Hot Takes: Esports Edition

It’s april fool’s so nothing I say is going to be taken seriously so why not go over some thoughts I have about various Esports because it’s not like anyone cares especially today.

Cinderhulk Jarvan is actually like the stupidest build in the world. The entire point of picking Jarvan is using his strong early game ganks to create and subsequently snowball a lead into enough map control to capture Baron and push towards a victory. Nothing kills your effort to snowball a game like building 0 damage and trying to smack your wet noodle of a champion around. For the love of all that is good, play into Jarvan’s strengths and build Warrior.

I really liked the GOATS meta of competitive Overwatch. I know some people don’t like seeing the same 6 heroes over and over again, but GOATS required a lot of critical thinking from the people that played it in order to properly manage your ult economy and be aware of exactly what your opponents were capable of. It rewarded the smartest of players rather than those who were just skilled mechanically. As an added plus it curved the excessive use of Mercy in competitive and that’s just lovely.

Sidenote, Mercy’s resurrection mechanic is just bad competitive design. It allows teams to make enormous mistakes and have a hero come by and erase the fact that you screwed everything up. I think it’s not too bad now that it has such a long cooldown and Mercy ult doesn’t give another free rez but I’d still prefer it just gone from any competitive version of the game. Thematically it’s pretty dope though.

On the other hand I’m generally OK with resurrection mechanics in League of Legends, except Zilean. Zilean ult needs like twice the cooldown it has, at least from level 16 onwards.

Hungrybox might just be one of the greatest smash players to ever pick up a controller, but Puff is still the most horrendously boring to watch character in the game. I’d rather watch 100 wobbles than a single puff versus a campy fox match. I respect Hungrybox’s skill a lot, but good lord make it stop.

Fortnite could’ve been the biggest esport ever but Epic squandered it with game changes that knee-capped the competitive players in order to keep very casual players from feeling like they sucked too much.

This isn’t really that much of a hot take at this point, but league of legends champions hit their power spikes way way too early. I remember the good ole days where there were actual late game champions that didn’t become strong until they got 4 items or so and you needed to actually work with your team to enable them. Now everyone is crazy strong after 2 items and some champs just become useless later so no one even bothers to pick them. I get Riot’s desire to keep game times a little shorter, but this desire has made a lot of their champions useless and left to collect dust on a figurative shelf

A North American team will never win the League of Legends world championship. Ever. Also since I’m using Faker in the picture I should have a hot take about him. Faker is the weak link of the current SKT T1 line-up, and while part of that is due to how the team plays he’s still not doing his best and it’s showing.

Later!

Autowin

The League of Legends summer season is underway and I couldn’t be more excited. Lots of cool storylines to watch from TSM’s attempt to rally from their worst playoff finish in history, Team Liquid defending it’s the first title in franchise history, Cloud 9 subbing out 60% of their starting roster between spring and summer, and to top it all off Riot introduced a new patch (version of the game) the totally upended how one can approach the game forcing every team to reassess their own strategies. These would all be interesting things to write about but before I can even get to that we have to talk about the really big story from week 1 of the NALCS. Echo Fox was awarded a win over Clutch Gaming by referee decision (yes League of Legends has referees, they don’t like stop the game for penalties or fouls though) rather than actually winning the game. Part of me is hoping that by going through what happened in a post I can kind of figure out how exactly I feel about it all.

This is a bit weird so let me explain. The game starts and Echo Fox and Clutch go back and forth in the early game, but by the mid-game Echo Fox is taking a lead and had taken 3 dragons. (Extra objective in the game which gives bonus stats) Then at around the 27-minute mark Echo Fox take the Baron (a Big objective that gives a lot of gold and helps teams push into enemy territory more easily) and win a team fight convincingly. From there they take another dragon and push down several turrets and break open Clutch’s base. I think it’s pretty important to note that their gold lead at this point was over 10,000, that’s a big number in League of Legends because it’s commonly believed that a 10,000 gold deficit is nigh impossible to come back from. It’s sort of a benchmark for blowouts. So Echo Fox is in total control of the game, they have a huge lead and have already cracked the main defence of Clutch.

