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New to League, I have some questions about professional games.

Echofinger·7/2/2016, 4:50:27 PM·3 votes·639 views

I understand the meta. 5 players, 3 lanes and a jungle, and why the team is spread out on the map, at least until a tower or two drops.

  1. I am curious about why the roles are placed where they are on the map. Usually, tanky champion top, some pew-pew or pew-pew/tank mid, and the support/ADC bottom. What is the logic here? Is there a reason the support/ADC duo can't go top? Or mid?

  2. In a lot of the LCS games I have watched, the two teams send 3 champs to a lane a few minutes in, and burn down a tower. The opposing team often does the same thing. Is this just habitual at this point? What are they seeking to gain by not contesting a tower attack and instead taking a tower themselves?

  3. Last week I happened to watch a number of games where Trundle was being picked for top. He then proceeded to go up there and pretty much own the lane. There was a lot of commentary from the announcers about what a good counter to Trundle might be. I believe the team opposite Trundle picked Gnar, and that didn't work out so well. Later, I watched a few ranked games using the U.I. in game, which I believe were Master tier players. One of them happened to be a similar Trundle top match, but in that game the opposing team countered with Cassiopia, who proceeded to annihilate Trundle for 30 minutes. I guess I am asking why don't I see LCS teams get brave and throw a high-DPS champion against a tank top lane? In particular after getting crushed in the first game of three, why the rigid adherence to putting a tank top no matter what?

  4. Is there a place to hear the team chat for these games? I'd rather listen to them than the announcers, even if I have to watch the game a few days later.

  5. Is there a way to watch LCS matches with the spectator UI we have in game? I see they use that for broadcasting the matches, but obviously you can not mouse over the various information, see gold earned, move the camera, etc., at your own discretion.

I apologize if the questions are silly. I imagine I have only watched a couple dozen matches, so perhaps I just haven't seen enough games. Thank you to whomever replies.

10 Comments

Serika Zero7/2/2016, 8:30:00 PM4 votes

The 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 meta is there because its one of the best way to "share experience" and "share gold" in your team. it could also be 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 or 1 + 1 + 2 + 1

In LCS you actually see a variation of this. After a certain minute (1-2 items) adcs generally move to mid lane together with their support. While the mid goes to bot or top and the top goes bot or top. (The last example). Or in lane swaps (regardless if successful or not), where the adc and sup go top lane while the top laners go bot lane.

until now, the reason why the meta was mostly 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 was because dragon is on bot lane. So you wanted to have most of your team mates on bot lane.

Now, why its ADC+sup over any other role? Because ADCs are the best "class" at taking down objectives (dragon, baron, tower) you want to have them "baby sitted" and protected.

Regarding tanks, aps, assassins, etc. They usually play what's overall the "strongest" in the patch. But they generally take a long time to pull out a counter. So, a slight meta is ensured for a slow time. Every one plays control mage mid? - control mage meta. They all try to get good at control mages instead of playing something else (ie: assassins). Right now vlad, swain and irelia are super strong, so instead of a lot of counters. They focus on those.

Also, you want your team to have the next thing: wave clear, engage, disengage. Tanks generally offer engage, hence why they are often played in jungle or top.

  1. they do this in order to dodge match-ups they don't like and get some gold sometimes they also want to set the enemy top laner behind, which lane swaps generally make them have less exp than everyone else and get farm and exp good enough like: Vayne + Alistar is very bad vs Caitlyn + Karma. So the first team would not want to face the second bot lane -> so they gona try to swap

  2. Trundle is good vs tanks or off-tanks why aren't the lcs players bring better counterpicks? see point 1. They usually play what they believe its the best in the patch. VERY VERY few teams are innovative. And its not "tank top every game". Irelia is a fighter, not a tank. Jax is a fighter, not a tank. I've also seen a bunch of top lane jarvan. But like I also said in point 1. Teams want engage, disengage and wave clear. Trundle gives your team disengage, front line, destroy enemy tank by pressing one button, and facilitate poke (with pillar slow power). The main reason trundle is picked is because he is an anti tank monster.

