So, anyone playing League of Legends?

[Bester]

How anyone can follow LCS I have no idea. The structure of who plays vs who, when, why, etc - no clue.

In TI5 it was crystal clear - a simple chart with teams. A team wins - it moves forward, the team that loses is out, etc.

In here - no fucking idea. I just read an article on rpshit about it and understood nothing.

 

[4249]

Isn't TI closer to Worlds rather than LCS anyways? As in an annual tournament to decide who's the best team in the world. Worlds are pretty clear cut as well once all qualifiers for them are done.

http://na.lolesports.com/about

Each 10-team league competes over nine weeks, with every team facing one another twice per split, for a total of 18 games each. The regular season is played in a Best of 2 Round Robin format, with each team playing once a day.

So basicly LCS is a round robin tournament with 10 teams running for 9 weeks two times a year (Spring and summer split). After each split there are playoffs, to which the top 6 teams qualify to. Both playoffs give championship points, which decide who goes/gets a shot to go to worlds. Winner of summer playoffs also automatically qualifies for Worlds. Weird that the site mentions only summer split having playoffs, as spring has them as well but they're just not as high stakes.

 

[Bester]

Ok, I thought this WAS world's, I just couldn't figure out how it worked. Whatever then, I'll wait for World's.

 

[Renegen]

Yeah the LCS is just regular season and it's every weekend at the same time, so hard!

Of course you'll have problems with the schedule since you're new to it, your bias is showing.

 

[Bester]

I'm not biased (why would I be? it's not like I'm a dota2 player), I'm not even criticizing it, I just find it hard to understand.

There are much clearer systems, like in case of fifa world cup. (I'm not a football fan, so I might be wrong about some details) You have groups of teams (say 5 teams in 1 group), each team in a group plays against each other accumulating points and then top 2 teams from each group go to play offs. And it all happens pretty fast.

In here as I understand it, you have a shitload of teams in one group (europe or america or asia) and they all play against each other regularly over a long period of time, right? It's certainly less spectacular, because of how much time it takes and how irrelevant just one game becomes. And they all accumulate points, right? If that's the case, I don't even see a list of teams with their standing. What's that about?

 

[Markman]

Worlds is in October, I think.
To get there from LCS there are 3 ways.
1. Win the summer split playoffs. (CLG, Fnatic)
2. Have most points combined from both splits. (TSM, H2K)
3. 4 remaining teams with the most points will have to go through the gauntlet.
Last place team will have to win 3 Bo5s to get through, while the 3rd team with most points will have to win 1.

Does this help?

 

[Markman]

For regular LCS split there are 10 teams playing each other twice, playing 18 games each per split. Out of those 10 only 6 go to playoffs where the points are earned.
Top 2 teams with most wins in the split get a by directly to semifinals while the bottom 4 need to fight it out in quarterfinals first before getting there. The higher they end up, more points they earn.

Edit. There is no world ranking, they are all separated and have a bit different system from LCS. Only chance to have em duke it out is on Worlds.

 

[Bester]

Does this help?

Thanks, I got a couple of questions though.

So if I got it right, there is one season a year.
For each season there are two splits. So 2 splits a year.
For each split - each team plays against each other. Same 10 teams for each split (same teams, right? so they'll play against each other AGAIN in the next split). Who determines which teams are going to participate?
Then at the end of each split, 4 teams are dropped, the other 6 go to playoffs (and play against each other again...). Then the 2 best teams go to some other, seasonal playoffs? (which means there's going to be 4 teams at seasonal playoffs competing for 2 tickets to world's?). Others go back to playing against each other AGAIN at regional tournament, to which you refer as the gauntlet?
Also when 2 teams from the first split get a ticket to seasonal playoffs, are they replaced by some other 2 teams in the second split?

You can see why a person would be confused.

And in the end, at world's, you'll have some kind of dota2-like elimination system in place for 30 teams? (10 from NA, 10 from EU and 10 from Asia)

 

[4249]

Only EU and NA has LCS, LCK(Korea) and LPL(China) etc. have different formats.

