The very last best-of-one match in professional League of Legends has been played, at least for the NA and EU LCS, and thank goodness for that. As has been noticed by casters, community figures, and the teams themselves, a single IEM event can have a western team play enough games to cover the span of their entire spring split—in other words, a single tournament is worth more in terms of adapting to the spotlight and endurance under pressure than anything they've done over the preceding weeks or months.

The summer switch to a best-of-two and best-of-three system doesn't just acclimate teams better to tournament conditions. It's also a lucrative development for them as professional organizations—and the difference between professional and amateur has always been about whether or not you get paid for what you're doing. As esports teams are financed largely by sponsorship deals and sales of team merchandise—the Riot stipend is only a fraction of the operational costs of the top teams—the extra time spent in front of the camera is important in terms of justifying their asking prices. The more games they have to churn through, and the longer time they get to spend in front of a camera, the more that everybody wins (albeit, in the case of sponsors, indirectly).

In and of itself, the greater exposure given to LCS teams is awesome. Though it means more work for the players, it's work they should be glad to undertake if the goal is to be competitive at international events—and for the development of their individual community influence as well. The problems, then, aren't within context of the western premier circuits—the problem is that they're the only ones getting these structural improvements.

Big bets

The news of North American Challenger team Ember's collapse was only a surprise in terms of how quickly it happened. One minute, they were writing screeds about player compensation transparency (taking the time to humblebrag about how much they could afford to pay their own) and next they re announcing the closure of their League of Legends team and the free agency of all but one player. Sympathies were especially reserved for jungler Santorin, who had just gotten out of his involvement with the sleaze surrounding European Challengers Huma two months before Ember's collapse.

The actual fact of a Challenger team dying off, regardless of how many six-figure paychecks they were slinging around, wasn't so surprising—especially after they lost their bid for an LCS spot. It is incredibly hard to get monetary traction at sub-LCS levels of competition: the viewership is a fifth of the regular broadcast (if you're lucky), your players are largely unknown, and the amateurish reputation of the circuit grants it less prestige.

The recent rash of high-profile, big-wallet investors don't actually provide any more stability to the Challenger scene—if anything, money makes it worse. Ember isn't the first to have their backers suddenly vanish after just one split: an investor's willingness to spend a few million on a project doesn't mean they'll be patient about making their money back. It's also been demonstrated by North American circuit leaders Immortals that you make a much higher and faster ROI by investing directly into the LCS itself, instead of bearing the uncertainty of missing out on qualifiers for technical or personnel reasons.

These aren't problems that can be solved overnight, but they are issues that can be alleviated with more intensive investments and focus on the Challenger scene by Riot. The often sleazy issues regarding player contracting and visa acquisitions should absolutely be more strictly scrutinized by Riot—at the very least, requisite contractual transparency measures can save the players from a lot of heartache and frustrations. A minimum duration stipulation too—it might scare off a portion of possible investors, but it's much healthier for the players and means that a rag-tag group of five solo queue warriors actually have a chance to develop into an actual team.

It'd also, of course, be necessary to expand the scope and style of Challenger-level coverage—to at least give the players a shot at a fanbase outside of the hardcore enthusiasts. While it's too much (and contrary to purpose) to give the exact same prominence and priority to Challenger players as they do to LCS-involved personalities (such as with the Drive video series), there's definitely a compromise between "equal coverage" and "almost none at all," and it doesn't yet feel as if Riot's found the right balance yet between the two.

Nor with other regions, to be frank.

We re still here

Speaking of suffering due to lack of exposure: Taiwan didn t get a bid at IEM Katowice. In fact, Taiwan is unique in more ways than just that: the LoL Master Series held in Taipei is the only one of the five premier leagues not to have an English broadcast. It's also the worst of the five in terms of endemic sponsorships and Challenger support, and that is directly tied to the lack of exposure and comparative support. The Riot Taiwan esports office consists of basically one official liaison, and local publisher Garena isn't willing to cough up the expenses to run an international marketing program—not when their well-defined operational region gives them few benefits from doing so.

In fact, the only attempt at licensed English casting of the LMS came from Twitch.tv, during the qualifiers run leading up to Worlds, and that was both short and poorly received (though it did help launch LCK caster Achilios's career).

Granted, the LMS does extremely well with what little it has. Its top players have shrugged off magnitudes-better contract offers for the sake of staying with their band of brothers, and its now year-old freedom from Southeast Asia's raised its teams back to international relevance, outcompeting North America and China alike while trading respectable blows with Europe and Korea.

But that haunts the region with a simple question: how much better could we be doing? How much are we really sacrificing out of emotional loyalty? Given the hard infrastructural and sponsorship limits imposed on the circuit, very few Taiwanese/Hong Kong players will be able to go pro for more than a few years at a time, meaning that the higher salaries in even the LSPL will eventually outweigh their loyalties—they might not be able to retire even with an LPL paycheck, but they can at least afford that transition back into a normal life. And that question's going to haunt even the likes of AHQ top laner Ziv, or Flash Wolves star jungler Karsa, no matter how impressive they were at the last Worlds.

