Full-time: Starting from Ye Xiu vs. Faker

Chapter 445: First settle accounts, then question (Part )
A strong division has the composure of a strong division.

The hard power is there, the overall record is brilliant, and we are aiming for the championship.

Even if one or two teams perform unsatisfactorily, there will be no major setbacks.

So no matter how bad the public opinion is, it can’t be that bad.

The weaker divisions have their own way.

There was no hope in the first place, so when the time came to lose there was naturally no disappointment.

If there is still a little bit of highlight performance after losing, it will be worth it for fans to open the champagne.

For these two types of competition areas, there is no need to worry too much about public opinion issues.

So who needs to worry?

It’s probably those regions that look very strong and set a high tone, but when the real fight comes they lose miserably.

In a parallel world, this is what LPL is like in S5.

And here, the same is true for LEC and LCS in S1.

First up is LCS.

Although they only finished in the semi-finals in the spring season, LCS was very ambitious in the summer.

This high level comes from the lavish spending of money across the region.

After MSI proved the huge commercial value of the League of Legends, the investment in major competition areas increased significantly in the summer.

However, different regions have different approaches on how to spend this significantly increased investment.

LPL's investment is mainly in infrastructure and personnel allocation for competition and training.

The original makeshift teams now have professional training bases, and the generous treatment has attracted many highly educated talents to join the e-sports industry, greatly improving the level of professionalism in competition and training in the entire competition area.

Anyway, the players in the current competition area have sufficient strength, and helping them to provide good support is the biggest reinforcement.

Want to buy players? That depends on whether the strong teams will let them go, and the youth training players can't spend too much money.

LCK's investment is similar to LPL's, the only difference is that they mainly rely on the capital from the Kespa period.

So they do not lack talented young people, but they lack an environment that can cultivate and train them.

In other words, bring back such an environment.

As far as the current results are concerned, although the reconstruction of Kespa is a long and arduous task, it can only be regarded as a shell at best.

But the dominance of LCK, like that of StarCraft next door, has quietly emerged.

So how does LCS spend money?
They bought people.

Compared with the laborious and slow-moving logistical construction, buying existing experts is obviously the way to spend money that is more likely to produce results.

Moreover, this method has been verified in LCS.

I have to say, IMPACT is a very interesting person.

On the one hand, he is indeed one of the undisputed super players in LCS.

But on the other hand, it was precisely because his performance was so outstanding that the LCS teams saw the sweetness of C9 buying players and building a team, and they all followed suit, wanting to use this method to quickly put together a galaxy battleship.

As a result, many players from the rebuilding LCK and the "working hard" LEC have been attracted by the high salaries offered by North America to join the LCS teams.

LPL is even more outrageous. LCS directly pulled an entire team over to clean up the e-sports workplace environment.

This strategy of purchasing players did work in the beginning, and the intensity of the LCS summer games was obviously more than one level higher than that of the spring.

The fight is exciting, and the audience's confidence grows day by day, and their expectations for the future become higher and higher.

In the midst of all the singing and dancing, everyone seemed to have intentionally or unintentionally overlooked an important logical issue:
Since buying players from LEC or LCK can produce good results in LCS,

Even buying a team from the LPL secondary league could almost bring down your championship team.
So, either the LCS is some kind of golden land, where all the scumbags that other regions don't want come here and immediately make the leap to success.

Either...

Maybe LCS itself is the biggest scumbag?

Clearly, confident North Americans think it's the former.

After all, IMPACT took revenge on his old club at MSI. No one wanted him in LCK, but when he came to LCS, he became a god of war. This fully proves that LCS has the magical power to turn decay into magic!
perhaps.

So even though three of their teams are truly "native North Americans"; it's hard to say whether there are even one-third of them, LCS fans firmly believe that they are strong contenders for the championship.

Even if we fail to win the championship in the end, as long as we secure a top four spot like in the spring and maintain the status of the four major divisions, it shouldn't be a big problem, right?

But the facts tell them that the problem is huge.

TL was eliminated at lightning speed in the qualifying round, and even DFM, whose spring was basically a roadside obstacle, was able to win a small game against TL.

