Fucking Broken in League of Legends part 1: The Scientific Method
Learning to Learn: the key to unlocking Latin American international performance
My name is Bomes. I was a League proplayer and coach in Latin America tier 1 circuits for the better part of the last twelve years. During my long ass career I’ve realized some constants that make teams/coaches/players excel over others. In this series I share my shit for free ‘cause writing about League keeps me distracted from thinking about killing myself.
The Knowledge Rat Race in the Age of Information
It’s not 2013 anymore - everyone watches every LPL game. Even the most rancid, weak as fuck, 4fun tier 3 teams have coaches that will watch every game now.
You’ll never get an edge over anyone by copying China. Everyone’s doing that and other regions have better players than us. You’ll be 1 step behind everyone and 2 steps behind China. To get ahead you need to make up your own playbook, and to build that efficiently you need to learn how to learn.
M E T A
Magic: The Gathering is one of my favorite games of all time and it’s where I learned the definition of “the metagame”. In Magic, the meta is the distribution of deck archetypes you face or expect to face at a certain tournament.
Some players copy the meta and just bring the “strongest” deck. But in MTG you’re playing a 60 card deck with a 15 card sideboard, a reserve bench of 15 cards you can swap freely with in between games of a best-of series. The sideboard in magic is THE toolbox you bring to adjust on the fly against the meta, but there’s also the freedom of copying a popular deck BUT making substitutions to some of the 60 cards of the main decklist to adjust for the opponents you expect to face.
The good players ‘netdeck’ (copy popular decks verbatim), the great players ‘netdeck+’ (I made this up, netdeck with adjustments) but the really exceptional players watch the meta and they craft and perfect their own personal counter deck. This is how the meta evolves. When you beat the meta, you become the meta - a deck is only popular for as long as people fail to fully develop an effective counter. Without innovation by exceptional players, the game would never evolve.
League is the only gaming environment I’ve participated in where the meta is taken as gospel at face value and it’s really really REALLY hard to make a player stray from the chinese picks even if you have solid as fuck arguments. This is, I believe, because Riot nerfs everything 2 days after it’s discovered instead of letting the meta evolve by itself. Players are used to Riot “solving” the popular strategies by removing them so we’re conditioned to not even bother researching counters. League players are also in general dumb as fuck kids with gigantic egos so it’s really hard as a coach in the third world that you don’t need to be asian nor tweet in english in order to know your shit and make up a good strat.
Why the fuck do you think our third world ass region always loses to everyone at international events? Is it because china has 100000x more people? Probably, but it’s also because our gameplan every year is “ummm.. yea.. lets.. copy china lol” - they know their shit better than us brother. We send our representative to worlds each and every year playing the exact same style the rest of the world plays - but worse and 2 patches behind ‘cause we run out of shit to copy after regional playoffs.
We need to start thinking of “the meta” as something that has to be countered, not emulated. It doesn’t have to be done in China for it to be a good strat.
Gigabyte Marines: the footprint of vietnamese Gigachads
If you didnt watch league in 2017 go watch this game until around 5:15, when Nocturne uses his first Ult of the game. Yeah, that’s not a typo, 5:15 level 6.
LINK: FNC vs. GAM - Group Stage Day 1 - 2017 World Championship - Fnatic vs GIGABYTE Marines
It’s one of the most unique strats in League of Legends history and it helped a team of Vietnamese randoms win against Fnatic.
Putting you into context, this is Worlds 2017. Laneswaps were nerfed out of existence (or so you thought, Rekkles!) before Worlds 2016. At this point it’s been over a year since the strategy has been deemed unusable and there wasn’t a single laneswap game in the world afterwards.
Everyone comes to the tournament playing honorable 2v2 botlane for the past year. You’re from fucking vietnam playing against a top EU team and you have an insane jungle player but not much else. You’re not gonna win fighting fair and square, so you come in with your own unique ass shit: 2v1 top with 3 combat summoners and a super aggresive early damage lane for the dive. Grab a tank with super high aoe damage and go send him help jungle. Tank no need item, aoe damage kill camps fast. Nocturne 6, Karma 3. GG EZ.
