Tag: league of legends

The LCK Fall Split Finals AKA Worlds 2016

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the second year in a row, mythical gf and I decided to go see the finals to the League of Legends World Championship.  For the second year in a row, the finalists were both teams out of Korea; hence the renaming of Worlds to League Champions Korea’s Fall Split, since for the fourth year in a row, Korea has run roughshod over the competition and would be champion of the game.

Thankfully, 2016 would be a year in which Worlds was held in the United States, absolving me from making a third international trip within the span of six weeks.  Instead, it was merely a leisurely weekend trip to Los Angeles, which saw a miserable flight out to LA, lots of junk food and Pikachu Game on top of League-related activity.

But for simplicity sake, we’ll stick to the Worlds experience, because honestly, there’s not a whole lot to talk about in regards to playing Pikachu Game on the Santa Monica Pier, and being sat next to a 400 pound blob on a flight.

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The sexy, red-haired, rain making elephant in the room

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Every Worlds, there’s always a not-popular/meta champion pick that emerges from some team, usually from Korea, that takes the tournament by storm, or is effective enough to surprise out some critical victories.  Sometimes they’re picked against lesser opponents so that players can hide their hands and not reveal their A-games to those stronger challengers scouting in the wings, or sometimes they’re busted out at a critical juncture of a series to catch the opponent off guard, and by the time they understand what is happening it’s too late.

Every year, there’s always one or a few picks that are remembered for its breaking of the meta, and outside the box thinking, or sometimes just plain goofy audacity, that sometimes works because nobody is expecting it.  In Season 3, OMG’s LoveLing bust out a jungle Volibear that completely blindsided TSM en route to a 43-13 drubbing.  In the Season 4 Finals, Royal Club’s inSec selected Rammus to jungle, and although his line score didn’t look that impressive, he most definitely contributed to Royal’s only win before ultimately succumbing to Samsung White.  And then there was last season SK Telecom T1’s Faker going all the way to Jupiter to select Olaf to play in mid lane (link above), and then still throttling a completely lost Bangkok Titans squad who inexplicably tried to go bruiser-vs-bruiser against Faker by picking Irelia mid.

It’s a legit strategy when it comes to League of Legends, since there are just so many available champions to pick from.  No matter how infallible or statistically reliable some champions are, out of 150+ available, there’s going to be one that’s an effective counter somewhere.  And the players that hide them in their hands until critical points are legit risk takers, choosing to unleash them when the stakes are high.

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Korea Stories: League of Legends

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of in to League of Legends.

And as much as I’m typically opposed to doing stuff like playing the same game I could play back at home, there was a part of me that was really curious to find out what League would be like in Korea, the region of the world in which the talent is undisputedly the greatest and where the competitive scene is respected and regarded as a legitimate, money-making spectator sport.

I wanted to try playing League of Legends on the Korean server and see what the differences were.  And surely, in the part of the world where League is so highly regarded, I should be able to find some cool League merch, or some professional League gaming team swag, right?

It started out pretty amusingly, when I got to Korea.  Through international roaming, my phone piggybacked onto whatever provider would allow it, and in the case of being in Korea, my phone immediately latched onto an SK Telecom signal.  Now this might seem like no big deal to the vast majority of people, since SK is one of South Korea’s corporate giants that have their fingers in just about every possible business venture from petroleum to telecommunications, but to a League fan, SK is primarily known as the company that owns SKT T1, basically the Chicago Bulls or New York Yankees of the League competitive scene.  SKT has won two of the five world championships (and Korea didn’t play at all in year 1) and are in position to compete for a third, but they are undoubtedly the most prominent team in the entire world, when it comes to League.

Yeah, just connecting to SK Telecom cellular service elicits that much of a response.

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Visiting the Motherland, with my Mother

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If I didn’t mention it before, the trip to Korea was one that I took with my mother.  The idea was that way back when, my dad and sister went together, so it seemed like a suitable idea that this would be a mother and son trip.  My mom had recently retired, so she had nothing but time on her hands, and from my perspective, this was a trip that had to be done sooner rather than later, because I didn’t want to live my life with the regret of never going to Korea with my mom while she was still physically able to.  Not to mention, my mom had never been back since I’d been alive, so it was literally 38 years since she’d last been in Korea.

This is without question one of the best ideas I’d had in my life, and although I’m not going to sugar-coat and say it was a perfect trip, I don’t have any regrets about going to Korea with my mom one bit.  It was meaningful and memorable, and I’m glad to be able to say that my mom was there the first time I visited the Motherland.

