Click to open network menu
Join or Log In
Mobafire logo

Join the leading League of Legends community. Create and share Champion Guides and Builds.

Create an MFN Account






Or

MOBAFire's first Mini Guide Contest of Season 14 is here! Create or update guides for the 30 featured champions and compete for up to $200 in prizes! 🏆
's Forum Avatar

Why the koreans are simply better.

Creator: Pølsemanden November 4, 2012 7:07pm
Pølsemanden
<Member>
Pølsemanden's Forum Avatar
Show more awards
Posts:
3805
Joined:
Jan 6th, 2011
Permalink | Quote | PM | +Rep November 4, 2012 7:07pm | Report
There are numerous reasons. In this thread i'm gonna focus on the 3 that i think are the current core setbacks of western professional gaming as opposed to eastern.

1: Job as opposed to Hobby.
The asian teams consider LoL much more as their job than their hobby. Whereas the europeans n especially the americans simply play the game for pleasure as much as they play it as their only source of income. They don't train nearly as much and don't feel obligated to train. They're like the amateur football teams that just play once every 2nd week and never trains. Then goes to the pub after finishing a good game. Whereas the asian teams might not have the mechanics of the europeans but they train everyday and use every non sleeping minute to consider how to play and what tactic to use/counteruse in the next game.

2: The public service need.
The western playerbase live for their fans. They have loong streamathons and frequently stream 6 hours straight solo quee. While also teaching the viewers about the game. This is really fun to watch and a present to the fans of both the european and american players. But this is all time going directly from organised plays and scrims which obviously has a negative effect on the teamfighting of the team.
An example of how well put together asian teams are, is how "bad" shy played teamwise for blaze simply because he wasn't used to playing with them - mainly in teamfights did you see shy falling off, but his laning face also seemed somewhat hindered from not playing on the side of his regulars.

3: The starcraft phenomenon.
It's no secret to anyone that lol as played in the western world is a really slow paced game. You sit back for a nice 20 minutes and farm, not really do anything else. Except for the occassional jungler gank and dragon attempt.
Starcraft is a whole other level of pace for a game. You're constantly clicking on the keyboard and the mouse to correct one little small detail and you have to have map-wide pressence from the first second you enter the game.
There's a reason that there's a saying: to marry a korean you have to beat her father in starcraft. It's not necessarily true(never been to korea, i wouldn't know) but the hype around starcraft is much bigger over there and every single korean nerd does to some degree know the mechanics of starcraft. When then koreans were introduced to lol, they didn't have the hindering of being an ex-dota player that farmed for 20 minutes. They came to lol from a fast paced gaming environment where the position of enemy as well as friendly troops were constantly changing they came into lol with far superior microing and macroing. They never knew how to afk-farm for 20 minutes because it seemed illogical to them. They had from the first day they played lol been much more objective minded and that has transferred into their lol play.
Shy, toplaner for azubu frost and one of the core elements of azubu frosts success in the season 2 final has only been playing lol for 7 months and was screwing around with people who had played since beta.
Where is my point with all this starcraft nonsense? My point is, "they"'re used to play games at a much faster pace than the typical lol player. So they transferred this into lol. This level of pacing and agression is so far a much better and more effective way to play the game. Remember that russian team with a lot of early agression and pacing in their style who suddenly showed up and won all the tourneys? Well the koreans are the new russians, and as opposed to M5 i think they've come to the top to stay on it.

If europeans or americans doesn't find some kind of way to either pace up their game or counter the much faster paced way of gaming the koreans are bringing, their upcomming titles are probably around 0
Ty MM and Blood for the sigs :3 | Rammus is comming back - heard it here first!


"Carrying"-guide | My reviewservice
Yukimaru
<Member>
Yukimaru's Forum Avatar
Show more awards
Posts:
1370
Joined:
Jan 14th, 2011
Permalink | Quote | PM | +Rep November 5, 2012 3:31am | Report
I can only agree with point 3, back at Season 2 Finals we saw European and American Teams had way better Teamfighting but they lacked the earlygame aggression with the balls deep towerdives from behind n stuff.
astrolia
<Fabulous>
astrolia's Forum Avatar
Show more awards
Posts:
1168
Joined:
Sep 24th, 2011
Permalink | Quote | PM | +Rep November 5, 2012 4:11am | Report
Asians don't "consider" it a job, it is their job. When NA teams don't win tournaments, it's no big deal because they can make more money streaming than they make from winning tournaments. Asian teams don't have that luxury, and it's a very serious issue when they don't place well at a tournament. No results, no bueno. NA teams won't improve unless they quit making money off of streaming.
hi embracing. yes i play ff14 now.
KSS Awake
<Member>
KSS Awake's Forum Avatar
Posts:
172
Joined:
Aug 8th, 2012
Permalink | Quote | PM | +Rep November 5, 2012 5:42am | Report
The sad truth: league of legends competitive scene is and will be dominated by asians for quite a while. The only western team that has chances against them is M5 and maaaaaaybe clg eu, I don't think that the NA teams will ever try to focus on wining tournaments as long as Dyrus and TheOddOne can pull out 30K viewers.

