Nirvana Top Laner, Reborn Tokyo Girl

Chapter 174, page 171: The World's Best Top Laner?

In the following days, the CFO entered the classic rhythm of every World Championship.

There are a few things that you have to experience no matter where you play in the World Championship.

First, it's about playing practice matches and ranked games in a foreign country.

Normally, due to physical distance, each competition area will inevitably operate independently.

It's impossible for G2 to come and play scrims with T1 or BLG every day.

That's really unrealistic.

It's not just a training match.

The same applies to ranked matches.

Normally, players from Asian regions who can play on the Korean server will play on the Korean server. Only players from regions who cannot play on the Korean server will consider using other servers for daily ranked training.

However, it's different during the World Championship.

The world's strongest players will all gather in one place.

I started playing ranked matches and scrims in this new place.

As a result, there was an atmosphere similar to the "World's Greatest Martial Arts Tournament".

Martial arts masters who are usually scattered all over the country gather in one place, making the local server very lively in a short period of time.

Every World Championship has two regular events: leaks of training matches and observer (OB) footage of ranked matches.

Many local experts also have a greater passion for ranked matches in order to snipe players who come to the server to compete.

Before each World Championship, someone would leak inside information about practice matches to generate buzz.

The same applies to this competition.

First, Shimamura Yuna's daily ranking up on the North American server attracted a lot of attention.

[Shimamura Yuna is climbing the ranks in the US server with an incredibly high win rate and rapid progress!]

[Shockingly fast ranking speed on the North American server, prodigy Yuna Shimamura is dominating North America!]

[Absolute power! Yuna Shimamura is destroying the North American Sky Ladder!]

Titles like these have been popping up all over YouTube lately.

Almost every content creator who does OB (observation/observation) has recently been focusing on Yuna Shimamura as their main OB subject, constantly releasing videos.

The reason for doing so is quite simple.

Firstly, Shimamura Yuna is a highly popular professional player, so everyone is naturally concerned about how well she plays.

Secondly, many professional players have a habit of hiding their accounts, so it's not always possible to find their corresponding accounts during each World Championship.

But Shimamura Yuna was different.

She never changed her name or surname; she was simply called "shimamura".

She's easy to find, and she also plays a lot of ranked matches, so there's a lot of material to gather.

If someone is popular and their content is easy to find, why wouldn't people want to make videos for them?

Therefore, in the past few days, videos of Yuna Shimamura have almost flooded the League of Legends section of YouTube.

The style of the videos will vary depending on the language.

For example, in Traditional Chinese, people like to use titles like "Crush North America!" or "Dominate the Ladder!"

In the English-speaking region, the style is quite different.

Although they each have their own unique features, they are all titles aimed at attracting traffic, and the result is always the same: praising how strong and amazing Yuna Shimamura is.

Moreover, although the title and gimmick are slightly exaggerated.

But what these videos say isn't entirely false.

Indeed, Shimamura Yuna seems to be in excellent form lately.

Among all the professional players who come to North America to play ranked games, she is among the best performing group.

She quickly leveled up her official account to 500 points.

Moreover, the win rate remained an astonishing 67%.

Observing her in-game actions, one can only describe them as exaggeratedly detailed.

It's to the point that even her longtime viewers would find it exaggerated.

During the time of Oni-Oh! Yuna, and when she first started playing professional matches in the first stage, Shimamura Yuna had high scores and good skills, but in terms of style, she was more like an old-timer.

Although he has a high score and plays well, it's obvious that his reaction time isn't very fast and his controls aren't quite at their best.

They belong to the type that compensates for shortcomings in operational reaction by relying on experience and style.

However, many viewers who watched Shimamura Yuna's broadcasts during this World Championship had a very clear feeling that...
Is this still the Shimamura Yuna I know?

Yes, the impression Shimamura Yuna gave from this large number of North American ranked games is that her skill level is visibly much higher than before.

Although the heroes I play are still the same ones.

