Raz

Fairly difficult to get me frustrated but an issue that never fails to rile me up is one where people take false criticism to heart or just generally take any and all opinions that come at them with higher value than necessary.

It’s already a difficult subject to touch on because the fair questions are “Whose opinions are valuable?” and “How can one differentiate proper criticism from the rest?”. The answers to these appear to be subjective; Some will have a thicker skin so it’ll be easier for those to take in more opinions than the average person, but the answer to those questions are much more firm.

Regardless of perspective, intent should always be weighed. As simple as it sounds, every point or opinion does not have equal weight. They should be considered, they are all given an equal platform and should be read first before judgement but those opinions with mal intent should be disregarded fairly quickly. Far too many people fail at this first step, they see an opinion held w/o merit or reason and they’ll get into an argument or at the very least they’ll allow it to affect their mood/view. There’ll be frustration because someone you hardly know, if at all, will hold a false or hateful opinion towards you but there’s not much you can do about that. Don’t take the Richard Lewis road of throwing that opinion on a pedestal it does not deserve and don’t take the approach of trying to understand or change it. Move on dot com, life is too short to be overly conscious of how everyone views you.

Every major chat service has this in place. Anonymity, especially in League, is something of great value. In the past year a number of issues have been brought up in league that I can confidently point to anonymity being the answer to.

The challenger scene is facing a vast number of problems and a number of them come down to the players themselves not being able to hide their presence online. Just recently Riot changed the system to make ranked 5s defunct through the ‘BattleGround’ process that’s far more random in seeding. The problems with the Ranked 5s ladder were pretty clear, while a bit difficult to address; A+ teams that were recently formed found it extremely difficult to rank up when teams already at the top were dodging them if they knew the enemy team was queued up. This is an age old problem that many, including Wickd voiced his displeasure with. How will a superior team find a game if players can simply look at their friends list to see who's also queued up? Also the spectate feature in ranked 5s showing games that are currently happening should not exist for this reason. I've mentioned it before but the ranked 5s ladder should not be anywhere near similar to the soloq ladder in structure. The soloq ladder saw value in tracking a player's progress, and even just being able to spectate their game would be a fun feature since soloq held it's value in being able to scout players on a professional level while just simply admiring or learning from them on a casual level. The ranked 5s structure on the other hand is different to this in it's very core; It's a much more inherently competitive environment. It should be the result of previously noted scouting. These teams climbing want to succeed at any cost, so a team knowing their current progress in challenger already changes that environment in favour of those who're at the top. A good example would be a champion putting his title on the line in wrestling. In wrestling you win a title via pin or submission. So of course if the champion is a villain and finds his reign as champion threatened, he'll find other ways to keep the belt, even if it means losing the match via count-out or disqualification. Tying it back to my point, a team that knows it has more lp in the final days will have the incentive to sack games they're currently playing by underhanded means if it means they'll keep the lp lead w/ drophacking or more innocently will just duck & dodge opponents.

In my culture a middle name doesn’t end. It is simply the continuation of my family legacy. ‘Hamid’ is my father’s name, ‘Usman’ is my grandfather’s, Gabaa is his. My father shows great pride in being able to recite the past 13~ names of our fathers. Bit sexist obviously but what I took from it was what a name symbolizes.

The first month of my birth my name was Calloo. Pronounced like the instrument, ‘Cello’. Ironically my father felt like the name would be hard for Canadians to pronounce and I might be discriminated for it so changed it to ‘Barento’, the name of my great great grand father. He saw a lot of pride in the name, but as I grew I resented it. Moving across the city often the thing I hated the most was being introduced to my new classmates with hope in a new start, only to see the faces of my peers as I write my name on the board or when the teacher herself butchers the pronunciation.

It wasn’t until highschool that I started to settle into who I was and what my name meant to me. I didn’t practice my religion, and I didn’t much care for the Oromo culture and traditions but that isn’t what my name stood for. My name stood for me. My experiences, my love and my influences. My father as large as his flaws were in many cases: is my shining light. His intelligence, his courage and care. I wear my name on my chest. As narcissistic as it sounds it’s the one thing I value most.

I was asked a question on reddit a week ago that I took to heart and said I'd make a video to really answer. Well  I decided writing it out would be a better approach, though probably less accessible.

