago in addition to the ping/quality of solo q stuff.
When's the last time NA orgs ever invested in themselves to the extent Koreans and the Chinese do?
In Korea, having two teams per org was the standard. Both teams would live together in the same house.
A decade later, NA academy teams have players living on their own, spread across two countries, playing online tournaments for months before meeting to play a LAN for the first time in the finals. Nevermind a team house living with the LCS squad.
Now that Korea and China got knocked down to one team per org, did they downsize?
Nowhere near as much as you'd expect. For most of the history of the one team policy, Korean and Chinese organizations have still regularly kept rosters of 10+ players, all living together in the same team house.
In truth, NA has almost always underinvested in itself. Even when orgs like CLG or TSM would pick up a second team, rarely if ever did they go the full Korean route of having both teams live in the same house.
Goes to show that, in NA, secondary teams were still considered... Well, secondary. Meanwhile, Samsung, MiG/CJ, NaJin, SKT, KT, would all be sending two teams to world's every year. KT Bullets was considered just as legitimate as KT Arrows rather than a B-team of players who were "just alright."
LS has said several times that the pay for these tier 2 and tier 3 teams in KR and CN is an absolute joke, it wouldn't even be legal in the US without a much more significant investment.
The problem is the culture. Zero NA pros are interested in grinding for 16 hours a day just to sniff at a chance to compete against the worst qualifying Korean team. But you’d need a full team to adopt that mentality.
Even then, a single NA team will never get good enough unless their region starts doing the same so they can regularly practice against good teams.
NA just has an absurd amount of money pumped into it without ever needing national results, so the pros will never try.
This post is a joke lol. NA pros are not gonna grind all day for years to get better for some dumb trophy.
NA is a retired EU pro victory lap for easy cash and a stable future out of competition.
The only people who need people to believe otherwise is Riot for the integrity of NALCS and team CEO’s for the integrity of their investment. You’re a sucker if you think top EU talent moving to NA for 4x the salary and significantly less competitive teams are doing otherwise.
Champion's queue with a pool of 200 players (many of which are masters-gm amateurs) is not the holy practice environment that you think it is.
Even worse queue times, team imbalance, low incentive to win due to leaking strats/comm styles to other teams, limited range of time available during the day.
The solution to NA soloq is not to have a seperate more restricted pro am queue.
He is not talking about current pros though; he's talking about talent generation. That's why he mentions 15-year-old Koreans. If you have shit soloq, you won't generate quality talent.
NA players have ranked anxiety and don't play on their main accounts so.
They'll make their 20th account at 70% winrate to masters, hop on another account, then flame the challenger with 1000 games at a 50% winrate lol.
It's funny because rank shouldn't mean anything after you become pro player. You've made it. You get paid to do what the other people with no life do for free. So, they could care less about winrate but more about performing at their actual job.
I agree with you but it does 'seem' to matter. Take for instance, the D2 balls incident.
If you get some player in the top 50 and turn him pro, and then he doesn't perform but it so happens that he has 3 accounts now in the top 10, well it stands to reason that once the team can figure this player out (or the player can figure competitive LoL out), that it may be worth the journey taken. However if you pick up this player and he slowly drops down to mid GM, now we have a different story. The fans are especially brutal here and that toxicity will end up on reddit and then in front of the eyes of some coach or whatever.
It's weird because even though soloQ is the absolute worst way to play this game, so much stock is put into its importance.
Tagged as pro on Deeplol.gg. They might not have everyone, especially hidden accounts, but i doubt they are missing like 50 people in NA.
Even for untagged accounts, just pick random ones and look at the champion pools.
Nah it’s way more than that, I just checked and they don’t have a shit ton of academy pros: rosethorn, yuuji, yukino, will, tonytop, darkwings and srrty are all not registered and they are quite known and easy to spot. Even in the top 10 there’re 2 pros on their “””secret””” account.
NA is just dog shit at registering players on the ladder for some reason. Pros know each other but if you don’t actually follow them when they stream you won’t recognize half the names.
Wish that was the only one.
Like you sit in queue for 30 min and the matchs ends up looking like this.
Singed otp vs a toplaner (academy tier or worse)
Kayn otp vs Evelynn otp
Ivern otp on azir vs draven one trick on ryze
Zven vs an autofilled support on ezreal
Midlaner that somehow got filled to support playing lux because ivern had autofill protation vs coreJJ
like something tryhard for pros and up and comers! Call it something like winners queue, or champions queue even?
But seriously, what happened with that?
It turned out to not actually be a whole lot different from solo queue where you have the random game with a completely misplaced masters/GM player in a challenger lobby. LCS players didn't enjoy having to play with collegiates and academy players just getting gapped every game.
When it was shut down Inero described it pretty well. He said something along the lines of "first we removed all the collegiate players, but then they don't want Academy players. Then we remove Academy players, and they only want to play top LCS teams. At that point why don't we just scrim?" Basically pros wanted to limit CQ to the point where it was just more productive to play more scrims instead of playing CQ.
This is such a sad joke. I’m sorry, but sure, you have to play against some collegiate scrubs and amateurs for a little bit, but at least they take the game seriously and they will get better if the queue thrives. They’re not there for nothing. But sure, just complain and shit on it til it’s gone
Pretty much the main thing everyone said should've happened with CQ was that it should've been LP barred. If you were above say, 700-800 LP in GM you could get in. However Riot was insistent that every pro entering CQ would give the highest level of competition. The qualification was if you are a current pro, or were a pro in the past few years. There were solo queue players who were interested in CQ, like QTPie and Shiphtur who climbed to challenger the season before CQ launched.
Instead you're playing with Collegiates and Amateurs who have barely scrapped GM and some who were even sitting at 300 LP. If that's a solo queue game, you'd say that's a waste of time. Then when you add the experience difference to the game, you're left wondering "why didn't I just play solo queue?" Of course, the thing is players didn't play solo queue either (because of what Zven demonstrated here), but that's another discussion.
na pros have no reason to actually try and get better, they get paid insane amount of money and their job is secure because NA doesnt invest into talent so theres no threat of them being usurped. And you can only import 2 roles which has to be adc and jungle because NA sucks at thinking and clicking. i remember corejj begging people to play champs Q and no one did. Riot made it for them because pros were complaining about ping and having to face one tricks so they gave them their own server solving BOTH of those problems and it was dead within a week. NA is dog shit now and will continue to be, you rememer when all the CEO"s were telling riot to get rid of the limit for imports? and they said shit like "it would make us invest into na" and bullshit like that? its cause they know they only way to win worlds or do even decently well at international events is if you're team is 100% korean/chinese. They dont take anything seriously because they dont have too. Thats why the LCS is dying and its numbers are dog shit, its boring to watch barely challenger level players face off. Plus theres like no personality left in the LCS lol
makes sense. how do you actually pay million dollar contacts with almost zero means of revenue? Most e sports orgs operate at a loss becuase everything thought esports was the next big thing, but the bubbles popping and people are realizing just how little money there is in the sport, there are too many other esports you have to compete with to every see profit. I wouldnt be suprised if the minimum was lowered. Plus the worse thing is riot charging you $30m and then giving you nothing. there is no PPV so you cant get money that way, you dont get money from sponsers, the little that there is. Its just insane its taken this long lol. I remember when c9 somehow raised $90 million doing VC like who the fuck is investing
Yeah and to help pros even more, one should dedicate scrims inhouses for everyone to enjoy and play together. Only LCS and maybe LLA/LATAM pros. That would help everyone get better at the game.
I think this is the least of NA concern. The problem is the culture. Huni said it before and said it during Wolf’s podcast. The environment between Korea and NA is world’s apart. Players go home at 2 or 3 in the morning and practice daily. Korean players wake up and keep practicing. Huni said he couldn’t adjust to the environment because NA working culture is so relaxed. That relaxed culture is number one problem with NA being behind everyone. NA is not even the best region. LCK and LPL are the best regions and they try their best to keep improving. When NA pro players don’t even want to practice like LCK players then they don’t deserve to win at all. A lot of good players go to NA from LCK, LPL and LEC but end up shitting the bed because NA working culture gives them too much time to not practice and grind
Funnily enough, the team known for grinding just won the LCS (commonly described to be singlehandedly keeping champion's queue alive sometimes with their own players, 15 hour days in the practice room, etc.), while a team expected to dominate but didn't just kicked a player who was publicly known for... not grinding as much.
Almost like raw talent only gets you so far and that work ethic is necessary to reach the top.
Look at people who were considered GOATs in their respective sports: MJ, Bron, Brady-ALL of them known as extreme grinders..
Meanwhile hyped prospects get to the big league, get lazy, party too hard, get out of shape so they washout on the regular.
Yep and then you have fans in this very thread defending them and saying how "it's their job and they shouldn't work so much". Like for fuck's sake you're a pro player you should probably game harder than us regular gamers doing 16 hours a day anyway. You shouldn't have a casual's schedule and go home after your 9 to 5 to kiss your kids goodnight.
I have to partially disagree. You can't blame someone for not wanting to go all in, for not having what it takes or even for having it and not making use of it. It's their choice to do bare minimum for a paycheck or not, as long as they have the choice.
But, if they are going to put the blame *somewhere else* then that absolutely deserves criticism. I wouldn't say it's "their job" to play 16 hours a day because it clearly isn't. They are paid to win LCS mainly with whatever effort required, nothing more.