-thanks to The_Nameless_Bard, effinvices, Joxuu, LaCorpse and arcan3 for the sigs-
Embracing
<Crowd Favorite>
Embracing's Forum Avatar
Show more awards
Posts:
5764
Joined:
Feb 2nd, 2011
Permalink | Quote | PM | +Rep November 5, 2012 5:46am | Report
The reason why asian teams seem better is because of how they learn the game.

Americans start from Playing --> Getting better --> Making plays --> Mechanics --> Pro

Asians however start from Playing --> Getting better --> Consistent play, good mechanics --> Making more plays --> Pro

Asians focus more on mechanics and how they can maximize control over the character.
NA teams tend to overlook such things and focus on scrimming scrimming and scrimming
GrandmasterD
<Member>
GrandmasterD's Forum Avatar
Show more awards
Posts:
7950
Joined:
Sep 26th, 2011
Permalink | Quote | PM | +Rep November 5, 2012 6:24am | Report
I think a huge factor is that the Asian community came quite a bit later than the American and European community. They had the advantage of analizing those metagames and the changes instead of inventing it all by themselves.
Pølsemanden
<Member>
Pølsemanden's Forum Avatar
Show more awards
Posts:
3805
Joined:
Jan 6th, 2011
Permalink | Quote | PM | +Rep November 5, 2012 10:44am | Report
I actually think that a very nice counter to the whole korean agression would be to run exhaust-promote on a support jarvan and making the ad and top take teleport.

How would this work?
The teleports:
Teleport ganking is quite a common and basic way of creating map-wide agression. It's not too strong because of the channel time, which renders teleganks subpar at best. Teleport counterganks on the other hand are still quite common but much much more devastating.

Theese counterganks would offer the ability to especially counter the early invade tactics of the lane switches that azubu blaze has been taking advantage of: Double lane top helping steal red making the double lane further advantageous.

Furthermore the jungler should whenever teleports are up carry a ward for the teleport map control to take effect.

The jarvan:
Pølse's nuts trying to make a jarvan duo-lane without leona lol. But the idea behind the jarvan "support" is to have a support that is viable as:
A 0 cs support duo-laning against ad-carry-support.
A solo-lane capable of solo laning against the enemy solo-lane if the ad-carry teleported out.
Jarvan can as one of the only champs in the game viably do both, which is why jarvan or another viable support bruiser is somewhat core to this strategy.
He's also a very scary champion to dive so that's another + in the jarvan book.

The promote:
Promote was used by chauster and CLG.PRIME in their sivir split pushing tactic. With a triple teleport(somewhat what i'm suggesting) except where clg.primes focus of this spell was to create early agression, my point is to kill it when they're trying to gang up and 5 man dive ya. Send a promoted minion down a lane and make it push. This will if done properly create a slowly but surely pushing lane that will net you both gold and exp, the main point of this tactic is though that you're forcing the enemy team to make the choice, between taking damage to a tower(minions will damage it a bit), abandon the push and kill the promoted minion(agression killed) or DIVE YO NIGGAZ, but wait. BY DOING THIS the agressor takes a big chance, IF this fails and they get aced, you will now have 2 teleports(maybe even 3) which can now teleport to the promote minion lane and surely get a tower or 2.

This tactic would need a lot of skill to actually fulfill but i believe if done to perfection it would somewhat counter the korean playstyle.
Ty MM and Blood for the sigs :3 | Rammus is comming back - heard it here first!


"Carrying"-guide | My reviewservice
JEFFY40HANDS
<Altruistic Artist>
JEFFY40HANDS's Forum Avatar
Show more awards
Posts:
9281
Joined:
Aug 10th, 2010
Permalink | Quote | PM | +Rep November 5, 2012 11:07am | Report
It's more along the lines of NA/EU teams becoming flexible and practicing 5s more rather than solo queue.

Asian teams in general tend to have a more structured early game. As in a check list of objectives, NA/EU just kinda want to farm all day and use or develop a plan for mid/late game...


There's more to it all really but it really isn't directly related the things you specifically listed.
astrolia
<Fabulous>
astrolia's Forum Avatar
Show more awards
Posts:
1168
Joined:
Sep 24th, 2011
Permalink | Quote | PM | +Rep November 5, 2012 12:28pm | Report

I think a huge factor is that the Asian community came quite a bit later than the American and European community. They had the advantage of analizing those metagames and the changes instead of inventing it all by themselves.

A lot of them played on the NA servers w/200 ping and were innovators over here though. Stanley from TPA is known for the GP10 bruiser thing. (Then there are anomalies like Shy from Frost who started playing League during April.)
hi embracing. yes i play ff14 now.
ShanaXI
<Member>
ShanaXI's Forum Avatar
Posts:
20
Joined:
Oct 23rd, 2012
Permalink | Quote | PM | +Rep November 11, 2012 8:04pm | Report
The idea of maintain an income through winning is kinda scary once you think about it.

It's not like following simple or even complex directions or running errands like in a normal job. If you're living of a game like that, you'll either place well and earn money or lose some during a losing struck. Even if I get better, I don't think I'll ever be THAT good.

That said, pretty interesting facts.

You need to log in before commenting.

League of Legends Champions:

Teamfight Tactics Guide