Lane-pushers tend to be very divisive games: you're either a fellow addict, or aspects of it repulses you deeply—usually the community. The problems are well-known, and inextricably tied to the nature of the game: the extremely teamwork-oriented nature of League of Legends means that all of your allies and yourself stand as potential and catastrophic failure points. It almost doesn't matter how well you're doing if your teammates totally trip over themselves, and it's conversely vivid and painfully obvious when you're the one weighing everybody else down.

Of course, the same pain points are its strengths. It feels good to be part of the reason why a team won—good enough to be addicting. When you pull off a successful wombo combo, leading to a downed nexus, the frisson of accomplishment is a potent endorphin rush, and you're even inclined to feel positively of the four others that helped you to that point.

The main problem is how to get to that point when you don't have anybody to handhold you through the basics. Even I only got into the game, after a few frustrating starts, because of the patient assistance of a few old high school buddies willing to give me pointers—and it took longer yet before I had any confidence in my contributions, given that one of them was Diamond-ranked when I started and was, in fact, skilled enough to carry the game on his own versus lower-tiered players. Secretly, that was just yet another reason to get addicted, as skill progression in games like League are at a steady enough clip that you're able to notice the progress. You're hooked into thinking that it'll take just a little more effort before you, too, pick up pentakills.

It also leaves most people blind to how much effort they'd put into the game to get that far, and frustrated why newcomers can't grasp seemingly simple concepts.

One of my friends, fervently in the non-MOBA camp, describes it as such: by the tribunal guidelines laid down by Riot, he would absolutely be reported after every game, and absolutely deserve it. Because when his teammates, frustrated by my friend's lack of competence and success, tells him "stop feeding," he's going to take it as a cue to park his ass back in base and walk away from the keyboard. After all, he knows he shouldn't be giving up kills. He knows he should be more careful. But if his own teammates are going to harass him without actually offering any useful advice, he isn't going to just donate more than half an hour of his time to a bunch of hostile people.

Now, what would help best is if there was some sort of officially supported mentorship program, where people can volunteer to teach, others can sign up to be taught, and both get rewarded materially for good behavior (the more IP for newbies the better, quite frankly—getting a ranked-ready rune page up is time-intensive). In lieu of that, new League players can at least get by with some basic tips for how to survive on Summoner's Rift.

Don't feed

It's obvious why teammates get frustrated when somebody racks up a double-digit death count: at roughly 300 gold per death, that's a LOT of cash they donated to the enemy team, and a lot of items the enemy team subsequently bought to make life rough for the rest of the feeder's team. But what's not so obvious is how to avoid doing so: when you've just entered the game for the first time, you haven't yet grown the instinctive grasp of spell ranges and potential threats everybody else seems to have.

The good news is, developing that sense is easy enough. You're even provided with a champion right off the bat that gives you a good sense of it. Though Ashe is currently a terrible AD carry all around, her extremely long auto-attack range matches roughly with the engagement ranges of common gap-closers and spell effects. A new player should absolutely use her to practice switching between attacking and moving—and, if at all possible, learn to do so by alternating between basic move commands and attack-moves (or holding the "A" key, then left-clicking as normal).

Why a-moves? To minimize chance of error. Normally, the move and attack commands are identical, just contextualized by whether you've clicked on an empty patch of floor, or if you've clicked within the hitbox of a viable target. The problem is if you misclick: if you hit the floor next to your opponent, you'll walk toward them and into spell range instead of safely firing off arrows at range. A-moving, on the other hand, tells your champion to only close in far enough to get an attack off, guaranteeing safe (or safer) range of engagement even if you misclick—your champion will attack the first hostile target within range, then move if none others are nearby.

It's not the easiest trick to learn, but that just makes it all the more important to pick it up early. If you find yourself feeding, check to see how much of it is simply because you walk a little closer to the fight than you wanted to—or, at least with bruisers, just at the wrong time.

Don't facecheck

Of course, covering just micro-level range management isn't going to save anybody if Sejuani appears from behind you and rams her giant pig right up your unmentionables. Junglers are the great equalizers of the game, explicitly designed to show up at the worst moment to ruin your day. But they aren't ghosts, ineffable and impossible to avoid: there are plenty of ways to keep them in check, and they cost a mere 75 gold apiece!