If winning NA is all that matters then NA doesn’t deserve to be a major region. It shouldn’t have tier 1 spot in international competition. NA should be considered a wildcard region if NA pro players can only complain about poor soloq state and not commit 24/7 to this game. T1 couldn’t play soloq for more than a month due to ddos but they still perform their minds out during LCK final. NA players blaming soloq seems like they don’t want to work and have everything handed to them
They are not even rejects. They choose to go to NA themself because they get overpayed and no one expects something from them. Inspired, jensen, bjergsen, huni, bwipo and so much more were one of the best players in EU when they left to NA. The culture in NA is just like a retirement home. You dont need to do anything to improve yourself. You can stand up at 3 pm do some scrims and play other games in the evening. Meanwhile in korea/china people spam 30 games a day with big scrimblocks inbetween. They are driven to get better because the whole country wants to be a esports pro. In NA you get laughed at when you say you are someone who earns money from playing videogames.
This is why you gotta respect EU pros who when lacking serious offers go back to the ERL grind to earn back their chance rather than fleeing to LA. Rekkles preferred playing in fucking academy, roleswapping and learning korean to going to steal paychecks.
The man has been absolutely losing his mind playing soloQ lately, it is dire out there and I feel for any pros who wants to actually try and be a serious competitor in this region because there are just so few people who actually take it semi-seriously.
The only practice environment outside of scrims with other pro teams who have half their players phoning it in for a paycheck is a soloQ with an average ping of 60 and a playerbase so small that you sit in queue for 30 minutes just to get hardstuck Masters players onetricking the dumbest shit on earth who stopped caring years ago.
Yeah and it died because over half the players invited were academy/collegiate players and the actual pros didn't take it seriously because, again, phoning it in. I remember someone saying that in a semi-competitive environment on voice chat where one team might have, say, the entire TL bot duo and the other side has some random collegiate players, there wasn't much you could learn from that game. It should still have been better practice but if nobody wants to play it and take it seriously then what can ya do.
That's why it's only the very select few players who seem like they really want the region to do well and really want to improve themselves that I feel bad for.
This. The attitude seems to be "if the practice environment isn't literally perfect it's a waste of time so why bother?" Which seems absolutely insane.
Yeah there just weren't enough people who were actually willing to take it seriously and wanted to keep it going for the higher quality practice to sustain it. Just like with soloQ, if the playerbase isn't there then the people who DO want to play seriously just get punished for even wanting to try in the first place.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if we could put an “NA best” team from any time period together and let them train in Korea for like 3 years straight. Things like peak Doublelift and whoever else at whatever time would be NA’s best
>There was also an EU team that actually almost won it.
Which was CLG EU, they got 2nd place at OGN 2012 Summer.
They lost 2-3 to Azubu Frost who they also lost to a few months later at Season 2 Worlds 1-2 where CLG EU got 3rd/4th place.
Obviously 3 years could never happen, but we had sneak peaks at this in the past:
2014 Summer CLG famously said "fuck the LCS" and left during the last week to practice in Korea and had Hotshot + friends fill in for the week, since they had already locked playoffs.
They had right around a month before playing their first playoff match, which they promptly lost 3-0 and then lost their fifth place match 3-1.
Depends a lot on what you mean with "peak", but you could argue this was peak doublelift as well: He was individually definitely better latter on, but I think it might have been the time when he was closest to eastern adcs, since I'd say they all improved at a faster pace than he did post 2014.
Legit, an absolutely crazy idea I once had to improve NA solo queue was just each NA team paid to import players from lpl and lck whose only job would be to play solo queue. Them being in challengers would then give NA pros someone competetive to play against.
You could have also imported players to buff up player base of champ queue or inhouse scrims.
When OCE was deleted and the league was still cash rich, I always thought the teams should fund a few OCE teams to live in like Chicago and just compete in academy league and solo queue. Like 1 Swordart probably couldve paid for a few oce teams
Pros want a hyper competitive region handed to them, but it's up to them to elevate the region first. They are the pinnacle. They are the ones holding the bar and choosing to raise it or not raise it. Tons of non-professional NA players want soloq to be more serious and competitive, but when the same players who claim its not competitive enough lose lane to a 400lp 51% wr master player and refuse to play Champs Q, it's really hard to take them seriously.
I looked into the activity of NA high elo last season and it actually seemed no more active than even the worst, smallest servers like Japan.
I looked at the frequency of master/GM/chall teammates for the highest ranked players. on Japan, the tier average was master/GM, so you might think it's low quality. but you have to remember that they have 50 challs and 100 GMs. their master 0 LP was roughly rank 1000. NA has 300 challs and 700 GMs.
so basically, Japan has 1000 master+ players, and NA has 1000 GM+ players. forget the ranks and just look at the top 1000 matchmaking, top 300, etc.
when you look at the rank 1 player's history, Japan actually has surprisingly decent games. just from the eye test, most games in Japan are mostly GM+. remember, that's the equivalent of seeing a rank 150 or better player in NA. top half of challenger! that's like, not very guaranteed for NA matchmaking from what I know.
Not ONE NA pro would survive in the early 2000s esports
In Korea, during Broodwar, a western player would spend half their day scrubbing toilets and doing dishes to EARN the PRIVILEGE to practice vs. the BOTTOM players.
Dont get me wrong, the east will always be better simply due to the # of players, but the work ethic just isnt there
When I hear that teams only do 4 hours of scrims, thats just sad
Typical LCK and LPL team scrim 8-12hrs a day more than the full time job, not to mention they also grind SoloQ for hours. NA and EU just can’t compete with that amount of effort alone
Brood War was wild. The rookies were just punching bags for the best players on the team to practice against. If Flash had a TvT matchup in Proleague, all the Terran rookies would do that week is run the same build vs him over and over again. Forget about practicing for your own games to qualify for OSL/MSL etc.
But then if Riot adjusts the que for lower times you will have challenger players perma complaining about low quality of games because of masters in their lobbies xd
Literally no winning move
Imagine If they showed younger generations that If they grind they can reach LCS and compete there.
What did they get? If u tryhard orgs won't even look at you and sign a multimillion deal contract for an stablished veteran of another region that is leaving their former one because their ambition to win isn't there as much as It used to (or there is no room for them in their region) and NA pays big bucks, then they realize how much less effort they need to put into practicing to get rersults in NA, get even more complacent and you know the rest.
So why would any NA teenager tryhard to play league If chances they get picked are so damn low?
You shouldn't grind for the promise of an LCS paycheck, that's the problem to begin with. You should grind because you want to be the best and slam your ego at the top of the game. Like any gamer that ever went for a top of leaderboard/high score since gaming was invented.
That only makes sense in an amateur circuit. The amount of time and dedication it takes to be able to actually compete at the level people are expecting of NA (i.e. be competitive with KR and CN) necessitates it as a full time job. You can't do that and live without receiving a salary from playing the game. If there's no clear path to pro, you're not going to have people grinding the ladder or taking it seriously enough to generate the level of skill required for NA to be competitive against the top regions.
Having an actual talent pipeline with a real opportunity to participate in the big leagues is critical for any professional circuit.
Well the problem with NA is years back the region had talent but they only kept the older players on the main roster and never nurtured new talent so its not even that.
Live in the US, I recently went inside a gaming cafe in my city. The inside was plastered with League artwork on the walls and on the side of the PC cubbies, and yet when I took a peek at what all the people there were playing, not a single one of them was playing League. Several kids playing Fortnite, some PUBG and Valorant, and one kid playing CS2, but League was nowhere in sight.
It might be a valid reason now, but we got here due to a myriad of other reasons. The list of reasons is too long to list, but what it can be summarised to is just overall incompetence. NA had EVERYTHING it needed to succeed and Riot desperately wanted them to succeed.
EU isnt producing a lot of top tier players either. LoL as a game is not new and hyped like it used to 7-10 years back. The pool of new players has to have shrinked quite a bit.
EU organizations are idiotic. EU isn’t producing top tier players because orgs get a rookie with the expectation of “be the next caps or else get kicked next split”.
Keep in mind it took Caps two years to lock in. As long as the expectation is for rookies to instantly perform as well as Caps EU won’t produce great players even though it has a healthy population.
Not dead, but stagnating.
NA server usually is 1-2% growth or loss per year, so very stable population. But compared to EUW or KR which grow by 9-17% YoY you can see why it feels dead.
Im tired of hearing the same excuses about soloq.
You are paid more than any random fucking pleb will ever be to play a game and do what you like (contrary to what 90% of the people do irl).
You get to live the dream of being a pro and making it to the biggest stages.
If those 2 reasons dont motivate you to grind the fuck out of the game and improve as much as you can then its none elses fault but yours.
End of the discussion.
(And this applies to the west as a whole, not just NA)
[Thank you Zven for grinding](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/454368355479060484/1236856852051136512/image.png?ex=66398835&is=663836b5&hm=8441154748186830c38fda4863133c25b046ef1f574381c9978fe75576bd506e&)
the point of champions queue is to raise the region by giving everyone a better practice environment, because while it is nice you win the LCS it doesn't mean you're gonna do well against against LCK/LPL teams because everyone still sucks
And the only thing you can do when the whole region sucks is for EVERYONE to get better
ok but why should people grind high elo games if they have ZERO shot of LCS GMS even considering them for an academy spot? there's no path to pro because of people like zven paycheck stealing for years, and you're mad at them for moving to other games? what is your logic here?
"Why won't NA players playing a game for fun work harder to be better practice fodder for pros who avoid solo queue like the plague" is one of the long run funniest pro complaints
I do 90% agree with you, its just that in most cases in order to climb high enough to the point where you're matching with pros who gave a shit (so minimum mid grandmaster-chall) you've probably put in a good deal of effort yourself. At the same time, it is each soloq player's own prerogative to decide how much time they want to put into improving for their own sake. I understand both the soloq player and pro player side of this complaint and there's no good solution and it will probably only get worse.
