Yatsee - NA economic influence is actually hurting its own chances at winning worlds (video)

yatsee·Jan 5, 2016·1 votes·539 views

tl;dr: The current rules do not foster the development of regional talent in the NA region.

7 Comments

Ale non è maleJan 5, 20163 votes

Tl; DR your analysis is very very very poor

You are not tackling the two major factors here that hinder NA talent development

The 1st thing you are not absolutely getting is that we are in a paradoxical economic situation compared to any competitive environment...money and investors should go where the talent is (KR first, Eu second, than CN, etc...), because it would make sense that the best leagues from a competitive stand points get richer while the weakest leagues become poorer and so they have no money to buy foreign players well known or in their prime and got to rely on local talents on cheap/unknown players from stronger regions to catch up and become more attractive for sponsors to get money and improve Instead, NA is getting sponsorship money and new investors and premiere air time (which brings more money) they should have not received given their competitgive results, so basically money aren't going where competitivity is, but where entertainment is...which even in the context of American sports that give importance to the entertainment side of sports does not make sense at all. Where is the incentive to improve if you can get good amount of revenue while performing on mediocre level? Teams can just be happy enough to just survive in NA LCS without aiming to get to the top because they can rightly exploit an economic inefficiency where they can spend the least amount of money and effort possible and get big returns as result. You can't really blame team like Dignitas that assemble mediocre rosters with veteran players year after year because from an organizational point of view what they are doing is more than legit enough, just go with the bare minimum to survive until they can find some big deal (young cheap player that proves to be extremely good or good aging player that is overlooked by the richer teams and can they can get him for cheap) and then try to spend a little bit more to compete

The 2nd thing, is that NA has by far the weakest talent pool compared to the player population because it is the only major region that COMPLETELY lack a competitive underground before getting to CS. Go on lolpedia and esportspedia and check the number of competitive tournaments that involved minor teams in S5 NA in the entire season 5 has had the grand total of 1(ONE) big tournament that featured these teams, the recent HTC Ascension. Stop. Then check out the number of relevant tournaments in the other regions, and you can see that not only KR, Eu or CH had more tournaments, but even TW, BR and such had more tournaments with better quality in them (example PGL tournament in EU had more qualitythan HTC Ascension) How are you supposed to recognize true talents in your region if you don't have a proving ground when you can see how they perform in tournaments and in a team environment before getting to CS, and places where players can train, learn and evolve as players, going from being talented soloQ tilting mid laners to become maybe a top 5 midlaner in the world ( Febiven path )? As long as NA doesn't build their competitive underground but only aim to build teams from high CS level and above, you will never have an environment where you can have local talent developping and evolving in LCS caliber players. You will have an environment when players like Baby or Moon still get to LCS without having proved absolutely nothing (or having being totally terrible in Baby case) at lower levels because they just happen to play in roles not covered by imports and because they are touted as talented players merely based on their age... Hech, the whole Open Qualifier thing system created by Riot for CS Qualifier was a clear attempt to promote the building of this competitive underground that was completely lacking in NA where you had only 3-4 teams/orgs semi pro beyond CS level, because that change did not make any sense for EU challenger ranked scene where you yet had a good amount of amateur/semi-pro teams competing which saw their plans screwed because of the super teams that OQ ended up promoting (Huma or the failed attempt of Na'VI), where orgs that worked an entire season to get into CS were surpassed by these teams (3 or 4 of Enigma, K1Ck, 3sUP and Millennium will fail to get in CS QUALIFIER - not even CS - despite being at the top of the challenger ranked scene for the entire season)

You say that in the long run there is not going to be any good NA players...but this has yet been true for a long time, barring exceptions NA has had few true players of international level, the money is only allowing to replace some non LCS caliber players with players fro other regions Until NA doesn't recognize what are the factors that keep them behind in developing local talents, their success will depend only on imports which will push even further back NA grown players