Although overall it still maintains that steady style.

But it just feels like an upgrade.

It's like the evolution from Care to Chovy.

She's still a bit of a turtle, but not indiscriminately so; she'll choose to play in a more greedy and risky way.

She's starting to compete with others in terms of skill and reaction time.

This surprised many longtime viewers who knew Yuna Shimamura.

Is this really the Ms. Shimamura we know?

Is this still the same little old boy we know?

In fact, this change in style was already quite noticeable in the latter half of the LCP regular season.

In the latter half of the LCP regular season, Shimamura Yuna clearly began to employ more strategic maneuvering and her reactions became faster than before.

The LCP regular season was just too boring, which meant that many viewers were just casual observers and had never actually watched Shimamura Yuna's matches, so they didn't have a deep impression of her.

It's only now that many viewers are belatedly realizing how significantly Yuna Shimamura's skills have improved.

This improvement, of course, is not something that happens out of thin air.

This is what Shimamura Yuna said before: LCP is a more suitable region for her right now.

In fact, she has already reached a bottleneck in her personal operating skills.

These things are similar to software.

Her software is very advanced and sophisticated.

However, in contrast, her physical attributes, namely her physique, are not keeping up with the intensity of her training.

The final result is that an RX580 graphics card, when running the latest AAA games at 720p resolution, is both laggy and sluggish, but barely usable.

What she did this season in LCP was stop upgrading the software and instead focus on improving the hardware.

Daily exercise, health maintenance, and daily psychological counseling.

For Yuna Shimamura, all of these things were far more important than staying in the training room and grinding away at League of Legends.

As for going to the LPL, let's not even talk about whether the club would allow her to do so.

Even if the club allows it, if someone were to leak information saying she's doing "meditation training," she would be under immense public pressure.

Therefore, this kind of thing can only be done in LCP.

Thanks to her meditation training throughout the LCP season, Yuna Shimamura's physical attributes have improved significantly. While her physical abilities are still far from those of an average person.

But he's probably much better than the average internet addict.

She still can't compare to the other men in the team who are working out.

But compared to the many professional players in the LPL who don't exercise at all, her seemingly thin body is probably actually stronger.

At least not to fall behind.

In terms of physical fitness alone, he should have no problem completing a full BO5.

Moreover, in the first two games of the BO5 series, she was still able to show a little bit of the potential of this body that had just turned 18.

In other words, the child has grown old, and the old have become children.

Better physical fitness allows her to better utilize her physical potential and leverage her experience and skills.

Having matured through this season in LCP, she has completely transformed into a better version of herself.

Through these videos, many English-speaking viewers who previously had only a vague impression of Yuna Shimamura saw her performance on the ladder up close for the first time.

This was the first time I had ever clearly seen how brilliant Shimamura's performance was.

Because of these videos, many YouTubers are now praising Shimamura Yuna as a "strong candidate for the best top laner of the new century".

There are a lot of clueless people overseas who are just trying to attract attention, and they basically spend all their time in the comments section saying things like "number one top laner" and "world's strongest top laner".

Every comment section is flooded with "Can they beat Shimamura?"
It's gotten to the point where it's starting to annoy people.

It vaguely reminds me of when PUBG was at its peak, when a bunch of people in China were hyping up Shroud as the best entry fragger in North America.

We're not actually very familiar with each other.

However, we absolutely must capture the popularity and the enthusiasm.

Basically, he is the most star, the most watched, and perhaps the only contestant in this competition.

Since everyone has such high expectations, let's briefly talk about her current stats in various aspects.

First, let's talk about pure gaming skills.

In this respect, her improvement must be minimal.

I can only say that I've barely kept up with the version, and I can barely understand which heroes are good and which are not, and I can pick out the corresponding heroes to play.

Take the hero Shepherd for example. It's now considered her new signature move, an absolute signature move that no one dares to let her play.