This, too, has to be a top-down consideration from Riot: how to support a region that spits out a disproportionately high amount of their best and most exciting players. It is a concern that mirrors larger the disparity in treatment between the LCS and Challenger scenes, and likely warrants the same solutions. It's easy to lose sight of the importance of doing so, amid the glitz and high drama that the premier circuits are deliberately engineered for, but the fact is that these easily-ignored circuits and players constitute the seed corn of a healthy esports ecology.

In their rush to lavish fame and monetization options upon today's esports stars, it's even more important to lay the groundwork for tomorrow's. Faker's going to falter (again), FORG1VEN's gotta fly soon, and even Bjergsen's going to eventually bounce. Given the lack of human cloning technology at this moment, it's all the more important that Riot has a more viable long-term talent development strategy. The sooner it arrives, the better.

Editor s note: this is James last League of Legends column for us, at least for the time being—he s moving on to exciting new things. We ll be back with a new League of Legends columnist in a few weeks, but this marks the end of LoLWatch in its current form. I d like to thank James for his hard work and insight over the last year or so: you ve helped this Dota guy understand a few things about this LoL game everybody seems so excited about. - Chris

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

The regular season has finally ended after nine weeks of play, and the Renegades' victory over Team Impulse marks the last-ever match under the NA LCS's old best-of-one format. The top six teams are now settling plans for a glamorous trip to Las Vegas to decide the North American title for the split—and to see who gets to represent the region at the Mid-Season Invitational in May.

Of course, the odds for some teams are better than others. A few teams were lucky to make it to the playoffs in the first place.

The path of kings: C9, TSM

In any prior split or year, the quarterfinals match between Cloud 9 and TSM would've rightfully been the grand finals. TSM in particular had an extensive history of dominance in North America—maybe not one matched with international success, but regional kings all the same. Cloud 9, too, had gotten used to being at the top, and they've been there since the founding of the original LCS roster. No rookie organization until now has been as successful, much less dominant, as C9 was in their prime.

Yet history has predictive limits—nobody would've predicted just how badly TSM floundered this spring, especially not in light of the roster they brought (and bought) together. The likes of Bjergsen—for a long time, the undisputed best mid laner in North America—with Doublelift, Svenskeren and Yellowstar was justifiably expected to be a winning formula, based on their prior work. Top laner Hauntzer was expected to be the weakest link of the lot, yet arguably proved a lot more consistent and dependable than his more storied and experienced teammates.

Not to mince words, but TSM is probably going to lose to Cloud 9. The team s dysfunctions have generated a lot of wild and baseless speculation and fingerpointing—but the fact that it's dysfunctional isn't in dispute. By contrast: Cloud 9 isn't a perfect team by any means, but the one thing nobody doubts is who's in charge. Team captain Hai has thrived in the support role—it's probably a lot less punishing to his wrists, for one, but more importantly the role facilitates his influence on the team's overall map control (thanks to providing most of the in-game vision) and shotcalling.

That seemingly-simple act of putting everybody on the same page at the same time is something that has stumped TSM all spring. True: TSM has traditionally done best in multi-game sets, like the best-of-fives that will be played out in Las Vegas, so discounting them entirely is, from a historical sense, unwise. But the TSM playing this split is almost unidentifiable from their prior form, so historical precedence can get wrecked.

The path of conquerors: NRG, Team Liquid

Given their famously high-profile investors, not to mention the caliber of their Korean players, NRG probably expected to be doing better than they were at the end of the split. To be clear: fifth place is not too shabby for a rookie organization, and if they were measured by the standard esports metrics of the last few years it'd be pretty impressive all around.

But they aren't just any esports organization. They're the little brothers of the Sacramento Kings. They count A-Rod, Shaq and Jimmy Rollins among their backers. And that actually sucks for them, because living up to those names and their lofty expectations is no easy task when Team Liquid's Dardoch is staring you down from the other side of Summoner's Rift.

It's rare for rookie players to give you chills when you watch them. The competitive pressure at the top of a region's circuit is vastly greater than anything solo (or dynamic) queue offers, greater than even the most intense Challenger Series match, so it usually takes at least a split or year for a player to really find their groove.

Dardoch, on the other hand, took to it like fish to water. Team Liquid's experiment with directly fostering North American talent has borne fruit far quicker than anybody had supposed, and its first product is a jungler that didn't just prove a worthy replacement for IWillDominate—at times, it's as if TL's fanbase's already forgotten their former jungler. The general rule is that a jungler's only as good as his team lets him be, but with TL it's almost the other way around—AD carry Piglet honestly hasn't looked this confident and in the groove since before he left Korea.

Too bad Piglet's former teammate Impact can't say the same. His bizarre man-against-the-world solo engages on the enemy team have left NRG fans and everybody else scratching their heads in dismay. The NRG vs TL quarterfinals match pits two former world champions against each other—but only one of them is looking like his old self at the moment.

