Pro Play and Celebrity Gossip

[Ashamanchill]

Curse and CLG  Oh my.

[Rasix]

Yah, both embarrassing for completely different reasons.  NA LOL looking strong.  

It's interesting how every top laner seems to get wrecked by NickWu in lane unless the enemy jungler spends the entire first 10 minutes sitting on him.

edit: Man, Regi's TF is hard to watch. 

[Ashamanchill]

Not as hard as any Dig game right now.

[Kail]

I just don't get what they're even doing anymore.  It's like they're trying to lose or something.

Curse is running jungle Fizz, AP Nunu, support Elise, and AD Ezreal, with Nyjacky on AD Tristana mid.  I mean, what?  Last game they were running against an all AD team, and the only one with armor was Saint.

[Azuredream]

That last game meant nothing to Curse. TSM had already locked up #1. I guess they just decided to roll with some weird troll comp instead of trying to win.

[Azuredream]

I love watching Copenhagen Wolves. Bjergsen is my favorite player right now. That last game versus Fnatic was excellent.

[Rasix]

All Star Teams

China and South Korea's teams are scary.  3 WE players and 2 iG..  Due to some sort of vote normalization, SE Asia's team is a bit messed up.

[Ashamanchill]

North America v China  Yeahhhhhhhh.

[Rasix]

Well, either they give ESL the offline client or I think this is the last EU LCS event they host.  Another restarted game for EG and like a 3 hour delay while they unfuck the internet issues.

[Ashamanchill]

That game was really fucking shitty to watch.

[Rasix]

DIG drops game one.   They really can't team fight for shit.  And yah, don't give Daydreamin' anything with hooks, although it would be weird to ban out 2 support champs from the guy that joined the team like 2 weeks ago.

[Malakili]

wow

[Ashamanchill]

I find myself stuck cheering for CLG in this mess, as I see them as the only ones capable of maybe beating TSM.

[Kail]

I dunno, I was kinda rooting for Curse before... but I didn't know they fired Elementz until today, and they are playing... not so well...

[Rasix]

I dunno, I was kinda rooting for Curse before... but I didn't know they fired Elementz until today, and they are playing... not so well...

 

ZionSpartan is a damned beast. 

Also: hook city. 

[Malakili]

[Goumindong]

Straight up i just do not understand why Curse let Vulcan have Nasus and Kog'Maw/Trist in game three. You know they're going to pick a late game comp if you let them... why let them?

[Azuredream]

Gambit v Fnatic game 4 was great if you didn't catch it- there was 1 kill a minute nonstop for like, the first 30 minutes, with the game finishing at 50+ minutes and 20+ kills each side. The whole series was entertaining. Going from watching that series to watching Curse vs Vulcan, it feels like the level of play took a sharp dive. NA really isn't very good.

I don't even understand what Vulcan was doing game one. I've seen them swap around all the roles before, but I don't really get why they do it. It seems like any advantage from surprising their opponents is outweighed by them not playing as well on their secondary roles.

[Ashamanchill]

Straight up i just do not understand why Curse let Vulcan have Nasus and Kog'Maw/Trist in game three. You know they're going to pick a late game comp if you let them... why let them?

Cause Curse lose games in the champ select screen. All the time. They will go out and play well at their roles, but then they fall to teams that have been allowed to produce a better synergy than them.

[Rasix]

Could be because they don't practice picks & bans in scrims.   It's mentioned in many interviews that they just troll champ select in their scrims and other teams find it baffling and not particularly great for their scrimming partner.

edit:

Heh, I also remember seeing an interview with a Korean pro, where they said NA loses at champ select every time.

[Malakili]

Heh, I also remember seeing an interview with a Korean pro, where they said NA loses at champ select every time.

You've really got to wonder why too, it isn't like the information on good counter picks is secret.  Is it just that the NA players have fewer champions on which they feel comfortable so they are too limited?

[Rasix]

Gambit v Fnatic game 4 was great if you didn't catch it- there was 1 kill a minute nonstop for like, the first 30 minutes, with the game finishing at 50+ minutes and 20+ kills each side. The whole series was entertaining. Going from watching that series to watching Curse vs Vulcan, it feels like the level of play took a sharp dive. NA really isn't very good.

That game was crazy.  The team fights were insane.  This is normally not a type of game that GG loses, just because they team fight so much better.

Curse v Vulcan.. a sliding team and a team that, quite honestly, sucks.  Vulcan is terrible.  Top teams should not lose to them. 

[luckton]

Weird request: Anyway to download and watch the games offline?  Can't get to Twitch or YouTube at work anymore, but if I could load up the game on a flash drive, would help my day go by quicker and easier.

[Rasix]

No. Not that I know of.

[Goumindong]

Weird request: Anyway to download and watch the games offline?  Can't get to Twitch or YouTube at work anymore, but if I could load up the game on a flash drive, would help my day go by quicker and easier.

Download them from youtube

Could be because they don't practice picks & bans in scrims.   It's mentioned in many interviews that they just troll champ select in their scrims and other teams find it baffling and not particularly great for their scrimming partner.

edit:

Heh, I also remember seeing an interview with a Korean pro, where they said NA loses at champ select every time.

There isn't really a reason to practice picks and bans. The purpose of not banning in scrims is to allow the other team to play their best composition. I.E. they want to see the best compositions around so that they know how to ban when they see those compositions come)

That is, not banning in scrims should make you better at banning in tournaments. But it doesn't seem to have because instead of looking at the kind of compositions that Vulcan did well at and then banning out those compositions as best they could, they just banned some assassins.

