2015 Worlds Group Stage Day 5 (Group A) - Page 2

On October 07 2015 05:23 zer0das wrote:


I feel like the China proponents are the biggest homers. Talk up the region constantly, come up with a million excuses if they don't live up to the hype. Namei, LGD, IG.... there's more excuses here than CLG at their peak of excuse making and when Link wrote his manifesto combined.

On October 07 2015 07:18 Saradin wrote:


It's easier to feel that some other fanbase are the biggest homers. Consider traditional sports fandom and how one team's fans think of others. It's just so much easier to trash some aspect of another team (be it their fans, commentators, whatever) than it is to admit that your own side isn't exactly different. An NBA example would be something like, how Celtics fans feel about Tommy Heinsohn* doing colour for the Celtics, vs how every non-Celtics fan's view his work.
It also gets too easy to evaluate a piece praising your own team as 'legitimate' while at the same time a piece praising a different team as 'pfft, blatant homerism at work'. Just how fandom generally works.
Now in this case, we're English speakers living somewhere in the west and typically hang around English language communities. At some point sooner or later we just get numb to the local echo chamber, and forget that when evaluating other regions' supporters.

*for the non-NBA fans, the context here is that if you poll non-Celtics fans for who they find to be the worst homer announcer, you can expect the top result to be Heinsohn.
Of course, the Celtics fanbase's love for Heinsohn isn't really for him as a colour caster specifically but more for his overall ties to the Celtics, as he's either been a player, coach, or caster for them since 1956. Now that guy is a franchise lifer.

On October 07 2015 07:47 Saradin wrote:
Think of reddit. Think of how people react to a western win or defeat, or a non-western win or defeat. Think of how people evaluate their region's historical performances, then contrast to how they evaluate other regions'. The differences in general attitude are really noticable if you're not already part of the echo chamber. One example: compare evaluations of Taiwan's s3-s4's stretch of godawful international performance to NA's s2-s3 stretch of absolute dogshit + s4's 'YEA, WE GOT TWO TEAMS OUT OF GROUPS AND THEN PROMPTLY GOT DESTROYED RIGHT AFTERWARD, WOOOOO'. The former tends to get trashed; the latter gets s2-s3 glossed over while s4 is treated as a fucking point of pride.
Or even more extreme, think of the demographic lolesports caters to.

On October 07 2015 08:01 Amarok wrote:


The problem is you're contrasting casual western fans with Chinese analysts and experts, specifically the English speaking ones that have been talking about China having the best teams in the world. No one's shitting on the opinions of the casual fan on QQ (or whatever social media platform most of the LoL discussion runs through) because most of us can't read it and it'd probably be the level of discussion seen on Reddit/facebook anyway.

From what I've seen western analysts/experts have been pretty reasonable about the highs/lows of their scene(s).

On October 07 2015 08:13 Saradin wrote:


I'm not? I was responding to 'proponents' as 'people in general talking' as opposed to experts/analysts only.

On October 07 2015 08:45 cLutZ wrote:


Then your post is really confusing/misleading because I had the same reaction to it as Amarok.

Chinese "Experts" billed LGD/EDG as 2 of the top 3 teams here, and iG being somewhere between 4 and 7. Non-Chinese experts largely trusted these evaluations and maybe threw Fanatic or CLG into their top 5.

The other problem is this is a systemic problem of the Chinese scene (with the rare exception of MSI). They are almost certainly why, for instance, GodV was #3 on the list, last year Namei was similarly ranked. Or, even in their own scene they are continually delusional, even as 4 of the top 4 6 of the top 6 (sorry, corrected when fact checking) teams in the LPL had the max # of Koreans in their active rosters.

On October 07 2015 09:35 Azarkon wrote:


This has been a persistent problem with Western analysis of the Chinese scene in general, across all eSports - they simply don't know what's going on, so they base their analysis strictly on past results and the stereotype of "Asians are skilled at games and try very hard in them, therefore they must > West gamers who are all casual and lazy." The sole exception to the image of Asian professionalism in eSports is that it is not applied to Southeast Asia due to their repeatedly bad results.

The first time this stereotype was challenged in Dota 2, people were completely caught off guard, same as this year in LoL. It turned out, in that case, that both the "experts" and the public had formed such an uniform opinion of East > West that they were willing to believe whatever was fed to them, such that arguments that went against all logic - eg "it is healthy for a scene to have no new players, because it shows how skilled the veterans are" became the standard. Again, same as in LoL, whereby the LPL people were saying that the LPL's poor practice culture was ultimately irrelevant because the individual players were so damn talented, and that playing randomly was as effective as playing tactically because who needs to rotate when you can just fight?

The learning experience, in this case, was necessary for Dota 2 analysis to move beyond the simple idea that Western gamers were casual screw ups while Asian gamers were try hard professionals and that this won't ever change. As it turned out, Chinese players were just as casual and lazy as Western players - and the "experts" simply failed their job. With LoL, I imagine and hope this year will be a similar learning experience.

On October 07 2015 09:26 Amarok wrote:
In fairness to Monte he's always been extremely sceptical about the China crowd bigging up and/or excusing flaws with the Chinese scene. That said, I agree he regularly glosses over similar flaws in the Korean scene.

I think the key thing people have missed with China is that LoL has evolved more and more into a game that is won by teams over individuals and comms are crucial to good teamplay. Sure Pawn, Imp, Rookie, Kakao, Deft et al are phenomenal players but it doesn't matter if communication is less than perfect at an absolutely crucial moment. Note, I said "less then perfect" instead of "bad". You only need players to react a call a split second later and an opportunity is missed or a fight is lost. Throw in a scene that manages to put players like TBQ and Kitties on teams that are supposed to be contenders and inconsistent coaching structures and it's easy to see why they'd be inconsistent at best.

I hope this year will be a wake up call for people like Monte/Moser who have absolute faith in the superiority of their scene. Even if a Korean team ends up winning the whole thing, teams like Origen and C9 look very competitive, as have Fnatic over the course of the year (though I'm not convinced they're dead just yet). Between the skimming of the Korean scene and China being China it's easy to understand why things are closer to reaching parity.