The question was simple, it asked me about my path in being an analyst, how others can and what the job pertains to on a daily basis. I decided to expand upon this one because it wasn't long ago that I wondered the same. A year back I got into working with LPLEN on a possible content expansion. I drew the interest from my love of watching and playing the game, it kept my brain active and my mind off unwanted thoughts. It didn't take long before the idea of the expansion fell with the broadcast rights being centralized and so my experience off of that was a few nights of casting lspl and lpl expansion games. I got to know a few people more, their love and dedication that far exceeded my own and how it fuelled them. Around this time I took over Souldra's position on China Talk, he became my closest friend in the scene and he had too much on his plate at the time. I also got to volunteering with esportspedia as they were looking to beef up their staff and add more to their content. Where I got to meet River who quite honestly will work herself to death at some point in her life. So to keep this concise the volunteer experience and networking I gained through these channels helped me out quite a bit. There always seemed to be people and orgs looking for a helping hand and it was always enjoyable. If you ever just want a place to start or hobby to keep you busy writing is also great.

Although I trusted a lot in my game and competitive knowledge I came face to face with the realization that I had a lot to learn. Sometime near the end of December I nabbed myself the position of volunteer analyst for Team8, helping them work on pick&ban, level 1s and data mining team tendencies. The discussions had with Hermes, Matt & Elbion were enjoyable. The experience opened up perspective and made friends.

It was after a meeting that I was contacted by a friend about a trial he was having with the Chiefs and said he needed a bit of help explaining his thoughts and/or concept. It's a funny story because at this time I knew little to nothing about OCE. The extent of my knowledge were the immunity and Legacy brand. I ended up watching the scrims, listening to him discuss with the team and I found myself interjecting a lot. I felt bad since I wasn't on trial and thought I negatively impacted his chances. I came to the realization that somehow I got picked up along with him and I took the opportunity to test myself with the team as an analyst. As the team qualified for Turkey in the spring split I couldn't commit the time with some life problems. What little time I had worked with them as they prepared for Turkey that split taught me that my initial methods were vastly inefficient, passive and naive.  I had a renewed drive as the team came back to prep for the summer split and each scrim felt productive. With the level of scrim partners it kept me thinking outside of the box in being able to find efficiency & quality in each scrim. I liked being far more hands on with the team and started being called the coach so I ran with it.

It was at some point near the end of the split that I needed a change. I was set on leaving a simple day job since I couldn't support the daily 2-7am scrims without income to pay for school fees but it was at this time that Brokenshard was looking for someone to take Frosk's position in a head analyst role for the Dig.eu team. Scrims would be at a much improved time for me and I could also fit in a sidejob if need be. I took the offer, trialled with them as they re-qualified for the EUCS and I was finally announced. Working with Ram, Waboba and the team was great. It was a tad awkward for me trying to find my place but after some time I found comfort. The scrim days were relatively short but consistent and structured well. The proper structure taught me a bit and I came to incorporate it.

That was my experience and my path going from place to place. I left a lot out but decided to focus moreso on the experience building and networking. The most important aspect of being an analyst is the mindset and drive. Understanding that to be able to explain a concept you must fully understand it, and that there will always be some aspect of the game you don't fully understand whether you know it or not. The value of perspective, importance of understanding people’s thought process ect.

So a lot of the day to day work and task will come from knowing what the problems are on each team. Some teams may have more core communication issues than the next, others will have problems in macro knowledge. Being able to form some sense of structure and flexibility will go a long way. A lot of experience and people got me to be who and where I am today and to be truthful I don't see it as any form of accomplishment until I pay it back with success.

 ‘LPL expert' is a term I tend to avoid. A lot of questions surround the meaning of an 'expert' and in my view I don't see myself as an expert if I don't even understand the chinese language. It creates a lot of walls in understanding the community, getting important information, following the players/teams on social media and getting a feel of the general environment. Unlike Kelsey, I haven't been to China, been in contact with their orgs.

With that being said, as much as I would like to avoid it, I get called an LPL expert because I've simply followed the scene and watched the games post Season 2. Why? Because you'd be hard pressed to find people who actually consistently watch the games throughout the seasons. From the small lplen community that existed early to the start-up of the riot oce production, western viewership grew but is still not comparable to Korea.

I love dialogue, especially one centred around western league or Korea. They always felt tame and easy to agree on. Easy because the information was always present, everyone had seen the games and understood the context so that didn't separate one person from the next, so the differences in opinions were either stylistic or a lack in game knowledge that could get cleared up by presenting facts. The difficulty with discussing lpl games is that it's actually just difficult to find people who watch the regular season games and understand the context.