The gated path

Waiting in the wings for the quarterfinals results are The Immortals and Counter Logic Gaming, the latter of which is looking to defend their Summer 2015 title. The greater risk is, of course, the Immortals—the team with a near-perfect season and the most dynamic and engaging play style in the entire NA LCS isn t to be trifled with. Huni and Reignover were the architects of Fnatic's perfect regular split last year, and Wildturtle's rejuvenated powerhouse performances throughout the spring is a direct rebuff of the criticisms he weathered while playing under the TSM banner—something that only causes further lamentations for his old team's fans.

CLG, on the other hand, have a few obvious issues. First and foremost is a static play style—pretty much every single match boils down to a splitpush strategy based around sending Darshan through an empty lane while the rest of the team keeps the enemy team engaged with a barrage of hard-hitting pokes. Second is that Huhi and Stixxay have obvious mechanical deficiencies compared to their counterparts on other teams—an issue that proved a crucial hindrance during IEM Katowice.

And yet it might be more dangerous to play CLG. If there's been any overarching theme to this spring's international success stories, it's that macro play is very nearly everything. CLG engineered the Immortals' sole defeat all split by virtue of immaculate map play, China was thoroughly embarrassed at IEM Katowice by their failures to adapt to it, and Korea's not only written the book on it, but several followup dissertations as well.

Whomever wins the North American title will find that they need to play to CLG's level to beat the Immortals. Given how games have worked out this spring, it's the only way they'll get into position to take advantage of Stixxay and Huhi's individual weaknesses in the first place. Fail that check, and they can be certain that Darshan'll be knocking on their front door.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

I haven't been deep into the League of Legends scene for a while now, but this clip left even me dumbfounded. LoL player Delogrand—who either prays to RNGesus twice a day or is truly one level above 'next-level'—managed to get both a Baron steal and a pentakill with no help from his team and after being the first person to die. I'll let the clip above speak for itself, because its genuinely incredible to watch nothing but fog of war as the kills roll in. Be sure to keep watching to see it from the enemy team's point of view. 

Delogrand is playing Malzahar, a champion added to LoL nearly six years ago that doesn't see a huge amount of play—not none, but it's fair to say that the opponents in the video above may not have been familiar enough with him to know what was coming. After blowing his ultimate combo on the enemy tank without much gained, Malzahar ran blindly toward the Baron pit to try and disrupt the the other team from taking it. He was quickly (and predictably) blown up, but Delogrand managed to use his E ability, Malefic Visions, on a weak enemy before dying. This is where the fun begins.

Malefic Visions is a damage over time ability that lasts four seconds, but if the target dies while it is still applied, the ability jumps to the next closest target and its timer restarts. So even though Malzahar was long dead, Malefic Visions killed its first target (the already low Heimerdinger, who mistakenly stuck close to his team) then hopped from enemy champion to enemy champion, with the help of some unfortunately place Heimerdinger turrets and a lot of damage from Baron Nashor, eventually getting the final tick of damage on Baron itself. 

It's truly a sight to behold, and I don't think I've seen anything quite like it before. It took a healthy dose of luck, Baron damage, and clueless opponents, but that doesn't diminish what happened. And I think the stunned response from Delogrand's team, standing in base wondering what just happened, pretty much sums up my reaction as well. 

Thanks, /r/LeagueOfLegends.

This week, things ramp back up for Dota 2 with Pit League Season 4, Hearthstone's Winter Championship crosses the ocean, the LCS marches onward like an unstoppable army, and Heroes of the Storm sees its biggest tournament since the Spring Championship. There's a whole bunch of great tournaments happening this weekend, and here's how you can watch them all.

Hearthstone: European Winter Championship

North America had its time in the limelight last week, so this weekend Europe takes its turn. As with the other regions, the European Winter Championship is the first of three qualifying tournaments where the winner walks away with a ticket to this year's World Championship and the largest portion of a $100,000 prize pool. Play begins at 14:00 CET (6am PST) each day, starting today and going through Sunday, and you can find the stream here.

Heroes of the Storm: Enter the Storm #2 Playoffs

A double elimination tournament between eight teams fighting over at $10,000 prize pool, Enter the Storm #2 concludes this weekend after group stages narrowed the field last week. Some of the best teams in North America—including Cloud9, Tempo Storm, Team Naventic, and Gust or Bust (previously King of Blades)—face-off for the first time since the NA Spring Championship last month. The bracket kicks off today at 1pm PST (21:00 CET) and then 11am PST (19:00 CET) on both Saturday and Sunday. You can watch the stream here. 

League of Legends: NA LCS, Korean LCK, Chinese LPL, Taiwan/Hong Hong LMS

League of Legends' esports scene continues to be a nuclear clock, with which we can measure all other things. The LCS, LCK, LPL, and LMS all march merrily onward, drip feeding you high-level competitive LoL at all hours of the day. Korea's LCK is on Saturday (starting at 1am PST/08:00 CET) while China's LPL games start today at 10pm PST (05:00 CET) and then Sunday at 12am PST (07:00 CET). The LMS also enters the fray this weekend, with games at 4am PST (11:00 CET) on Saturday, and then again at 10pm PST (05:00 CET). All of this is going on around the North American LCS, which begins at 12pm PST (19:00 CET) both Saturday and Sunday. You can visit LoLesports for a full schedule and livestream link.