Then something happens. A bug. Some weird interaction the game is prepared to handle or who knows what, but all 10 players and the observers and anyone else become disconnected from the game. Single players disconnecting from the game isn’t that uncommon and when they do the someone else can pause the game until they reconnect, but everyone being disconnected removes that possibility. This is so rare that it’s actually never happened in the NALCS before in 5 years of the league’s operation. With no one able to pause the game things just kinda played out without player interference while the refs try to reconnect people to the game with no success for thirty or so minutes. This would be akin to like if the lights went out in a basketball game but for some strange and inexplicable reason, the clock kept. Absolutely bizarre. So the refs left with two choices. Remake the game or give Echo Fox the win.

Both of these rulings have a basis in the LCS rulebook, (yeah they’ve got a rulebook, what do ya think they’re amateurs?) but both of these are also lose-lose scenarios. If they remake and Echo Fox loses people will complain that bad code robbed their team of a rightly deserved victory if they remake and Echo Fox win they’ve basically wasted a huge chunk of time in an already long broadcast day, (From a PR perspective this is probably the optimum outcome) and if they simply give the win to Echo Fox people will argue all week about whether or not the game was still “winnable” or not for Clutch all the while blaming the refs and making fun of the competative integrity of the league. In the end, they decide that awarding Echo Fox the win is the way to go.

Honestly, I have a pretty mixed opinion about that. I really thought this would help me reach a concrete feeling on what happened, but it’s just a really rough situation. On one hand, I really don’t think there was any way that Clutch could’ve won that game. Like they were really, really far behind at that point. To make a traditional sports and heck the World Cup is going on let’s use a soccer reference. Imagine that a team is up 7-0 against another team with 5 minutes left to play plus whatever extra time they’ll be. Sure technically it’s possible that the losing team could pull off a miracle and still win that game, but no one in their right mind would believe that it would actually happen right?

On the other hand, it leaves a really bad taste in my mouth to think about a team being given a win by the refs and not by actually beating their opponents. It just doesn’t seem to jive with me as a competitive person. I suppose it doesn’t really matter now though, the decision has been made and the only thing to do is move forward, oh also make endless fun of Riot Games for having a game where their spaghetti code can still fly so off the handle that professional games can be ruined by it. I’m definitely going to do that. Anyways, NALCS is pretty cool and you should like check it out if that’s your kind of thing. Later.

Legacy

I’m talking about League of Legends today, and I know that pretty much everyone that reads this has already tuned out but it’s still something that I really want to take a stab at so buckle up.

In the North America League of Legends Championship Series (NA LCS or LCS for short) there is one team that stands tall above the rest. Team SoloMid. (TSM) They’ve made it to the finals of the LCS 10 times, coincidentally that’s the number of finals there have been in the history of the LCS. Out of those 10 final appearances, they’ve walked away with the trophy 6 times. TSM has been the unopposed kings of North America since the inception of the LCS in 2013. Despite this dominance at home, TSM has always struggled at international competitions. Since 2013 the team has never placed above 7th at the World Championships and holds a dismal record of 14 wins and 23 losses. Hardly a satisfactory result for the undisputed kings of NA.

So coming into the 2018 season owner Andy “Reginald” Dinh decided radical changes to the team were needed to help solve the international problem. Dinh removed 3 of the 5 starting players from TSM including support player Vincent “Biofrost” Wang, Jungler Dennis “Svenskeren” Johnsen, and AD carry Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng. In their place, Andy brought in young local talent Mike “MikeYeung” Yeung (a real creative name I know) to the jungle position and imported Jesper “Zven” Svenningsen and Alfonso “Mithy” Rodríguez from Europe to play AD carry and support in an attempt to beef up the roster. Andy made it clear that the changes to the team were made in an effort to give TSM a better chance on the international stage. It was assumed that TSM’s changes wouldn’t affect their domestic performance and the team would continue to find success at home.

This past Sunday TSM lost their quarter-final match against Clutch Gaming. The streak of never missing an LCS final was broken. The kings were toppled by a team in their debut season. For Dinh, this is the worst case scenario. This loss casts enormous doubts on whether the team will be able to make a dent at the World Championships this year. It even casts doubt on the team’s ability to qualify for Worlds. Perhaps TSM will prove their doubters wrong and come back during the summer split swinging for the fences, the team will come together and perhaps they’ll once again dominate their domestic competition and perhaps they’ll even make a deep run at the World Championships. They could even win, but there can be no question. For the first time in the team’s history, their legacy of domestic dominance has been tarnished.

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