Yes, I know: "USE MORE WARDS" is a League clich by now. The idea that Garen's waiting in every bush to ambush you has been ground into the community conscious since Season 1. But you can't just scatter the little green things willy-nilly and expect them to miraculously prevent ganks on their own—I see even pro players dump them in their own jungle, for example, hoping to catch an invade while it happens, and it's frustrating how pointless this is. Wards that aren't in neutral or hostile territory tell tales too late: by the time they spot the enemy jungler, all you know is when you'll be forced to fight. It'll be too late to actually avoid the engagement—better, almost always, to drop them at neutral range, like by the river, or in the enemy's side of the map to scout movement before their plans solidify.

Of course, all the wards in the world are pointless if nobody looks at the minimap, and that, above all, is what's causing so many deaths in the lower-level queues. Players complain a lot if you don't point out when the enemy's left the lane, but frankly? It was their business to know. Quick and frequent glances at the minimap are a winner's habit: do it often enough, and you can guess what's about to happen based off what you don't see.

Do farm

All of the above lends credence to my friend's idea of just hanging back and not doing anything. But that's a form of feeding too, mathematically: the gold differential between you and your counterpart on the enemy team is something you can control, and deliberately allowing them to get significantly ahead means that your team can't rely on you to provide counter-pressure from the same role. While it isn't giving the enemy team gold directly, it works out to the same effect, and is to be avoided for the same reasons.

But how to do so? The standard lane compositions in solo queue help here: since you're going to spend 99% of your games facing a player trying to do your job against you, it's pretty easy to track how aggressively or passively they're farming. If they're attacking everything, pushing as aggressively as possible, it's a good idea to try and keep up—letting them push you back just makes life harder for you as you struggle to fight your own turret for last-hits.

Idly: when farming under turret, it's good to know how to get last-hits despite the turret shots. Generally, you want the turret to land two hits on melee minions before you take a shot, and you want to make an auto-attack on a ranged creep before the turret hits them, then finish up. This changes as you itemize, but is generally appropriate for the first 15 minutes.

Conversely, if they're playing passively, it's usually a good idea to slow down the pace of your farm as well, and focus only on last-hitting minions. The reason to keep equal pace ties in with the tips preceding this section: minimap and range awareness is very important if you think the jungler's liable to approach. The middle of the lane is neutral territory, safe from your own turret and hard to gank, so managing your farm to match pace with your opponent is a good way to stay in that range.

Don't despair

The most important skill to learn in League has nothing to do with mechanics, skill shots, vision management or anything in the game code. All that comes with time, practice, and a little research. But it's your mental game that turns these disparate techniques into coherent skill—and strength of character is hard to teach.

You are going to have games where you're simply outmatched. Games where your teammates are outright liabilities. Games where, no matter what you do, you can't seem to get an edge.

Don't despair. It isn't as hopeless as it looks. If anything, turnaround games are more common nowadays, ever since they took the gold bounty off Dragon—it's harder for a team to pull out the early 10,000 gold leads we've seen in prior years. And the nature of the game is such that even if you fall behind, there's still a chance to win a fight.

Since the enemy team's damage-dealers will usually build like glass cannons, it's possible to beat a team that's well ahead of you by better positioning and setting up ambushes. If you can patiently wait for the chance to jump their AD carry and mid laner, especially at around 50 minutes into the game, what seemed like an inevitable loss is suddenly a white-knuckle victory!

So hesitate a bit before you confirm that forfeit vote. As bitter as defeat is, the taste of comeback is sweeter than my words can do justice. Almost as sweet as the tears of your defeated opponents!

In early 2013, Riot Games issued a permanent ban against League of Legends players Nicolaj Jensen and Khaled Abusagr because of persistent toxic behavior and participation in DDoS attacks against other players. Yesterday, however, it rescinded the ban against Jensen, meaning he will be eligible to resume playing professionally on May 11 of this year.