Starting from minute 1 you’re playing a strategy that you invented and perfected through iteration and you know all the variants inside out. Most importantly, you’re gonna be playing against someone who will, invariably, be CONFUSED AS FUCK. Watch that fucking Maokai walk up level 1 and lose 80% hp while he tries to figure out what the fuck is going on with these random ass vietnam team doing this weird shit - I guarantee the guy’s 100% tilted from minute 1:40 as well.
You don’t beat teams with more money at their own game - you drag them down to your own weird ass gamestate and you beat them with experience. Because that’s one of the only edges you can get against a team with better infrastructure, better players, better practice, better region around them.
“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience”
The Scientific Method: Disregard Meta, Acquire Knowledge
How do you make your own shit you say? Well you don’t need to be smarter than China at League of Legends. You just need to be smarter than China at the scientific method.
From Wikipedia: The scientific method is an empirical method of acquiring knowledge.
In smaller words, the scientific method is a set of steps to follow when you don’t know something, but you sure as shit wanna try and find out.
Let me walk you step by step through a personal example. I really enjoy thinking of non standard botlaners/”adcs”. When looking for something new to play, I literally look at a list of champions and go one by one asking myself “would this guy be a good botlaner?” (Observation/question)
My research in this case would be the hundreds of games I played asking myself the same question about multiple champions - I kind of know by now what makes a good bottom laner. If your Observation/question is instead, for instance, matchup related here is where you watch proviews.
One of the champions that caught my attention once when looking at potential melee botlaners was Dr. Mundo. And my Hypothesis was something like this:
“I think Dr Mundo would be a really good botlaner despite being melee. His Q has a lot of range, very little cooldown, and costs nothing if you last hit with it. I compare it to Ezreal - Ezreal is a really good botlaner and his Q has a lot of range, very little cooldown, and costs almost nothing. Ezreal has a really shitty early game but he can ride it out with his Q during lane. Dr Mundo should be able to do the same since his Q does more damage, costs less, and has less cooldown.”
The other side of my hypothesis was that just sitting back and farming with Q would probably work but it would be boring as fuck. I enjoy having fun, so I realized my Dr Mundo had to be a fighting botlane, not a passive farming/scaling one. So I grabbed my trusty lab partner, Matol, and I gave him the mission briefing:
“next time we’re versus Jhin, we’re gonna play Mundo Blitzcrank. Mundo has more tankyness (melees have more stats) and more AD (E is fucking broken, no, really, go read it) than any adc early game, the only issue is getting to melee range but once we can fight we should win anything. I’m gonna go Exhaust+Conqueror on mundo for the ultimate ‘win any fight’ setup, lets walk up level 1, I exhaust and we all in, burn his flash.Level 2 flash hook him he dies 1000%.”
Wanna know how the lane went? I was 8-0 Legendary by minute 10.
Conclusion: Poggers
But then we tried it against Ezreal and we could only farm, it was impossible to kill him - he was too safe. But he also didn’t do anything against my big purple tanky ass.
Conclusion: next time vs ezreal, go full scaling runes+items, play for late and roam mid a lot, we can have prio easily.
Then we tried it with Nami, with Soraka and with Thresh and it fucking sucked with all, we couldn’t fight anyone and we got countered by grievous wounds super easily when we were enchanters, was really tough to do anything in fights after lane ‘cause it’s kinda hard to engage alone with Mundo.
Conclusion: Mundo is 100% better with an engager
Then we played a game against Caitlyn Lux. Oh boy. Unplayable. Caitlyn has too much range+an escape, just like ezreal, so you can’t touch her but Caitlyn Lux, unlike Ezreal, can actually damage you earlygame and they hurt a lot.
Now if someone wants to copy my shit because I was succesful with it - I already what I’m picking against them. I’m two steps ahead of the competition, just because I thought by myself and followed the scientific method to get conclusions from my hypothesis based on the evidence observed from experimenting.
Then you’re gonna come into the tournament and everyone will have practiced vs Zeri, versus Sivir, and versus Lucian most of their time and all of a sudden you lock in fucking Exhaust Conqueror Doctor Mundo Blitz and you walk all over them because you know exactly how your strat works and your opponent is confused as fuck and tilting from minute 1.
It’s like a rap battle where you prep your verses 3 months beforehand and the other dude is fucking freestyling. Completely unfair.
Conclusion?
The Scientific Method is Fucking Broken