Each split has a promotion tournament before it starts, which is the way that teams change in the LCS. From the bottom three(summer) or four(spring) teams of the split, the worst team automatically drops out and can't participate in the promotion tournament. The others have to play against Challenger Series teams to keep their spot. If they lose, they will be dropped from the LCS and the Challenger teams will take their place. Challenger Series is for teams that are on top of their regions respective ladders.

All 6 of the top teams of a split go to the regional playoffs at the end of each split. For both playoffs you're rewarded Championship points. The team with the most points in the end of the season gets to go to worlds. The team who wins summer playoffs gets to go to worlds. Then there's 4 teams left, who have to play against each other in Regional finals, which is a bo5 single elimination tournament with placings based on their championship points. So, let's say we have Teams 1, 2, 3 and 4. 1 has the most points, 4 has the least. So the bracket would go like this:

Team 3 vs Team 4 -> Team 2 vs Winner -> Team 1 vs Winner

Worlds has 16 teams who have to qualify to play there. LCS qualifying I just explained, other regions qualifiers I'm not so familiar with. This year the tournament has places for 3 teams from Europe, 3 from NA, 3 from China, 3 from Korea, 2 from Taiwan and 2 for International Wildcards, aka the smaller regions(Brazil, Japan, SEA, Latin America, Turkey, Oceania and CIS). Before the bo5 single elimination bracket stage which decides the winner of the tournament, there's a group stage, where the teams are divided into 4 groups of 4 and play against each other in round robin format. In groups each team plays against the others in its group twice.

edit: There's no teams on this yet, as qualifiers are still going on, but it explains the structure of the actual tournament pretty well.

http://lol.esportspedia.com/wiki/2015_worlds#Results

 

[bloodlover]

Spoiler

SKT facerolled KT 3-0 with blind picks and Riven mid... I really hope there is at least one team in the world that can be a problem for these guys but I assume only a team from China would have some kind of chances. Don't get me wrong, I still want SKT or any Korean team to win but from what I've seen, EU and NA have zero chances thus making for a very boring world championship.

 

[Bester]

So I got back to playing lol seriously again. Played 2 games with Skarner and I sucked. Could anyone explain to me what's so good about Skarner right now?

(and maybe explain Garen if you can pls, he's got 55% winrate)

 

[Renegen]

Skarner is an amazing duelist, never dies and is crazy fast around the crystals. He can do anything he wants. Garen it's all about the true damage ult.

 

[Bester]

and is crazy fast around the crystals

And whoever is your enemy jungler, he's also going to be crazy fast. So advantage negated.

Or is he really THE champ who can take advantage of those crystals better than anyone else? I kinda doubt it.

 

[markec]

And whoever is your enemy jungler, he's also going to be crazy fast. So advantage negated.

Or is he really THE champ who can take advantage of those crystals better than anyone else? I kinda doubt it.

He is the only one who gets the buffs, its his passive.

 

[PlanHex]

Hah, they fucking did it!

From 7th to worlds. Nice.

 

[Erzherzog]

Did we just have a dozen posts to explain how a simple league style system works? Every team plays every week, check out the schedule to find the specific match ups you want to see. It becomes way easier to follow if you pick a player or a team to root for, such as H2K for when I'm looking at EU LCS or watching Shiphtur for NA LCS

Spoiler

I swear to god he just plays so passive because he's secretly holding back and someday he'll go all crazy like...

Anyways I barely touch the game nowadays since I was just settling into top lane as a main position that I could legitimately play but then juggernaut patch is released and everything got flipped onto its head. Now it feels like Wukong just doesn't do enough damage. Darius plays completely differently from what I liked about him, I'm a shit laner so the zero cast time Q was amazeballs, in silver tier you can legit hit it and not get traded onto AT ALL. And my Swain play is lacking but then again I liked him more when assassins were not so fucking gimped, he worked best when he could outlast a burst and then control lane during their cooldown, I mean I picked him up when fizz was meta and Akali was at least playable. I ask you, when's the last time you've seen akali?

Stale meta was noob friendly man. I've begun playing Riven of all things just to feel like I can affect the outcome, the server move helps. Turns out I really WASN'T complete shit at mechanics, turns out 110 ping WILL make you worse at the game. Get fucked west coast.