The reinstatement, as noted by Kotaku, is the result of changes made last year to Riot's policies regarding bans and permabans, which now "focus on the goal of reform, not just punishment." As part of those changes, permabans became indefinite suspensions, subject to a review process once a mandatory minimum period of time had passed. "Each review is holistic and takes into account both in and out of game behavior," the policy states. "Penalized players need to show through their ongoing actions that they have made a genuine and long-term change in their behavior."

Jensen apparently has. "Since his last review, Jensen has continued to demonstrate behavior in game that is well above the normal standards of good behavior across all of his accounts since at least January 2014," Riot wrote in the suspension review summary. "Additionally, according to our monitoring tools, he has not been implicated in any DDOS or Drophacking-related exploits since Q2 2013. There have been no serious offenses or violations of the letter or spirit of the Summoner Code since his account-sharing related offense in Q1 2014."

Jensen is the first permabanned League of Legends pro to ever be reinstated, and because of that Riot took extra care to get it right. "In this most recent review, in addition to a review of old and secondary accounts through November, all games on his most recent primary account for which there was a shadow of a doubt regarding Jensen s behavior were individually analyzed," it wrote. "All the data supports the conclusion that Jensen has legitimately reformed and has earned a second chance."

Unfortunately for Abusagr, Riot declared in no uncertain terms that he's not ready to return. "Abusagr continues to display unacceptably negative behavior without any significant progress toward reform. His most active account has been reported in 47 percent of his games in the last 90 days and 50 percent in the last 60. He's received a total of 1830 reports in 590 games. 70 percent of which were for offensive language, verbal abuse or negative attitude. An audit of chat logs from games he has been reported in reveals consistently offensive, hostile, and homophobic rhetoric," Riot wrote. In light of his "absolute lack of commitment to reform," Abusagr won't be eligible for review again until summer 2017.

Organizers of the Game Developers Conference have generously posted many videos of the sessions recorded at this year's show online. You need to be a member to see some of them, but there's no shortage of fascinating talks that are available for free. After looking through them, these are some of the free sessions we think you shouldn't miss.

VR for Indies

Virtual reality was without a doubt the theme of GDC 2015. Sony had a new Morpheus model, Valve demoed Vive, and Carmack was on stage talking up mobile VR. However, the most down to earth, realistic session I saw about VR at GDC was VR for Indies, where Darknet developer E McNeill, Max Geiger, Ben Kane, Holden Link, and Vi Hart talked about how smaller developers can take advantage of this new technology, or if they even should. They weren't there to pitch you on a new product. They just talked honestly about what can be done now, and can hopefully be done in the future.

The Power of the Abstract

In this session, indie developer and game critic Liz Ryerson makes a really strong case for why we should stop chasing super realistic graphics and games that aim to emulate reality as closely as possible and instead consider the power of the abstract. It's not only a fascinating perspective, Ryerson also mentions several interesting games during her talk that you can download and play right now.

Growing the Participation of Women in eSports

Ever wonder why there aren't more women in eSports? This talk from professional players, Blizzard's Kim Phan, and Heather "SapphiRe" Mumm from the ESEA will not only tell you why, but what we can do to fix the problem.

The Dawn of Mobile VR

Look, I'm not even going to pretend that I understand what John Carmack is saying half the time, but I do know when I'm the presence of genius. Carmack made Doom, he dabbles in rocket science just for kicks, and he's doing a lot of important work on the current resurgence of virtual reality. Here he's talking about mobile VR, but you'll learn a lot about Oculus in general, and it's always interesting to hear him talk.

Divinity: Original Sin Postmortem - Success Stories and Lessons Learned

Divinity: Original Sin was easily one of the best games of last year, and a perfect example of what makes PC gaming so great. In this session, Larian Studio's Swen Vincke explains how they created Divinity. Spoiler alert: it wasn't easy.

Building Fear in Alien: Isolation

Speaking of some of the best game of last year, this session will tell you all about how Creative Assembly created PC Gamer's 2014 Game of the Year, Alien: Isolation. One of the coolest things about this session is that at some point Creative Assembly considered making Alien: Isolation a third-person game, and there's even the footage to prove it.