A good example would be this spring split. It started off with EDG being the favorite by miles and of course they dominated heading into the playoffs at first place. The team that took 2nd place was the lspl graduates Snake. They were a team that didn't understand laneswaps and had a glaring weakness in their play style that they relied so heavily on. Snake was a bad team, but throughout half the spring split teams didn't pick/ban properly against them nor did they ever challenge them macro-wise. On top of that as the split was moving on, the coordination in the hybrid rosters of Vici, iG and LGD improved. Near the end of the split you had those teams handily hacking at Snake's comps through adc or utility bans that made the juggermaw possible or taking baka off of Xerath and playing an all-in comp effectively against it.

With all that being said, as the split was ending Snake had already landed a second place finish. Why didnt teams p/b properly or were motivated enough to play disciplined games early in the split? Game value mostly. In the LPL season, the goal is to take top 8. Top 8 teams are then thrown into a bracket stage very similar to the NBA's. In these brackets there was no incentive to take 4th and 5th place. In fact, landing there meant you were without a doubt facing EDG in semis. Teams would rather dodge that side of the bracket for a better shot at the finals and so this didn't speak much to Snake's strength. Snake went off to the playoffs, almost lost to the 7th seeded King 3-2 and went on to lose to both the 6th seeded LGD and the 5th seeded iG, taking 4th , only taking a single game off of iG.

To explain this more clearly, LGD took 2nd place overall without much of an effort. Teams like Vici were not awarded for their season placement and were awarded the same prize money as OMG, and King, while also being put on the harder side of the bracket. Teams knew this nearing the end of the season and so the final weeks saw to numerous troll games. Worst one being LGD vs. iG. The set that decided the bracket placement for each teams and was branded as “Oscar night” for a reason.

This is why the basic context mattered so much. A team's motivation going into a 3rd party tournament qualifier or going into LPL playoffs mean so much. But so often do people like Monte analyze without having watched half the games to understand that. People will overvalue Snake's wins and look too far into LGD's losses and immediately get surprised when the playoff results show their true value.

Summer split is another great example since that system changed dramatically mid-split and so did teams and their attitude towards season games. LGD often wandered near the bottom half of the standings right up until the new playoff brackets were announced, they immediately shot up in the rankings as a response of the added value. Similar to LCK's gauntlet but with a twist. A team's season play directly impacted how many games they played in playoffs and the quality opponents they faced. Had this system been swapped in for Spring playoffs with the same seeding Snake would have shed a tear knowing that they were guaranteed a 4th place finish without having the chance to nearly lose out to a 7th seeded team. Alas, the points M3 and QG sat on pre-announcement allowed for them to keep their position. M3 barely locking in 8th with World Elite just missing the chance.

Felt like ages, but it wasn't long ago since Team King was feared by both LSPL and LPL orgs. The reason was simple – teamplay. 5 players, unheard of, effectively no names, surged up with a playstyle based around a teamwide committal to skirmishing. A roam heavy focus, that assured the opposing team that if they took a trade, no matter how good, they had to fully commit to it or it would result in failure.

So what has changed? How could a team rise up as the best from LSPL, pressure LPL squads, fail against them in Spring Split and almost drop out to Young Glory and 2144 Danmu Gaming? Well for one, Xiaohu and Letme are different. With js/Assassin/Sask moving to Royal Club's LSPL line-up and Skye proving to be too linear of a player, Letme and Xiaohu took over. Both players were improvements but it never addressed the core problems the team had.

Fittingly enough, the RNG is too impulsive. From mlxg's invades to the skirmishes they choose to fight across the map. One thing that never changed about the core King players of ley, wuxx and mlxg, is their aggression. The team skirmished often with a lot of faith in their own mechanical prowess. What changed was the work and pre-planning put into those skirmishes. When King was dominant, it's not as if they won every trade. In fact Wuxx and ley were on the losing end of a trade quite a bit vs. LPL opponents. The pair would go into a trade understanding they always had the safety net of TP, jungle presence and a midlane roam from Assassin. Assassin and mlxg's map pressure is what made this team. 

Of course as soon as they entered the LPL the meta hit Skye hard, the loss in their coach, Lovett, hit their strategy and overall team cohesion and all the bad habits remained. For an all chinese team, it's surprising that they're also the least coordinated LPL team and it showcased itself during the LPL promotion/relegation tournament.

The squad went a full 5 games with both Young Glory and Danmu. Against both teams RNG applied constant and at times suffocating pressure in every lane but teams were quick to find out that the pressure applied was usually unsupported. If mlxg invaded, his laners adjacent to him weren't in position to help were he in trouble. If wuxx and ley looked to scrap it out, they were without tp and jungle pressure. If the team moved to siege a tower, it would be without pushing side waves. In fact they seemingly never have sidewaves pushing in their favour.