 

[Renegen]

I had to watch the C9 games after you wrote this, I completely counted them out, wow.

In other news, fuck Gangplank. Nothing but a selfish champion that builds full damage in laning screwing up your team comp and then misses all barrels, he's such a 100 or 0 champion that I just hate him completely. What did Riot do to the Jolly Roger, the guy used to have a Cleanse, overall versatility and he's turned to this

And yeah the ping is amazing, I get 45 right now though I didn't notice anything on the low skill fighters I play. You also need to be less of a meta sheep Erzherzog, people in ranked don't play the latest shit, it takes at least a month to filter through and even then they do it badly.

 

[Erzherzog]

I find if I do 3 matches in a day on the weekend days, I'll find shit that just got played saturday in LCS, played on sunday in TB.

Then again I played Wu for the first time since 5.16 and this happened.
http://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/NA1/1937378563/44226535?tab=overview

To be fair, GP and Shaco were obnoxiously bad. Shaco kept trying to splitpush, I manged to wipe him off the map in just one rotation of abilities every time he separated from his team. GP would just spam barrels when pressured, one time I got stupid and ganked shaco around his blue when GP was decently close, he had a couple seconds to react so he placed two barrels on me instantly so I just walked away...

And you can hardly blame me for chasing meta when I'm bitching that my trio of Darius/Wu/Swain aren't faring how I'd like. Besides that I play lots of Mundo. If I was trying to be meta you'd see me on some shit like Maokai.

 

[markec]

Had few insane last games, had silver Fizz in team going against diamond one in mid and got destroyed by him and went trolling, at 20min enemy Fizz had 20 kills. Still almost won the game at 50min mark until our fed Udyr decided to go 2v5.

Played Janna supp, late game both Dragon and Baron go up at the same time, team decides to go for 5th Dragon while enemy team suddenly rush Baron. I go to Baron pit to buy some time for my team but Baron is going too fast. I decide to go for miracle steal, wait for it to go to 1000hp and charge my Q and actually manage to steal it with fucking Janna.

Enjoying Shen at top, cant remember when I last time lost line with him. Just recently raped Nasus main on top, he had less then 100 stacks at 20 min.

So can anyone explain how matchmaking works in this game. I dont play ranked and due that Im unranked yet every game I get gold and plat for teammates and opponents with diamond appearing every few games. Then few games ago got Challenger 1 for enemy who was a monster.

 

[Bester]

I ask you, when's the last time you've seen akali?

I've only seen her picture recently, in this context: it was a black & white picture of her face, a black ribbon in the corner and it said "R.I.P. 2010-2015"

Played a few games yesterday. Nobody wanted to go mid. Had to go there myself, and the weird thing - enemy team didn't want to play mid either, so each time they picked two ADCs and one of them went mid. They had free farm and then destroyed me with their superior range and poke. Evening ruined.

 

[Erzherzog]

Was the enemy mid Varus?

 

[Bester]

No, Ez twice and Lucian one time.

 

[Erzherzog]

Well forget my earlier bitching, some champs do well in the new top lane. I've been trying to find a replacement for Swain in this assassin-less meta and I'm pretty sure I've settled on Kennen. Fiora, Darius, Garen are all top picks lately and he craps on all of them, it's awesome. Plus, unlike Darius and Garen, he's pretty much guaranteed to help in teamfights with his Amumu-lite ult.

I'm even consistently beating gold tier players with it. I really wish ranked TB was a thing because I'd be all over that.

 

[PlanHex]

I really wish ranked TB was a thing because I'd be all over that.

From what I've read, ranked TB will only support choosing your role (including fill) and then going to draft mode as usual though. Then again, Kennen isn't exactly banned often as far as I know.

 

[bloodlover]

Laughing my ass off at NA players streaming from KR. HotShotGG got owned so hard, 4-10 in the last game and he was unranked. Sneaky and Incarnation play for 12+ hours yesterday and could not get out of D1.

In b4 NA does not get out of group stages at worlds.