Building a Sport: The Design Philosophy of League of Legends

If you play League of Legends, watching this session should be mandatory. Ryan "Morello" Scott, League of Legends' Lead Designer, and Frank Lantz, the Director of the New York University Game Center, discuss how Riot Games designs and balances an eSports sensation that over 70 million play every month. Lantz is a big fan of the game, Scott is surprisingly open, and it's really interesting to hear them nerd out about the design decisions, big to small, that make League of Legends tick, even if you don't play it.

#1ReasonToBe

2014 was a pretty difficult year for women in the games industry. In the #1ReasonToBe session, game developer Brenda Romero hosts a panel including game critic Leigh Alexander, developer Adriel Wallick, Uncharted writer and current creative director at EA Amy Henning, and others who work in different parts of the industry. They discuss the highs and lows of their experience in games, and how to create a more inclusive way forward. 

League players set a lot by their solo queue ranks. It's set something of a social hierarchy—the Challenger royalty, the titled nobility of the Masters, the knighted Diamonds, Platinum yeoman... and, of course, the massed peasantry of Bronze. The nominal meritocracy, as defined by your ability to win solo queue matches, has its flaws—never mind that the season's-end rewards are definitely one of the driving forces behind botting and elo-boosting shenanigans that regularly plagues the game, but it also sets some rather fundamentally erroneous assumptions about the skills required to reach the thin airs and heady heights of pro play.

Pro players, when they can be bothered to answer, posit that a truly skilled player can carry themselves up the ranks with any champion. And this is true! At least to an extent. While being forced to play with nine other players does put an extremely large randomizing factor on a player's chances, my personal experience is that even a support player can "carry" a game with sufficient understanding of the inter-relation between runes, masteries, basic mechanics and player behavior.

Even a Sona player can carry low-Elo games with good positioning and instinct for spell ranges. Especially if they grab a Sheen. And it should, by all rights, be even easier as a mid laner or AD carry, given that they have the additional flexibility of farm gold to enable them. If you're stuck in the lower ranks, chances are that your farm isn't very good, you're not careful enough to maintain vision (please, for the love of whatever deity you subscribe to, buy at least one ward on every recall), you're not packing the right runes to win trades, or you get caught because you haven't developed an instinct for spell ranges yet.

Past a point, though, yes: it is definitely your champion holding you back.

Betting against Bard

League's newest champion is a great case study for the differences between a pub-stomper, or a champion good for solo queue ladder-climbing, and a tournament-caliber champion. I wouldn't play Bard in solo queue—his laning is weak, his stunning skillshot has an incredibly slow missile speed, and his heals reward patience and setup rather than combat usage, making it fairly dismal for 2v2 trades. Worst of all, his Tempered Fate ultimate in solo queue's uncoordinated environment will get you yelled at by your own team for freezing them in place at inopportune moments. Some of this can be offset by customization—full AD marks lets him at least apply a bit of auto-attack pressure in lane, though it won't fully address the deficiencies in his kit and design.

And yet: I think Bard has a good chance at seeing tournament play. A lot of his weaknesses can be summarized as "too dependent on teammates." Follow-ups on Tempered Fate and chases through Magical Journey, even where to put and when to use Caretaker's Shrines, are all dependent on a high level of coordination with your team—more so, at least, than what's required from stacking a bunch of AOE abilities on top of an obvious cluster of enemy players.

With that follow-up, though, Bard's an amazing champion! Suddenly Udyr has a gapcloser that extends far past the immediate screen—so long as there's a wall nearby. Suddenly, Janna's Monsoon doesn't kill a fight—Tempered Fate's locked down her team, preventing escape! The increasingly common 2-man jungle strategies you see at high-tier play are further enabled, as Bard overtly benefits with xp and free mana from roaming around, picking up the chimes scattered across the map.

Of course, you never see 2-man jungling in solo queue. In fact, it's vanishingly rare to see anything but the 4-year-old 1-1-1-2 top-to-bot lane compositional standard even in Team Builder queue, even as it's been proven over and over that a good roaming or laneswap strategy can utterly kill an enemy champion's scaling. Of course, the trick is to pull off a good laneswap, and that is exactly where solo queue falls short. Bard's (potentially) strong in a team environment, but solo queue is all about the individual skill...kind of.

