Boards›Esports

I think the reason World's has been so good, is the same reason so many people dislike Solo Queue

ValyrianBlade·10/21/2018, 5:16:33 PM·3 votes·2,023 views

There are too many OP champions and games snowball too hard.

In past worlds, we still saw underdogs win a game or two over the favourites. In fact, it was rare to see a favourite win a series 3-0. However, the underdogs would win with either a niche champion pick/strategy or an OP pick and the favourite would respond by just banning out the practiced strategy and then winning any "normal" game.

Take RNG vs G2 for example. We all knew going in that G2 would try to win by split pushing. And they did just that. RNG couldn't just ban out the "OP Splitpushers" because there were too many of them. Aatrox, Urgot, Irelia, Akali, Fiora - how do you ban all 5, meanwhile when you need to ban Heimer as well?

Then take the jungle picks, how many AD dueling stat-check run-at-you-and-kill-you junglers are super strong right now? Nocturne, Xin Zhao, Lee Sin, Camille, Olaf. How do you ban them all?

And that's not even considering how broken LeBlanc seems to be in any game she sees play. Or that Kai'sa and Xayah are both big threats in the ADC role.

The "favourite" can't just ban out a strategy they don't want to deal with. Which is probably a good thing.

However, it's the same thing that's causing players to hate casual league.

I don't want to deal with a jungler that's able to 1v1 anyone starting at level 1 onwards, can clear fast, has gank pressure, etc... Aside from Lee Sin (who thankfully falls off) all of those picks basically do the same thing to you. It's almost a waste to ban one of them, because the player can just jump to another without really needing much practice - the skills are all basically the same. And yet, they're all among the strongest champions in the game.

I'm sure there's lots of other players that don't want to play into an overbearing top lane opponent, and yet again these split pushers are among the strongest champions in the game.

And then we get to the snowball point in the title. You give any of these champions a lead, and they can snowball it out of control. You can't stabilize a game and stall out to late. Yes, I don't want games to go 60+ min (even casual ones). I want to be able to sign into a game when I only have 60min available and be confident I can finish it. However, I don't want games decided at 20-25min. If coordinated pros can't stop the bleeding and prevent games from being wipes within 35min, how do you expect solo queue players to stop your feeding teammates from allowing a 20min stomp?

Just my view: Worlds is the best ever BUT It's the same thing that has made solo queue so frustrating.

8 Comments

JackMcSnipeyz10/21/2018, 5:27:54 PM5 votes

Most of fnatics games started as them losing. C9 game 3 they were losing and got back thanks to smart plays and some luck.

Many games were unexpected and were not closed until the last turret was down. So i disagree, snowballing was way less noticeable and many comebacks were made due to smart plays.

In pro play some champs will ALWAYS be ontop because the skill gap is closed so champ picks matter a whole lot more. However, we've seen so many pocket and niche picks in this worlds compared to others, it doesnt mean everything is OP, it means you can execute unexpected picks without losing. We had freaking heimerdinger bot being pick/ban, hecarim top, ekko mid and Draven. You cant dismiss all those picks by focusing on popular ones, there will ALWAYS be popular safe picks, but this worlds showed us that if teams bring their best and play their own style, they have equal chance as the "meta"

Dr Poro10/21/2018, 5:34:13 PM2 votes

Surprisingly, most of the games aren't stomps. A very few of them are pretty much decided by 15 minutes. But most of them are decided around 25-30 minutes or even later in the very nice clutch games. I think 25-30 minutes average is a good game length. Baron is really powerful, but it's still possible to win against it as shown. There's no metric that single handedly decides games and that's awesome. It's a combination of all the things: jungling, all 3 lanes matchups, rotations, teamfights, splitpush, objectives, front-to-back-protect-the-carry, wild assassinations. We've basically seen everything at worlds and have games decided by so many different factors.

When you talk snowballing, I think about soloQ where games are often decided before 15 minutes by one or two lanes snowballing out of control. That's not happening too often in Worlds. The occasional snowball is fine because that means that early game IS important too. I don't call a game that's decided around 25 minute baron plays a snowball, though. At some point the game needs to bend to one side or the other. 25 minutes is a perfect moment imo.

And yeah, there are many powerpicks right now. But is that a problem? I think that ideally, you would want to have even more! It means that you do see different champions in each role. While of course not the full roster is viable, it's not the 'ban best two, pick next best 2' like it often was. During group stages we did see that somewhat because teams followed the general idea of what was best. You'd expect that the meta would be more defined in knock out stage where everyone knows: "okay this is the pick you should definitely play now. It's black on white." But that didn't happen. Teams have developped their own tier lists and play their champion pool instead of having one champ pool that fits every team in worlds like last year in the 'protect the adc' meta.

Full Brain10/21/2018, 9:09:52 PM1 votes

There are really only a couple champions where that was a problem in worlds. Early to mid game power spike champions that you absolutely can't start feeding at the wrong time. Pretty much it is just Akali, Leblanc, Graves, and Leesin. All of them fall off hard at the start of late game if you didn't feed your brains out to them but if you did they are unstoppable burst damage monsters flying around the map. Akali is normally banned, LeBlanc should continue to be banned more and more, Graves usually can't get to that point, and teams just pick tank solo laners or ban Lee to prevent him from doing it so people pick faster clearing junglers or better teamfighting junglers.

PsychoWhite10/22/2018, 4:59:59 AM1 votes

Those are my thoughts exactly. I think this is the best world's ever. But at the same time soloQ is just a big mess. Whoever gets the most OP champs wins. Think Urgot/Xin/Irelia/Kai Sa/Pyke...they are a mix of mostly ad dmg and some ap but it's just an instawin if you manage to build that. You used to be able to kite short range champs with others(Cait for example) but now everyone can just jump at you and you die instantly, you hate it, but if you see it in pro play you love it. I don't even know what I'd like to see changed... I'd also like to be able to watch some games go really late, I'd like to see a Viktor/Azir farming simulator in some of the games. The "John just SOLO KILLED Smith with Irelia WhAt An OuTpLaY" thingy is getting boring it's not even fun. Oh Caps got Irelia oh look he's getting 6 soon time for the solo kill again let's lower the volume if I ever hear a caster call an Irelia solo kill an "outplay" I'm gonna bleed.

My ideal game would be 40 minutes long, you can see at least 2 barons and 1 elder, early game champs had their chance, now late game champs have the upper hand. Now it feels unfair that the first team has almost no chances to win a late game comp, but that's fair, you picked a champ for early aggression to bully your opponent.

I'd like to see changes, where late game comps have chances of going late game against an early game comp, but also early game comps having chances at defeating a late game comp after reaching late game.

Saezio10/22/2018, 7:40:20 AM1 votes

PLEASE DELETE IRELIA

ShadWooo10/21/2018, 7:19:42 PM1 votes

Absolutely agree.

Despite snowballing was not so common in worlds matches, and from the games I was watching only 1 was truly decided at 15min, the games had quite a lot similar with EU/NA soloQ. In my opinion, the reasons games weren't huge stops were these:

  • first and mainly, huge difference in vision, lack of vision really empowers assassins, fighters and roaming by general in soloQ
  • communication - unlike soloQ team are communicating via voice chat and so they can better respond to plays and roams
  • a really big emphasis on counter picks and (semi)global abilities especially when some assassin is picked early, so basically each play after 15minutes accelerated into 4v4 or 5v5
  • with some exceptions overally risk-averse play even when they are winning, in worlds only Gambit and Vitality played true soloQ style and it backfired for them
KCT1 Otter10/21/2018, 5:24:33 PM1 votes

Games are supposed to end in 20 minutes what are you talking about dude?