A Quick Backtrack and Retrospective

Season 2 draws to a close, and the Taipei Assassins have taken the throne, and shown themselves to be the best team in the world. Their ability to adapt to any and every situation that was thrown at them gave them the ability to take down every team they faced with apparent ease.

However, the Taipei Assassins are a name that did not exist in the time of Season One. But new teams show up all the time; it’s to be expected. As is the change in strategy, and even the size of the event. But really, how much has Riot managed to shape and grow League of Legends as a sport? Let’s have a look into the past for a moment and see what exactly it is that has changed so dramatically over the past year.

Just a year ago, all of the buzz was around Fnatic’s victory over Against All Authority in the finals of the World Championship at Dreamhack 2011. Neither of these teams has had a significant presence for a vast majority of Season Two, largely because of players breaking off into different teams and moving on. However it is not just the teams that are present that is so incredibly different. Compositions, popular champions and even summoner spells have changed drastically in that time. Even just in the final match, we see a whole slew of set ups that would be almost unheard of in todays meta. Let’s take a look at the box score of the final game of the championship:

There are a few things that may strike you as odd when you first look at the screen. How about Kuja building three Heart of Golds to go along with the Philosopher’s Stone on Janna? It might even be the popularity of Thornmail as the main way of stacking armor against AD carries.

Kujaa didn’t build a single one of the most commonly built support items in the final game; instead of opting for a Shurelya’s Reverie, he decided the extra gold income was more important than the ability to make his team run faster for a short period of time. And since Locket of the Iron Solari didn’t exist, and Randuin’s Omen is often considered a suboptimal item for many supports, Janna included, Heart of Gold saw a much greater amount of time in the backpack of the support, sitting there and generating gold so that the support player could buy wards. While this sounds no different today, there is very little building of Aura items. Outside of Will of the Ancients, items such as Aegis of the Legion were far less popular than they are today.

 

Season One Support in five easy steps

What about summoner spells? There was no streamlined theme as to what position on the map should be using what spells. In Against All Authority’s match against Team Solo Mid, Yellowstar ran Ghost on AP Sion, and even Reginald used Ghost on his AP Twisted Fate in the mid-lane. The composition in this game for aAa has a grand total of zero ignites, which is absolutely unheard of in games today. Two of the champions which would today likely be running ignite, Sion and Malzahar, are respectively running Ghost and Teleport in its stead.

The increased mobility was considered more important than the increased 1v1 potential at the time, and would lead to more plays around the map. Along with zero ignites, there is not a single Exhaust on either team. A lack of exhaust is drastically different today, where teams will almost always be packing at least one, and often two or on some occasions three in any given team composition. This was also a time when Clairvoyance was basically a requirement in all compositions, due to the routes used in the old jungle being so consistent that it was possible to keep tabs on the other teams jungler throughout the entire early game, and have very little fear of ganks due to vision.

Why only look at summoner spells and item builds? Who do you think were the top bans at this tournament? It certainly wasn’t Ezreal, in fact he wasn’t banned or picked throughout the entire tournament. Morgana remained untouched as well, and so was Shen. Even Ryze didn’t see a single pick or ban throughout the entire tournament. Blitzcrank only saw one game worth of play, and he lost. In Season Two he was banned a great number of times. In fact, Season One, the most common picks of all were Nunu and Janna. Out of 28 games, Nunu was picked in 18, and banned in 8, while Janna was picked in 18 games as well, but only banned in one.

I refuse to be bad.

The trinity of AD carries that exists now wasn’t even a concept at the time, either. Ezreal hadn’t seen the various tweaks that shot him to popularity, and Graves wouldn’t be released for another month after the first season ended. Corki and Ashe were the two most popular AD carries by far; mobility was a trait that was not as prominent or heavily valued in carries at the time, and the utility that Ashe offered was second to none.

However, many teams were terrified of the damage and presence Vayne offered, and she was banned out a grand total of eleven times; this put her exactly on par with the number of bans that Alistar received throughout the tournamentCorki however dealt even more damage than he does now, not to mention that Phosphorous Bomb he has? Yeah, it blinded at the time. At this point it was impossible for any AD carry to have a hope of dueling Corki if ever he landed a Q, and it isn’t hard to land.

Even Teemo saw play in the finals.  Stupid Teemo.

The meta that people have become so adhered to now also had not fully come to fruition, yet, either. This was the tournament where the AD Carry/Support Bottom lane, Bruiser top lane, AP mid and jungler composition was the most at odds with the North American compositions. European teams had adopted a double AP, Support/AD Carry, jungler setup, which then transformed into the bruiser top lane that it became today.

This strategy was at odds of the ever popular triple solo lane, jungler and roamer combination that had become so popular in the recent time. The setup the Europeans used allowed for so much burst that their ability to make a team-fight a 4v5 almost instantly made it extremely difficult for the compositions that North American teams were using to create a teamfight in which they would have a consistent advantage. This teamfight difficulty and the enhanced dragon control that having two people in the bottom lane offered allowed Fnatic to defeat every North American team they ran into.

It wasn’t just the laning meta, however. Even down to what type of jungler was viable has change in a year’s time. It was only a year ago that single target junglers were all the rage; Trundle, Fiddlesticks, Nunu and Warwick were all very popular at one point, although not all of them particularly so during the finals. Shyvana didn’t exist, Doctor Mundo was an extreme rarity, and Udyr didn’t see any play in the season one championships. All of these were champions that came to light and real popularity over the course of season two, through either meta-game changes or just good old buffs.

MUNDO NOT SURE WHY NO ONE PLAY HIM SEASON ONE

The entire e-sports scene in America has changed drastically in the one year since the end of Season one. Season one had a final prize pool of only $100,000. This is merely 5% of the prize pool that was given out for the Season Two finals, which amounted to $2,000,000. This is an astonishing level of growth over a single year. Not only did the prize pool rise greatly, but stream numbers multiplied by enormous quantities. The highest number of concurrent viewers on the stream of the season one finals didn’t even break 70,000. Reports of numbers for the Season Two finals have that number reaching 900,000, and this does not include various TV stations that broadcast the event.

League of Legends is unlike so many other games; the game that you are playing and watching so much now is so different from what it was a year ago. Sure there are similarities, champions that will seemingly always be popular, but look at it now. We went from a painful, slow jungle with a handful of champions who could even survive it, to a jungle where even ridiculous ideas like jungle Ashe can work, even if they are very far from optimal.

From one meta to the next, even now there are very few familiar team names from the world finals. There are only two teams that have played in the finals for both Seasons; and those are Team Solomid and Counterlogic Gaming. Neither of them have seen success in claiming the title of champion, yet remain the only familiar team faces. A great deal of players have made dual appearances, but not for the same team twice in a row. This has kept the scene extraordinarily diverse for the past year, and with Season Three up and coming, we can only hope for bigger events, more teams, and more strategic shifts.