NA LCS: Old Dogs and Fresh Blood

It is no secret that the Pacific rim League of Legends scene is considered more highly evolved than the European and North American scenes. Back in 2012 both EU and Asia were highly critical of the NA scene, specifically for their performance in the Season 2 World Championships and although season 3 has been a great time of growth for eSports in the West, the Pacific rim still tends to dominate the scene.

I recently did a study of the North American LCS players and their overall experience. Both their experience as pro players in general as well as their experience within their respective teams. I wanted to see if there were any trends between experience and LCS team ranking.

Lets take a look at the data. First, I decided to take a look at how much overall experience each team had by summing up the total time that each player from the current LCS rosters had as a pro League of Legends player. The graph below compares these results to current LCS ranking.

Next, I decided to see how long each player has been on their current team and then I summed those results. Matching this data with LCS ranking gives the following graph.

Both of these graphs give startlingly similar results. One might expect that having more experience would generally lead to a better ranking and less experience to a lower ranking, but the results do not really point to such a conclusion. Rather there is a rough bell curve putting the most experienced teams right in the middle of the pack and leaving the less experienced teams on the top and bottom. What could be causing such a trend?

Lets take a step back and think about the first half of Season 3, the LCS Spring split. I didn’t gather any specific data but looking at the data from this study and using some common sense we can see that this trend is new to the Summer Split. At the end of the Spring Season Team Solo Mid, Team Curse, Team Dignitas, and Counter Logic Gaming were the top 4 teams in the ranking as well as in experience, a fairly predictable result. Even before the season started the terms “the top 4” and “the bottom 4” had emerged because of the huge disparity in experience between teams.

Why now, in the Summer season, are the results so startlingly different? How have Cloud 9 and Team Vulcun managed to pass their more experienced competitors? I believe that a world centric approach to strategy and meta may be a factor.

Daerek “LemonNation” Hart from Cloud 9 elaborate’s on C9’s approach to strategy and meta, “Cloud 9 is already a part of the world meta...while all teams not looking out into the world for influence upon their strategy will fall behind.” While these are extremely bold and somewhat biased words, they seem to make a lot of sense. Up until recently the only real scope that North American teams had to worry about were the other North American teams. Asia and Europe seemed like far off worlds. But, since the Season 2 World Championship, teams have had to rethink the way they operate. The ‘world meta’ is becoming more and more important every day that draws us closer to the Season 3 World Championships. Are the North American teams ready and able to adopt a world mindset in order to redefine themselves as world teams?

There is an old adage, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. Is this something we may be forced to apply to some of the more experienced NA teams? Is the LCS becoming a place for new blood to come in and easily adapt to the ever changing world landscape? I for one believe that, while change is hard, the teams and players that have been molding and defining competitive League of Legends scene for all of us fans for so long are fully able to adapt and become a potent part of the ‘world meta’ and a force to be reckoned with on the world stage.