Yatsee - NA economic influence is actually hurting its own chances at winning worlds (video)
tl;dr: The current rules do not foster the development of regional talent in the NA region.
7 Comments
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
Faker can't be bought.
came to thread, guy looks < 20. i guarantee you he has nothing useful to say. left thread