Dota 2: Dota Pit League Season 4

Things ramp back up from the post-Shanghai Major dip with Pit League Season 4 and a $100,000 prize pool, not including the additional prize money from the sale of in-game tickets. Games will kick of on both Saturday and Sunday 10:45 CET (3:45am PST), with the round of 8 being held on the former and the semis and finals on the latter. You can find more information about the tournament on its official site, and watch the stream here.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

There's been a lot of disgruntled murmurs about the current state of professional League of Legends. The laneswaps, the tower pushes, the decided lack of fighting... it all adds up to a fairly dismal viewing experience for the long-term fan. Esports' selling points are, after all, intrinsically tied to action: ace players styling on others, wombo combos locking entire teams up in a mess of pyrotechnics. It's much easier to appreciate a hard-won battle than it is to respect the calculations and intricate mind games involved in what is generally known as "macro play".

But while the lion's share of the blame is directed at lane swaps and the non-interaction they foster, the idea that they should be designed away with is preposterous. Laneswapping isn't inherently a problem—rather, it acts as an enabler for a much healthier state of the game. Champions and strategies that would otherwise wither and die in the laning phase are made viable by good map play.

Conversely, though, there are team compositions that do want those direct matchups. And it is true that the current state of the game has leaned too far away from them. But the solution isn't to beef up towers, or to get rid of Zz'rot Portal, or the various other suggestions meant to directly cripple laneswapping as a viable strategy. It's better to understand that the intense focus on strategic swapping is symptomatic of more fundamental issues with this season's design.

Risk/reward ratios

Pro play is all about min-maxing—you want maximum reward for minimal risk, because the other way around loses you games. Yes, exceptions exist within the combat-happy LPL, but IEM Katowice conclusively demonstrated that even the best Chinese teams, experts in the 5v5 brawl, will fall apart if you play the game more like Baduk than Rock'em Sock'em Robots, focusing more on map control than kill bounties.

It is, after all, safer and less risky to farm up gold by knocking over towers and minions than it is by risking your own life for a kill. Ironically, increasing the amount of gold per kill only further discourages fights between pro players—getting 500 or more per head sounds nice on paper, but you have to be absolutely sure that you're not giving up the same, as recovering from giving up an increased kill bounty gets harder and harder.

This was as true in season 2 as it was in seasons 4 and 6, so why was it that teams back then were a lot more willing to brawl? It's not that their understanding of the game was that much cruder back then, but a difference in gold-sourcing compared to then and now.

Neutral objectives have two things going for them: one, you can't hide behind minion lines to go after them, and two, you need to invest heavily in wards to be able to see threats around you while you take them, which indirectly blinds you to threats in other parts of the map. As a result, going for neutrals means risking fights—and so the reward for doing so was equal to the risk taken. The Dragon objective is meant to do just that, but it's lately been a lot less tempting now that they removed the one feature that made it such a hotly-contested objective in prior years: gold.

Yes, the dragon stacks are useful, and a team with five is almost insurmountable in fights—but when itemization is the number one factor in a team's success, it's no wonder that teams would much rather farm towers than hunt lizards. The same problem afflicts Rift Herald as well—yes, it helps teams push lanes and take towers too, which would on paper suggest that the Herald's a high-priority objective. But between the high damage it applies to its attackers and the inherent risk in going after neutral objectives, it actually isn't worth risking giving up gold to the enemy team to prioritize it.

While both Dragon and Rift Herald are at least safer sources of indirect value than going one-on-one with an enemy player, the overwhelming importance of itemization makes indirect value the same as worthless.

Waiting around

It's not just the lack of gold to scrabble over, of course. Compounding the risk side of the ratio is the direct cost of dying at all. Thanks to the reworked respawn timers, fights in the mid-game are a lot more conclusive than on prior patches—and this was probably the biggest design mistake so far this year.

A dead player doesn't just reward bounty gold to the enemy team. In a lot of the recent fights, a single player's death can snowball out of control—their removed presence means their team can't keep the victors of a single fight from knocking over two or three towers immediately after, cementing a permanent map-wide advantage.

This only further incentivizes teams to stay the hell away from each other. The hit-and-run map play strategies also have that going for them: if you can't take the turret right away, it's good enough that you landed a few autoattacks on it. Your team can move elsewhere, slowly grinding away each open turret one hit at a time until something finally crumbles—either the turrets themselves, or the enemy team's patience.

If that sounds incredibly boring to watch, it is. But it's either this or win and lose by the coinflip that a full 5v5 brawl effectively amounts to.

Uptempo

The good news is, the fixes for the current problems in League as a spectator esport are fairly simple. It isn't just a matter of reverting changes made either—the death timer situation, for example, might be a massive snowball, but so was the old Dragon's ambient team gold. In the case of neutral objectives, it's enough to make the gold bounty "localized," or basically rewarding only those that contributed directly to taking it down.