  3. no, generally the games even on live, they are like 30 seconds behind so that the audience can't influence actual plays. you get a bit of what they talk in PTL mike check segment (or something similar)

  4. no, the LCS games are playing on a local network, giving the players very low latency (~5ping) and making it impossible to be hacked by outside sources (without electro magnetic laser weapons)

KirynDawn7/2/2016, 4:58:38 PM2 votes

  1. people do that because that is 'meta' and seems to have the highest chance of winning the game. Remember its a game and you can play however you want but if you want to win following meta is the way to go.

  2. LCS teams will lane swap to avoid a bad matchup and get their adc through the laning phase. Depending on what side you are it will open up other opprotunities too like a dragon or rift herald.

  3. They do take high dps champs against tanks. you'll see some Quinn or Graves . However currently teamfights win games. If you don't have a frontline for a teamfight you're more likely to lose against a team that does currently (the game changes all the time though).

  4. There's an segment called mic check that lets you listen in on what they say but since e-sports is a professional scene and you can't control what the players say you most likely won't see it on any live broadcast.

  5. No there isn't because they play on tournament servers I believe where there is almost to no ping. If you watch the broadcast through lolesports.com they display all the information you could ever need plus a twitter feed.

QQsha7/3/2016, 1:29:40 AM2 votes

Side lanes are inherently more dangerous to farm. It takes twice the distance to get back to your tower for safety, and it's easier to set up ganks from behind the tower. It also takes longer to walk to lane. This means mid lane is the safest and easiest way to accelerate your farm. If you don't have to play safe to respect as many ganks, you can play farther up and deny yourself less farm. And while the wave can still be put in unfavorable positions in mid lane, it's not as bad as if it were done in the side lane where you'd be completely open to ganks. Not only that, Blue buff is accessable to mid lane from Red and Blue side spawns.

Mages tend to power spike hard in the mid game, from both levels and items. ADCs are more item reliant, so it makes the most sense to have the mage (or assassin) in mid lane. Then you pair the support with the ADC to compensate for the more dangerous long lane and make sure they can get as much farm as they can as safely as they can. What goes in top lane is whatever can survive in the top lane and is whatever the team needs to round out their composition. With a tank, it's harder to lock the guy down and kill him before he gets back to the tower.

  1. Now, as for why the ADC and support bot instead of top, it's because you want power around dragon side. As for lane assignments beyond that, it depends on what your goal is. To take down towers, you want your ADC in that lane, and the support usually follows the ADC early on. If you put an early 2v1 in mid, your mid gets screwed early as well. Depending on the matchups (both with the players and champions), this may or may not be favorable. Same thing happens with top lane. You can do any lane assignment you want so long as it accomplishes a non-immediate goal that you want. Sometimes the goal is as simple as getting a safe level 6 so you don't get bullied in lane. Sometimes it's dodging a rough matchup altogether and farming side waves as they come to you, taking early towers to make up some of the difference in CS from moving around the map so much. When you think of lane assignments, you want to think of assignments that are most favorable for your team to pick up farm. After that, you can think of whether you can tweak it to disrupt your opponent's ability to farm on top of that. In one of SSW's games against TSM in 2014, they laneswapped for 2 reasons: 1) get the Twitch a safe lane until he gets Bilgewater Cutlass to lane safely against Lucian, and 2) put the enemy top lane Lulu behind so their top lane Ryze can bully him when they swap back so 3) the top lane will get ahead later on so that when TSM eventually decides to send Zed into a side lane to split push, they can answer with a Ryze that has Rod of Ages, Frozen Heart, and a Teleport to respond. which would put TSM into a massive hole and deny one of their win conditions. As you can see, none of these reasons for their lane swap had an immediate effect, they were all for a much later goal that denied the enemy a win condition and reinforced their own win condition (this was back when Ryze didn't get 30% CDR for free and only got 10%, making Frozen Heart a VERY good item for him with the CDR and mana). Twitch gets a safe road to his BoRK powerspike, while Ryze gets to slowly power up when the Lulu gets bullied (there were ganks into the top lane as well to burn Lulu's Flash so that they had to play even safer, denying more farm).

