League of Legends: Reborn in Season 3, Tuning the Entire League

Chapter 207 World Championship, Here We Come! (Seeking monthly votes)
September 5, 2013, afternoon.

The NXG North American advance team, led by Chen Muxin, has already departed for the S3 World Championship, while the team members remaining at the base are scheduled to fly two days later, in the early morning of the 7th.

This arrangement is to help the athletes better adapt to the time difference.

The flight from Shanghai Pudong Airport to Los Angeles takes about 11 hours. When you arrive, it will be around 10 p.m. local time. The cabin is already difficult to sleep in due to the roar of the engines on the way. So even if you can't fall asleep after landing, the fatigue will help you drift off to sleep and get back into your normal sleep rhythm more quickly.

After seeing off the operations manager, in the evening, Jiang Ming and his teammates gathered at the base to watch the draw ceremony for the World Championship.

Unlike later events, Riot Games in 2013 did not release many pre-tournament promotional items before the World Championship, such as the top 10 rankings of world-class players.

However, players privately created all sorts of rankings on the forums.

Given the nature of LPL players, they would naturally want to rank all the players from the three teams at the top, so such rankings between players are just for fun and don't have much real value.

However, even Riot Games probably didn't expect that a draw ceremony they came up with on a whim would ignite a global discussion about the S3 World Championship ahead of schedule.

Taking LPL as an example, the popularity of the TGA live broadcast room is exploding, with the number of real-time viewers soaring, showing a strong trend of surpassing the just-concluded LPL gauntlet finals.

It's worth mentioning that IG just defeated Royal Club in the gauntlet to secure the second seed for the LPL region.

However, in the current format, the difference between the second and third seeds is not significant and will not affect the group situation between Royal Club and IG. After all, Riot's World Championship format is not yet fully mature at this time, and the number of participating teams is far smaller than in later years. The regional ranking has little impact on the group's quality.

While the group stage is not the decisive factor in determining the champion, as there are many examples of bottom-ranked teams from different regions making a comeback to win the championship, no one would refuse to play an "easy mode" in the group stage. The scenario of facing strong teams from the start and being forced to reveal one's tactical cards too early in a BO1 format in order to advance is terrifying to even think about.

The S3 World Championship Finals featured fourteen teams. The top seeds from the four major regions of North America, LPL, OGN, and Taiwan's LMS directly advanced to the quarterfinals. The remaining ten teams were divided into two groups, A and B, and played a BO1 double round-robin tournament. The top two teams from each group advanced to the quarterfinals.

So in reality, today's draw ceremony has little to do with NXG.

For this reason, Jiang Ming did not watch the draw ceremony with the players in the training room. Instead, he went to his office, set up a live stream to analyze the group stage situation for the audience, and casually filled up his time.

As soon as the live stream started, the chat was flooded with viewers, filled with question marks and friendly greetings for the missing person.

[Hey, who's this? Who followed this unknown streamer for me?]

[Missing Persons Return Series]

[You still remember you started out as a streamer? You're just abandoning all those old fans.]

[Sigh, they used to call her "Sweetie" when she was selling pancakes on live stream, but now that she has a club and is making money, they call her "Old Mrs. Cow."]

Newcomers always beat the old!

"Cough cough!"

Jiang Ming looked embarrassed and quickly explained, "I've been preparing for the World Championship lately, and since you all have some free time today, I came here to do a live stream for you all right away."

The number of people who rushed into the live stream far exceeded his expectations.

It seems that when it comes to the specific group assignments in the competition, both players and casual gamers care about them to a similar degree. Those who don't care at all are unlikely to have much enthusiasm for the competition.

Just think about those clubs in the original timeline that "forced things to be interesting"—they even used the players watching the draw ceremony as promotional material, which shows how much attention this segment received.

However, no one expected that this part, which could have been a way for club operations staff to coast along and get paid, would later become "historical evidence" for fans to criticize the team because of a mishap by a top-tier operations club—in their pre-match draw video, a player delivered a classic scene of laughing twice, which resulted in losing the game.

[Ming-ge, Ming-ge, could you give your comments on the seeded teams from the other regions first?]

[The top seeds don't seem to be facing each other, I'm also quite curious which two teams IG and Royal Club will be drawn against.]

[I don't care which team I draw from, I just hope there isn't an internal conflict!]

In front of the computer screen, Jiang Ming was wolfing down the dinner that his senior had specially cooked for him.

Yes, it's definitely hot!
Suddenly glancing at the comments, without even putting down his chopsticks, he said to the comments about the civil war: "Well, how should I put it, I don't really like to use the analogy of which team you get to play against to describe it."

