{"id":46038,"date":"2018-08-04T10:32:15","date_gmt":"2018-08-04T14:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=46038"},"modified":"2020-08-08T10:32:29","modified_gmt":"2020-08-08T14:32:29","slug":"man-the-league-scene-has-certainly-changed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=46038","title":{"rendered":"Man, the League scene has certainly changed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-family: Lora; font-size: 12pt;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"border-image alignnone wp-image-46039 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/faker_qq.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"287\" srcset=\"https:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/faker_qq.jpg 510w, https:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/faker_qq-300x169.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 510px) 100vw, 510px\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Lora; font-size: 12pt;\">It might sound like something that might\u2019ve never happened, but I haven\u2019t played <em>League of Legends<\/em> in nearly a month.\u00a0 While mythical gf was out of the country, I spent most of that time doing little projects around the house to try and surprise her with some cosmetic changes here and there, and because I was on permanent dog duty that whole time, I didn\u2019t feel good about hiding out in my office playing League for hours for the sake of the dogs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Lora; font-size: 12pt;\">I don\u2019t really miss it, or have any anxiety at not having earned any <span style=\"text-decoration-line: line-through;\">IP<\/span> blue essence in that time; considering that among my friends I\u2019m the only one who\u2019s been the closest to having been the most regular player, it\u2019s easier to have walked away, considering I haven\u2019t been leaving anyone behind in the process.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Lora; font-size: 12pt;\">But I don\u2019t intend on staying away, since ultimately I still did enjoy the game, it\u2019s just that I found other things to do with my spare time than play League, but until that time comes, it\u2019s almost been a full month since the last time I queued up on the Abyss, and there are sure to have been a hundred little tweaks and changes that will blindside me the next time I log in.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Lora; font-size: 12pt;\">However, as long as it\u2019s been since I last played, it\u2019s been nearly triple that, that I\u2019ve paid any attention to the League esports scene.\u00a0 It\u2019s funny to think that like 2-3 years ago, I was really into the weekly standings and looking up videos and recaps afterwards, to get the condensed action minus all the mundane boring farming and laning phases of the games, and I\u2019d care about who was on top in NA, all the way to trying to figure out what darkhorse secondary region was doing what.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Lora; font-size: 12pt;\">I\u2019m going to chalk it up to simply doing more grown-up responsibilities creating the lack of time to vest in following esports, the sentiment I\u2019ve had for a while that Riot Games cares more about the professional scene than it does the game for casual players, and the general oversaturation of esports as a whole for why I\u2019ve become so apathetic about League over time.\u00a0 But since ESPN started covering esports, I\u2019ve found it easier to just glance at headlines to get an idea of what\u2019s going on, instead of actually delving too deep into summaries and stats.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Lora; font-size: 12pt;\">One thing I\u2019ve noticed throughout the last two League seasons that hasn\u2019t been hard to miss, has been the gradual fall from grace by not just SK Telecom, but the South Korea in general.\u00a0 Sure, a South Korean team still won the last Worlds, but China has won the last two Rift Rivals, the last Mid-Season Invitational, and has created this reputation of being the stronger region over the South Koreans.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Lora; font-size: 12pt;\">Amidst all this has been the tumultuous decline of SK Telecom, the vaunted three-time World Champions of League of Legends, who are all but dead in the water currently.\u00a0 What started as getting swept out of the finals in last year\u2019s Worlds, SKT is now in a position where they might not even make Worlds this year, and have a higher possibility of missing it than their last possible shot at getting in, which will require them to defeat just about everyone in a gauntlet tournament, to get the third and last seed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Lora; font-size: 12pt;\">Within the squad remains the supposed greatest player in the game\u2019s history, Faker, who I\u2019m just finding out has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.espn.com\/esports\/story\/_\/id\/24260217\/with-faker-benched-skt-searches-identity\">actually been relegated to the bench<\/a>, in favor of a guy that seemed like a middling mid lane fodder player in Pirean, whom I still remember being the mid laner for the perpetually mediocre Diginitas squad in North America just a few years ago.\u00a0 In fact, I didn\u2019t even know Pirean was Korean, because he looked like one of those weird Asian cultures that could\u2019ve just as easily been Mongolian or eastern Chinese.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Lora; font-size: 12pt;\">But the point remains, Faker is on the bench, SK Telecom is a middle-of-the-pack squad, AD carry players are playing shit like Vladmir, marksman characters are pretty much all obsolete, and NBA teams pretty much own every team in North America.\u00a0 Ultimately, this all feels like a microcosm of how fast things change in not just the League of Legends scene, but in all of esports in general, as the young ADD things like esports takes a hold in mainstream culture, perplexing old motherfuckers like me who always has a hard time grasping the sheer speed in which things move and are accepted.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It might sound like something that might\u2019ve never happened, but I haven\u2019t played League of Legends in nearly a month.\u00a0 While mythical gf was out of the country, I spent most of that time doing little projects around the house to try and surprise her with some cosmetic changes here and there, and because I &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=46038\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Man, the League scene has certainly changed<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[160,154,103,133],"class_list":["post-46038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-esports","tag-league-of-legends","tag-motherland","tag-old-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46040,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46038\/revisions\/46040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}