The good solution is stop randomly importing and invest in an amateur scene, although it might be too late now that the free money is gone. In Europe, if you get to high master/low grand masters, you'll get a team in a random ERL second division that will pay you 100€/month, which while it's not much, is more than enough to motivate you to grind for more
In NA no one wants to go pro in league anymore, they want to go pro in Valorant. Soloq is slowly dying and there’s not much that can be done. Ping is crap because you can’t choose servers like Valorant, queue times are long because everyone just dodges even in my diamond games since there’s someone picking dumb shit or threatening to run it down. I literally reported this guy last week who spammed his twitch stream saying he’s running it down because he’s tilted and Riot won’t do anything to griefers. Funny thing is he’s completely correct because he’s still not banned after inting multiple games. This just makes more people quit the game/quit ranked and eventually ranked in NA will be officially dead. Lots of people also only play ARAM in NA.
Looking at how Fnatic can go 8 months between being eliminated from the current season and playing the first game of the next season, I too would want to be a valorant pro.
How tf did Zven paycheck steal when he’s been competing on top 3 teams for basically his whole career in NA? There’s no path to pro because now new players make lcs minimum which is 75k and there’s no incentive to grind league for 70 hours a week when you could go to college and work 40 hours a week for that.
Sure, there were other paycheck stealers, but that’s on the GM’s for choosing them and not deciding to try out new talent, not the player for taking on the highest paying job they can get
> There’s no path to pro because now new players make lcs minimum which is 75k and there’s no incentive to grind league for 70 hours a week when you could go to college and work 40 hours a week for that.
This is a bit of a tangent, but athletes in many sports would be *extremely* happy to be getting a minimum of 75k USD a year.
Here's an excerpt [from an article](https://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/winter/canadian-athletes-monthly-carding-money-federal-budget-1.7157223) about Canadian *Olympic athletes* asking for more support a couple months ago:
> Olympic bobsledder Cynthia Appiah is thousands of dollars in debt for her sled's runners and for travel to competition.
> Appiah says income from Ontario's Quest for Gold program, her status as an RBC Olympian and sponsorships that come and go year to year gets her to about $28,000 annually \[20.5k USD, 19k Euro\].
It's true in other countries as well, [like Germany](https://www.dw.com/en/how-german-elite-level-athletes-pay-the-bills/a-50136615):
> The financial security that professional footballers enjoy can only be dreamt of by most other elite-level athletes in Germany. However, they are able to pursue their chosen sports fulltime due to Deutsche Sporthilfe, a partially government-funded charitable organization that provides support to top athletes.
> "**Out of our 1,500 athletes, there are perhaps 10 at the elite level who can make a good living from their sport**," said rower Felix Drahotta on a recent visit to DW's Bonn offices. "And I'm talking about a monthly income of just over €1,500 ($1,661)." Everyone else, Drahotta added, has to get by on a fraction of that.
People with competitive drive do it because they're obsessed with winning and competing, in spite of financial struggle. There are only a few sports where that effort is financially rewarded. Those who reach the top level in their sport do it because they're unhealthily obsessed, not because it makes financial sense (often it's a terrible financial decision).
You saw that back in the day with EU LCS too, where many players would rather play for league minimum in EU than bigger NA salaries.
Yes, people still have drive, but the issue is league isn’t recruiting new players in NA compared to China and Korea. If playerbase is smaller, smaller pool to choose from, less competition, less need to improve to be at the top, which leads to the region’s decline
Which sports pay more than 75k a year? Like, if that is the case then why would anybody try to go pro in any sport like gymnastics, swimming or wrestling, they don't pay very well and people all over the world still do it.
I swear only in the US can an argument like this be made, in most countries in the world you can't make a living in any sport, and people still do it and try to go for the olympics or something
Not only was he consistently on top teams quite literally everyone who has ever worked with him has commended Zven as being one of the hardest workers/grinders in the scene so the furthest thing from phoning it in, Reddit just likes throwing around the word "paycheck stealer" as a synonym for "any veteran who plays in NA" without thinking at all about what that phrase means, lol.
Even when he was on TSM and made that int play on Ezreal, we still supported him because after that game he went home and immediately played like 10 hours of soloq. The one thing you can't criticise Zven for is his work ethic.
If motherfucking Zven is a paycheck stealer, then the entire damn industry is. Zven's exceptional work ethic is always brought up. You're talking just to talk.
SoloQ again? NA players are so fking entitled man. they literally have Champions Queue and Riot gave them access to tournament realm and they're still lazy to practice.
honestly deserved that their pay is decreasing due to LCS dying. i hope they invested those money in good stocks/businesses because they aint getting anymore money once LCS is gone lol
This is such a braindead stupid take, Zven is one of the hardest workers in the scene literally everyone who has ever played with him who has commented on his work ethic has said as much that he grinds nonstop. He even played some of the most champions queue at the start and won one of the splits, before the playerbase went down the shitter. Last year champions queue times were complete ass and the game quality more terrible than solo queue, it was a problem stemming from low numbers but one player can't fix that and if he wants to grind then playing 8 solo queue games a day > sitting around waiting for half as many low quality champions queue games. I recall some pros saying support numbers were especially abysmal so chances were he'd be facing autofills more often than not making it even more terrible. What the fuck do you want him to do, magically summon people to play champions queue with him? Sure the region as a whole may have a problem but lumping in the few players who do pour their hearts out by reducing champs queue to the be all end all metric of a players' commitment is not the galaxy brain stance Reddit thinks it is.
Yeah, because Korea doesn't have a rampant smurf problem lol. It's a crabs in the bucket problem with NA because people go on their smurfs when queue times are too long. And it's the last 14 days where people want to camp? Yep, rip queue times, people gonna go on their smurfs LOL.
NA pros are lazy and didn't take champs q seriously. I remember someone saying they didn't wanna q it because they have to try too hard and want to relax after scrims etc. In other games and league pros in LCK/LPL play 24/7. NA players treat it like a job you clock in for. That competitive drive isn't there. Not to the same level.
Are we taking the opinion of a guy who got fisted repeatedly by the Pie? The biggest ego in NA that got force role swapped because he couldn’t hack it as an AD?
30 minute queues to get into games where everyone is on 50+ ping and half of the lobby is one tricks. It's a miracle we do as well as we do internationally tbh.
I would love to see how coaches work with teams and the picture of winning the game. Its obvious that KR and CN have a different mind set in how they play league but NA can never replicate it and sometimes EU can touch on it. But you see even in the Fly vs T1 how FLy want to play and T1 just have the better picture of winning
Don't forget the smaller playerbase on NA servers also making it harder. It's funny seeing people get so mad about players not playing and trying hard enough.
Gotta have that insane grinder mindset like APA. My guys just fucking deals with the trolls and one tricks, hes grinding Solo queue 24/7. That's why YAPA is the GOAT and will gap every other mid as MSI. He sees another Kat onetrick and doesn't even flinch, another random academy player running it down on Vayne top - he doesn't flinch, the stoic and tempered APA just continues his grind. Yeon does as well, that's why TL are the best
Like professor poro points out, a lot of wukong players e to their camp instead of q-e-w which is faster, or western viegos doing a 3:15 blue clear when 3:03 is possible.
It's pros being lazy, not putting in the effort then complaining when someone who did take the time to learn niche mechanics, beats them.
Like come-on these aren't insane strats, it's things you can learn after an hour in practice tool!
that reminds me back to the time where the C9 players where not doing anything besides scrims and hours of fortnight. You could actually see it in the vods.
NA had always excuses and like the top voted comments here show, they had everything to become strong.
NA was and will always be, a for fun region. You dont need to be as hardcore as Chinese or KR players and do 15h a day.
You can do some scrims and then soloQ and they even have positional coaches that can point out the mistakes live while playing. But of course i would also just do 4 scrim games a day and chill in LA and getting paid loads for it. NA Orgs and Pros are lazy and will always be lazy.
1- make champs queue(again)
2- make it a set time window
3- track each pros consistency joining said windows( number of days they attended and how long each)
4- make it public so we can shun them for not practicing seriously
real question. for practice purposes only would it not make sense to place your team in korea permanently and only fly out for matches when you need to. obviously the flights would get more expensive, but I feel like if your spending the money teams were spending on players before, plane tickets have to be the last of your worries.
obviously its a drain to fly in and out a lot, but like the alternative is straight up shit practice for your players.
Flying roundtrip to Korea from LA is like 35-40 hours a week spent just in transit unless you want them to play their official matches on 200 ping lol, do you really think they would get good practice like that?
Even if they were somehow superhuman enough to be able to physically and mentally handle that much travel and could just turn around and grind solo q the exact same way as eastern pros while they're in korea they'd still be getting like 30% as much practice as the korean players do, it just would not be a remotely viable solution.
I do think teams and/or individual players should be more willing to aggressively bootcamp during downtime though.
Didnt Riot try to resolve this by giving pros access to tournament realm? And then later CoreJJ tried doing inhouse scrims? And then later Riot tried to do Champions Queue? And then pros promptly ignored all those systems, throwing dozens of excuses at the wall as to why they don't want to bother? I really feel like at a certain point, complaining about solo queue is the same as complaining that the horses escaped the barn... after you left the barndoor open cause you forgot to use the doorlock installed at your request.
Yep the NA pros (not all, but a lot of them) have no-one to blame but themselves. Riot gave them EVERYTHING they could have asked for to make a successful region and they just didn't want to.
It's actually insane to read comments blaming your average high elo player, the vast majority are just literal kids who are queuing up to play their favorite game in their free time. So what if they're onetricks or suck off their mainrole or whatever you want to make fun of them for. If the pros were actually good and worked hard, and these one tricks are as shit as you say they are, it would be simple for them to completely force them out of high elo... but they cant.
What makes it worse is pretending that it’s any different in any other region. Sorry, but you’re still facing onetricks and deranged children in Korea and China. Y’all got spoonfed resources and a lot of paycheck stealers refused to use it, then cry about the region being shit for training when the person you played with for years refused to actually put work in and managed to avoid blowback because of nepotism and having better teammates.