  2. For the most part, responding would be too late and the tower would be down (along with most of the farm in the lane). Sometimes, teams do respond and defend (just not in LCS because fuck LCS). Generally, responding costs you more than just trading towers. If you trade towers, you're even in all aspects if you take the tower down at the same time and don't botch the bounce. If you defend, you lose gold and exp that the tower killed and aren't even guaranteed to save the tower. It's a riskier prospect. If you just take the tower and bounce the wave, your top lane gets gold and farm, which eventually (in most cases) the enemy duo will come down to deny, but at least your top laner got something before they have to scavenge for scraps. Now, in the case that you take down the tower noticeably slower, the enemy team can take another objective in the extra time they earned (this can be a tier 2 tower or Rift Herald/Dragon). If you take down the tower drastically slower than the enemy, then you might even have to back off the tier 1 to save your tier 2. While this game is considered an RTS, you're still limited by moves similar to chess, the only difference being you don't have to wait for your opponent's moves to make your own. But responding to an attack where you're several moves behind instead of trading when you're equal on moves makes the analogy pretty obvious for why you should choose one action over the other, right?

  3. It's not a rigid adherence to putting a tank top lane. If you want a tank, you can put it in the jungle or support. But the fact is, Cassiopeia top has a massive flaw, which is ganks. In a professional game, you have the option to use lane swaps to dodge the matchup or ganks to destroy the Cassiopeia. If you open with the lane swap option, the gank option becomes significantly scarier. So you've dodged the bad matchup, AND destroyed the Cassiopeia. What can Cassiopeia do against an Elise/Trundle gank? A Rek'Sai/Trundle gank? Nothing but die. At least with most meta picks, you can run or survive long enough for the team to help or get an advantage somewhere else on the map to punish. With Cassiopeia, she just dies. Not only that, Trundle is much better in lane swaps than Cassiopeia. He can take jungle camps faster and he can take down the tower faster. The team with Cassiopeia will be behind early on and have to spend more resources to keep Cassiopeia safe from the ganks that everyone in the world knows SHOULD be headed her way. And if they aren't, because mind games, then they're even farther behind, because Cassiopeia naturally would've denied some farm, but the wave will naturally push out to a position where it's safe for the Trundle to farm it, and the jungler wastes his time on a countergank that didn't happen, and can't even gank the Trundle because the Trundle will be playing back.

  4. Mic check. They put up clips of the pros and what they say. They generally don't put the entire thing up because of obscenities, and Riot wants their content to be family friendly.

  5. Nope. Thank Riot for not having an official replay system.

Yes, these are some long answers. But you asked questions about some fairly advanced topics with so massive misconceptions built into your thinking.

Let me re-clarify:

THERE IS NO OBSESSION TO PUT TANKS IN THE TOP LANE. THEY WERE IN THE TOP LANE BECAUSE THEY DO WELL GIVEN THE CONDITIONS OF THE LANE ITSELF.

DREADN0UGHT7/2/2016, 5:22:51 PM1 votes

{quoted}

  1. In season 1, there was no instilled meta. People played pretty much anything anywhere. At some point, people trended towards bruiser/support bot lane, marksman mid, mage top and a tank or assassin in the jungle. It was by the end of Season 1 that European teams introduced the current meta with tank/fighters top, assassin/tank//fighter jungle, mage/assassin mid, Marksman bot with Support. It was simply effective, and nothing could withstand it, so it became the popular and recently, the official meta.

  2. LCS teams use strategies that are very elaborate and unsafe in SoloQ/DynQ. Its simply a strategy and has been trendy in the past months. Its where a team will send their adc and support top lane to get a safer lane. So the other team sends their top laner bot. That usually ends up in a 3 man top and bot tower race. Its boring. Don't do it in DynQ

  1. Again, there is a distinctive difference between DynQ and LCS. Cass top would not stand a chance in LCS. Gnar is a very teamfight oriented champ and would offer a much better synergy in the mid/late game. And besides, one failed game does not mean the match up is a bad one. Only that mistakes were made.

  2. You cannot have access to team chats because it would reveal strategies as they disscuss in champ select and ingame. You can hear clips sometimes from post-game, but they only leak funny moments, and refrain for letting anyone hear strategic conversations.