World Championships is around the bend and we're starting to hear of regional casters/analysts that won't be present for the production. This seems like tradition at this point. Year after year a certain expectation is had for regional representation only to be dashed. It's usually followed by social media outrage and then constant criticism of the chosen analysts as the event happens.

I understand the criticism of course. For those who've had the sorry experience of following my opinions during previous international events know how much I've disapproved of the analyst desk. China is without a doubt the one region just never got represented properly up until MSI. Before MSI Deficio was actually just the only one who constantly presented accurate information and for how large and impactful the region was, it was unfortunate.

For the regions that were represented, it almost felt worse. The analyst desk slot was more of a battle of personality and celebrity status than anything. I find myself cheering on CLG so that they qualify for worlds if only to have Doublelift too preoccupied to accept a desk invite. Luckily for korea Montecristo is popular enough so that the region is decently represented.

A counter argument would be that there are no articulate chinese/kr/TW analysts out there that are fine in front of a camera but that's not a point you can't make without having tried to look. There are countless names within each region. Countless minds I've had the pleasure of picking. Countless perspectives, faces, all pg and rather photogenic. None considered. I can understand the monetary aspect of having numerous western voices and have them recognizable to the main audience, but it's probably much more valuable for the audience to understand the storyline of each team & player that's fighting. Each scene, team and player has a story. Some inspirational, heart breaking and comical. What attracts a viewer isn't always the story teller, but far more often the story itself. Not having the historical context available can be devastating to the broadcast to anyone trying to invest in the product.

That being said, it isn't Doublelift's fault he doesn't know much on OMG. It isn't the desk's fault when they generalize a region and misrepresent their worth. They were picked. Sure it's up to them to do their homework but more often than not they try. The problem is that you can't expect someone to be experts or understand nearly enough on a region in a months time. You can watch the latter half of the season of LPL vods and can speak to their recent play, but can't speak to their org, their players, their growth and more importantly their motives. A lot gets lost, and they'll be forced to comment on sets like SHRC vs. EDG, SHRC vs. OMG, SSW vs. SSB and generally anytime TPA or AHQ play.

It seems like the word is out on the death of lplen, to many this is good news as criticisms of the quality was piling up, but to some this is heartbreaking. You can chalk up the differences of opinions to conflicting point of views, which is why I feel it’s important to share my own since I too started off as a casual viewer.

Getting into LoL Esports

As any other spectator, I followed NA, EU and OGN. I got into watching the lpl from watching iG and WE flex their strength at S2 World Championships. Both teams were extremely fun to watch, especially iG with their nonsense picks and potential that really defined them. At this point I was still merely a casual viewer that wouldn’t stay up if there was a tournament taking place past a certain time, but I would watch it whenever OGN was on that night.

As I watched more lpl and OGN, I started gaining more interest in exploring the two scenes a bit. I started out by tuning into NLB streams where production quality was pretty stellar but the casting was pretty bad after Keats took over. Well, bad in a hilarious way. At that point I started wondering more about China and their amateur scene, and hilariously enough their LSPL aired earlier than their LPL games so I tuned in more often for the LSPL games. The LSPL had no English casting and streamed on an unstable Chinese streaming platform, it also didn’t have an English audience so the experience was pretty painful, especially if I was tuning in to a Kx.happy game.

Introduction to LPLen

It was only after keeping track of the LSPL did I really closely follow the LPL through the lplen twitch stream. The production quality was pretty bad but compared to the Chinese streams the difference was miniscule. The casting was fun and solid. When Frosk was paired with Pira it was gold, when Rapid worked with Nero it was decent and the real fun was when I tuned in for Hughbo and Nick Yaco. Every pair brought their own twist and turns, with Frosk+Pira being the best casting I’ve listened to since Monte+Doa.

What I loved the most about lplen was the small twitch chat community. It was tightly knit and fun; From Mozzie and Kelsey constantly having to inform people of what patch the games were being played on, Jimlord’s rise to mod’ship, to Souldra’s real talk moments but that was usually batted away by Kelsey who tended to the twitch chat as admin. The most memorable moments of the stream was surrounded by Moobot’s auto-bans and whenever the dancing juice girl appeared in an advertisement.

The small viewership was a blessing and a curse. With the small community I enjoyed the experience a hell of a lot more and got to meet a lot of new friends. But of course it also meant that those who worked hard behind the scenes to get the business going weren’t getting their just deserts.