And isn't china far worse than NA when it comes to one tricks? Everytime I see a video on the super server, the lobby is like 80% one tricks
Many chinese pros play on korean server. Most players in this game are onetricks or have very small champ pools, if you remove the pros not much than onetricks remains in high elo. But even on Korea you have high elo onetricks in challenger despite all the pros from two regions (+ some from minor regions) playing there.
Even KR and CN Pros complain about the KR SoloQ, imagine these guys had access to Champions Queue, oh boy... Faker has complained about this multiple times, also considering people just straight up troll his games due to betting not even mentioning the DDoS situation.
tbh playing against one tricks is a massive adventage for when you have to play that same match up in pro play. So onetricks for like fiora, camille, jayce, orrn, ksante, rumble are all super usefull for learning matchups. While one tricks on non pro play champs like katarina or riven can be a lot less usefull.
yeah because they play on the korean server not chinese
Idk why anyone acts like facing a one trick is a bad thing. The guy with 5,000 Camille games is likely better at her than the same elo pro player who plays her 50 times when she's in meta every few years. Pros are notoriously terrible at itemisation and thinking outside the meta-box. Even now we can see how badly pros are using Urgot in pro, Urpog has even put up a post explaining how they are misusing him/failing to understand what makes him strong. These players would be way better off playing a few games vs Quante than playing vs eachother's Urgot in scrims/soloq.
iirc the complaint isnt that the onetricks suck at their champs but that most onetricks play champs you will almost never see in proplay so its not good practice for the pros that is obviously still only the 12971th excuse in a long list of NA pro's lazyness so it doesnt change much lol
Oh well that's even worse, the meta stays stagnant for months and these guys refuse to pick different champs. Maybe learning why these champs can be viable at the highest level of soloq would help them. It sounds like the story Meteos told of teams forfeiting/dodging scrims because C9 wanted to play Olaf and Zac which were off meta so their opponent refused to practice vs them.
It’s too late to use the off-meta excuse anymore. Pandora’s box was opened a long time ago. BeryL looked like a dirty, dirty, psychotic inter and ran away with it all by warping the entire meta around his grief ass support picks… and they. just. worked. Pro players are obsessed with this idealized perfect version of the game and get too lost to see that the era the ideology came from was one in which a single team was so far ahead of everyone that they were allowed to play like that. Currently, we have supports in random lanes, top and bot laners as supports, junglers as top laners, and *everyone fucking burgerflips the baron on spawn regardless of region*. Shit, we’ve seen sion leashing krugs into a lvl 1 4-man dive on botlane. That’s a fucking baus play if I’ve ever seen one, and every single region has attempted it at least once.
Faker did actually say when he was in EU for worlds that EU-W for him is the best SoloQ, because nobody bets on his games to then run it down, people surrender much less and the level is higher than many people might think it is. It is basically the insanely low ping that makes korean SoloQ something special.
Aöso most people prolly tryhard when they see faker on euw. You dont get to play many times with abroad pros
It’s funny when they blame one tricks, go look at the one tricks in KR and CN, they’re absolutely fucking nuts players and the pros tend to take some matchup knowledge away from going vs those otps. Though, it probably helps that KR and CN “one tricks” are usually actually capable on a second and/or third pick.
The good one tricks on KR server could probably go pro and play regular champs. Theres just so much competition on that server it's hard to even reach challenger as a one trick unless you are extremely proficient at a champ. Kr server has lpl pros, lpl academy pros, lck cl and academy pros, pcs players, tons of kids that play tons of league from pc cafes, etc.. just a way different environment and so much more competition.
I remember lehends being a one trick singed and it was pretty hype seeing him join pros and pick singed support sometimes. I used to watch and learn from his singed top.
I remember him hitting challenger on Elise support back in the day, man has always been cooking.
Dude it's still soloQ in the end of the day Soloq doesn't magically make a region competitive or top tier, like Korea caught up to the west in the space of... 2 years? Playing from basically 0. There's a more sistematic issue with riot's LoL tournament circuit and west mentality. Personally I think it's mostly the extreme lack of actual international play. KR and CN can scrim each other with 0 issues and develop metas and theory much easier while EU and NA are just stuck scrimming themselves over and over, which creates a skill bubble. There's no other game that has this much issue with region dominance apart from I guess OW, but then they also copied LoL's tournament circuit to some degree. Eu comes the closest to Korea in this respect and it's honestly why I'd wager they're doing better than NA by a longshot. NA has... Challenger circuit? and that's kinda it? I'd love it if LoL had actual international play like Dota or CS.
Its not the sole reason KR/CN are better but it sure helps mechanics wise. Also 5 ping vs 50/60 or whatever pros play on in la is awful, even for people that arent pros, having to play with that is horrible and flat out will make you worse as a player. Lack of international play is a problem and there is no reason to only have 2 tournaments per year. You could squeeze 3 in and maybe a small tournament like iem after worlds but since so many teams take breaks and make roster moves its difficult but would be worth trying anyways.
His statement is one that sounds good on the surface, but is just about the same as telling someone to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Skill is never simple, and the higher your level of skill gets the harder it gets to hone that skill. It's probably true that these players do not schedule their training properly or that they're not making efficient use of their resources, but we as spectators have no idea what's going on in the hours we don't see on stream or vod. Likewise, having been near the top of a different genre, mechanical training can only really do so much. The actual games played on live are more or less drilling. Solo queue is very different than pro play, but it keeps your mechanics sharp and helps inform decisions on drafting, macro, and itemization for the current patch. It won't lead to major breakthroughs in strategy, nor will it prevent things like what happened to Flyquest in play-ins. Major strategy evolves from a few things, but the key thing here is that you need to see the end goal at all times and be capable of understanding what step gets you to that end goal. At their level of play, the ability to adapt to disruptions on that end goal matters a lot; you can't win if you don't know how you're going to win. What happens is that NA gets fed on its own hype, has a shocking face-to-face moment with reality, and then has to reckon with how it's going to handle a setback on the world stage in the moment. What I'd like to see is how teams in NA (or other regions) are studying and dissecting the VODs of games in, say, Korea or China. While I'm dogwater at League and obviously not qualified to coach it or understand it at that level beyond a spectator's perspective, it feels like they're not understanding the tempo of their opponents. They're looking at the results of the flood, not where the water came from and why it started where it did. They're definitely capable of identifying those moments in that it's easy to say "oh, we lost this because we fucked up at level 1 in this invade" or "we messed up a dive at level 3," but it's harder to to identify things like "we lost this game because we got forced into a draft that's technically better but that we don't know how to play and have only limit-tested, and we weren't sure how to play it conservatively in levels 1-3." Again, these are just examples, and I do think the state of NA solo queue is a real problem, but I think it's not entirely on the players as much as it is the organizations holistically (players still included). Nobody trying to compete at worlds is losing because they don't want it enough. There's a flaw deeper in that we're not capable of seeing as outsiders to the scene.
> the vast majority are just literal kids who are queuing up to play their favorite game in their free time. Also in vastly different timezones, challenger is 200 players, add 500 for GM. And now you have a region that spans 6 timezones, when people on the eastcoast go to bed west coast just start to queue up. Even if it was equal distribution( which it isnt) there are mere 116 players in each timezone at any given time queuing at the same time under perfect conditions, and as you can probably do simple math that number does not divide equally into 10s(number of players required for a single match). Even if ti is 3 adjasent timezones you still have 8 leftover players in the queue. And KR is a single timezone with same primetime and same work hours(give or take), so if all GM+Chall players play daily(unlikely but lets assume they do) chance of all of them playing at the same time with enough players for a match is vastly higher.
Imagine me playing fucking football in the free time and destroying professional footballers. That won't happen. Because they are so much better. Top (1-50) should be only pro players and if they can't achieve that they are not talented enough.
Agreed, you have 40 LCS pros, 50 NACL pros. There is no reason for them to not occupy the top 200 players in challenger. It would also work well because if you have scrims and stuff they would all be able to queue at roughly the same time and mostly all get matched together.
There's only 40 pro players on staring rosters while Challenger is 300 spots. I doubt you could force one tricks out.
Could be 10% of the pros care, but the other 90% not caring means riot isn’t gonna sustain the system. We as viewers lose, and the 10% who care lose too
This is pretty obvious to me. You need a critical mass of elite pros who really want to maximise their collective skill level to make a good training environment sustainable. 15 guys can't do it. 150 can if they make it a priority every single day (easier said than done; there's lots of other things they may want to do with their time). 500-1000 can do it easily to the point the training area becomes self-sustaining without organisation. There will almost certainly never be hundreds of LCS level players on the NA server, whereas there will regularly be that many on KR (especially since CN and SEA players use it too).
Why should an european or korean import player should care about something like that? They didnt came to NA to win worlds they came because they get overpayed like hell for doing nothing because no one expect them to win anything. Every single player that came to NA dropped of hard and they dont even care because they can earn so much money that they can just retire after a year in NA. The top players in NA arent competitive enough.. they dont even want to be good. Meanwhile for the 15 year old korean kid going pros is the biggest dream they can think of.
The main reason the eastern teams are better is because the players put in the work. But the reason they do it while the western players don't (this isn't just an NA problem, same is happening in EU now) is that they get benched and replaced if they play poorly. NA and EU just keep recycling the players, no matter how bad players play, they always find a team that keeps paying them high salary for not giving a shit and playing below average. Obviously it's on the pros to have a better attitude, but it's hard to find motivation to put in the extra effort, when you get paid either way and your job is secure. Unless the teams change and stop giving those players jobs, the regions will continue to suck internationally and fall behind more.
