Boards›Esports

Why NA is still very likely to lose worlds.

Ready 2 B Blamed·10/4/2016, 12:16:16 AM·4 votes·1,125 views

I feel by now that some people should have matured by now to talk about this without being childish. Though, I know some still will. But I sincerely do believe NA is.. to some extent the best region. However, I don't believe they are the most intelligent. If we hadn't noticed, the games in which NA wins vs teams like ROX costed them a lot to achieve such victories. Here's my theory in why KR is going to win worlds: As good as Korea is, they don't seem to be playing very intellectually. ROX Tigers almost lost to ANX. SKT loses to FW and ROX loses to CLG. If you noticed, These teams have one thing in common: They have comfort power picks. However, when they go to a more meta restrained team composition, they don't play as well. I believe Korea uses early group stages as a form of gathering information and scanning how powerful these teams are with specific champions. To Korea, simply hearing someone is good with said champ isn't enough for them to simply waste a ban on those champions. When it comes to games where Korea REALLY wanna win, they highly value ban phase and choose to use it passively at the beginning of group stages to allow the other teams to "dominate" them in said phase so that they can see how the enemy teams conquer them in draft phase.

To put it simply, Korea throws in champion select early in group stages to see scan the enemy teams at their strongest so that they will know what to do in the later parts of the tournament. That is my theory anyway. I do still "kind of" have hope for TSM because TSM is the only NA team with a large champions pool in almost every position so it's difficult to ban them out. However, It is still likely ROX or SKT will overpower them just in raw skill.

18 Comments

GhostOfTsushima10/4/2016, 12:29:53 AM2 votes

This is the most crap observation I have ever seen. Where does he get his facts from LOL

SKT ban Mord all game at Worlds, without even seeing one Mord who did a good play. They completely just respect that Mord is an OP Champ in Solo Que last Season

Kal Vas Flam10/4/2016, 12:41:52 AM2 votes

Asians in general have a different strategic philosophy. This can be traced back to WW2 and Vietnam. Asian battle philosophy is to take territory and fight around controlled areas. NA strategy is largely to take out priority targets and chip away at smaller targets from there. The whole reason we lost the Vietnam War is because the Asian strategy is better at defending and taking territories, and if you look at map play in LoL, the same theory applies. NA has traditionally been miles behind Korea and China on map control and instead focused on big team fights with the intent of deleting big carries first, that was always the main reason they lost, not just because Koreans are "superior" mechanical players. NA's large imports of Asian players has obviously had an effect though as we're seeing TSM, CLG, and C9 doing a much better job at map control and thus doing much better in these matches. Whether or not we're there yet is still to be determined.

Note - my explanation of Asian strategy vs NA strategy is obviously extremely simplified, but in that's it in a couple of sentences.

Slappybiscuit10/4/2016, 6:04:49 AM2 votes

If asian team loses = they werent trying very hard, they were sandbagging, they didnt want to reveal any strategies, other team got lucky/cheesed If asian team wins = they the best baby, unstoppable, why is there even a tournament? crown these kings, have my babies, $5 sucky

Treeofwar10/4/2016, 12:23:27 AM1 votes

SSW did not do that nor did SKT

Miror B10/4/2016, 12:24:02 AM1 votes

NA started out strong at last year's worlds to go 0-10 in week two. Until they actually secure a quarterfinal spot, I'm not jumping on that fap-wagon.

Requiemsfire10/4/2016, 4:33:43 AM1 votes

Still though SKT Faker considers Rox Tigers and TSM their greatest competition and the team they must watch out for. Don't forget anything can happen on the world stage, strategies used in each game aren't the same and that the teams will probably continue to try and innovate or perfect their strategies as we draw closer to the finals.

Look at what we saw with ANX vs G9 where ANX made history as a wild card team in defeating the number 1 seed in Europe using one of the most unique compositions in worlds seen thus far with their incredible executions and well thought out actions.