yatseeJan 5, 20161 votes

thanks for the response: 1)money goes where talent is: I disagree. Taking a look at other sports, soccer for example, NA professional League was created about 20 years ago. Whereas all other soccer leagues in the region were created nearly a century ago. Where is the money in the region? of course is in America. Lets take a look at South America: Brazil and Argentina produce some of the best players in the world. Argentina finished second last year in the world cup and Brazil has historically been considered the best national team of all time because they have won the world cup the most. Those two countries have shitty economies, therefore the players migrate to Europe for extraordinarily higher salaries. I do not know the exact numbers but willing to bet more than 10 times that of their home countries. I think in soccer is clear that money goes where economies are and not were the best players are. America does not throw as much money into soccer because quite frankly Americans do not care about it, if they did we can all agree America would be a powerhouse in the sport. 2) I state on the video that if I was the teams I would do the same thing. At the micro level, teams are being given incentives to buy foreign players. In the long run that will hurt us. But I say that I dont blame teams I would do the same thing. However, I do say and I even wrote it on the description that if it was like traditional sports were each region controlled itself, it would be in the best interest of Riot NA to implement rules that motivate teams to invest in NA talent. For example: the grandfathered rule needs to go. 3)I also made a video arguing that teams that want to make a profit have to go into the eyes of the public otherwise they are not going to make money. Teams that are below CS do not make money, thus they are not attractive to investors. I acknowledge this point that was not what the video was about. It was about bringing out a topic that some people might have not thought about before. Of course I acknowledge there are multiple factors that make NA lack talent, I even have multiple movies on the subject. Again I just wanted to show that that specific rule is hindering the possibility of NA rookies making the jump to competitive. 4)I do not say that in the long run there will not be good players: please stop putting words in my mouth. I say that in the long run it will hurt the NA region to import so many players, because regional talent is not being developed. I say that in the long run NA will be worse off than a region like Korea where the dozens of players make the jump to competitive every year, where hundreds of players are exposed to the competitive scene, something that does not happen in NA.

I really would have hoped you answered what I stated, which you did on my first point and I just happened to disagree which is good and a conversation starter. I think you commit strawman in every other argument though.

If someone wanted a tldr, they just got it cause I basically had to restate all my points. Maybe I was not clear enough.

Ale non è maleJan 5, 20163 votes

Point 1: The soccer example you did is terribly wrong for various reason First, because Brazil and Argentina soccer leagues are theirselves second tier leagues, because they historically competed globally with European soccer leagues, teams, national teams and European soccer leagues were more successful in richer countries and could import South American stars to set themselves further ahead and leave them behind as far as money goes Secondly, because MLS itself is still very very poor, still poorer than Brazil and Argentina. Don't get fooled by the big salaries given to few selected players/stars, these money are the exception and not the rule. for the non designated players the salary team cap is about 3,5 M$ for 20 players, and the max player salary is about 400k player which is far less on average than EU leagues and even Brazil and Argentina

For reference, this is an article from november 2014 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2833020/Premier-League-wages-dwarf-Europe-flight-players-England-earning-average-2-3million-year.html

The fact that MLS is growing because is following an healthy provess by buliding revenue through soccer dedicated stadiums and such is good and is helping them to close the gap, but they still have long way to go to reach even Brazil (and Argentina has been suffered from over a decade of cyclic economic crysis, so they are in far worse shape than before) As matter of fact, money goes where competitivity goes in soccer (if anything the problem is for the leagues/teams that are behind to grow when so much money is soaked up by top leagues/teams)

Point 2: Riot has yet putting rules in places to preserve players of their native region, in this case NA region. The 3/5 rule is far more restrictive than the rules existent in any e-sport where you can actually istantly have teams comprised of full foreign players competing for your region. And the time needed to grandfather a player is veery veery long, since no player that wasn't yet in NA at the time the rule was introduced has had the possibility to be grandfathered (the actual grandfathered players are the guys that were yet in NA before the rule and thus Riot couldn't just kick them out screwing up teams), and turnover rate in LOL has been fairly high The problem is that even if I go to analyze the NA players actually in LCS, a good number of them are there ONLY because of the actual protection, because no teams would have hired RF Legendary or Baby...but if NA players can't step above those level player, no way you can protect them enough if they keep sucking...what Riot does is more than enough, you have to blame NA scene only if there aren't enough good NA players (and this before money pured in)

Point 3: You completely don't get my point. I get what investors are aiming for, it is right that big investors want spotlight and money... But this does not automatically hinder NA talent jumping to LCS level. I bet that American investors would be more than happy to build their brand around local players, and would even favour a NA player above a slighlty better foreign player since it could bring them more money through advertising, streaming and such The problem is that there is no underground competition that develop these talents and so orgs are forced to pick foreign players. There are no tournaments for challenger ranked teams (the only exception, again, was HTC Ascension), there are no training/proving ground from soloQ talents, there is no way to check if someone success in soloQ can be replicated in competitive or if some player that have slightly less success in soloQ (low challenger/master tier players) because of less mechanical skills can be instead be successful in comeptitive because they have superior teamwork/shotcalling/decision Making/flexibility/efficiency on a wider champion pool, etc.. And nor org is promoting these either. in NA there is no org that want to start from minor tournament (that barely exist, but still), and challenger, you aim directly from mid/high CS above, which still means there is no undergound competitive scene that develop players from these teams, so you either recylcle beteran, grandfather player, or got to promote straight bad and unproven players from soloQ which do not increase the level of Na grown players