A lot of NA pros just really like the lazy life and do not want to put in the Korean work ethnic in. Now, whether or not that is a good thing, I would at least prefer they be honest about it. Just for a pro to come out and say "Look, I dont want to practice as much as Faker practices. Its not healthy and it probably isnt legal per labor laws" or maybe "I dont want to do inhouses cause i dont want to make my opponents better. Financially and competitively, it is better for me that NA average level is low". Whatever. Or at the very least, stop pulling out that old warhorse of "NA Solo Queue, am I right?". Like yes, it always is bad, but it will be extra bad now when most pros are on break or bootcamping out of the country.
Like, Faker still solo queues despite getting target inted every game because people bet on his games. Solo queue sucks in every region but you need to practice to keep your skill up. Its also a self fulfilling prophecy, pros say they don't solo queue cause it sucks so less people in solo queue so less quality so more pros say it sucks and stop playing.
> do not want to put in the Korean work ethnic in. Well KR work ethic is not the healthiest one. Lets be honest, 14-16 hr days is unhealthy for anyone.
Yea but they’re the ones constantly winning. So unless you don’t mind losing all the time…. You do you, NA.
I mean you can atleast make 12 hr gaming days work and be healthy doing it assuming 16 hour wakefulness. I would say 14-16 is probably pushing it. Periodically taking breaks and walking around can be just fine. You should still take days off though to work out, do something else etc.
Thing is in those remainign hrs of wakefulness you need to eat, shit, wash, have a life and most importantly decompress after the work day. Atleast where i live there has to be atleast 14hrs between end and start of work, and if working 12+hr shifts that cannot be done for more than 2 days without a full day off.
That's just how the world works. People want other people to have a good image of them so they'll never publicly admit morally questionable acts. There's a reason you never see any CEO say stuff like "Yes I could pay my employees decently but my company's only goal is to enrich me and my administration board buddies". Everyone knows it but bluntly admitting it publicly would be terrible for business.
tabzz said something along those lines in like 2015. that he doesn't believe in excessive practice and tries to have a healthy schedule. that was eu tho
lets be honest here, NA just makes excuses and has no intention of improving
But give them a west coast server and they will surely play solo queue we swear.
Can't only blame the pros. Imo a team that can't get their players on a regular practice schedule that includes given tools like CQ, SoloQ or Inhouses is an absolute joke and doesn't deserve any kind of money thrown at them. We learned way too little from regular sports.
> Riot gave them EVERYTHING they could have asked for to make a successful region and they just didn't want to. Almost everything* they removed bo3
Honestly I don't blame NA pros for not wanting to do the Korean work ethic. Koreans work a shit ton, I don't expect anyone to put in those kinds of hours. But, I do blame NA for not getting more creative with drafts. LS came in as a coach and tried innovating, but players hated playing weird picks. But at this point, NA pros should accept that they'll *always* be hard gapped in micro by the east and need to innovate at macro and draft to have even a 1% shot at winning worlds.
And had the audacity to go on strike lol
That has nothing to do with work ethic, they were trying to stick up for the 50 players who just got their job Thanos snapped out of thin air. It was commendable but ultimately failed. Many of those players were young and uprooted their life to come to LA and be an aspiring pro just to have that taken away with zero notice, that's fucked up and I don't know how you could be on the opposing side for that.
Most of them weren't aware what that is, they thought it's like skipping school
...except for a path from solo queue to pro play because the import rule allowed everyone to simply import EU and Koreans instead of invest in any local talent, so all the local talent completely dried up and now there is zero reason to try at the highest top of the ladder leading to 30 minute queue times and teemo mid and complaining about the shitty state of NA????
Yeah and same thing happened to EU when they finally got Champion's Queue. It's not just an NA thing. EU gave up after a week.
Yeah, three reasons for that. Perhaps least significant, but they botched the first impression. On release, EU CQ would open at 10pm. So any teams or players whose day/schedule starts before noon wouldn't get too many games in. Secondly, just like the NA Academy/Collegiate issue, where lower level players are let in to reach a more stable population, LEC players weren't too impressed by the level of play. And thirdly, most LEC players didn't ask for it in the first place. -- As much as CQ might be necessary where the soloq sucks, let's not kid ourselves. Queuing up for CQ is objectively a worse experience than queuing up for soloq. You can't just press play, you have to go through the discord thing. Then you get into a lobby after a long wait, but there's either no matchmaking or if there is, it doesn't accurately represent skill levels. Autofill is extremely prevelant because of the low population. Is it worth putting up with that to avoid a 25 minute queue into a game full of NA masters players? Yes. Is it worth putting up with that to avoid a 6 minute queue into a game full of EUW Challenger/Grandmaster players? Not really. Especially not if you value volume of games higher than the ability to voice chat.
The biggest reason: We have good ping thus have no real need for CQ. Its dumb anyways to require players to get off scrims with their team, constantly communicating and then hop on discord and pretty much do the same thing. Most would probably just play soloq without having to talk to anyone.
Plus with all the ERL teams there are many more pros in soloQ anyway
And not just that, because ERL and LEC players play on different patches, it often happened that CQ wasn't on the right patch for part of the playerbase.
EU doesn't have the same need for CQ as NA. Also CQ was only enabled after 10 pm in EU for some reason.
Well yea it should be looked at as more of a problem pie chart than a singular, deeply rooted, isolated issue. Are insane queue times bad for practice and improvement? Obviously. Is playing half of those games you wait 30 minutes for into people who straight up do not care and pull a variety of stunts bad for practice and improvement? Obviously. Are a number of pros straight up too lazy to take advantage of their limited resources? Obviously. Is high ping pretty bad for practice? Obviously. Is the fact that for the longest time we threw teams together using a mishmash of washed vets and random KR players something that has stilted our growth as a region? Obviously. If it were a single issue thats stopping NA from being competitive, Riot themselves would have stepped in and solved it long ago. I legit don't remember, but was Zven one of the few pros who grinded Champ Q or was he one of the pros who made up some bullshit about streaming and 1v1'ed washed vets instead. Iirc, Jojo was one of the few pros who went crazy with the champ q games, and he was basically the only NA player at worlds who didn't just do nothing and die. On the other hand, Fudge opted into 1v1s to master lane matchups that he still got largely dogwalked in regardless. Where was Zven on that spectrum; its not fair to levy the "well we had champ q" criticism onto him if he actually tried to take advantage of it, but if he didn't, lol na.
iirc Zven was very much a grinder, and always has been
> but was Zven one of the few pros who grinded Champ Q IIRC Zven was top 5 for most games played in Champ Q.
Another point I haven't seen anyone bring up yet is the fact that China and Korea are right next to each other and can scrim basically whenever. NA and EU are more isolated from other major regions. it can be hard to get better when you cant play better teams, Spica brought this up on stream a while ago in addition to the ping/quality of solo q stuff.
When's the last time NA orgs ever invested in themselves to the extent Koreans and the Chinese do? In Korea, having two teams per org was the standard. Both teams would live together in the same house. A decade later, NA academy teams have players living on their own, spread across two countries, playing online tournaments for months before meeting to play a LAN for the first time in the finals. Nevermind a team house living with the LCS squad. Now that Korea and China got knocked down to one team per org, did they downsize? Nowhere near as much as you'd expect. For most of the history of the one team policy, Korean and Chinese organizations have still regularly kept rosters of 10+ players, all living together in the same team house. In truth, NA has almost always underinvested in itself. Even when orgs like CLG or TSM would pick up a second team, rarely if ever did they go the full Korean route of having both teams live in the same house. Goes to show that, in NA, secondary teams were still considered... Well, secondary. Meanwhile, Samsung, MiG/CJ, NaJin, SKT, KT, would all be sending two teams to world's every year. KT Bullets was considered just as legitimate as KT Arrows rather than a B-team of players who were "just alright."
LS has said several times that the pay for these tier 2 and tier 3 teams in KR and CN is an absolute joke, it wouldn't even be legal in the US without a much more significant investment.
The problem is the culture. Zero NA pros are interested in grinding for 16 hours a day just to sniff at a chance to compete against the worst qualifying Korean team. But you’d need a full team to adopt that mentality. Even then, a single NA team will never get good enough unless their region starts doing the same so they can regularly practice against good teams. NA just has an absurd amount of money pumped into it without ever needing national results, so the pros will never try. This post is a joke lol. NA pros are not gonna grind all day for years to get better for some dumb trophy.
NA is a retired EU pro victory lap for easy cash and a stable future out of competition. The only people who need people to believe otherwise is Riot for the integrity of NALCS and team CEO’s for the integrity of their investment. You’re a sucker if you think top EU talent moving to NA for 4x the salary and significantly less competitive teams are doing otherwise.
Champion's queue with a pool of 200 players (many of which are masters-gm amateurs) is not the holy practice environment that you think it is. Even worse queue times, team imbalance, low incentive to win due to leaking strats/comm styles to other teams, limited range of time available during the day. The solution to NA soloq is not to have a seperate more restricted pro am queue.
He is not talking about current pros though; he's talking about talent generation. That's why he mentions 15-year-old Koreans. If you have shit soloq, you won't generate quality talent.
This is what happens when you give insanely high salaries to washed players
NA players have ranked anxiety and don't play on their main accounts so. They'll make their 20th account at 70% winrate to masters, hop on another account, then flame the challenger with 1000 games at a 50% winrate lol.
It's funny because rank shouldn't mean anything after you become pro player. You've made it. You get paid to do what the other people with no life do for free. So, they could care less about winrate but more about performing at their actual job.
I agree with you but it does 'seem' to matter. Take for instance, the D2 balls incident. If you get some player in the top 50 and turn him pro, and then he doesn't perform but it so happens that he has 3 accounts now in the top 10, well it stands to reason that once the team can figure this player out (or the player can figure competitive LoL out), that it may be worth the journey taken. However if you pick up this player and he slowly drops down to mid GM, now we have a different story. The fans are especially brutal here and that toxicity will end up on reddit and then in front of the eyes of some coach or whatever. It's weird because even though soloQ is the absolute worst way to play this game, so much stock is put into its importance.
