Climbing the Ladder

Banelings waddle up the natural ramp, looking for any potential connection. It makes little difference at this point, the game is Rogue's. A massive army of hydralisks and queens forces its way up, shooting down all interceptors before they can do any harm. herO realizes his defeat and concedes. Rogue has qualified for the WCS Global Finals. On match point, with his back against the wall, against one of the most dangerous players in StarCraft II, Rogue has done what seemed impossible only a few weeks ago. When all odds were stacked against him, Rogue pulled through.

His rather weak 2600 WCS points are boosted massively by two tournament victories towards the end of the year—IEM Shanghai and GSL Super Tournament. Had Rogue not won both of them, he would not be here. That BlizzCon qualifying run, stretching across two championships, included wins over GuMiho, Stats, Dark, ByuN, herO, Maru, Dear, INnoVation, and herO again. Had Rogue lost any of these series, he would not be here. So is this just who Rogue is now? A player who, when the clutch is required, performs to the very best of his ability and outplays even the best in the world? We commonly associated these last minute runs with his team-mate sOs, a player that specializes in bringing out the best when it counts. It appears we must begin to describe Rogue in similar terms.

But how did this happen? At the start of the year, Rogue crashed out of the GSL in the first round and did not even qualify for SSL. There was talk of him playing more Overwatch than StarCraft II, and even retirement was murmured to be an option for him. When Rogue tore his path through the IEM Shanghai championship to win his first ever trophy, he appeared a fundamentally changed player. Instead of relying on trickery and deception, Rogue outplayed his opponents in standard games. He exploited every chink in their armor, made subtle but intelligent adjustments and simply outclassed them. He brought to the table the kind of standard finesse we usually associate with Zergs like Dark and soO, but not Rogue. How did he go from a Proleague wildcard to a sturdy macro player?

The answer is quite simple. When Rogue won IEM Shanghai, he had been top of the Korean ladder for a good amount of time. His MMR then—and now—is astonishing. Rogue regularly occupies the top spots on the Korean ladder with not one, but two accounts at, and sometimes above, 7000 MMR. To put that in comparison, Serral and ShoWTimE were hailed in the international scene for reaching that mark in Europe. Rogue did it in Korea, where the best players in the world hold their practice sessions, and held that high MMR for months straight. This meant that he consistently played against only the very best in the scene—the INnoVations, the soOs, the Darks and the Stats of the world. His skill guaranteed him an even better practice situation, and improved him yet again.

It is time to start looking towards the Korean ladder as a valuable indicator of skill. "Ladder doesn't matter" is foolish commentary. Nonsense. All the best Korean players have, for years, said in interviews that ladder is their primary tool for practice. They take it seriously. And as such, the examples of players reaching top spots on the Korean ladder and then carrying that skill over into tournaments is extremely long. Then-Liquid'HerO reached the top of the Korean ladder before his breakout performances at Dreamhack, MLG and NASL. IM_Seed's GSL championship was predated by a surge to #1 on ladder. Maru's Starleague championship shortly after the beta of Heart of the Swarm was only shocking to those that had not followed his absurd ladder record at the time. Zest's all-kill against SKT, his GSL championship following immediately after, as well as his domination of 2014 as a whole were all accompanied by him holding the top spot on the Korean ladder for almost the whole year. TY and Stats battled for the top spot early this year, when TY won WESG and IEM Katowice and Stats took home his GSL Championship. INnoVation, in his stretch of dominance this year, was second only to Rogue on ladder. Rogue himself is only the latest in a long, long list of champions built on the Korean ladder.

Rogue's self-reinvention happened behind closed doors, and we had little chance to witness it. The WCS system is partially to blame—a player who loses early in a season has very few competitions to play in for a long time. But the signs were there. His sustained high ladder ranking should have been the indicator we needed that things were beginning to look up for Rogue. And they sure did. Rogue used his time out of the spotlight superbly. He fixed tendencies that kept him down and replaced them with better. No longer will he rely on specially crafted builds that fall apart if countered correctly. He now appears entirely confident in his own skill and ability to outplay even the very best in the world, and plays accordingly. No longer is he the player who was sent out specifically to snipe certain opponents on certain maps by his team in Proleague, but he is now a player you would send out against anyone—because he is that good. And he finally has the championship trophies to prove it.

And so it happens that Rogue, a player who, until the very last map we saw him play, had not even qualified for BlizzCon, enters the tournament as one of its greatest favorites. No other player in the world can claim to possess the same form Rogue is in at the moment. But form is temporary. Class is permanent. Now is the time for Rogue to show that he is not a one-time appearance, and that he does not run purely on form. All the signs for true greatness and skill are there. Now is the time to show his true class.