  1. I believe the LCS games are played on a closed server, meaning they are not connected to the main hive. I don't think this is possible.
dakm1027/2/2016, 8:07:28 PM1 votes

  1. I think that the reason why the meta is the way it is is mostly based on the way that lanes are designed. for example, top lane is a very long lane where it is extremely easy to be ganked. So because of that you want someone that can survive on their own such as a tank or a fighter like irelia, jax, trundle, etc. They also do well with constantly fighting with their laner and don't need as much scaling as a marksman. I would say that this meta CAN be changed, mage top laners are often put into the meta such as lissandra due to the fact that she has a way to easily escape. Meanwhile Mid is the way it is because the mid lane is the lane where you can roam extremely easily. It also gives solo xp that is paramount for some champs like syndra who is quite level reliant. also since mid laners have cc they are great at roaming which is important for a lane where it is extremely easy to do so.

  2. I don't really know the idea behind lane swaps and other people would understand more than me about this. sorry

  3. I think that this point is very valid. Mage tops are shown to have an advantage against trundle in many scenarios. The most common one in lcs is where lissandra is picked into trundle and can handle him in lane easily. I feel like other mages could pull this off and I love the idea of more people playing champions that they are adept at not because that champ is in the meta but because they have fun and play well on that champ. For example I love when Froggen plays Anivia not because it is a super meta pick but because he is good on it and comfortable on it.

  4. yeah access to team chats would be a very bad idea since strategies would be leaked left and right. just a bad idea in general no offense

  5. The lcs is played on a LAN server which is closed from the rest of the game. It is a custom game that is even played on another server so that you cannot interfere with it or with the game itself. Like imagine if a person was watching and leaking stuff to a team? that is why that is a bad idea.

BigBellBrute7/6/2016, 4:13:33 PM1 votes

{quoted}

I understand the meta. 5 players, 3 lanes and a jungle, and why the team is spread out on the map, at least until a tower or two drops.

  1. I am curious about why the roles are placed where they are on the map. Usually, tanky champion top, some pew-pew or pew-pew/tank mid, and the support/ADC bottom. What is the logic here? Is there a reason the support/ADC duo can't go top? Or mid?

  2. In a lot of the LCS games I have watched, the two teams send 3 champs to a lane a few minutes in, and burn down a tower. The opposing team often does the same thing. Is this just habitual at this point? What are they seeking to gain by not contesting a tower attack and instead taking a tower themselves?

  3. Last week I happened to watch a number of games where Trundle was being picked for top. He then proceeded to go up there and pretty much own the lane. There was a lot of commentary from the announcers about what a good counter to Trundle might be. I believe the team opposite Trundle picked Gnar, and that didn't work out so well. Later, I watched a few ranked games using the U.I. in game, which I believe were Master tier players. One of them happened to be a similar Trundle top match, but in that game the opposing team countered with Cassiopia, who proceeded to annihilate Trundle for 30 minutes. I guess I am asking why don't I see LCS teams get brave and throw a high-DPS champion against a tank top lane? In particular after getting crushed in the first game of three, why the rigid adherence to putting a tank top no matter what?

  4. Is there a place to hear the team chat for these games? I'd rather listen to them than the announcers, even if I have to watch the game a few days later.

  5. Is there a way to watch LCS matches with the spectator UI we have in game? I see they use that for broadcasting the matches, but obviously you can not mouse over the various information, see gold earned, move the camera, etc., at your own discretion.

I apologize if the questions are silly. I imagine I have only watched a couple dozen matches, so perhaps I just haven't seen enough games. Thank you to whomever replies.

  1. There is absolutely nothing that says the ADC and Support can't go top. And they often do to initiate a lane swap. But recall that the Dragon is closer to the bottom and the Baron doesn't spawn until later. So most of the time, you're going to want your duo down there to start.

  2. This is a lane swap and is often done to get around a bad match up. If say team X sends their duo top and the other team sends theirs bottom, it is much better for the other team to stay where they are and farm and get gold and experience in the process and trade tower for tower rather than try to send em up top to prevent it.

  3. Gnar is actually a decent match up into Trundle. That one just lost. The pros play to team compositions much more so than solo Q. So sometimes you'll see a bad lane match up. I think I only played top into Trundle once. I chose Teemo and poked from Distance. I am not a pro and I don't expect Teemo to be played by the pros any time soon, however.

  4. The only team chat you get to hear is what they play for you at the end of the game.

  5. You can't watch them with the in game feature because they aren't on that system. I hate not being able to control what I see too.

DænariusKhølerin7/8/2016, 6:33:07 AM1 votes

Some of these are questions I had even after a few months of playing... lol.