This isn't because she practiced a lot, but because the hero wasn't difficult to begin with, and her style was a perfect fit for her, so the buff immediately added her to her hero pool.

Aside from this role, her hero pool hasn't changed much.

Those who can't play heavy armor warriors basically don't know how to play them.

Even for a skilled light-armored warrior, the skill level hasn't improved much.

It's not accurate to say that they didn't learn or practice.

Instead, she has to devote too much energy to physical training and mental recovery every day. It's already a bit of a stretch for her to maintain her current proficiency with these heroes. She definitely has to make some trade-offs.

In short, in terms of skills, she has basically remained stagnant.

However, her improvement in physical fitness was particularly noticeable.

As mentioned earlier, she is now physically better than most internet-addicted teenagers and can maintain her focus for longer.

However, she may still be emotionally unstable, which may cause her to suffer losses at times.

Let's take all aspects into account.
Shimamura Yuna believes that, in terms of individual skill alone, she is about 30% stronger than she was in the Vanguard Tournament.

That sounds pretty exaggerated.

You won the Pioneer Tournament, and now you're even stronger than in the Pioneer Tournament, so isn't winning the MSI championship a sure thing?
But in reality, Shimamura Yuna had no idea about this at all.

She is indeed better than the Vanguard team.

However, the problem is that the intensity of this MSI is visibly more than 30% stronger than the Vanguard tournament.

The teams that came from the Pioneer Tournament have now been proven to be complete scoundrels.

They were able to win the first stage only because the strong teams hadn't yet gelled and adjusted to the new season.

Once the strong teams have gelled and are in good form, these players will naturally be easily defeated.

Typical examples are HLE and TES.

At the time, I thought it was a battle between two powerhouses, LPL and LCK.

Unexpectedly, this is a double whammy of LPL and LCK.

The teams that have come now, whether it's BLG, AL, GENG, or T1, are all much stronger than the teams that came back then.

Compared to the strength of these teams, it's really hard to say whether the CFO's slight increase in strength is enough.

Shimamura Yuna was still quite apprehensive about this.

However, after a few days of training matches, her mood eased a little.

As the reigning world champions, CFO is a team that generates a lot of buzz, and other teams are very willing to play scrims with them.

After these few days of training matches, Shimamura Yuna was surprised to find...
It seems that none of them are as strong as she thought.

In her memory, during the Vanguard Tournament, their win rate in practice matches against HLE was almost 19%, meaning they couldn't win at all.

However, in this training match, they maintained a good win rate against both GENG and AL.

GENG is the strongest team in Shimamura Yuna's opinion; she can only win about 30% of the time against them.

AL, on the other hand, can maintain a win rate of 4%, or even close to 5%.

Against teams other than these two, the CFO almost always had an advantage.

Yes, including BLG.

Actually, Shimamura Yuna was somewhat surprised by this result.

In her view, BLG, as the strongest LPL team in last year's World Championship, was just one step away from defeating T1, the champion.

Even though they're not in great form right now, they should still be considered a strong team, right?

But the result was completely different.

Judging from the scrimmages, BLG seemed utterly pathetic when facing CFO.

Even when the CFO was playing a practice match, HongQ felt a little unreal.

Thinking, "Hey, are they deliberately letting the money go to waste?"

But if one game was a throw, two games were throws, and every game was a throw?
Clearly, they were in bad shape.

They just weren't playing very well.

"BLG, to us, is just a challenger after all?"

Thinking about this, Shimamura Yuna felt a very subtle feeling.

BIN, Knight, Elk
These once-powerful IDs are now unable to defeat their own team.

These IDs, which she once looked up to, have now become her challengers.

This is truly amazing and feels so subtle.

This kind of training match content has given Shimamura Yuna greater confidence for the upcoming matches.

Although everyone says that if scrims were effective, TSM would have won the world championship long ago.

But she felt that even if she didn't win the championship exactly as she wished, the result of this competition wouldn't be too bad.

(End of this chapter)