The LeBlanc paradox

You would think that a burst assassin like LeBlanc would be a normal (and possibly frustrating) part of the solo queue experience right now. We know, from LCS games and elsewhere, exactly what she's capable of in equally capable hands: almost single-handedly devastating teams and taking turrets. Yet, for all of her demonstrated prowess, her solo queue win rate is a relatively abysmal 47%, or statistically more of a hindrance than help.

Have pro players deceived us? Is she actually a bad champion? Patently ridiculous, as anybody that's had the displeasure of going up against a decent LeBlanc knows. But between her slow chains and squishy defenses, she's a very temperamental champion. Unless you know exactly what you're doing and how you plan to get out from moment to moment, you'll likely find yourself at the wrong end of a stun or bind—and subsequently wrecked.

A good player can get incredible mileage out of a champion with a high skill ceiling. The Faker vs Ryu Zed-on-Zed showdown in the summer of 2013 stands as proof that the game has ridiculous mechanical depth to it, under the right circumstances. Even milliseconds may be taking too long to respond to a world class player's course of action. But a player trying to get good might not benefit so much from that ceiling—actually, they should be more worried about meeting the requisites of a champion's skill floor.

The skill floor is, simply, that bare minimum of competence you need to make a champion worth playing. A champion like Sona, for instance, has an almost depressingly low skill floor—stick close to an allied champion, press buttons, and you're playing her well! Or well enough, at any rate. Sure, you miss out on well-timed Power Chord usage or a good flash-Crescendo, but they aren't absolutely vital to making her a useful teammate. Champions heavy on the AOE usage or otherwise commanding self-targeting spells instead of skillshots tend to be very newbie-friendly as a result—and, consequentially, much easier to grind ladder points with.

Do they also tend to suffer against a high-ceiling champion? Sure. The way the game's designed, high-ceiling champions tend to be packed with a lot more power, at least in the form of tactical flexibility. What makes LeBlanc terrifying isn't entirely the damage output at her disposal, but a significant part of it built inherently into her extreme mobility. Anybody foolish enough to attempt a Sona mid lane into LeBlanc, for instance, would probably do less damage to their team's odds by sitting at fountain and walking away from their keyboard—with only Flash as an escape from LeBlanc's kill pressure, any ill-conceived attempt to play Sona as a mage inevitably ends up with her doing a pinata impression.

But does the same hold true for the increasingly popular Diana mid? Definitely not—and though Diana isn't quite as easy as Sona, her targeted Lunar Rush and Pale Cascade shield offers her both more survivability and guaranteed damage than LeBlanc. Or Ziggs, who benefits greatly from the recently upgraded mana regeneration for Athene's Unholy Grail—there's very little for LeBlanc to do against a kit built around easy waveclearing and lane pressure. She can't even roam properly, thanks to Mega Inferno Bomb's ludicrous range.

Even outside the mid lane, the difference between skill ceiling and skill floor holds true. Caitlyn's free Elo for most people, especially compared to Ezreal—her longer range, reliable escapes, and easy waveclearing makes her much easier to lane with than Ezreal's single-target-centric kit. And in the jungle, nobody's picking Sejuani over Lee Sin because of her greater mechanical potential—more like it takes a heck of a lot less effort to turn her into an unkillable perma-slowing tank. Who needs to InSec their way into a fight if you can just run them over headlong with a giant pig?

Skill society

There is definitely such thing as "Elo hell." There is definitely such thing as the unwinnable game. There are definitely some champions that counter others, thanks to the interplay between their kits. But what a lot of players fail to ask is whether or not they've contributed to their own torment. Did you pick Draven, a short-ranged high-complexity AD carry, into Caitlyn—who's exactly the opposite? You didn't just inconvenience yourself—you not only indirectly fed Caitlyn a lot of gold, but made it so that the enemy jungler can focus their attention on other lanes, making it harder for your teammates too. Picked Zed mid, and your entire team does only physical damage? The other team thanks you for all of the Randuin's Omens and Thornmails they're gonna stock up on, neutralizing damage from your side across the board.

There is an elusive happy medium to find in solo queue: a compromise between selfish play and team synergy, between ease of use and high potential. It isn't entirely about how godlike you can play Riven top lane—if you play with that kind of self-centered mechanics-only mindset, you'll only get partial credit in solo queue's skills test.