That in itself would force interesting decision trees onto teams. While the pre-eminent importance of gold drive them to the objective, having all five of them on-location to enjoy the bounty risks giving up control over the rest of the map. Similarly, not having all of them in attendance greatly increases the odds of an ambush.

The conflict is made even greater if the exact same localized gold values are applied to Rift Herald as well as the Dragon, as it'd then double the neutral objectives teams need to control—an incredibly difficult proposition given the hard limit on wards they can push onto the map. It'd straight-up double the ambush opportunities for either side as a result.

But all of that would be meaningless if Riot doesn't do at least one reversion: the length of mid-game death timers. This, too, has a gold cost attached: exactly equal to the items and base stats of the player knocked out and unable to defend. For the sake of spectator-friendliness, it'd probably be best if players were actually allowed to play the game.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

A relatively quiet weekend, this, as everybody in esports is tired out after a busy week of being fired. Haha! A topical lie. There's still top-level CS:GO season play to catch, the best Hearthstone in the Americas, and the ongoing drama of the international League of Legends scene. Details, timings and stream links below. If we've missed anything, let us know in the comments so that I don't get fired. Have a great weekend!

Hearthstone: Americas Winter Championship

The first of three international Hearthstone championships running in March, over the next two days the best players in the Americas will do wizard poker at one another for a shot at the World Championship and a slice of $100,000. Play begins at 10:00 PST (18:00 GMT) each day and you can find the stream here.

CS:GO: ESL Pro League Season 3

Ongoing season play between some of the best CS:GO teams in the world, streamed throughout the weekend. One notable matchup is Astralis vs. EnVyUs at 09:00 PST/17:00 GMT on Saturday. You can also expect Virtus.pro, G2 Esports and others. Play begins at 09:00 PST/17:00 GMT on each day and runs for around 12 hours. Find it all on the official ESL stream.

League of Legends: NA LCS, Korean LCK, Chinese LPL

As the dust settles on IEM Katowice, the international LoL season enters one of its busiest weekends. There are games happening all over the world - if you're willing to split your time between different leagues then you can start off with Korea's LCK on Saturday (starting at 00:00 PST/08:00 GMT) or even China's LPL if you're willing to get up early in Europe (games start at 21:00 PST/05:00 GMT). Then you've got time for a nap before the NA LCS kicks off at 12:00 PST/20:00 GMT. Play continues into Sunday in China and North America - check out LoLesports for a full schedule and livestream.

Dota 2: Fnatic vs. First Departure, WePlay Season 3 SEA

There's not a great deal of Dota 2 on this weekend, but the Shanghai Major proved that it's well worth keeping an eye on the South East Asian scene. With that in mind, you can catch Fnatic vs. First Departure at 05:00 PST/13:00 GMT on Saturday via the JoinDota Twitch channel.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

IEM Katowice's League of Legends program went roughly as expected. There were two notable surprises: Fnatic did much better than their EU LCS form would have suggested, while Counter Logic Gaming's individual weaknesses were exposed in turn. But it settled out as everybody predicted: SKT T1 had another perfect run through another international tournament—the second time that they've managed to do so despite struggling to stay playoffs-viable back home in South Korea. North America, of course, was the whipping post for the international assembly.

But the interesting thing is that they weren't alone. Arguably, they weren't even the worst. As much of a joke as North American teams are in an international context, at least they're willing to laugh along to some extent—in China's case, everybody's awkwardly trying not to stare.

Since late 2012 China has been considered the second-strongest region in the world of competitive League of Legends. The winners of IPL 5, the gung-ho hyper-aggressive "freight train" that gave even SKT T1 K in 2013 a bump, so on and so forth: they've earned the respect of the world through the virtue of being the most entertaining region to watch. Though the Koreans' immaculate strategic perfection would have them take home the trophy time and again, everybody nonetheless appreciated the gusto and fearlessness that Chinese teams would bring to the table.

Since last Worlds, however, all that has seemingly deflated. And it isn't just in League of Legends. Whether at Dota 2's Shanghai Major or halfway across the continent at IEM Katowice, China's esports programs have reached an unexpectedly ubiquitous nadir. What the heck happened to an entire continent of players?

Losing the arms race

The most obvious issue with Chinese esports is that they're woefully out of date. Excuses have been cobbled together to try and explain it—Tencent was notorious for pushing live patches late, occasionally making it so that Chinese teams have to fight in metagames they haven't practiced on a professional level. However, scrutiny quickly dispels the myth: at least with Katowice, they've had at least as much time as the Korean teams. In fact, eastern practices are largely homogenized: the top Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese teams have publicly acknowledged each other as scrim partners, and it is common practice for players to log on the Korean solo queue ladder as a way to sharpen their skills.

Besides, even China knows that their strategic deficit isn't based on the latest patch, but stemming back all the way to late last year—and possibly earlier.