I let my mom drive when it came to planning for the trip, since my initial idea of planning a trip to see the places of her childhood and upbringing seemed to fall on deaf ears, so it ended up with us having a few days in Seoul on our own, but then ultimately going on a multi-city tour group through the rest of Korea, back-ended with two more days in Seoul before coming home.  I’m not going to pretend like I was pleased with the idea of being on a guided tour, since typically I prefer to be in control of my own destiny, but it was what my mother had wanted, and she didn’t seem to understand that I was quite the competent planner on my own.

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Competitive League still has a lot to learn

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Mythical gf favors European League of Legends team Fnatic.  By proxy, I’ve become somewhat attuned to their standings, and it doesn’t hurt their favor with me when they field Korean players.  Anyway, for the growing demographic of people who follow the competitive League scene, this is the time of the year in which the respective regions begin wrapping things up, and preparing for Worlds.

Regions in North America, Taiwan and to some degree China, have no parity whatsoever, so it’s basically the teams that were expected to make Worlds, pretty much locking things up, and jockeying for seeding, while everyone else is just playing for, well, paychecks.  Korea to no surprise, is a nuclear warzone in itself, as there are no real surprises with the teams that will be making Worlds, but like the others, are duking it out for seeding, with the reigning champs, the two-time winning SK Telecom already getting upset and failing to secure the Korean #1 seed (but still going to Worlds).

If there’s any region that has any parity, and no real predictability, it would have to be Europe.  Up until this year, it was pretty much a surefire bet that Fnatic would make Worlds, as they’ve made it to Worlds almost every single year of competitive play.  However,  due to the never-finalized, perpetually work-in-progress, always young-and-changing rules and format of the competitive scene, this is a year in which Fnatic is by no means a lock to even make it into Worlds.

In fact, if not for a questionable policy in the format, Fnatic should mathematically be eliminated from Worlds qualification.  But because Rito prints so much money, they don’t seem to care that they could milk more games, which would mean more broadcasts, more ads to spam, and more money to make, but as stated, they make so much money that they would rather have a kind of lame policy, instead of creating some sport drama narrative that other, physical sport leagues would salivate at the idea of.

This is the kind of stuff that will always separate eSports from athletic sports.

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Must be nice to be so rich, people don’t matter

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Good news: I secured tickets to Worlds, the League of Legends world championship, this year in Los Angeles

Bad news: They’re nosebleed seats, because I among hundreds and thousands of other aspiring ticket purchasers were unable to get luck of the draw through AXS’s convoluted “randomizing” ticket queue system

Naturally, thousands of people are livid at the system used by Riot Games to sell Worlds tickets this year.  Personally, I’m not pleased with it either, considering the planning, preparation and execution of my own pursuit to get the best possible seats, and still barely eked through to get shitty nosebleeds.  I mean, at least I managed to acquire tickets, but I’m not satisfied with the system in which they were acquired.

Basically, AXS is a company that somehow makes people wish Worlds tickets went on sale through Ticketmaster.  This is the equivalent of preferring Playstation 4s being sold at Walmart on Black Friday as opposed to buying them from AXS.  Never mind the bullshit fees that pretty much equate to a whole third ticket, because most people expect ticket sellers to rape people with their bullshit fees.

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League of Payforachievements

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Since not all of my six readers are League of Legends players, much less gamers at all, I’ll try to kind of start with an analogy that those who have gamed at all within the better part of the last decade might understand.

Achievements, have become a pretty normal thing in today’s gaming landscape, with players getting little pop-up notifications in-game from their systems themselves, when they accomplish particular tasks in the games they are playing.  Ultimately, they’re utterly useless in the grand spectrum of most games, but their existence has created somewhat of a collecting hobby for those who game.

Some achievements are justly achieved by accomplishing monumental feats, like beating Mass Effect 2 on the hardest difficulty without dying once.  Others are as systematically simple as proceeding through the story, and getting an achievement for each notable storyline break point.  There are achievements of insanity, such as completing an entire Left 4 Dead 2 campaign only using a melee weapon.   There are achievements of futility, such as deliberately getting every single question wrong in a round of 1 vs. 100, and then there are achievements of everyone gets a trophy, such as simply starting a game.

The point is, achievements have become somewhat of a point of bragging among gamers, and one of the greatest accomplishments is getting a 100% of achievements earned in games, because usually every game has a good variety of achievements from layups to Hail Marys.  As in the case of XBOX Live, players’ stats have a running tally of how many games they get 100% success rate on, and for players like me, it’s something to be prideful of, to be able to prove just how little of a life I can sometimes have, when I obsess over trying to Boomer Bile over all four survivors in one hurl.

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