Point 4: NA IS YET worse than every major region barring maybe taiwan (and that's only because TW has an even smaller smaller player population, in proportion TW is far better than NA too). it is not in the long run, it is the actual situation, mainly because of the things said above in Point 3. The exposition to a somewhat competitive scene must happen even before getting to mid-high CS, which does not happen in NA, and the system/scene isn't even interested to have a small group of guys/small e-sports org to have a road to slowly grow, which in hindsight further damage NA player development... You don't have k1ck or Enigmas or 3sUP in NA, and no chance players from such teams can develop in LCS caliber players or even in LCS caliber orgs like what happened to Unicorns of Loveback then In the long run there will be ever less good players than the amount that actually exist, because you won't even get the occasional Zion popping out from a smaller team, but the problem is that even before moren and imports come, NA is behind because is far worse in player development. And you have purposedly ignored this key thing, that is the thing that kept KR and Eu affloat despite CH and even NA having more money even in S5 and losing players to those regions

I have not used strawman argument, but the problem is that your analysis didn't just nail the key points, imho, not more than the common reddit/user post out there that sees imports taking NA players slots

TL; DR I think your analysis was very limited because you didn't consider a lot of key points when evaluating NA scene vs external scene. You just started the analysis by the effects and sticked to them without looking at the roots of the problem, which is what you could/should have done into your analysis

yatseeJan 5, 20161 votes

quote: "The 1st thing you are not absolutely getting is that we are in a paradoxical economic situation compared to any competitive environment...money and investors should go where the talent is (KR first, Eu second, than CN, etc...)" from first post.

I bring up an example when that does not happen and you respond

"The soccer example you did is terribly wrong for various reason First, because Brazil and Argentina soccer leagues are theirselves second tier leagues, because they historically competed globally with European soccer leagues, teams, national teams and European soccer leagues were more successful in richer countries"

** which is EXACTLY my point: richer countries get better leagues, how good the country plays a role too, but in traditional sports money plays a bigger role.

you are right MLS does not pay as much as Argentina brazil or Europe. I specified MLS big salaries relative to their region, that is CONCACAF.
I find these two statements contradictory, I would like clarification.

a) national teams and European soccer leagues were more successful in richer countries and could import South American stars to set themselves further ahead.

b)As matter of fact, money goes where competitivity goes in soccer.

4)"The 3/5 rule is far more restrictive than the rules existent in any e-sport" In the context of the NA region it doe snot seem to be working. In other esports there is not as much regional tournaments that conclude in a world championship. In my understanding other sports have majors and tournament year round where top players attend.

Your second point seems to say that if NA players suck, then its ok to just import players and basically have a Korean/European challenger scene in the NA LCS. My argument is that the rules I would put in would kick those guys out, and put rookies on teams. In the short run, the League would suffer. 3 years down the road NA might be a powerhouse a worlds.

6)Your point 3 is not what the video is about. I understand I responded before briefly, but it simply is offtopic. I do not know if you are right, that can be a factor too. I dont know.

I agree with point 4 even though its offtopic and I made no remarks to that.
I quote: "In the long run there will be ever less good players than the amount that actually exist, because you won't even get the occasional Zion popping out from a smaller team"

EXACTLY THE POINT I WAS TRYING TO MAKE IN THE VIDEO, thanks. Many can be the factors that make this happen. I argue the fact that NA has money worsens the situation.

I am not trying to write an encyclopedia on why NA doe snot develop talent or why it sucks at worlds. I am simply bringing up a very specific topic to light that I think has an easy solution.

Ale non è maleJan 5, 20162 votes

{quoted}

quote: "The 1st thing you are not absolutely getting is that we are in a paradoxical economic situation compared to any competitive environment...money and investors should go where the talent is (KR first, Eu second, than CN, etc...)" from first post.

I bring up an example when that does not happen and you respond

"The soccer example you did is terribly wrong for various reason First, because Brazil and Argentina soccer leagues are theirselves second tier leagues, because they historically competed globally with European soccer leagues, teams, national teams and European soccer leagues were more successful in richer countries"

** which is EXACTLY my point: richer countries get better leagues, how good the country plays a role too, but in traditional sports money plays a bigger role.

you are right MLS does not pay as much as Argentina brazil or Europe. I specified MLS big salaries relative to their region, that is CONCACAF.