As translated by Goldper10 author Hodeken, LMS caster Clement Chu was able to interview Edward Gaming coach Ji "Aaron" Xing after Worlds 2015. And Aaron's summation of the state of the Chinese game still stands:

"...this kind of play style has actually been pretty commonplace in Europe before. Perhaps it's because Western teams thought that they could not get an advantage in a direct matchup with the Asian teams so they put a lot more effort in planning and strategy. Especially their wave management and timing of when to push down turrets, which explains why they prioritize champions with good wave-clear and the teleporter mid lane."

That exact pattern of behavior expressed itself half a year later at Katowice: CLG's beautifully coherent macro play, centered around tandem plays with Darshan's splitpushes, was exposed under international pressure as a means of alleviating attention from mid laner Huhi and AD carry Stixxay. Against a team of similarly developed macro strategies, those weaknesses proved fatal thanks to the extended mid-game respawn timers this year. But even while losing, they were at least able to catch people off-guard, even pushing deep into SKT T1's side of the map.

And what about teams that haven't developed anti-splitpush strategies at all? Then the inverse was true. No matter how well Royal Never Give Up played in skirmishes, they ultimately had to ironically give up when even their best fights netted them zero turrets and lost buffs. Same with QG Reapers, who were blown out of the water by a resurgent and increasingly confident Fnatic—QG had absolutely no idea how or when to play around Rekkles's Jhin, losing fights before they even knew they started as soon as Jhin's ultimate was off cooldown.

China came in expecting a knife fight. What they got, instead, was a Cold War of manipulations and maneuverings.

Weapons development

You would think that if Edward Gaming's coach could accurately identify China's weak points, then the entire region must surely be busy solving it. And it's an assumption further fueled by the eyewateringly large amounts of money that China has flung at top South Korean talent for two years running. Yet that raises only more questions.

The Korean coaches hired to help develop LPL teams used to play on LCK teams that did just fine with their macro play. If nothing else, it's inconceivable for them to have effected zero change within the teams they now guide, given the stark differences in Korean and Chinese play styles—yet where is it actually expressed?

Of the Chinese teams at Katowice, both have Korean coaching staff. Of the two, only QG have really developed a map play strategy for regular LPL use—one that actually stands in interesting contrast to the Western style by deliberately losing a side tower early so that AD carry Peco can then freeze the minion waves and spend the rest of the game farming passively.

It was also a style abandoned entirely at Poland, as Peco was swapped out for Uzi instead—and Uzi is the last player to send 20 minutes passively last-hitting. Royal fared better in Group A, stomping through both Origen and Ever—expected wins, given both teams were struggling for relevance back home. But against Fnatic, who had polished up surprisingly nicely by the playoff brackets, they were quickly outmaneuvered. Jungler Mlxg, top laner Looper, support player Mata: these are all extremely well-respected names, and the tournament clearly demonstrated their individual skills. But individual mechanics amount for little when your entire team's positioning had been carefully predicted and manipulated into Rekkles's gunsights.

For Chinese League of Legends to reclaim even a shadow of their former respect, two things should be considered. One, pay whatever amount of money it takes to drag Aaron out of temporary retirement, as he seems even now to be the only coach with the insight to recognize the weaknesses in the Chinese style of play—and, crucially, was the man to defang Faker's LeBlanc last year. Two: to stop hiring foreign players and staff entirely.

The problem with strategies like CLG's splitpush is that it requires a level of communicative fluency that might simply be impossible for Chinese teams as they are. Not necessarily between the players, mind you—in-game, shotcalling and timers are usually reduced to short-syllable names, timestamps and pings. Generally, when you're busy with skirmishes, the shotcaller isn't making a long-winded spiel about how they should approach the next fight.

Outside of the game, though, when the coach and players are discussing strategy, mutual fluency is a much bigger deal. The ability to explain the hows and whys they should approach a game in a certain way, and especially how to time itemization with map movements, is already difficult enough when you share the same language (so difficult that Origen still hasn't settled on a coach). Having a live-in interpreter can only help up to the point where jargon and game slang start to muddy the waters. Heck, TheScore's Kelsey Moser has had trouble finding anybody that can translate "split push" into Chinese in the first place—and it's a good question whether it's simply because the interpreter didn't know the words for it, or if there is actually a linguistic void for the concept among Chinese esports.

That's slightly unfair in the sense that Snake clearly knows what it is and practices it regularly. But Snake isn't QG Reapers, and isn't Royal Never Give Up. There needs to be more than one Chinese team diligently practicing complex strategies against each other—losing and winning in turn, testing and refining their approaches with every iterative game. And they need to be good enough that it's clear to the rest of the scene that the effort isn't wasteful.

If they can't figure that out by the summer split, then forget about October. Might as well give their Worlds seeds to Taiwan instead, just a hundred miles off the coast, and save on the heartbreak.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

There are two fun things about being on two different power ranking panels: one, to see how community figures talk about teams and players behind closed doors and a signed NDA (the specifics of which I can't go into detail on—I signed it too).

The second fun thing is comparing what goes on within those closed discussioned with the wild speculation that power rankings conjure from the audience as a whole.