True mastery—and a fancy precious metals border—comes from understanding the game as a whole.

There's a lot to dislike about ESL's best-of-one group stages, as used in IEM Katowice—competition is often volatile, especially with lane pushers where there are balance disparities based on what side you start on or whether teams run into each other in the first two or three minutes of game-time. It could've been worse, sure, as the double elimination format means a team has to screw up twice before they're truly knocked out, and if you're that shaky on the international stage, you weren't set to win it anyhow.

But while the group format itself was unimpressive, the results coming out of it was amazing. Upsets all around: white was black, up was down, Korean teams actually lost, and everybody was chowing down on apple pie in the end. It was easily the most exciting League of Legends tournament in a while—and though the sub-optimal group stage format puts a lot of its results into doubt, there were lessons aplenty to be learned from its outcomes.

Even gods bleed

CJ Entus getting knocked out: fair. Among the OGN regulars, it was widely recognized that their standings in their home circuit was a bit deceptive: while they weren't Samsung-level bad (and imagine saying "Samsung-level bad" just a few months ago), their early-spring performance was now overshadowed by an extremely rough latter-season patch. Calling them "tepid" would be doing them a favor, with the only decent performers being Coco and—to the consternation of everybody that's ragged on him last year (including me)—Space.

Yes, we're talking about the team with Madlife and Shy, the superstars of Season 2. No, neither of them are anywhere near at an acceptable level of play at the moment. CJ Entus getting knocked out of groups wasn't entirely expected (KT Rolster Bullets and SKT T1 K were both in dire straits when they swept their IEM tournaments), but if there was going to be any team to disappoint South Korea it was going to be them.

GE Tigers, though. What? Really? They haven't dropped a set against anybody in South Korea! They were supposed to yawn and steamroll over China's Team WE, who had replaced their mid laner and support literally days before the tournament! Instead, for the first time since 2012, an international tournament with Korean teams failed to have a Korean finals.

Suddenly, blood is in the water, and everybody's a shark. The great exodus of 2014's paid off, alright—it might not necessarily make China more competitive (Team WE was wrecked by North America's Team Solomid 3-0, and haven't made as much of a splash back home in the LPL), but it sure as hell has made Korea weaker. Where once even their lower-tier teams made everybody else look laughable,

Has South Korea's esports golden age run its course?

TSM! TSM! TSM!

Given the nature of international competition, the death knells of one region's supremacy usually means another coming up in its place—and North America has been waiting with bated breath for years for their turn. They lost their grasp of it wwaaaaaayyy back in Season One, when the European metagame that made permanent the distinct roles of League of Legends ended up with Fnatic and Against All Authority in an all-European finals, found themselves in shockingly short measure in Season Two, when the Taipei Assassins demonstrated the value of a truly professionalized training environment, and the next two years were basically KeSPA flexing their muscles.

Each and every time, in each and every season, Team Solomid was North America's best hopes and most popular team. Sure, their innate American-ness might be a tad questionable—the team now consists of two Danes, a Korean, a Canadian and a Dyrus—but with their victory at IEM Katowice, the organization's finally cemented a long-pursued global leadership.

Coach Locodoco's done a continent proud. The biggest criticism against TSM, prior to Katowice, was a notable binary in their play patterns: either Bjergsen went off, or the team suffered. But while they're still centralized on his success, their dependency was notably lessened: Santorin and Lustboy, in particular, had astounding performances, promising a tactical breadth that will prove all the more vital in future tournaments.

Western whiplash

Of course, it's one thing to say that TSM's a major Worlds contender now. It's another thing to say that their success is reflective of the western circuits.

Case in point: the poor European teams. SK might be struggling, but they're still among the top three teams of the EU LCS right now. And Gambit, while comparatively low in the standings, is the opposite case: their ranking belies what has been solid and increasingly respected performance over the last month. Yet in neither case was success found on the international stage, as both China and Taiwan caught them by surprise, knocking them straight out of the groups stage.