I find these two statements contradictory, I would like clarification.

a) national teams and European soccer leagues were more successful in richer countries and could import South American stars to set themselves further ahead.

b)As matter of fact, money goes where competitivity goes in soccer.

Nope, you are showing you are pretty ignorant about soccer history Europan leagues were better than South American leagues since the start, and the fact that EU countries were richer than South American countries expanded even further the gap because EU teams could buy South American stars This is NOT like the actual NA situation, when they are effectively worse than the other main regions and getting more money, in soccer EU was yet better from the start and started to build an even increasing gap during time because of money...

Heck, Brazil and Argentina until after WW II - where in EU soccer leagues were yet reaching great success - weren't even the leading South American country in soccer, back in time Uruguay was the leading country of South America - Brazil was not a competitor win world level competition before 1950 World Cup when they lost vs uruguay, and Argentina didn't beat uruguay either when they reached finals of a world level competition -

The comment about USA and CONCACAF is just backpedaling, since you were using Brazil and Argentina in the example and not made mention to CONCACAF...and quite honestly, how could any CONCACAF league compete to MLS? Canada is into MLS, so the only half-big country that could compete with MLS is mexican league, but mexican league has never been an important league even looking at south american continent context and USA + Canada are 3 times bigger than Mexico

4)"The 3/5 rule is far more restrictive than the rules existent in any e-sport" In the context of the NA region it doe snot seem to be working. In other esports there is not as much regional tournaments that conclude in a world championship. In my understanding other sports have majors and tournament year round where top players attend.

Your second point seems to say that if NA players suck, then its ok to just import players and basically have a Korean/European challenger scene in the NA LCS. My argument is that the rules I would put in would kick those guys out, and put rookies on teams. In the short run, the League would suffer. 3 years down the road NA might be a powerhouse a worlds.

6)Your point 3 is not what the video is about. I understand I responded before briefly, but it simply is offtopic. I do not know if you are right, that can be a factor too. I dont know.

I agree with point 4 even though its offtopic and I made no remarks to that.

I quote: "In the long run there will be ever less good players than the amount that actually exist, because you won't even get the occasional Zion popping out from a smaller team"

EXACTLY THE POINT I WAS TRYING TO MAKE IN THE VIDEO, thanks. Many can be the factors that make this happen. I argue the fact that NA has money worsens the situation.

I am not trying to write an encyclopedia on why NA doe snot develop talent or why it sucks at worlds. I am simply bringing up a very specific topic to light that I think has an easy solution.

The 3/5 rule does not seem to work even though is restrictive because there are not enough good NA players. You don't want to hear it, but it is the sad (for NA fans) truth And if NA players are not good enough, there is nothing that can be really done to help them more than that

You want teams to put rookies on NA teams instead of imports, and I agree NA teams should be doing that...but where are going the team to get those rookies? There are no minor teams from which pick these rookies. THIS IS THE KEY POINT NA lack the competitive underwood that all the other major regions and even the biggest wildcard regions, have. Without this competitive undergound, you can't distinguish the good young talents from the bad young talents out of soloQ It does not matter if there are money or not, without the competitive undergound you can't develop local talents and teams will go for imports...without money instead of Froggen and Huni and YellowStar you just get Avalon, Jebus and Trashy, but the core problem is the same, is that there are no way to develop talent in NA

There is no easy solution in what you are suggesting, because the solution is only to improve the level of Na players Heck, Riot is even promoting the big collegiate tournaments and changed the method to qualify to CS qualifiers to help Na scene, how can they do more? If there isn't a competitive underwood of amateur/semi pro teams you are going to get the Baby, maplestreet and the soloQ random guys picked by teams just to build a roster of 5 guys The big orgs would be willing to get NA orgs over foreign orgs if the guys are around the same level, if you notice the org that moved first in the off-season all aimed to get the best NA talent they could get (C9 went for Bunny fufu, TSM went for Hauntzer and Double, IMT went for Adrian, NRG went for Altec), but the problem is that the talent pool is little CLG and Liquid that were late after those teams, to find rookies for their team had to pick up players from their challenger teams, because there was no other place they could search for All of those other NA fill-up, there are probably no Zion, and even if you add other 10 NA players to replace some of the imports you would likely get 1 Zion at best because overall the level is low and is extremely rare than from dirt you get raw gems