Yes, it's true—bias exists. Though never quite in the form the audience assumes it does, nor from the panelist they think it comes from (unless it's an LMS team suspiciously far up—I take full credit and/or blame for that). To shed the tiniest amount of light on an otherwise deliberately obscure process: favoritism for any one team or region is usually the most erroneous audience assumption. Rather than jockeying with each other for the chance to increase their region's prestige, regional panelists tend to be the most critical of their teams—after all, nobody knows their flaws and shortcomings better (which is why COUGAR E-Sports will remain dead last so long as I draw breath).

There's even a tiny amount of envy involved when the international comparisons are made. Just as the grass is always greener on the other side, so is the team-fighting better coordinated, the individual mechanics sharper, and the map play more strategically sound. Furthermore, comparative strengths are cast in the context of prior tournament winners—most of which have been Korean, which admittedly sets an extremely high standard across the board.

The biggest contention right now, with IEM starting this week, is whether the Chinese teams—and QG Reapers in particular—have been given a fair shake. If you've been watching the LPL, they mostly have.

Hitting the weak point

Chinese team QG Reapers, as with the Immortals, ROX Tigers, and ahq e-Sports Club, went the first half of the spring split without dropping a single set. In fact, unlike the ROX Tigers, they didn't even drop a /game/ among their sets until fairly recently. Cast in the context of China's stereotypically hyperviolent and extremely volatile metagame, a team has to be something extraordinary indeed to achieve such consistency—or, alternatively, there has to be a crucial region-wide habit that they're uniquely exploiting.

In China's case, their regional preference for heavy brawling, originally a characteristic of the once overwhelmingly dominant OMG, makes for a primitive map control game. Historically, their most impressive international performances have come as a result of forcing an emphasis on mechanics: the 4v0 lanes of Worlds 2013, for instance, isn't some great feat of strategic timing and canny scouting—it simply forces teams to either fight China on their own terms, or give up free map gold. Uzi, the single most successful Chinese player in terms of international results, built his fame off of 2v2 outplays and gung-ho dueling.

QG's strategies this year are the polar opposite of that traditional style: instead of relying on early-game power spikes, they vastly prefer scaling options like Viktor and Ezreal and forcing laneswaps—all the better to feed AD carry Peco with. They'll deliberately allow a team to take the turret out from under Peco so that the minion wave can be frozen on their side of the map, allowing their carries to farm up until later in the game, neutralizing their rivals' aggressive strategies while giving them a significant advantage when the death timers are longer.

In short, QG is the only Chinese team playing to the current meta, and their losses so far have been a result of switching away from that—it's not that Uzi sucks now that he's on QG, but that his early-game strengths are actually a liability under the team's current strategy. Yet it's this same strength that has them rated so unfavorably when compared abroad.

Frontrunner fallacy

The problem is that everybody else has been playing the laneswap meta for ages now, and QG's actually looks pretty bad in comparison. The lane freeze to pump Peco full of steroids isn't flawless: team strategies based less around seeking advantages through team fights and more about taking turrets, for instance, leaves QG trying to defend objectives at a numerical disadvantage against teams that are increasingly using double (or even triple) AD carry compositions. Not only do turrets tend to fall extremely quickly when everybody's building some form of attack speed, but that also neatly neutralizes QG's scaling advantages too.

The tower emphasis compounds QG's issues as well. Current laneswap strategies are based on tower trades in quick succession to stay on top of each other's global gold—a stark contrast to QG's freeze method. While the Chinese style does make for one extremely fed carry, it indirectly starves everybody else on the team—and 4v5 fights are extremely unpleasant when you're not just lacking a player, but also collectively down an item compared to your counterparts.

The most extreme version of this: Counter Logic Gaming, whose Darshan vs The World strategy has made them the west's highest authority on how to play the 4v4 and 4v5 game to near-perfection. CLG's splitpush timing is something that QG has never had to deal with before—simultaneous objective prioritization designed to stretch them across the map and allow Darshan's dueling champion to pick fights with Peco at will. And Peco isn't going to be winning mid- and late-game fights into Quinn or Fiora. But at least CLG offers some hope that QG can find and outplay individual players to take the pressure off—Huhi and Stixxay, in particular, are the most exploitable vulnerabilities on the North American team's roster.

Less hope exists in the face of SKT T1, even as the Korean team struggles domestically. Blank replacing Bengi for IEM may or may not be an issue—but outplaying Faker has historically been presumptuous at best, and SKT T1 has proven before that their struggles at home doesn't stop them from flawlessly sweeping international tournaments.

That does raise an important question: what would it take for QG, and China by extension, to be warranted more competitive merit? And the answer to that is "pulling an OMG." Just as OMG's 2013 dominance left a permanent mark on the character of Chinese League of Legends, QG's current dominance should by all rights force teams to (eventually) adapt to them. Their expected failures at IEM will provide a playbook for that purposes—and set the foundation for China's Worlds bid in October.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

There are two fun things about being on two different power ranking panels: one, to see how community figures talk about teams and players behind closed doors and a signed NDA (the specifics of which I can't go into detail on—I signed it too).