[ezrast]

Nobody scrims to help the other team get better, though. Mostly I see teams use it to try out new characters and compositions, which you almost never get to do against organized pro-level opposition (see Crs's last game of super week, which they confirmed was just experimenting). Picks/bans aren't constructive here because nobody wants to have their pro top-lane Shen banned when all they really wanted was to try some crazy Blitz-Shen bottom lane kill comp, or something.

[Malakili]

Nobody scrims to help the other team get better, though. Mostly I see teams use it to try out new characters and compositions, which you almost never get to do against organized pro-level opposition (see Crs's last game of super week, which they confirmed was just experimenting). Picks/bans aren't constructive here because nobody wants to have their pro top-lane Shen banned when all they really wanted was to try some crazy Blitz-Shen bottom lane kill comp, or something.

Do the CJ Entus teams practice together (Frost and Blaze)?  If so it could explain their relative dominance.  One of the things Korean Starcraft teams do so well is give each other really high quality practice partners.  But given the nature of a team game like LoL teams don't get those inherent training partners just by being in a team house.

[ezrast]

Blaze was actually formed to be Frost's training partners. Blaze would scrim other high-level teams, then copy their strategies and play them against Frost so that Frost (who never scrimmed anyone but Blaze) could develop counters in secret. As it turned out, super-sekrit training shenanigans turned out to be less effective a team development strategy than actually practicing against other teams (who'd have thought?) making Blaze arguably the better team.

[Malakili]

Well, I bring it up because in Starcraft it is understood that just playing lots of games against other good players isn't really a good way to practice.  I wondered if it was similar in LoL, but I guess not.

[ezrast]

Well, "lots of games" is relative. Some high-level LoL teams are lucky to get a couple of scrims in a week, and while most pro players spend a lot of time playing it's mostly solo queue, which is barely the same game.

What do Starcraft players focus on? Testing out theorycraft? Execution and timing?

[Malakili]

Well, "lots of games" is relative. Some high-level LoL teams are lucky to get a couple of scrims in a week, and while most pro players spend a lot of time playing it's mostly solo queue, which is barely the same game.

What do Starcraft players focus on? Testing out theorycraft? Execution and timing?

Timings matter a lot.  A lot of times you have questions like "What do I need to do with this build to so that I can survive X timing attack" and so you have a team mate just do that timing attack against you 10-15-20 times in a row until you figure it out.  But you can't easily answer those very specific questions when you are mass gaming on ladder.  So in order to really refine a build you need to try it against really specific things to learn all the deviations and sidepaths you might have to take depending on what opponents are doing.  Ladder might be a decent place to identify some of those questions, but a really bad place to answer them, especially not with any kind of efficiency.

I guess the games are just very different and a lot of my intuitions which I have from RTS don't really carry over.

[Rasix]

MYM and DB are so god awful.  It's a pity one of these teams gets to win.   At least DB can be entertaining at times.. but they're all just so bad.

[Fordel]

Well, "lots of games" is relative. Some high-level LoL teams are lucky to get a couple of scrims in a week, and while most pro players spend a lot of time playing it's mostly solo queue, which is barely the same game.

What do Starcraft players focus on? Testing out theorycraft? Execution and timing?

Timings matter a lot.  A lot of times you have questions like "What do I need to do with this build to so that I can survive X timing attack" and so you have a team mate just do that timing attack against you 10-15-20 times in a row until you figure it out.  But you can't easily answer those very specific questions when you are mass gaming on ladder.  So in order to really refine a build you need to try it against really specific things to learn all the deviations and sidepaths you might have to take depending on what opponents are doing.  Ladder might be a decent place to identify some of those questions, but a really bad place to answer them, especially not with any kind of efficiency.

I guess the games are just very different and a lot of my intuitions which I have from RTS don't really carry over.

If the players are practicing for GSL or Pro-League, they'll know who their opponent is a week+ in advance, so they'll basically do a scouting report on the enemy player and have their own teammates emulate their play style as best they can. This can of course lead to players trying to out-meta each other and changing up their own styles to counter this.

[Malakili]

Well, "lots of games" is relative. Some high-level LoL teams are lucky to get a couple of scrims in a week, and while most pro players spend a lot of time playing it's mostly solo queue, which is barely the same game.

What do Starcraft players focus on? Testing out theorycraft? Execution and timing?

Timings matter a lot.  A lot of times you have questions like "What do I need to do with this build to so that I can survive X timing attack" and so you have a team mate just do that timing attack against you 10-15-20 times in a row until you figure it out.  But you can't easily answer those very specific questions when you are mass gaming on ladder.  So in order to really refine a build you need to try it against really specific things to learn all the deviations and sidepaths you might have to take depending on what opponents are doing.  Ladder might be a decent place to identify some of those questions, but a really bad place to answer them, especially not with any kind of efficiency.

I guess the games are just very different and a lot of my intuitions which I have from RTS don't really carry over.

If the players are practicing for GSL or Pro-League, they'll know who their opponent is a week+ in advance, so they'll basically do a scouting report on the enemy player and have their own teammates emulate their play style as best they can. This can of course lead to players trying to out-meta each other and changing up their own styles to counter this.

Yeah, this is particularly true for the Korean tournaments.  But the western tournaments almost never follow this format (I guess NASL not withstanding), and the Koreans still dominate them in a large part because of the practice regimen of Korean team houses.

[Rasix]

MARN and Complexity gone. Complexity got steam rolled hard.  MARN v. VES (such a photogenic team  ) was a decent series.  Game 2.  Craziness ensues.