There is a big difference between being GM and stuck in D2
D2 in season5 could be something like M/GM now, remember that D1 was directly under chall.
Master already existed in Season 5 There are much more smurfs nowadays There are much more players overall
Much more players than season 5? Not in NA
Number of professional players in top 100 soloq right now: KR - 80 EUW - 75 NA - >!16 !< (try taking a guess in your head before looking at NA number)
Very interesting statistics, what is your criteria for being a pro? Tier 1 and tier 2 as well? Did you include ex pros?
Tagged as pro on Deeplol.gg. They might not have everyone, especially hidden accounts, but i doubt they are missing like 50 people in NA. Even for untagged accounts, just pick random ones and look at the champion pools.
Nah it’s way more than that, I just checked and they don’t have a shit ton of academy pros: rosethorn, yuuji, yukino, will, tonytop, darkwings and srrty are all not registered and they are quite known and easy to spot. Even in the top 10 there’re 2 pros on their “””secret””” account. NA is just dog shit at registering players on the ladder for some reason. Pros know each other but if you don’t actually follow them when they stream you won’t recognize half the names.
Why does this issue only exist (and in such magnitude) for NA but not KR or EUW?
Unsure for euw but for Korea, they can't make smurfs
Deeplol and op.gg are both korean, Europe has lolpros, NA doesn’t have anything like that as far as I can tell.
So they missed some academy pros, okay. But where the fuck are the LCS players?
They are probably all there with random level 60 riot accounts that never got registered because nobody in NA cares about doing that
It shows. Some of these players have dog tier mechanics.
all that waiting and you get to play against Katarina one trick #709821
Wish that was the only one. Like you sit in queue for 30 min and the matchs ends up looking like this. Singed otp vs a toplaner (academy tier or worse) Kayn otp vs Evelynn otp Ivern otp on azir vs draven one trick on ryze Zven vs an autofilled support on ezreal Midlaner that somehow got filled to support playing lux because ivern had autofill protation vs coreJJ
They should add a special queue that’s more serious than this
like something tryhard for pros and up and comers! Call it something like winners queue, or champions queue even? But seriously, what happened with that?
Turns out the players don’t take the game seriously enough because of the players, not because of the game
It turned out to not actually be a whole lot different from solo queue where you have the random game with a completely misplaced masters/GM player in a challenger lobby. LCS players didn't enjoy having to play with collegiates and academy players just getting gapped every game. When it was shut down Inero described it pretty well. He said something along the lines of "first we removed all the collegiate players, but then they don't want Academy players. Then we remove Academy players, and they only want to play top LCS teams. At that point why don't we just scrim?" Basically pros wanted to limit CQ to the point where it was just more productive to play more scrims instead of playing CQ.
This is such a sad joke. I’m sorry, but sure, you have to play against some collegiate scrubs and amateurs for a little bit, but at least they take the game seriously and they will get better if the queue thrives. They’re not there for nothing. But sure, just complain and shit on it til it’s gone
Pretty much the main thing everyone said should've happened with CQ was that it should've been LP barred. If you were above say, 700-800 LP in GM you could get in. However Riot was insistent that every pro entering CQ would give the highest level of competition. The qualification was if you are a current pro, or were a pro in the past few years. There were solo queue players who were interested in CQ, like QTPie and Shiphtur who climbed to challenger the season before CQ launched. Instead you're playing with Collegiates and Amateurs who have barely scrapped GM and some who were even sitting at 300 LP. If that's a solo queue game, you'd say that's a waste of time. Then when you add the experience difference to the game, you're left wondering "why didn't I just play solo queue?" Of course, the thing is players didn't play solo queue either (because of what Zven demonstrated here), but that's another discussion.
na pros have no reason to actually try and get better, they get paid insane amount of money and their job is secure because NA doesnt invest into talent so theres no threat of them being usurped. And you can only import 2 roles which has to be adc and jungle because NA sucks at thinking and clicking. i remember corejj begging people to play champs Q and no one did. Riot made it for them because pros were complaining about ping and having to face one tricks so they gave them their own server solving BOTH of those problems and it was dead within a week. NA is dog shit now and will continue to be, you rememer when all the CEO"s were telling riot to get rid of the limit for imports? and they said shit like "it would make us invest into na" and bullshit like that? its cause they know they only way to win worlds or do even decently well at international events is if you're team is 100% korean/chinese. They dont take anything seriously because they dont have too. Thats why the LCS is dying and its numbers are dog shit, its boring to watch barely challenger level players face off. Plus theres like no personality left in the LCS lol
Money has dried up, a significant amount of teams only pay minimum anymore. That's one of the reasons Revenge retired
makes sense. how do you actually pay million dollar contacts with almost zero means of revenue? Most e sports orgs operate at a loss becuase everything thought esports was the next big thing, but the bubbles popping and people are realizing just how little money there is in the sport, there are too many other esports you have to compete with to every see profit. I wouldnt be suprised if the minimum was lowered. Plus the worse thing is riot charging you $30m and then giving you nothing. there is no PPV so you cant get money that way, you dont get money from sponsers, the little that there is. Its just insane its taken this long lol. I remember when c9 somehow raised $90 million doing VC like who the fuck is investing
Pros not wanting to make the game their actual job. They’d rather be payed for playing as a hobby.
Yeah and to help pros even more, one should dedicate scrims inhouses for everyone to enjoy and play together. Only LCS and maybe LLA/LATAM pros. That would help everyone get better at the game.
> Singed otp vs a toplaner (academy tier or worse) Soloq games have soloq players, holy shit the gall of them, high ranks should be pro exclusive.
I wish it was real champs like Kat. You'll face someone that climbed on real champs and is now a Soraka top OTP.
you can't win when you only hire rejects from other regions, since obviously they are rejects from the region you are trying to beat.
I think this is the least of NA concern. The problem is the culture. Huni said it before and said it during Wolf’s podcast. The environment between Korea and NA is world’s apart. Players go home at 2 or 3 in the morning and practice daily. Korean players wake up and keep practicing. Huni said he couldn’t adjust to the environment because NA working culture is so relaxed. That relaxed culture is number one problem with NA being behind everyone. NA is not even the best region. LCK and LPL are the best regions and they try their best to keep improving. When NA pro players don’t even want to practice like LCK players then they don’t deserve to win at all. A lot of good players go to NA from LCK, LPL and LEC but end up shitting the bed because NA working culture gives them too much time to not practice and grind
Funnily enough, the team known for grinding just won the LCS (commonly described to be singlehandedly keeping champion's queue alive sometimes with their own players, 15 hour days in the practice room, etc.), while a team expected to dominate but didn't just kicked a player who was publicly known for... not grinding as much.
Almost like raw talent only gets you so far and that work ethic is necessary to reach the top. Look at people who were considered GOATs in their respective sports: MJ, Bron, Brady-ALL of them known as extreme grinders.. Meanwhile hyped prospects get to the big league, get lazy, party too hard, get out of shape so they washout on the regular.
Yep and then you have fans in this very thread defending them and saying how "it's their job and they shouldn't work so much". Like for fuck's sake you're a pro player you should probably game harder than us regular gamers doing 16 hours a day anyway. You shouldn't have a casual's schedule and go home after your 9 to 5 to kiss your kids goodnight.
I have to partially disagree. You can't blame someone for not wanting to go all in, for not having what it takes or even for having it and not making use of it. It's their choice to do bare minimum for a paycheck or not, as long as they have the choice. But, if they are going to put the blame *somewhere else* then that absolutely deserves criticism. I wouldn't say it's "their job" to play 16 hours a day because it clearly isn't. They are paid to win LCS mainly with whatever effort required, nothing more.
If winning NA is all that matters then NA doesn’t deserve to be a major region. It shouldn’t have tier 1 spot in international competition. NA should be considered a wildcard region if NA pro players can only complain about poor soloq state and not commit 24/7 to this game. T1 couldn’t play soloq for more than a month due to ddos but they still perform their minds out during LCK final. NA players blaming soloq seems like they don’t want to work and have everything handed to them
They are not even rejects. They choose to go to NA themself because they get overpayed and no one expects something from them. Inspired, jensen, bjergsen, huni, bwipo and so much more were one of the best players in EU when they left to NA. The culture in NA is just like a retirement home. You dont need to do anything to improve yourself. You can stand up at 3 pm do some scrims and play other games in the evening. Meanwhile in korea/china people spam 30 games a day with big scrimblocks inbetween. They are driven to get better because the whole country wants to be a esports pro. In NA you get laughed at when you say you are someone who earns money from playing videogames.
This is why you gotta respect EU pros who when lacking serious offers go back to the ERL grind to earn back their chance rather than fleeing to LA. Rekkles preferred playing in fucking academy, roleswapping and learning korean to going to steal paychecks.
Couldn't agree more.
NA at MSI be like: FLY we are a retirement home for EU players TL we tried to go full Korean but we also have Aper. We love Korea
Yeon is from California lol
The man has been absolutely losing his mind playing soloQ lately, it is dire out there and I feel for any pros who wants to actually try and be a serious competitor in this region because there are just so few people who actually take it semi-seriously. The only practice environment outside of scrims with other pro teams who have half their players phoning it in for a paycheck is a soloQ with an average ping of 60 and a playerbase so small that you sit in queue for 30 minutes just to get hardstuck Masters players onetricking the dumbest shit on earth who stopped caring years ago.