At least SK had an excuse: after soundly thrashing the Yoe Flash Wolves, with Forgiven demonstrating his usual muscular prowess down in bot lane, they weren't expecting the rematch to be quite so vigorous. Unfortunately, while the GE Tigers might not have gotten past the 11th-place Chinese team, they did run over the European hope just fine—and that was all the inspiration that the Wolves needed to tear out their hamstrings.

It's even worse for Cloud 9, though—at least SK Gaming got a win at all. But the once-brightest of the recent generation of North American teams have definitely lost a lot of their luster. Balls and Hai have been struggling valiantly to stay abreast of their peers back home, but seemed like outright liabilities on the most recent world stage—facing the Tigers was a harsh lesson in their shortcomings, and losing to the Wolves was salt in the wound. And if Cloud 9 was doing so badly, the rest of the North American scene sitting under them from 4th and onward have reason for concern: they might be the biggest fish at home, but the rest of the world makes them look like mere minnows.

Ray of hope

I'm going to fanboy a bit, and you're just going to have to deal with it: the Taiwanese scene has waited two very, very long years for this moment. We've had to deal with the idiosyncrasies of Southeast Asian esports for years, sit through mind-numbingly inevitable and soullessly rote wins against the Bangkok Titans and Singapore's part-timer teams for months upon endless months, bear with the retirement of our best and brightest players, and a steadily growing sense that our one victory back in 2012 was just a fleeting dream.

We were beginning to believe the derision coming from our western peers: that we were irrelevant, a has-been wildcard region, and that our seeds and tournament presence would've been better-given to a Chinese team across the Strait, or up north to Korea. LMS? Yoe Flash who? Didn't the Taipei Assassins fail to win a single game back in Season 4 Worlds, where even Brazil managed an upset?

Wolves. Yoe Flash Wolves. Know that name. Without the yoke of Southeast Asia's "ten hours a week is a good scrim schedule, right?," with four good teams and three improving rookie teams to practice off (we try to pretend Dream or Reality doesn't exist), it turns out that Taiwanese teams are actually dangerous! Dangerous enough to catch Europe's best off-guard. Dangerous enough to flip a game against North America's top three.

Dangerous enough to be TSM's only real challenge throughout Katowice.

Steak. Karsa. Maple. NL. Swordart. My boys'll be there for the Mid-Season Invitational, you can bloody well count on it. Sleep on them at your peril.

We will have our day again.

I know two particular stories of League of Legends coaches, and the reaction to either seems to tell a lot about a player's mindset. In either story, neither coaches are ex-pros, at least not that of LoL itself. One speaks of disharmony between the coach and players, who hold themselves to be (at least historically) their region's foremost experts of the game. The coach was hired for form's sake more than anything else—a de facto manager and coordinator of scrims, but whose opinions of the game were distrusted at best. After all, he wasn't even Diamond, much less Master or Challenger, so what was his opinion really worth?

The other coach wasn't highly-ranked either. Yet the treatment from his players, all high-level tournament names, was near-cultlike devotion. They looked to him for instruction in everything—how and when to answer press, when dealing with sponsors, when boarding planes...he wasn't their boss or their father. He was their coach. You don't question the coach.

One team's western. The other team's Asian. You can probably guess which one, and which has done better internationally.

Is there some magic secret to coaching? Something that makes them somehow better than the players that've spent years playing the game at the highest level? Probably not. It's not as if Faker's coaching OGN winners—or even Toyz with GPL or LMS leaders. Actually, the Season 2 world champions have been the only ones that've dipped their toes into coaching, and generally to lackluster results. Stanley's Hong Kong Attitude: failed. Lilballz's Midnight Sun: still rookies (though decent for what they are). Game expertise isn't the same as leadership capabilities—and even shotcallers make poor coaches, because leadership isn't the same as telling people what to do.

What is coaching, then, if not game expertise? Why aren't good players naturally good coaches?

Point of view

Technically, everybody in a lane-pusher has full and unlimited view of the map. Vision is shared among teammates, and unless you deliberately chose to lock it, the camera is generally on free movement. Yet viewpoint is incredibly subjective from player to player—mainly as a matter of priority and training. Playing midlane means minimal exposure to the head-to-head dynamics against Maokai, or how to survive one-on-two or one-on-three when cornered. And the AD carry probably isn't going to care over-much about general vision theory and strategy, except to not step into random bushes on their lonesome.

