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

Chapter 263 E-sports Zhao Gao!

"A true master must always keep the heart of a student."

Master Yi, the Sword Saint of Wuju Blades!

Even before today's live broadcast, many people were speculating that JM, the man who single-handedly led Wuju Master to the World Championship stage, would consider engraving the words "Wuju" on his championship skin.

However, things are not yet finalized, and no one can say for sure. There are many loyal players of Wuju Blademaster, but it is also a reality that their ranks are generally low.

They worried that JM might give up choosing the Sword Saint for other reasons, especially since the rival, Tanuki, was so beautiful.

They've even resorted to using real-life cosplay to warm up their beds—something those Sword Saint players can't possibly replicate!

Now that they heard Jiang Ming's definite reply, countless Sword Saint players in the live stream were overjoyed.

Several Riot Games executives who were in another room also started yelling.

Sword Saint is great!

Master Yi is so great! He's easy to learn and incredibly popular. If they released a skin for him, it would definitely be a bestseller...

With this, all of NXG's S3 World Championship skins have been finalized:
Top Lane: Nasus, Jungle: Aatrox, Mid Lane: Master Yi and Lissandra, AD Carry: Vayne, Support: Thresh.

"Thank you all for your hard work. We will keep you informed about the follow-up details regarding the skin treatment."

Mike stood up. "I hope to see you continue to have outstanding performances at the World Championships next year."

"Hmm." Jiang Ming remained noncommittal. "Maybe when NXG wins its second championship, you'll be racking your brains about how to target us."

"Haha, my friend, I look forward to that day. I promise you, I'll wait until you win a triple crown or something before I start watching you from every angle and taking you down."

Their parting wishes were very genuine.

Game companies cannot allow a single team to dominate the professional league championship. However, if we extend the timeline to ten or even twenty years, game companies would prefer to establish a dynasty as the benchmark for League of Legends esports.

By then, as long as that benchmark remains, League of Legends will still be the most popular online game in the world.

Mike felt that JM was the one.

After leaving Riot Games headquarters, the NXG team, having completely concluded all their affairs in North America, boarded a plane back home.

What? You mean what about C9?
For NXG, who still have the Summer Playoffs and NEST to play, the obvious choice is to wait until the transfer window, when C9's management will personally come to their club to discuss the specific contract.

……

Time flew by and it was now October 25th.

Just as the audience was still immersed in the joy of their region winning the world championship and their favorite hero being chosen as the subject of the championship skin, the playoffs of the LPL and OGN leagues reignited.

To be precise, OGN's season is the Winter Season.

Eight of the teams are participants in the Spring Season and have directly qualified, while the other eight are teams that qualified through the qualifiers. Each match is a best-of-two (BO2) series, and the team with the higher score will advance.

Case solved!
During Season 5, the LPL region's peculiar best-of-two format, where each team won one point and went home happy, was actually imitated from the OGN region.

However, other countries' playoff elimination rounds are all based on a best-of-five (BO5) format, but the LPL has not adopted this format, which is truly puzzling.

In terms of timing, OGN's winter tournament spans from 13 to 14, with a schedule that lasts for more than two months, making it one of their more important domestic events at the end of the year.

This also shows that the overall development of esports in South Korea is much better than that in the LPL.

Whether it was because SKT was really unlucky or because losing the finals offended the fans and also angered the regional head, the five guys who had just been thrashed 3-0 in the finals were immediately taken to the OGN Winter Season Round of 16 as soon as they got off the plane.

Jiang Ming was watching this game while preparing his team for the playoffs.

On the day of the event, the presence of many extreme fans from Korean online forums opened the eyes of Jiang Ming and the NXG team.

The contestants were competing on stage, while the audience sat below. Many people held up banners with the following text:

[A complete waste of space, down to 0 to 3!]

[A disgrace to the Great Cold Netherworld!]

[Can you provide me with some research material? Are the sharks in Los Angeles all vegetarians? They didn't leave you stranded when you swam back.]

Riot Games thoughtfully designed a jungle meta, nerfing NXG's mid laner, but you guys don't even know how to jungle. It would have been so much better to have sent NJ to the finals.

[A complete idiot who's good at domestic warfare but bad at international conflicts.]

The barrage of criticism from South Korean netizens was incredibly fierce. In comparison, the insults from domestic players in the live streams sounded like a mother singing a lullaby. The OGN region was already seething with anger because of their loss at the Shanghai All-Star event, leaving them with only two spots. Then, the two teams that snatched those spots proved to be even worse, compounding their frustration to the point where they were practically ready to throw water bottles at the SKT players on stage.

If SKT enjoys such treatment, SSO is naturally not much better off.

As a team that was eliminated in the group stage, the team was bombarded by fans who went to the head office and demanded that the team be disbanded and reorganized on the spot!
However, what hurt Korean netizens even more was that SKT, who were swept 3-0 by NXG in the finals, were probably spurred on by the NXG team. After returning to the league, they evolved again and started a bloody slaughter mode.