As fun as it was, people knew why there wasn’t much viewership. With China being the 2nd best region while at the same time airing earlier than OGN, it had the clear potential but the stream quality was just poor, the casting quality was inconsistent, the breaks were long and the games were late at night. I knew the interest would spike after world events when the general audience had the chance at viewing Chinese teams in HD, but always wondered if lplen would be able to facilitate the demands of the new viewers in time. As we can tell, the answer to that was no.

Joining LPLen and frequenting China Talk

Before realizing my interest for Chinese league of legends, I knew and admired both Kelsey Moser and Frosk. I knew of Kelsey through her work for Gosu Gamers and eventually through OnGamers, which made it all the more exciting when she followed me on twitter when I barely started using it. I started tuning into whatever Chinese talk shows that were taking place. When I started watching it was some lplen show called “Finger Trap” and I would watch VODs of China Talk. By this time I was already good friends with Souldra and so it felt a bit surreal being close to the people I held on a pedestal in terms of personality, knowledge and work ethic. This was around the time I got introduced to Drexxin and his work with Esports Heaven. A site I started frequenting but didn’t dish out articles as often as I would’ve liked, so I just went from site to site just reading esports articles whenever I had the time.

This was when I read the announcement that lplen was looking to hire more people to their staff on Frosk’s twitter. I was wondering what I should do with myself and so it felt like a sign. I also knew of good friends like Hermit who was just as interested as I was and sent in his resume. While having that internal debate with whether or not I should go down this route, Souldra told me that he wanted to work with me in casting future LSPL games alongside someone else who turned out to be Nick Yaco and the goal was to mirror the same laidback feel the Chinese casters have while maybe landing short of wearing paperbags. It was the push I needed and so I jumped at the opportunity and soon after I was asked to replace him on China Talk until the end of the year. Everything was happening so quickly and people started branding me as an “LSPL expert”. A title I feel was undeserved.

As I started doing episodes and talking more with Drex, Kelsey and Frosk I got a better look into who they were and what they had to deal with on a daily basis. The obligations, time constraints, zero sleep, flooding online harassments all the while the content they gave birth to die a young age in /r new of the league subreddit. After every conversation I asked myself one question; What’s the point? Why would anyone commit to such a toxic lifestyle? It only got worse when the two went on Summoning Insight, where more fans just dug into them. Before seeing any of this, I came in thinking that even the most unfair criticism will have a shred a truth. That there is always something to learn from hearing someone's opinions, but since reading through these reddit, askfm and twitter comments that isn't the case. You can definitely make the case that Frosk has too much personality for her own good, while Kelsey at times should show more. That being said, a hefty portion of the comments I read is just outright sexual harrassment, but I digress.

With plans of Hughbo, Nick and I shoutcasting LSPL games getting set up, the TGA and LPL qualification tournaments were coming and I was set to help cast. I was definitely nervous, I've never casted before other than random joke casts while spectating friends' games. As nerve wracking as it was, I had Nick and Hughbo talk most of the time until I was comfortable enough to really take control of the games. This was all during exam period, so when Hughbo dropped out I lost the crutch of a tri-cast but went on to do my best for the rest of the games with Nick, River, Alex, Pastrytime and Frosk alongside me. As much as I loved those who aided me during that week with the cast, the one person I credit for most of that success was Kelsey who had to deal with a scheduling nightmare, and a sleepless week/month. She even found herself solo-casting at one point, which was the greatest moment that week had to offer for everyone but her.

The Solution

Throughout that week I started to understand the difficulties of casting through the chinese streams. To anyone who thought watching a TGA stream was frustrating, try syncing it with someone else. At best, there was a 5 second difference, but that difference will regularly increase to 10 or more. On top of that Chinese streams weren't even in 720p, so re-streaming an already poor quality stream just snowballed that frustration. But if there was one shred of good news in any of this, it was that Kelsey was working out a plan that would get us streaming in HD through the Tournament Realm Client. That fact was even starting to get promoted to ensure people that the issue of stream quality would be resolved. Not only would it be easier to cast, but it would be the only HD stream of the LPL. As time went on, I was under the understanding that the deal with Riot was close and lplen was clear to make a massive shift in how the games were streamed.

This is all came to a close after an episode of China Talk when I was informed that Riot had other plans, and the dreams of LPLen was dead in the water. The friends of mine who worked tirelessly to build Chinese content for english viewers had their dreams taken away from them without even being given a chance. When I heard about it I didn't know what to say to them, how to go about it, there was no way I could understand how they felt. Both Kelsey and Frosk are without a doubt two of the most under-appreciated people in the community, they're people who've done so much only to receive a boot in the face.