At this point, if they were a little less optimistic, they would probably have sensed something was wrong.

But TL still has Wunder, the perfect shield. As for foreign aid, he usually praises them a lot when they are in the game, but if they are pulled in a certain game, he will immediately change to serving the country with loyalty.

In addition, Wunder's performance was indeed rather sluggish, and even EVI was able to gain a certain advantage over him by relying on his unique skill, the crab.

So he naturally became the focus of the entire LCS.

Can the poor performance of a top laner bring a team that originally claimed to be aiming for the top four in the world championship to the point where it can't even make it past the qualifying round?

Whether you and I believe it or not, LCS believes it.

TL was subjected to a barrage of criticism, so much so that Wunder even quietly deleted his social network account. Even after venting his anger, he still seemed to have not learned his lesson.

"As long as C9 attacks, everything will be fine!"

In their opinion, C9, which has retained the original team, has its combat effectiveness certified by MSI.

It should be much more reliable than TL, right?
But he overlooked that after MSI, the regions where the other teams were located basically made a qualitative leap, especially LPL and LCK.

Although the team seems to be the same as before, in fact, they have gone through many enhancements in one summer, including evolution in competition and training, evolution in mentality, growth of young people, etc. Their combat effectiveness is no longer the same as it was five months ago.

SKT went all out and replaced all the players and training personnel except for the two core players.

What has changed about C9?

Are there more logos on the uniforms?
no one knows.

Does such a C9 want to grab a spot in the quarterfinals in the competition with Fanhua and SKT?
Dream it.

So after the first round, LCS quietly lowered its expectations for C9 from qualifying to "dying standing."

But obviously, C9 didn't do that either.

Except for showing a relatively stable suppression ability when facing teams of MAD's level, whether facing SKT or Fanhua, they were just as powerless as those teams that came out of the qualifying round.

But this time, they couldn't put the blame on the foreign players again. Impact was already the most responsible one among the five players, and after him was Doublelift, the big brother who was dragged down by the support.

Although Fanhua's top laner was Zhao Yang when laning against C9, he was able to basically stay on the same level as Zhao Yang and was also useful in team fights. IMPACT definitely did not live up to his worth.

C9 can accept the departure of Wunder, who is only good at what he does, but for IMPACT, who won the Spring and Summer Championships and had a Spring Finals MVP, a legendary top laner who is a pillar of the LCS,

After once again fully experiencing the power of the LPL super top laner, LCS dare not let go of such a high-quality top laner who can truly compete head-on with LPLLLCK.

But the question is, if the foreign players are not to blame, how do we explain C9's total defeat?

The number one seed in the round of 16?

Could it be that... we are really that bad?
LCS fans who think about this become a little bit autistic.

It seems that we have already seen the future where the status of the entire LCS region will plummet after the two major seeds of LCS are eliminated one after another.

……and many more,
Two big seeds?

What about another one?

Until this time, the grieving LCS finally focused its attention on the second seed who was not loved by his grandparents but was doted on by his grandparents.

Then I was dumbfounded.

Sigh... why does this guy look... so strong and successful?

After seeing that Jia Shi even successfully eliminated LGM in the tiebreaker, achieving the feat of the first direct elimination of an LPL team in the history of League of Legends e-sports,
Many fans silently deleted their previous comments about expelling Excellent Era from the LCS.

Do you think Excellent Era is an LCS team?
...Well, why not?
Jia Shi naturally has an official account on the Internet, but because of its origin, its reputation has always been bad.

Especially after losing to C9 in the summer finals, the time and space police kept coming to the official account to open champagne and make sarcastic remarks.

By then, Jia Shi had figured it out.

I'm about to return to China to play in the World Championship. From now on, I promise that I will never come to LCS again except for MSI and the World Championship.

Then why should I still be here interacting with you bunch of losers?
So after Jia Shi returned to China, the official account on the external network stopped updating, and only the official account on domestic social media continued to be active.

This turned out to be a wise choice.

Ever since Excellent Era won the runner-up in North America as a LSPL team, they have attracted a large number of fans in China, and the popularity of their official account has been steadily increasing.