In the first match of the Round of 16 in the Winter Playoffs, SKT faced SGB and swept them 3-0!

In the first game, Koma drafted Ahri and Vi for the BBQ stall's jungle, paired with Renekton in the top lane and Caitlyn and Nami in the bottom lane, a lineup with full early and mid-game fighting power.

SGB, whose players were clearly a level below in skill and tactics, surprisingly fielded a weak combination of Spider, Kassadin, and Shyvana to compete against them.

Unsurprisingly, SGB lost tens of thousands of gold in the first game within 30 minutes, with all five players looking completely disoriented.

The second game was even more outrageous. With Faker picking Lissandra, he focused on the bottom lane and jungle, securing three kills in just seven minutes and dominating the game by over 2,500 gold. By the end of the game, the score was 17-2, a difference of nearly 17,000 gold.

Online, a post-match reflection from an LPL player who bypassed internet restrictions to watch the OGN Winter Championship went viral and became a trending topic.

Losing to NXG at Worlds doesn't stop me from going back to the league and beating you weaklings like spinning tops!

[Rational Analysis – Was SKT's loss at Worlds due to the weakness of their region?]

Royal Club, as the LPL's third seed, battled SKT for three hundred rounds, yet this strong team has never even reached the playoff finals in our LPL region.

As we all know, winning second place in the LPL (League of Legends) league is much harder than winning second place at the World Championship.

【? ? ? 】

Dude, why aren't we the champions?

[Hey, you guys don't really think it'll be hard for NXG to win the championship, do you? Whether it's in the LPL or the World Championship, they're a complete stomp against everyone.]

Korean players, of course, could not accept such remarks and immediately began exchanging insults with Chinese players.

As luck would have it, on the second day of the first round of the OGN Winter Championship, Royal Club clashed with PE, the runner-up of the LPL Spring Championship.

After the semifinals of the Summer Split were over and the results were announced, the OGN forums fell into complete silence.

Three to zero!
In the 2013 League of Legends World Championship semifinals, a team that was just one game away from losing to SKT with a score of 2-3, was swept 3-0 by PE, a team that had not even made it to the World Championship.

This left not only OGN fans, but also LPL fans and other players from other regions who had been following LPL matches since the end of S3 completely stunned.

Dude, is the LPL really that competitive?
In the three games, PE showcased three completely different and innovative lineups.

In the first game, the purple team picked a tanky Diana to counter Shenchao's big kidneys in the top lane, and a Nunu in the jungle to control the map, perfectly taking advantage of the jungle economy provided by Riot's new version. Then, the AD carry was paired with a Twitch, and all the extra resources were fed to the AD carry. It was an even better four-protect-one strategy than Royal Club, and they directly shot the entire Royal Club team to their knees.

In the second game, PE, who switched to the blue side, deliberately didn't ban the Crocodile. As a result, when Royal Club relaxed their guard, they picked the Desert Spider combo and put a lot of pressure on the top lane. As a result, Royal Club's top half of the map was on the verge of collapse in the first ten minutes.

In the final game, when Royal Club went all in on the early and mid-game with their lineup, PE managed to drag the game out to fifty minutes with their vision control composition and late-game "nuclear" carries Kog'Maw and Gragas, and successfully turned the tide.

The vast majority of viewers are not fans of Royal Never Give Up (RNG), nor are they unable to accept that a team that reached the semifinals of the World Championship would be defeated and sent back to the league.

But at the very least, it shouldn't have been a 3-0 scoreline.

This makes SKT's runner-up finish seem rather worthless!

[It's not just a matter of lacking prestige; I suspect that if Riot Games had given the LPL more slots, they might have swept all eight quarterfinal spots in S3.]

[It's pretty much over. The top four have three LPL teams, which isn't much different from the top eight having five or six.]

[LPL teams (faces contorted with rage, eyes bloodshot): Do you know what kind of life I lead in the LPL? Do you even know?]

[Waaaaah, we get bullied by NXG every day in the LPL! Just because we're from the same region, we're not good enough, we can't beat them!]

They bully us in the competition area every day, giving us zero points in twenty minutes all the time. Do you even know what the Linglong Tower is?

Everyone outside is laughing at us, calling us a weak team, a pushover, and saying things like "in esports, the strong rule, and if you're not good enough, it's no one's fault but yours."

They think they're so great, so arrogant, do they really think they can beat NXG?

[We still get utterly crushed by NXG on the world stage—but I can't take it, I can't stand this kind of life. I don't want to be called a feeding team, so we train day and night, hoping that one day we can defeat you and become the best in the league! ...]

【! ! ! 】

[Wow, this is the e-sports Zhao Gao, isn't it?]

(End of this chapter)