"In professional esports teams, everyone is aiming for the championship. No one considers it a success to reach the semi-finals or runner-up."

"Since everyone is aiming for first place, it's fine to avoid revealing your hand in the group stage BO1 matches and seek an easier group. But if you still think like that in the knockout stage, then it's dangerous."

After shoveling some rice into his mouth, Jiang Ming continued, "Moreover, if both Royal Club and IG can advance, the probability of an all-LPL match between the three teams in the quarterfinals is actually very close to fifty percent."

Because history has been messed up by its own actions, the current roster of teams for the S3 World Championship has changed considerably compared to its predecessor.

First, regarding the number one seed pool, the number one seed for the Korean OGN region has changed from Najin Sword to SSO. NJ, who should have been the number one seed, suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of SKT in a crucial battle for points. As a result, the players' mentality collapsed, causing their regular season ranking to drop directly to fourth place. Not only did they fail to secure the number one seed by being the top seed, but they were also brutally defeated by AF in the first round of the gauntlet, losing 3-0 and receiving a holiday notice.

The European region was represented by FNC, the S1 champion, while North America was represented by C9, a perennial esports powerhouse. Ironically, the Taiwanese region, which won the S2 championship, didn't have its number one seed secured by the champion TPA; instead, it was snatched by Orange Bears. In the end, they didn't even qualify for the World Championship.

So much so that the most classic soul-searching question was raised on the dark forums within the Taiwan region: TPA studied their opponents and found that they couldn't beat any of them in S3. For the sake of the glory of the S2 championship, they decided not to go!
Among the seeded teams, C9 and SSO are just there to fill the gaps this year. C9 goes without saying; their consistency in reaching the quarterfinals and semifinals at Worlds is comparable to Doublelift's group stage curse.

As the saying goes, no one can remember the top 16 unless they are in the top 16 every year!
Then there's the SSO team. Players from the original timeline might have a very biased view of the performance of ten of their players because of Samsung Blue and White's performance in Season 4.

In fact, during S3, the performance of the five members of SSO could be described as terrible. With the original members such as Redmi, Looper, IMP, and Dandy all still in the team, they were even repeatedly beaten by FNC and GMB in Group B, which was relatively weak in overall strength, and were eliminated directly from the group stage.

"Teams to watch in the group stage..."

Before Jiang Ming could finish speaking, the lottery ceremony in the live broadcast room had already come to a swift end.

The grouping process, with only two groups of ten teams, is quite typical and follows a normal rhythm.

IG and Royal Club were lucky; before the S3 World Championship implemented the rule of avoiding clashes between teams from the same region, they were in region A and region B respectively, thus successfully avoiding a situation where they would face off against each other in the group stage.

IG, who have fallen into Group A, will compete against SKT, Lemondogs, TSM, and the wildcard team GamingGear.eu;
Royal Club is in Group B, where they will face strong European teams FNC and Gambit Gaming, North American team Team Vulcun, and Southeast Asian team Mineski.

For every lucky one, there's an unlucky one. The two LPL teams successfully avoided elimination, but the European teams were forced into an all-European showdown. To be honest, if the draw guest hadn't been a former FNC support player, Jiang Ming would have had reason to accuse the NA teams of some kind of shady dealings.

Just as I was pondering this, my phone suddenly vibrated, and a message from Comrade Xiao Wang popped up.

Wang Sicong: "During the World Championship, NXG came to practice with our IG, you know what I mean?"

Jiang Ming: "This..."

"I might not really understand!"

The other party was clearly prepared and said directly: "I know you often arrange scrims with SKT. I don't ask for anything else, but I'll cover the round-trip airfare for your NXG players. Can I lend you a week before the quarterfinals?"

"Brother, you know, I'm not that kind of person..." Jiang Ming typed, trying to defend himself.

However, a new message immediately popped up: "Accommodation at The Standard Hollywood Hotel is also included!"

Upon hearing this, Jiang Ming immediately beamed with joy: "Oh, that's too kind of you. It's just training, exchanging ideas, and sparring. We're practically family."

Staring at the "generous terms" on the screen, Jiang Ming's mind was racing with calculations.

Although airfare and accommodation don't cost much, NXG needs to find a team to train with before the World Championship knockout stage. Now that an opponent has taken the initiative to come to them, even bringing gifts, they should not refuse this "convenience delivered to their door." At the very least, the money saved can be used to give some benefits to the fans and further improve the team members' meal standards during the competition.

With such a large, established business as a dog, we, NXG, a small, self-sufficient enterprise, must be frugal and diligent in managing our household finances.

Of course, Comrade Xiao Wang had his reasons for doing this.