There's also the limitations of exposure. Tournament players are going to be a lot more focused on local rivals than what's happening elsewhere—there's just only so many hours in a day to focus on anything else. Similarly with matchup considerations. Ex-pros like EU LCS caster Deficio outright state that tunnel-visioning is a concern for pro players, where their direct experiences with what works occludes what's possible.

The coach covers for that. It isn't his or her job to refine mechanics to Faker-level perfection. Nobody can play the game for you (and it'd get you booted off the circuit for account-sharing anyhow). But the direct tradeoff for focused skill development is tactical and strategic overview. If anybody thinks they can dedicate 10 hours a day to practice and still have time (and mental energy) left over to concoct world-tier strategy, they're flat-out kidding themselves. Execution is never the same thing as strategy.

Yes, the coach needs to understand the general framework, limitations and capabilities of and within the game. Strategy cannot be conducted without knowing what your pieces are capable of, or that of the opposition. But it isn't the general's job to know how his soldiers swing their swords, only that they do so at the right time and place.

And it's the soldier's job to trust that the general knows where and when that is. That their coach's put in the hours (and, if necessary, hired the analysts) to crunch the numbers and learn the habits and trends of their opposing numbers. That while the players might be called upon to advise them on specific opponents and the results of field tests, the coach has final say on the overarching strategy they utilize—because while they're scrimming and solo queueing, he's the one conducting the HUMINT necessary to turn their skills into success.

Of one mind

I know a story even more appalling than the cultural clash of the first two. Of a team on the verge of making it big, beating back every Challenger to come within a shot of the topmost pro circuit of their region. A team that's trained for months—and in a fit of hubris, threw it all away. For what? For the right to stay up at 4 AM the morning of the final qualifying match? For the right to booze it up and relax just when they were on the cusp of victory?

Worse is that their so-called "life coach" let them.

The coach isn't your friend. They aren't the team's secret-keeper. They're not there to hold your hair back when you yack into the porcelain after a victory celebration. Their job is to turn a team of solo queue stars into a finely tuned engine of conquest. There's a reason why the most successful coaches have generally been older (in conventional sports, a lot older) than the people they mentor: we're conditioned, even grudgingly, to respect our elders, and to be more serious in their presence. And we're conditioned, inversely, to take less shit from those younger than ourselves.

The coach's guidance isn't just on what champions to practice, and where to drop wards according to the team's jealously guarded and maintained timing playbooks. It's also on them to define the spirit of the team—whether it be a China-like aggression, or the deliberative patience of the European teams, but always focused and driven regardless of their situation.

In many (most) cases, that requires the exact opposite of chumminess. Discipline is a pain point, especially when coordinated across an entire team. But there is simply no choice: victory has always gone to the more disciplined team, and the coach must be both enforcer and exemplar of that ideal. And their lust for victory must be shared by all under their command.

The other side

Granted, somebody's gotta watch the coach too. There's no financial endeavor without its corruption from on-high. The history of commodotized music's been of managers handing their artists, flagging from cross-continental road trips, nondescript baggies of white powder that'll "perk them up." Sports medicine goes through regular cycles of self-flagellation for its complicity in feeding athletes various performance enhancers in search of that elusive edge against the competition—and don't think that the athletes themselves don't at least suspect that the injection might not just be "vitamins," accepting with a wink and a thin veil of plausible deniability that this is just the normative approach to professional competition.

Naturally, this approach mainly favors the rich and well-off teams that can afford the doctors involved. And for esports, it begs the question how many teams and coaches are writing off a nondescriptly titled budget line that correlates to their team's purchase and consumption of Adderall or Provigil.

There's a mutualized relationship in any form of governance. The players must submit to discipline, if victory is their aim. But the meaning of their victory is altogether too easily lost. Especially in esports, whose double-digit work days leave even professional athletes appalled at how much of the players' early 20s are thrown away into the competitive grinder, burnout is a massive risk. There must be a reflected trust—not just that the coach can rely on the players to follow their stratagem, but that the coach won't waste their players' efforts in the process.

It's when that bond of mutual trust and respect is perfected that we'll see more western victories. Everything else's just details in its creation.