Previously on the HGC Coaches series, we learnt the basics on Heroes of the Storm coaches, what they do, the different approaches a coach can take and the reasons why we don’t hear often about them. In case you missed it, you still can read Part 1.

The Coaches’ Performance

Different people from the Heroes competitive scene have shared their thoughts about coaching, but what’s the real impact of coaches?

To analyze it, we’ve taken the results of HGC teams for all the four major regions, including the standings of 2018 HGC Phase 2 after playoffs for North America, Europe and China (Season 4) and before playoffs for South Korea. The data from Eastern regions may be wrong: Blizzard still doesn’t include coaches in the official Heroes esports, so we can’t be sure about which teams have coaches and which don’t.The data used comes from Liquipedia.

The graph shows the number of teams with and without a coach per region, and the average position of this teams. The lower the average position is, the closer the position is to first place, and therefore, the more successful the team has been. The teams acknowledged as coached for this graph are: Gen.G, Ballistix, Team Dignitas, Team Liquid, Fnatic, Method, HeroesHearth, Tempo Storm, Team Freedom, Team Octalysis, LFM Esports, Simplicity, RPG and Chall Enge.







In order to have some perspective on those raw numbers, the highest average position a group of two teams can have is 1.5, and the worse is 7.5. For a group of four teams, the best would be 2.5, and the worst 6.5. And for a group of six teams, the best would be 3.5 and the worst 5.5.

Comparing the results with the theoretical values, we can see that the performance of coached teams is overall good, being close to a perfect score in Korea and the Western regions. However, Chinese trend is completely opposite to the others. This can be a result of their late entrance into the coaching world: Tseron, Korean coach for CE and former player for GLuck, joined the team in July, before GHL Season 3 playoffs. The other coach in China, chicken, joined RPG in late August. They may still need time to adapt to their new surroundings, but the fact is that none of them qualified for Finals.

Regional Differences

When comparing the more reliable data on the Western regions, the main issue is the different number of coached teams between North America and Europe. In Europe, only half of the teams have a coach compared to North America’s six out of the eight teams having one. The rest did however have a coach back in Phase 1 (CavalierGuest for Gale Force Esports, now Endemic, and Yuuj and Kubie for No Tomorrow). Also, NA has a more ingrained coaching tradition, with coaches before HGC era—as an example, Gale Force already had coaches in the Cloud9 days.

Despite this coaching tradition, North American teams still struggle when playing internationally against Korea or Europe. Team Liquid coach Zoos used to play in North America before coaching in Europe, and has been part of teams such as Panda Global, Team Blaze or Vox Nihili. His role as a coach is focused on both strategy and draft planning and facilitating a positive and useful practice environment for the players. As a connoisseur of both regions, he sheds some light on the regional differences:

Necessity of Coaches

As we’ve seen before, there are still many teams without a coach among the HGC regions. European teams without coaches, Zealots and Leftovers, managed to get second place at the 2018 Western Clashes, and now Leftovers is even going to the finals. If those teams can compete against coached teams, are coaches really necessary?

Coaches have reached out to Open Division teams, with the most notorious example of this being ePunks, coached by Sarly21. They won six out of seven European OD cups, becoming the first team ever to pass the 800 points milestone, something that solid HGC teams such as Leftovers or HeroesHearth couldn’t do (both got 720, though HeroesHearth lost their points from first two cups). Then after achieving that record, they were disappointingly beaten by the not-coached Holy Bananas at the OD Playoffs. We’ve talked to Olf, the melee player for Holy Bananas who recently subbed for Granit Gaming in HGC against Leftovers:



From their American counterparts, OD champions Scythe Esports, we have Nintorii, their support player.

Thus far we’ve gotten to know the effectiveness of coaches from a statistical perspective, seen the impact they have on their teams throughout the different regions and questioned whether coaches are necessary. But to all those who think that’s everything, fear not: the HGC Coaches series is not over yet.

Next week: HGC Coaches Part 3: How Coaches are Born.

Thanks to all the people involved in the project, don’t forget to follow them on social media.

• Zoos
  
• Olf
  
• Nintorii