LoL eSports Discussion

[TheIrishPope]

What a stomp
SKT SKT

[quadz08]

Royal got clobbered in every game in every lane, with the possible exception of Uzi - Tabe who tried

so hard

but just couldn't carry the other 3.

Also, re: Dram's post in the other thread - I hope Gragas' cask is the cup, and it's filled with soda (one of the SKT players joked that he wanted to drink cola out of the cup if they won, apparently).

[KaleiÐoscøpe]

I disagree. While Toplane was destroyed in every match, mid went very even, but Faker got help from the jungle where White did not. Uzi played well, but Tabe played sloppy and the duo in general did not do well in 2v2 matchups. But all their mistakes were made in the pick/ban phase before the game even began, so it's their own fault. Letting Jax through three times with little to no answer.

[quadz08]

I defiinitely agree that not banning Jax was extremely silly. Tabe didn't play terribly well, that's fair, but I think that Lucky got completely rolled by Bengi, which is what gave Faker and even greater lead over Wh1tezz.

[KaleiÐoscøpe]

Oh definitely. But I feel the skill level between Faker and White wasn't that big. It's the jungle that pulled SKT1 ahead most of the time, next to top lane of course. Lucky clearly isn't top tier jungle.

[Brandi]

In case anyone missed it:

Pretty cool imo (even if I don't watch football)

[JDodge]

royal club's losses had less to do with getting stomped in lane and more to do with the following:

game 1, they picked an incredibly all-in AoE combo comp (which relied on them properly using every skill in perfect rhythm to win fights, and relied on SKT falling into the right position for the combo); they then proceeded to horribly overcommit to a few dives and use malphite's teleport extraordinarily poorly, in addition to continually blowing all their major teamfight cd's into single targets, which eventually lead to them being unable to take

any

fight that wasn't the god fight their comp was built around (which SKT intelligently avoided like the plague)

game 2, for pretty much no reason they decided to pick kassadin into zed and proceeded to give up early advantages to a push comp (which you can't do if you value your buildings); SKT actually pushed their advantage fairly ineffectively (including the one fight they lost due to poor ez positioning at mid inner turret) and won that game significantly slower than they probably should have (royal club's comp was a bit of a ticking time bomb)

game 3, kennen facechecked a bush at level 1

while having shuriken leveled, meaning he had a free check

and immediately got dumpstered in the 2v1 (my main wonder with that, by the way, was why if the SKT plan was to wait in that bush, zyra started Q instead of E; i understand the reasoning for that as a general lane bullying tactic starting at 2, but it's obvious they planned the bush gank fairly early) - the rest of the game was best described as a cavalcade of mediocrity

this was the biggest chance for league and esports in general to showcase itself on the big stage; multinational corporate sponsorship has begun to emerge in the form of samsung and coke, minor associations are springing up with the NFL, etc.

instead what we got was a completely irrelevant and incomprehensible opening something because OOH LOOK CRYSTAL METHOD, probably the worst bo3 series of the tournament, and a completely lifeless and hypeless closing and award presentation

all of this followed a bracket format that lead to two of the least-impressive looking teams getting first round byes (gama bears and C9, who i maintain were potentially the

weakest

looking NA team there - TSM held fairly solid in the group of death and Vulcun would have advanced past groups if they could fix their terminal case of the throws caused by mancloud being greedy and zuna's godawful overaggro positioning) and an unacceptable number of completely pointless matches in the group stages, and poor pacing of the schedule leading to a fairly hype start tapering off into a complete loss of momentum

at the end of the day, i feel that an objective comparison of riot's work with S3 worlds and valve's work with dota 2's TI3 tilts heavily, heavily, heavily in the favor of valve, but the money/popularity sits in riot's court - for the benefit of esports worldwide, riot needed to learn from the successes of others, and instead disappeared up their own asses and put on a show significantly worse than it should have been (thus significantly letting down esports as a whole - league is the big game on the scene at the moment, and riot needs to be setting the standard high or meeting the high standards of others)

[zoraster]

I admit I don't understand lol as well as most, but I don't think there was a major problem with the way riot did this. I think the timing of matches could be improved so there isn't a hectic and exciting week 1 followed by only a couple of bursts, but over all they seem to have succeeded quite well.

[KageLord]

I disagree. While Toplane was destroyed in every match, mid went very even, but Faker got help from the jungle where White did not. Uzi played well, but Tabe played sloppy and the duo in general did not do well in 2v2 matchups. But all their mistakes were made in the pick/ban phase before the game even began, so it's their own fault. Letting Jax through three times with little to no answer.

I wouldn't say "all their mistakes". A big deal of them, sure. But they still had chances in the games and just made even more mistakes. Me and my friends were also wondering whether the Jax thing was just Godlike telling his team that he could definitely handle it and then failing horribly to do so.

royal club's losses had less to do with getting stomped in lane and more to do with the following:

game 2, for pretty much no reason they decided to pick kassadin into zed and proceeded to give up early advantages to a push comp (which you can't do if you value your buildings); SKT actually pushed their advantage fairly ineffectively (including the one fight they lost due to poor ez positioning at mid inner turret) and won that game significantly slower than they probably should have (royal club's comp was a bit of a ticking time bomb)

I wouldn't say for pretty much no reason. Giving him Zed might have been pretty much no reason, no way to know, but the Kassadin was relatively effective.

game 3, kennen facechecked a bush at level 1

while having shuriken leveled, meaning he had a free check

and immediately got dumpstered in the 2v1 (my main wonder with that, by the way, was why if the SKT plan was to wait in that bush, zyra started Q instead of E; i understand the reasoning for that as a general lane bullying tactic starting at 2, but it's obvious they planned the bush gank fairly early) - the rest of the game was best described as a cavalcade of mediocrity

