Tag: league of legends

I wonder if SK Telecom T1 hates international fans

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the main reasons why I enjoy professional League of Legends so much is because it’s simply something that Koreans are absolutely, irrefutably the greatest in the world at.  I’ve watched and had my heart crushed enough times at watching Koreans excel but fall short in a variety of international contests such as baseball, soccer and various Olympic sports to know how much I actually want to see South Korea win things, and in professional League, I not only have such, but because I also play the game recreationally, I have the ability to relate and understand how the players are playing and to appreciate just how good they really are.

Needless to say, over the last four years or so of watching professional League, I’ve witnessed Koreans dominate the scene without any legitimate concern that the ride is going to end any time soon; and personally, I love it to no end.

Obviously, a discussion about professional League of Legends dominance cannot be had without mentioning SK Telecom T1, the be-all, end-all when it comes to the entire esport.  Three-time World champions in an arena that’s only six years old, winners of countless tournaments both domestic and international, and after yesterday, two-time winners of the Riot Games Mid-Season Invitational, AKA mini-Worlds.  The bottom line is that SKT wins big and wins often, and their dominance over the scene is pretty overwhelming.

In other sports, this kind of suffocating excellence often prompts discussion over whether their constant winning is a detriment for the sport as a whole, and the League scene is really no exception.  SKT has been on top of the League scene for nearly four full years now, with only hiccups in Season 4 and the first Mid-Season Invitational, where they failed to win, but won just about everything else otherwise.  Suffice to say, it’s not really that big of a surprise that there are large swaths of League fans out there that have simply gotten bored of SKT’s constant winning, and have turned their allegiances against them.

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In Korea, it’s called “every day”

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Those who follow competitive gaming might not be shocked to find out that, more often than not, the highest level of competitors tends to come out of the east…ern hemisphere.  Asia.  Specifically, depending on the game, between Korea, China or Japan.  This isn’t to say there aren’t talented gamers in Europe, other parts of Asia, South America or North America, but it is safe to say that the upper echelon of gaming typically exists in southeast Asia, and this is punctuated by just how often times gamers or teams of gamers from this region win global tournaments and international competitions.

Although I’ll ultimately get back to primarily talking about League, this doesn’t apply to just League.  Overwatch, Counterstrike, Street Fighter; anything that is played competitively, for legitimate prize money, notoriety and business advancement, usually the best players of these properties are coming out of Asian countries.  Sure, there will occasionally be upstarts from different regions from time to time, but on the wider scale of the small competitive gaming history, it’s typically been some Asian guys hoisting trophies the vast majority of competitions.

One cliché that’s come into very popular fashion in the competitive gaming scene these days are the wide number of professional gamers from North America and/or Europe that flock to South Korea for weeks at a time to play the same game they play at home, but on the Korean servers, against Korean competition.  The logic behind this stems from the notion that you’ll only be as good as the strength of your competition, and if Korea is where the strongest competition exists, then Korea is the place pro gamers need to go play.

The best part about it is that all these non-Asian professionals call these Korean excursions “bootcamping.”

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I guess Lux is all grown up now

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the numerous memes out there within the League of Legends community is that people play X champion because of new skin.  It doesn’t exist without a degree of truth behind it, as the years have shown us, even the most irrelevant champions can benefit in pick rates if they’re given a new coat of paint (Heartseeker Ashe, Devil Teemo), but not all of them can be winners either. (Slayer Pantheon, any Worldbreaker).  Regardless, it’s safe to assume that if you see an overzealous insta-lock of a particular champion that just got a new skin, they will undoubtedly perform poorly and are playing for no reason other than to show off their skin.

This goes doubly and triply for temporary game modes where the games are shorter, but the luxury of being able to select one’s own champion is still available.  Needless to say, I’ve enjoyed playing Poro King over the last few weekends, since it’s been helping me rapidly boost my mastery rank with champions like Maokai, Skarner and Fizz, but it’s not lost on me that there’s an inordinate number of people playing Lux in the vast majority of these games.  Sometimes on my team, sometimes on the enemy team, often times on both, I’ve seen a few good ones and way more bad ones, but almost in all cases, they’re using the brand new Elementalist Lux skin (above, right), and I’m under the impression that most are playing her not because they believe she’s a smart pick for Poro King, but they just want to use the new skin.