Moreover, LPL fans, who are currently immersed in the power and calmness of victory, do not have the habit of expelling other regions from their membership.

On the contrary, they just felt that their own children were already able to go to other divisions to win glory for the country, and as a secondary league team, they forced the king of other division to fifth place.

Lift up!

With such a huge gap in treatment between the two sides, it is no wonder that Jia Shi has almost no attachment to LCS.

Now, the offense and defense have changed, and LCS is now rushing to the Excellent Era official account to express support.

Not only did a large group of LCS fans post cheers and "the last hope of LCS" under the official account of Excellent Era, which had not been updated for a long time, but they also made no mention of the expulsion from the region.

Even the LCS officials joined in the fun and came to cheer for Excellent Era. Some even dreamed that Excellent Era would defeat Blue Rain and advance to the semifinals, thus securing the final glory of the LCS.

Jia Shi was too lazy to even open the official account to take a closer look.

However, perhaps Excellent Era itself did not expect that their advancement into the quarterfinals would bring about very serious consequences for the LCS.

After C9TL's successive defeats, many knowledgeable people on the LCS side have begun to question the LCS's purchasing tactics.

Although buying players can indeed improve the strength of a team immediately, this method cannot truly improve the region.

Originally, with this great momentum, LCS from top to bottom was on the verge of awakening, and many teams have begun to consider whether to revise their big strategy for next year, wanting to have an e-sports version of reform.

But now that Jia Shi has shown some success, the trend seems to be reversing.

This buyer doesn't seem to be completely wrong...

Didn’t Jia Shi buy a whole team of young geniuses from LPL, and didn’t they achieve results?

Isn’t C9’s foreign aid IMPACT also a top player?
Is there a possibility that the mistake is not the act of buying players, but the direction of LCS support?
Looking at the tragic situation in which LEC struggled to win a single game in the group stage, LCS realized it.

Buying people is not a crime! But buying people from LEC is not a crime!

Because LEC itself is not good!

You see, if we buy an LCK team, we can get two wins, and if we buy an LPL youth training team, we can enter the quarterfinals.

What if we buy a whole Galaxy Battleship from LPLLCK next time?
Does that mean we can compete for the championship?
Compared with the arduous model of building competition areas, it is undoubtedly a more cost-effective idea to directly buy ready-made big brands.

I don’t know if it was to echo this idea, but soon, a new argument suddenly emerged on major discussion websites in North America:
In the MOBA game category, Asians have an innate advantage.

Although the argument and reasoning process of this article are actually very crude, and even the logic is a bit ridiculous.

But it really hurt the hearts of the North Americans who were making great achievements at that time.

As a result, he gained a lot of fans and laid a certain foreshadowing for the "racial theory" in the future e-sports circle.

As for C9 and TL, they had already bought their tickets to go home, but when they saw the shift in public opinion, they immediately decided to stay and started researching the LPL teams with huge sums of money.

I will try to bring one or two trial players back with me.

As for whether you can buy real high-quality players...

Good luck to them.

Compared to the chaos in North America, the situation in Europe is much more subtle.

The comment sections of the three eliminated teams were definitely overwhelmed, but not to the extent that it was in North America.

The reason is very simple. G2 took the initiative to post a message to help its brother teams, saying that the reason why the three teams were not in a hurry to go back was mainly to help G2 play training games.

This method helped the three teams save some face.

The European continent is now in a strange and sad atmosphere.

It felt like everyone confidently sent the king's army off to battle half a month ago, but within a few days, all kinds of obituaries came back from the front line like snowflakes, and three of the four armies were destroyed.

The remaining group carried the coffins of the three brother troops, singing a heroic and tragic song, and walked towards the final battlefield.

There is such a wonderful sense of tragedy.

So even though many LEC fans were already filled with anger, they still endured it at this juncture.

Everything depends on how far G2 can go in the next game.

If we can win, everything will be easy. It is also possible to grant amnesty to the other three teams.

But I didn't win...

Then wait for the real reckoning...

(End of this chapter)