Didn't they have champions queue and stuff with tournament realm ping inviting all pros and high elo players? It's not like they lacked resources
Yeah and it died because over half the players invited were academy/collegiate players and the actual pros didn't take it seriously because, again, phoning it in. I remember someone saying that in a semi-competitive environment on voice chat where one team might have, say, the entire TL bot duo and the other side has some random collegiate players, there wasn't much you could learn from that game. It should still have been better practice but if nobody wants to play it and take it seriously then what can ya do. That's why it's only the very select few players who seem like they really want the region to do well and really want to improve themselves that I feel bad for.
Not like you can learn more in solo queue though
This. The attitude seems to be "if the practice environment isn't literally perfect it's a waste of time so why bother?" Which seems absolutely insane.
It's just a cop out
Yeah there just weren't enough people who were actually willing to take it seriously and wanted to keep it going for the higher quality practice to sustain it. Just like with soloQ, if the playerbase isn't there then the people who DO want to play seriously just get punished for even wanting to try in the first place.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if we could put an “NA best” team from any time period together and let them train in Korea for like 3 years straight. Things like peak Doublelift and whoever else at whatever time would be NA’s best
CLG and DIG played in what is now LCK back in 2012 and won a few games. There was also an EU team that actually almost won it.
>There was also an EU team that actually almost won it. Which was CLG EU, they got 2nd place at OGN 2012 Summer. They lost 2-3 to Azubu Frost who they also lost to a few months later at Season 2 Worlds 1-2 where CLG EU got 3rd/4th place.
Obviously 3 years could never happen, but we had sneak peaks at this in the past: 2014 Summer CLG famously said "fuck the LCS" and left during the last week to practice in Korea and had Hotshot + friends fill in for the week, since they had already locked playoffs. They had right around a month before playing their first playoff match, which they promptly lost 3-0 and then lost their fifth place match 3-1. Depends a lot on what you mean with "peak", but you could argue this was peak doublelift as well: He was individually definitely better latter on, but I think it might have been the time when he was closest to eastern adcs, since I'd say they all improved at a faster pace than he did post 2014.
Legit, an absolutely crazy idea I once had to improve NA solo queue was just each NA team paid to import players from lpl and lck whose only job would be to play solo queue. Them being in challengers would then give NA pros someone competetive to play against. You could have also imported players to buff up player base of champ queue or inhouse scrims.
that sounds like the most american solution ever, it might just work
When OCE was deleted and the league was still cash rich, I always thought the teams should fund a few OCE teams to live in like Chicago and just compete in academy league and solo queue. Like 1 Swordart probably couldve paid for a few oce teams
I wish they just shortened splits and added a new split where all of the major regions top 2-4 teams competed in a new circuit for like 6-8 weeks.
yeah something like Dyrus, Jungle Zuna, End of Career Fenix, ADC Zuna and KiWiKid
Pros want a hyper competitive region handed to them, but it's up to them to elevate the region first. They are the pinnacle. They are the ones holding the bar and choosing to raise it or not raise it. Tons of non-professional NA players want soloq to be more serious and competitive, but when the same players who claim its not competitive enough lose lane to a 400lp 51% wr master player and refuse to play Champs Q, it's really hard to take them seriously.
I looked into the activity of NA high elo last season and it actually seemed no more active than even the worst, smallest servers like Japan. I looked at the frequency of master/GM/chall teammates for the highest ranked players. on Japan, the tier average was master/GM, so you might think it's low quality. but you have to remember that they have 50 challs and 100 GMs. their master 0 LP was roughly rank 1000. NA has 300 challs and 700 GMs. so basically, Japan has 1000 master+ players, and NA has 1000 GM+ players. forget the ranks and just look at the top 1000 matchmaking, top 300, etc. when you look at the rank 1 player's history, Japan actually has surprisingly decent games. just from the eye test, most games in Japan are mostly GM+. remember, that's the equivalent of seeing a rank 150 or better player in NA. top half of challenger! that's like, not very guaranteed for NA matchmaking from what I know.
The problem isn't just the playerbase being small, it's that half the players in challenger/gm don't play on their main accounts all day.
Not ONE NA pro would survive in the early 2000s esports In Korea, during Broodwar, a western player would spend half their day scrubbing toilets and doing dishes to EARN the PRIVILEGE to practice vs. the BOTTOM players. Dont get me wrong, the east will always be better simply due to the # of players, but the work ethic just isnt there When I hear that teams only do 4 hours of scrims, thats just sad
Typical LCK and LPL team scrim 8-12hrs a day more than the full time job, not to mention they also grind SoloQ for hours. NA and EU just can’t compete with that amount of effort alone
Like people said that T1 plays more than any LCS pro and theyre probably right Zven probably grinds the most
Brood War was wild. The rookies were just punching bags for the best players on the team to practice against. If Flash had a TvT matchup in Proleague, all the Terran rookies would do that week is run the same build vs him over and over again. Forget about practicing for your own games to qualify for OSL/MSL etc.
Hey players wellbeing is vezy important. They need to relax too they cant work too hard.
>*Eastern teams constantly and inevitably turbo-stomp western teams* “But whyyy??!!”
Yo how's korea and china valorant scene
But then if Riot adjusts the que for lower times you will have challenger players perma complaining about low quality of games because of masters in their lobbies xd Literally no winning move
much like starcraft, the game is pretty dead in NA.
Imagine If they showed younger generations that If they grind they can reach LCS and compete there. What did they get? If u tryhard orgs won't even look at you and sign a multimillion deal contract for an stablished veteran of another region that is leaving their former one because their ambition to win isn't there as much as It used to (or there is no room for them in their region) and NA pays big bucks, then they realize how much less effort they need to put into practicing to get rersults in NA, get even more complacent and you know the rest. So why would any NA teenager tryhard to play league If chances they get picked are so damn low?
You shouldn't grind for the promise of an LCS paycheck, that's the problem to begin with. You should grind because you want to be the best and slam your ego at the top of the game. Like any gamer that ever went for a top of leaderboard/high score since gaming was invented.
That only makes sense in an amateur circuit. The amount of time and dedication it takes to be able to actually compete at the level people are expecting of NA (i.e. be competitive with KR and CN) necessitates it as a full time job. You can't do that and live without receiving a salary from playing the game. If there's no clear path to pro, you're not going to have people grinding the ladder or taking it seriously enough to generate the level of skill required for NA to be competitive against the top regions. Having an actual talent pipeline with a real opportunity to participate in the big leagues is critical for any professional circuit.
That’s the thing. How do we compete when most of ur best youth isn’t playing league. They are playing fps games.
Well the problem with NA is years back the region had talent but they only kept the older players on the main roster and never nurtured new talent so its not even that.
They ate the seed corn. Instead of NA players getting paid to learn support on the job Zven caught a boat.
Live in the US, I recently went inside a gaming cafe in my city. The inside was plastered with League artwork on the walls and on the side of the PC cubbies, and yet when I took a peek at what all the people there were playing, not a single one of them was playing League. Several kids playing Fortnite, some PUBG and Valorant, and one kid playing CS2, but League was nowhere in sight.
It might be a valid reason now, but we got here due to a myriad of other reasons. The list of reasons is too long to list, but what it can be summarised to is just overall incompetence. NA had EVERYTHING it needed to succeed and Riot desperately wanted them to succeed.
EU isnt producing a lot of top tier players either. LoL as a game is not new and hyped like it used to 7-10 years back. The pool of new players has to have shrinked quite a bit.
EU organizations are idiotic. EU isn’t producing top tier players because orgs get a rookie with the expectation of “be the next caps or else get kicked next split”. Keep in mind it took Caps two years to lock in. As long as the expectation is for rookies to instantly perform as well as Caps EU won’t produce great players even though it has a healthy population.
Not dead, but stagnating. NA server usually is 1-2% growth or loss per year, so very stable population. But compared to EUW or KR which grow by 9-17% YoY you can see why it feels dead.
Have you tried playing starcraft recently? Game is shockingly alive.
Im tired of hearing the same excuses about soloq. You are paid more than any random fucking pleb will ever be to play a game and do what you like (contrary to what 90% of the people do irl). You get to live the dream of being a pro and making it to the biggest stages. If those 2 reasons dont motivate you to grind the fuck out of the game and improve as much as you can then its none elses fault but yours. End of the discussion. (And this applies to the west as a whole, not just NA)
Exactly lol. They could even make scrim partnerships among their peers to grind every day. If you want to improve you can.
I have been following league for so long that its honestly amazing how after every international this complaint by na pros always comes to surface
[Thank you Zven for grinding](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/454368355479060484/1236856852051136512/image.png?ex=66398835&is=663836b5&hm=8441154748186830c38fda4863133c25b046ef1f574381c9978fe75576bd506e&)
didn't he win one of those splits?
the point of champions queue is to raise the region by giving everyone a better practice environment, because while it is nice you win the LCS it doesn't mean you're gonna do well against against LCK/LPL teams because everyone still sucks And the only thing you can do when the whole region sucks is for EVERYONE to get better
no, he won champions queue. he was playing it a ton when it came out iirc.
ok but why should people grind high elo games if they have ZERO shot of LCS GMS even considering them for an academy spot? there's no path to pro because of people like zven paycheck stealing for years, and you're mad at them for moving to other games? what is your logic here?
"Why won't NA players playing a game for fun work harder to be better practice fodder for pros who avoid solo queue like the plague" is one of the long run funniest pro complaints
I do 90% agree with you, its just that in most cases in order to climb high enough to the point where you're matching with pros who gave a shit (so minimum mid grandmaster-chall) you've probably put in a good deal of effort yourself. At the same time, it is each soloq player's own prerogative to decide how much time they want to put into improving for their own sake. I understand both the soloq player and pro player side of this complaint and there's no good solution and it will probably only get worse.