This week, Riot Games released a patch update in preparation for the upcoming S3 World Championship.

This includes a reduction in the ward slots that come with the new heroes, allowing players to have only one ward at the start of the game, and the duration of these wards is shorter than that of normally purchased wards.

In addition, the respawn times of jungle monsters and minions have been synchronized, meaning that the buffs in the upper and lower halves of the map will spawn at the same time as the minions.

In terms of equipment, items like Deathfire Grasp and Brutalizer, which were previously overpowered in terms of cost-effectiveness, have been nerfed. While this doesn't prevent champions like Ahri, LeBlanc, or even Gragas from building Deathfire Grasp as their first item, it represents a significant adjustment compared to their previous excessive damage output.

In addition, to enhance the entertainment value of the S3 World Championship and lay the groundwork for further promotion, Riot Games also made sweeping reforms to the game mechanics.

Among them, the jungle economy issue mentioned by Jiang Ming was adopted by Riot Games designers.

The sixth group of jungle monsters, which is the predecessor of the number one ADC in the jungle, Frog Princess, is the Great Ghost!
Increasing the number isn't enough; there are also a bunch of adjustments to the attributes of various wild monsters!
In short, the health of both buffs has been increased, the amount of gold gained has been decreased, and the experience gained from other small jungle monsters has also been weakened. The purpose is to reduce the jungler's ganking ability in the early game.

Following the jungle adjustments, the damage of turrets was also adjusted.

"In the past six months of competition, we have found that it is too easy for the winning side to tower dive, which is a challenge to the deterrent effect of the towers. Therefore, we have decided to increase the attack damage of the towers and the attack frequency against heroes."

Faced with such an exaggerated number of version updates, Comrade Xiao Wang knew very well that the two training team members he bought from NXG were indeed quite capable, but their organizational structure was seriously lacking. The best way to adapt to the version as quickly as possible was of course to copy the answers from NXG, which had the most mature training system in the LPL.

……

The next day, with the release of the S3 World Championship group stage results and version changes, and the publication of clips of Jiang Ming's live stream analysis by many content creators, the following events unfolded.

A new wave of discussion has already swept across the internet.

The League of Legends forum was in an uproar, with the screen filled with trending posts related to the World Championship, and new replies popping up at a rate of three per second.

[Where's NXG? How did my huge NXG disappear? I've searched the entire group list and can't find it!]

[Is the person upstairs just a casual gamer? Our region's number one seed goes straight to the quarterfinals, you know? The group stage is just an appetizer, it doesn't even need to be served.]

Honestly, JM's analysis last night was absolutely right. Riot's tournament format is seriously flawed. Why should the top seeds from each region skip the group stage and jump straight to the quarterfinals? Wouldn't it be better to divide the twelve teams into three groups?

[What's most ridiculous is that there isn't even a principle for avoiding teams from the same region in the group stage. The two teams from the European region have to fight tooth and nail for a spot right from the start. I seriously suspect that the NA region pulled some strings to suppress the EU.]

Go IG! Beat SKT!

[Royal Family... Damn it, I'm not going to cheer them on. It's too much of a 'punk' vibe, I feel so embarrassed (laughing and crying)]

Stand up straight! It's time to prove you're the world's second-best mid laner! (Just kidding)

[Let's not even bother proving it. The last guy, Mingkai, wanted to prove he was the world's best jungler at the All-Star game, but he didn't even get a ticket to Worlds this year.jpg]

[This fist-pounding is blatant; they're practically nerfing my NXG now, aren't they?]

[That's right, the early game damage of turrets has been drastically increased, making tower diving extremely risky, and even the dragon's aggro mechanism has been nerfed...]

The most crucial change, in my opinion, is the synchronized spawning of jungle monsters and minions. Early game invasions become much more unpredictable as time becomes increasingly limited.

I suddenly miss JM's tutorial videos. If he weren't so busy with the World Championship, he would have released a guide by now, given his update frequency.

Hey, you know what? At the same pace as JM's old production team donkeys, we might actually stumble upon some new content tonight! Let's not worry about it anymore.

[There's nothing we can do about it. Even if we thoroughly researched the new version, releasing it now would be like giving the enemy an advantage.]

However, the online discussions did not affect the established schedule of the three LPL teams.

Two days flew by during the team's closed training. After the LPL officially released the team photos of the three teams, NXG and IG, who had already arranged to travel together, headed to Shanghai Airport to board a plane to California, the host city of this World Championship.

On the other hand, Royal Never Give Up (RNG) team, whether to save money or for some other reason, directly rejected the invitation to join NXG and IG when they learned that NXG and IG were planning to go to North America about ten days earlier.

(End of this chapter)