Personally, I think Lux is a poor choice for Poro King because although she provides decent crowd control and a little bit of wave clear in her ult, she’s a shit duelist if you can get up in her face, and is useless if she’s ever facing more than one enemy and will concede every objective.

But let’s not let those important factors factor in when it comes to choosing a team component, because that new skin is just so damn pretty.

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Photos: League of Legends World Championship, Season 6

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note]: this is unposted content from 2016, photographs from mythical and I’s trip out to Los Angeles for the 2016 LCK Fall Championship AKA Worlds, the season 6 world championship.

It also dawned on me that this trip capped off a span of two months where I visited Europe, Korea, went to Disney Food & Wine, and then Worlds, so basically an insane amount of leisurely travel in a short amount of time.

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The LCK Fall Split Finals AKA Worlds 2016

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the second year in a row, mythical gf and I decided to go see the finals to the League of Legends World Championship.  For the second year in a row, the finalists were both teams out of Korea; hence the renaming of Worlds to League Champions Korea’s Fall Split, since for the fourth year in a row, Korea has run roughshod over the competition and would be champion of the game.

Thankfully, 2016 would be a year in which Worlds was held in the United States, absolving me from making a third international trip within the span of six weeks.  Instead, it was merely a leisurely weekend trip to Los Angeles, which saw a miserable flight out to LA, lots of junk food and Pikachu Game on top of League-related activity.

But for simplicity sake, we’ll stick to the Worlds experience, because honestly, there’s not a whole lot to talk about in regards to playing Pikachu Game on the Santa Monica Pier, and being sat next to a 400 pound blob on a flight.

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The sexy, red-haired, rain making elephant in the room

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Every Worlds, there’s always a not-popular/meta champion pick that emerges from some team, usually from Korea, that takes the tournament by storm, or is effective enough to surprise out some critical victories.  Sometimes they’re picked against lesser opponents so that players can hide their hands and not reveal their A-games to those stronger challengers scouting in the wings, or sometimes they’re busted out at a critical juncture of a series to catch the opponent off guard, and by the time they understand what is happening it’s too late.

Every year, there’s always one or a few picks that are remembered for its breaking of the meta, and outside the box thinking, or sometimes just plain goofy audacity, that sometimes works because nobody is expecting it.  In Season 3, OMG’s LoveLing bust out a jungle Volibear that completely blindsided TSM en route to a 43-13 drubbing.  In the Season 4 Finals, Royal Club’s inSec selected Rammus to jungle, and although his line score didn’t look that impressive, he most definitely contributed to Royal’s only win before ultimately succumbing to Samsung White.  And then there was last season SK Telecom T1’s Faker going all the way to Jupiter to select Olaf to play in mid lane (link above), and then still throttling a completely lost Bangkok Titans squad who inexplicably tried to go bruiser-vs-bruiser against Faker by picking Irelia mid.

It’s a legit strategy when it comes to League of Legends, since there are just so many available champions to pick from.  No matter how infallible or statistically reliable some champions are, out of 150+ available, there’s going to be one that’s an effective counter somewhere.  And the players that hide them in their hands until critical points are legit risk takers, choosing to unleash them when the stakes are high.

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Korea Stories: League of Legends

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of in to League of Legends.

And as much as I’m typically opposed to doing stuff like playing the same game I could play back at home, there was a part of me that was really curious to find out what League would be like in Korea, the region of the world in which the talent is undisputedly the greatest and where the competitive scene is respected and regarded as a legitimate, money-making spectator sport.

I wanted to try playing League of Legends on the Korean server and see what the differences were.  And surely, in the part of the world where League is so highly regarded, I should be able to find some cool League merch, or some professional League gaming team swag, right?

It started out pretty amusingly, when I got to Korea.  Through international roaming, my phone piggybacked onto whatever provider would allow it, and in the case of being in Korea, my phone immediately latched onto an SK Telecom signal.  Now this might seem like no big deal to the vast majority of people, since SK is one of South Korea’s corporate giants that have their fingers in just about every possible business venture from petroleum to telecommunications, but to a League fan, SK is primarily known as the company that owns SKT T1, basically the Chicago Bulls or New York Yankees of the League competitive scene.  SKT has won two of the five world championships (and Korea didn’t play at all in year 1) and are in position to compete for a third, but they are undoubtedly the most prominent team in the entire world, when it comes to League.

Yeah, just connecting to SK Telecom cellular service elicits that much of a response.

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