I very much agree with the Kennen thing and that's exactly what I said at the time. I'm guessing Zyra assumed a laner for a world finals team that needed to win the game to stay alive, who had also just gotten stomped for the past 2 games, would not face-check. That's my only real guess as to what happened there.

this was the biggest chance for league and esports in general to showcase itself on the big stage; multinational corporate sponsorship has begun to emerge in the form of samsung and coke, minor associations are springing up with the NFL, etc.

instead what we got was a completely irrelevant and incomprehensible opening something because OOH LOOK CRYSTAL METHOD, probably the worst bo3 series of the tournament, and a completely lifeless and hypeless closing and award presentation

all of this followed a bracket format that lead to two of the least-impressive looking teams getting first round byes (gama bears and C9, who i maintain were potentially the

weakest

looking NA team there - TSM held fairly solid in the group of death and Vulcun would have advanced past groups if they could fix their terminal case of the throws caused by mancloud being greedy and zuna's godawful overaggro positioning) and an unacceptable number of completely pointless matches in the group stages, and poor pacing of the schedule leading to a fairly hype start tapering off into a complete loss of momentum

at the end of the day, i feel that an objective comparison of riot's work with S3 worlds and valve's work with dota 2's TI3 tilts heavily, heavily, heavily in the favor of valve, but the money/popularity sits in riot's court - for the benefit of esports worldwide, riot needed to learn from the successes of others, and instead disappeared up their own asses and put on a show significantly worse than it should have been (thus significantly letting down esports as a whole - league is the big game on the scene at the moment, and riot needs to be setting the standard high or meeting the high standards of others)

I agree about the opening, the worst bo5 series, and the closing comments. But saying C9 were weak is pretty unfair. The comment would be ridiculous to me if the word "looking" wasn't thrown on there (as saying they were the weakest NA team doesn't make sense, but saying they looked worse could be argued for). If C9 were in group stage I wouldn't have been surprised if they advanced over SKT (not saying SKT were worse, but they had a slow start and that could have spelt death if C9 was going undefeated at the time) or Gambit. I think they really suffered from being thrown in cold against a clearly strong team that was on a hot streak and had that Fnatic playstyle. Lemon made some very uncharacteristic mistakes in that series that really screwed them over and I don't think he would have done that after playing a strong team in groups once. I think the C9-TSM games have shown that C9 is a league apart when they are on their game and if you are giving Vulcan the botd by saying they would have done better if... you should be giving that to C9 and saying they would have done better if Lemon (or even better, the whole team) didn't get caught out when they didn't have vision of the enemy team. If they managed to win some teamfights when behind pretty big gold, imagine what they could have done if they didn't make some early mistakes (which compounded throughout the course of the game). Just like Royal they have to live with the big mistakes they made and the fact that they made those proves they just didn't deserve to win it this time.

[quadz08]

I'll let your relative expertise speak to the games and teams themselves and not get involved in that discussion any further. As to the presentation of the event, I agree with some of what you said, and disagree with some other things.

I think the opening music bit was somewhat incomprehensible, yes. I think their number from last year was much better and less contrived. That said, it was still cooler than the pregame show for any major sporting event I've ever seen, with the exception of the Olympics. I definitely agree with the games being probably the least entertaining in the tournament, but Riot can't do much about that. There have been much duller Super Bowls than that. I definitely agree that the group stage scheduling was extremely poor, and they absolutely need to fix that. (That last day of the group stages was by far the worst part of the tournament, IMO.)

That all said, I think S2 finals -> S3 finals showcased some positive changes from Riot on the event-planning front. Nothing broke, there were no pauses in Finals, the casters never felt like they were floundering. They could do with shorter time between games, perhaps, or better ways to fill that time, but I'm not sure what the appropriate way to do that is. All in all, I certainly don't think Riot did poorly with this, and I think anyone who'd never watched an esports event before would have been impressed, or at the very least, not disappointed.

[Lady Lambdadelta]

There was also no examples of cheating this year! That's good!

[quadz08]

hahahahahaha yes that is good

[TheIrishPope]

How did people cheat other times?

[killerjester]

Ghosting

[Tamuz]

TSM called room service and various take-out places to deliver food to CLG in 15 minute windows throughout the night before their head to head games, ensuring CLG got no sleep and were terrible the next morning.

Dig and Curse also colluded to play an ARAM instead of a real game.

[quadz08]

I know there was also an instance of two teams colluding to split the prize money in an MLG tourney last season.

[Glork]

That was Dig/Curse. They played G1 as an ARAM for funsies knowing that the outcome would be determined based on their prior agreement.

[quadz08]

Ah, right.

[Tamuz]

There was also the time Faker was high on cocaine and used an illegal part of his body to make a play, but no official saw it at the time so he got away with it.

[quadz08]

..... what?

[Tamuz]

My bad, confusing people for Maradona again.

[quadz08]

>_<

[Tamuz]

TSM called room service and various take-out places to deliver food to CLG in 15 minute windows throughout the night before their head to head games, ensuring CLG got no sleep and were terrible the next morning.

crap, was thinking of this: http://www.usatoday.com/story/gameon/20 ... s/2093631/

Man esports is so boring even their scandals suck

[Nexus]

Or when TSM leaked Dignitas' roaming strat to CLG just before their match.

Or the time one of the Azubu (I think Woong maybe?) players looked at the MASSIVE MAP behind their heads during the pause.

[xRECKONERx]

Didn't the collusion/ARAM happen at MLG Raleigh last year?

I overslept that day and didn't go