The second fun thing is comparing what goes on within those closed discussioned with the wild speculation that power rankings conjure from the audience as a whole.

Yes, it's true—bias exists. Though never quite in the form the audience assumes it does, nor from the panelist they think it comes from (unless it's an LMS team suspiciously far up—I take full credit and/or blame for that). To shed the tiniest amount of light on an otherwise deliberately obscure process: favoritism for any one team or region is usually the most erroneous audience assumption. Rather than jockeying with each other for the chance to increase their region's prestige, regional panelists tend to be the most critical of their teams—after all, nobody knows their flaws and shortcomings better (which is why COUGAR E-Sports will remain dead last so long as I draw breath).

There's even a tiny amount of envy involved when the international comparisons are made. Just as the grass is always greener on the other side, so is the team-fighting better coordinated, the individual mechanics sharper, and the map play more strategically sound. Furthermore, comparative strengths are cast in the context of prior tournament winners—most of which have been Korean, which admittedly sets an extremely high standard across the board.

The biggest contention right now, with IEM starting this week, is whether the Chinese teams—and QG Reapers in particular—have been given a fair shake. If you've been watching the LPL, they mostly have.

Hitting the weak point

Chinese team QG Reapers, as with the Immortals, ROX Tigers, and ahq e-Sports Club, went the first half of the spring split without dropping a single set. In fact, unlike the ROX Tigers, they didn't even drop a game among their sets until fairly recently. Cast in the context of China's stereotypically hyperviolent and extremely volatile metagame, a team has to be something extraordinary indeed to achieve such consistency—or, alternatively, there has to be a crucial region-wide habit that they're uniquely exploiting.

In China's case, their regional preference for heavy brawling, originally a characteristic of the once overwhelmingly dominant OMG, makes for a primitive map control game. Historically, their most impressive international performances have come as a result of forcing an emphasis on mechanics: the 4v0 lanes of Worlds 2013, for instance, isn't some great feat of strategic timing and canny scouting—it simply forces teams to either fight China on their own terms, or give up free map gold. Uzi, the single most successful Chinese player in terms of international results, built his fame off of 2v2 outplays and gung-ho dueling.

QG's strategies this year are the polar opposite of that traditional style: instead of relying on early-game power spikes, they vastly prefer scaling options like Viktor and Ezreal and forcing laneswaps—all the better to feed AD carry Peco with. They'll deliberately allow a team to take the turret out from under Peco so that the minion wave can be frozen on their side of the map, allowing their carries to farm up until later in the game, neutralizing their rivals' aggressive strategies while giving them a significant advantage when the death timers are longer.

In short, QG is the only Chinese team playing to the current meta, and their losses so far have been a result of switching away from that—it's not that Uzi sucks now that he's on QG, but that his early-game strengths are actually a liability under the team's current strategy. Yet it's this same strength that has them rated so unfavorably when compared abroad.

Frontrunner fallacy

The problem is that everybody else has been playing the laneswap meta for ages now, and QG's actually looks pretty bad in comparison. The lane freeze to pump Peco full of steroids isn't flawless: team strategies based less around seeking advantages through team fights and more about taking turrets, for instance, leaves QG trying to defend objectives at a numerical disadvantage against teams that are increasingly using double (or even triple) AD carry compositions. Not only do turrets tend to fall extremely quickly when everybody's building some form of attack speed, but that also neatly neutralizes QG's scaling advantages too.

The tower emphasis compounds QG's issues as well. Current laneswap strategies are based on tower trades in quick succession to stay on top of each other's global gold—a stark contrast to QG's freeze method. While the Chinese style does make for one extremely fed carry, it indirectly starves everybody else on the team—and 4v5 fights are extremely unpleasant when you're not just lacking a player, but also collectively down an item compared to your counterparts.

The most extreme version of this: Counter Logic Gaming, whose Darshan vs The World strategy has made them the west's highest authority on how to play the 4v4 and 4v5 game to near-perfection. CLG's splitpush timing is something that QG has never had to deal with before—simultaneous objective prioritization designed to stretch them across the map and allow Darshan's dueling champion to pick fights with Peco at will. And Peco isn't going to be winning mid- and late-game fights into Quinn or Fiora. But at least CLG offers some hope that QG can find and outplay individual players to take the pressure off—Huhi and Stixxay, in particular, are the most exploitable vulnerabilities on the North American team's roster.

Less hope exists in the face of SKT T1, even as the Korean team struggles domestically. Blank replacing Bengi for IEM may or may not be an issue—but outplaying Faker has historically been presumptuous at best, and SKT T1 has proven before that their struggles at home doesn't stop them from flawlessly sweeping international tournaments.

That does raise an important question: what would it take for QG, and China by extension, to be warranted more competitive merit? And the answer to that is "pulling an OMG." Just as OMG's 2013 dominance left a permanent mark on the character of Chinese League of Legends, QG's current dominance should by all rights force teams to (eventually) adapt to them. Their expected failures at IEM will provide a playbook for that purposes—and set the foundation for China's Worlds bid in October.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!