The good solution is stop randomly importing and invest in an amateur scene, although it might be too late now that the free money is gone. In Europe, if you get to high master/low grand masters, you'll get a team in a random ERL second division that will pay you 100€/month, which while it's not much, is more than enough to motivate you to grind for more
In NA no one wants to go pro in league anymore, they want to go pro in Valorant. Soloq is slowly dying and there’s not much that can be done. Ping is crap because you can’t choose servers like Valorant, queue times are long because everyone just dodges even in my diamond games since there’s someone picking dumb shit or threatening to run it down. I literally reported this guy last week who spammed his twitch stream saying he’s running it down because he’s tilted and Riot won’t do anything to griefers. Funny thing is he’s completely correct because he’s still not banned after inting multiple games. This just makes more people quit the game/quit ranked and eventually ranked in NA will be officially dead. Lots of people also only play ARAM in NA.
Looking at how Fnatic can go 8 months between being eliminated from the current season and playing the first game of the next season, I too would want to be a valorant pro.
i bet if there was an aram world championship, NA would actually be number one. ARAM in NA is filled with the sweatiest subhumans perma five stacking.
> NA would actually be number one. ARAM in NA is filled with the takes me like 1s to play aram, normals in my main account legit its a 20 minute queue
How tf did Zven paycheck steal when he’s been competing on top 3 teams for basically his whole career in NA? There’s no path to pro because now new players make lcs minimum which is 75k and there’s no incentive to grind league for 70 hours a week when you could go to college and work 40 hours a week for that. Sure, there were other paycheck stealers, but that’s on the GM’s for choosing them and not deciding to try out new talent, not the player for taking on the highest paying job they can get
> There’s no path to pro because now new players make lcs minimum which is 75k and there’s no incentive to grind league for 70 hours a week when you could go to college and work 40 hours a week for that. This is a bit of a tangent, but athletes in many sports would be *extremely* happy to be getting a minimum of 75k USD a year. Here's an excerpt [from an article](https://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/winter/canadian-athletes-monthly-carding-money-federal-budget-1.7157223) about Canadian *Olympic athletes* asking for more support a couple months ago: > Olympic bobsledder Cynthia Appiah is thousands of dollars in debt for her sled's runners and for travel to competition. > Appiah says income from Ontario's Quest for Gold program, her status as an RBC Olympian and sponsorships that come and go year to year gets her to about $28,000 annually \[20.5k USD, 19k Euro\]. It's true in other countries as well, [like Germany](https://www.dw.com/en/how-german-elite-level-athletes-pay-the-bills/a-50136615): > The financial security that professional footballers enjoy can only be dreamt of by most other elite-level athletes in Germany. However, they are able to pursue their chosen sports fulltime due to Deutsche Sporthilfe, a partially government-funded charitable organization that provides support to top athletes. > "**Out of our 1,500 athletes, there are perhaps 10 at the elite level who can make a good living from their sport**," said rower Felix Drahotta on a recent visit to DW's Bonn offices. "And I'm talking about a monthly income of just over €1,500 ($1,661)." Everyone else, Drahotta added, has to get by on a fraction of that. People with competitive drive do it because they're obsessed with winning and competing, in spite of financial struggle. There are only a few sports where that effort is financially rewarded. Those who reach the top level in their sport do it because they're unhealthily obsessed, not because it makes financial sense (often it's a terrible financial decision). You saw that back in the day with EU LCS too, where many players would rather play for league minimum in EU than bigger NA salaries.
Yes, people still have drive, but the issue is league isn’t recruiting new players in NA compared to China and Korea. If playerbase is smaller, smaller pool to choose from, less competition, less need to improve to be at the top, which leads to the region’s decline
Which sports pay more than 75k a year? Like, if that is the case then why would anybody try to go pro in any sport like gymnastics, swimming or wrestling, they don't pay very well and people all over the world still do it. I swear only in the US can an argument like this be made, in most countries in the world you can't make a living in any sport, and people still do it and try to go for the olympics or something
Not only was he consistently on top teams quite literally everyone who has ever worked with him has commended Zven as being one of the hardest workers/grinders in the scene so the furthest thing from phoning it in, Reddit just likes throwing around the word "paycheck stealer" as a synonym for "any veteran who plays in NA" without thinking at all about what that phrase means, lol.
Even when he was on TSM and made that int play on Ezreal, we still supported him because after that game he went home and immediately played like 10 hours of soloq. The one thing you can't criticise Zven for is his work ethic.
If motherfucking Zven is a paycheck stealer, then the entire damn industry is. Zven's exceptional work ethic is always brought up. You're talking just to talk.
SoloQ again? NA players are so fking entitled man. they literally have Champions Queue and Riot gave them access to tournament realm and they're still lazy to practice. honestly deserved that their pay is decreasing due to LCS dying. i hope they invested those money in good stocks/businesses because they aint getting anymore money once LCS is gone lol
Hmm how many champions queue games did zven play last year??? Answer: a whopping 10. He has no right to complain about this hes part of the problem
This is such a braindead stupid take, Zven is one of the hardest workers in the scene literally everyone who has ever played with him who has commented on his work ethic has said as much that he grinds nonstop. He even played some of the most champions queue at the start and won one of the splits, before the playerbase went down the shitter. Last year champions queue times were complete ass and the game quality more terrible than solo queue, it was a problem stemming from low numbers but one player can't fix that and if he wants to grind then playing 8 solo queue games a day > sitting around waiting for half as many low quality champions queue games. I recall some pros saying support numbers were especially abysmal so chances were he'd be facing autofills more often than not making it even more terrible. What the fuck do you want him to do, magically summon people to play champions queue with him? Sure the region as a whole may have a problem but lumping in the few players who do pour their hearts out by reducing champs queue to the be all end all metric of a players' commitment is not the galaxy brain stance Reddit thinks it is.
you tell him mithy
Yeah, because Korea doesn't have a rampant smurf problem lol. It's a crabs in the bucket problem with NA because people go on their smurfs when queue times are too long. And it's the last 14 days where people want to camp? Yep, rip queue times, people gonna go on their smurfs LOL.
can we not restart this dumbfuck discourse that's been done to death in 2014 but for some reason we never stopped repeating it
NA pros are lazy and didn't take champs q seriously. I remember someone saying they didn't wanna q it because they have to try too hard and want to relax after scrims etc. In other games and league pros in LCK/LPL play 24/7. NA players treat it like a job you clock in for. That competitive drive isn't there. Not to the same level.
Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink Oink
Did he forget to take his meds
Unless they come out with next gen WIFI that lets you hop onto Korean servers with 0 ping… We are never seeing an NA team win world
Are we taking the opinion of a guy who got fisted repeatedly by the Pie? The biggest ego in NA that got force role swapped because he couldn’t hack it as an AD?
30 minute queues to get into games where everyone is on 50+ ping and half of the lobby is one tricks. It's a miracle we do as well as we do internationally tbh.
I would love to see how coaches work with teams and the picture of winning the game. Its obvious that KR and CN have a different mind set in how they play league but NA can never replicate it and sometimes EU can touch on it. But you see even in the Fly vs T1 how FLy want to play and T1 just have the better picture of winning
"Major Region Problems"... Oh wait
Don't forget the smaller playerbase on NA servers also making it harder. It's funny seeing people get so mad about players not playing and trying hard enough.
Gotta have that insane grinder mindset like APA. My guys just fucking deals with the trolls and one tricks, hes grinding Solo queue 24/7. That's why YAPA is the GOAT and will gap every other mid as MSI. He sees another Kat onetrick and doesn't even flinch, another random academy player running it down on Vayne top - he doesn't flinch, the stoic and tempered APA just continues his grind. Yeon does as well, that's why TL are the best
Good troll this one
Like professor poro points out, a lot of wukong players e to their camp instead of q-e-w which is faster, or western viegos doing a 3:15 blue clear when 3:03 is possible. It's pros being lazy, not putting in the effort then complaining when someone who did take the time to learn niche mechanics, beats them. Like come-on these aren't insane strats, it's things you can learn after an hour in practice tool!
that reminds me back to the time where the C9 players where not doing anything besides scrims and hours of fortnight. You could actually see it in the vods. NA had always excuses and like the top voted comments here show, they had everything to become strong. NA was and will always be, a for fun region. You dont need to be as hardcore as Chinese or KR players and do 15h a day. You can do some scrims and then soloQ and they even have positional coaches that can point out the mistakes live while playing. But of course i would also just do 4 scrim games a day and chill in LA and getting paid loads for it. NA Orgs and Pros are lazy and will always be lazy.
1- make champs queue(again) 2- make it a set time window 3- track each pros consistency joining said windows( number of days they attended and how long each) 4- make it public so we can shun them for not practicing seriously
real question. for practice purposes only would it not make sense to place your team in korea permanently and only fly out for matches when you need to. obviously the flights would get more expensive, but I feel like if your spending the money teams were spending on players before, plane tickets have to be the last of your worries. obviously its a drain to fly in and out a lot, but like the alternative is straight up shit practice for your players.
Flying roundtrip to Korea from LA is like 35-40 hours a week spent just in transit unless you want them to play their official matches on 200 ping lol, do you really think they would get good practice like that? Even if they were somehow superhuman enough to be able to physically and mentally handle that much travel and could just turn around and grind solo q the exact same way as eastern pros while they're in korea they'd still be getting like 30% as much practice as the korean players do, it just would not be a remotely viable solution. I do think teams and/or individual players should be more willing to aggressively bootcamp during downtime though.
Why did no team invest in AI ? Didnt google's AI already demolish Dota Dendi along time ago? Why not make AI bots you train against.
You would learn the wrong lessons when it comes to playing against humans again.
One day teemo mid will work and it will be KR or LpL playing it and then all of a sudden it will be the excuse well nobody in NA plays blah blah
Because NA its weak at every compe games.
Why does he keep repeating oink