grilled-montecristo-thirty_to_sixty

T:
  So a few topics that have been referenced so far that I want to connect...  One is the fact that , an obvious criticism you will always get is that since you weren't a pro, there is the this level of instant validity that a pro gets, whether what he says is right or wrong that will always be negated if you're not a pro.  Someone will always say “Well, maybe he doesn't know what he's talking about”.  And then there is also the fact that, because you're trying to do the style of strategical thinking, that goes to not just one game and the specific things someone is doing here, but the meta strategy that builds on top of how that interacts with other strategies.  It means that you're getting into a very niche area like I referenced before.
  One thing <cut footage> know, or that they don't want to acknowledge, is that a lot of players themselves don't have this sort of knowledge, because they have a very specific knowledge, oftentimes limited to them and their experiences.  And sometimes their own experiences will prevent them from getting very very good at this, because what they see in their own games every day might negate the overall trend of where things are going.  So what I want to know was, how do you balance out going in this direction here, with... The problem is, I've seen a lot of your interactions on reddit or on twitter.  Oftentimes the problem will come if anyone who is not a pro says something that any pro disagrees with, because the fan will always think “Well, the pro must be correct in this sense”.  Can you speak to the disparity between these two positions?


MC:
  Yeah, it's actually really funny because I have a very mutually respectful relationship with many pros from around the world.  You have to look at it, there's only a certain amount of time in life.  The pros have to keep up their mechanics.  They have to practice, they have to scrim, they have to work with the same strategies over and over again to refine them.  In fact, that limits their ability to actually get a good gauge on strategy movement and meta change worldwide.  Meanwhile, while all the pros are working on their mechanics in solo queue, working on their lane matchups, developing their specific pools of champions, working with the champions that their team deals with.  During this entire period, I am literally just watching VODs from around the world.  I rely on the pros, like I said earlier, to feed me information that I would not know otherwise about subtleties and lane matchups, and in response I frequently find myself sending pro players VODs saying “Hey, with your player's styles and your player's champion pools this strategy might work for you.  Why don't you take a look at this?”  You know how often times the pros tell me “I had no idea this game existed!”  It's all the time.  So there's an interaction there.
  That's why I find it so funny that the western scene is now all hopped up on analysts, and everybody is excited when a team gets an analyst.  Of course, they should be.  Because, guess what,  the analysts job is the literally the same as my job.  It's to watch VODs from around the world and try to get a strategic edge from identifying weaknesses or potential changes, and maybe there is a popular champion in SouthEast Asia that hasn't caught on in the rest of the world yet.  You have to have somebody who is sitting there and who can dedicate their time to reviewing 10-12 hours of these VODs and saying “Why is this champion here?   What is it doing in these team comps?  How can it be used in different team comps?  Would it even be good against these team comps?  Is this this champion, or is this team comp, being used in a region specifically to counteract a region specific strategy that wouldn't work anywhere else?”  The pros don't have time to do that, they have so many other obligations.
  It just takes practice to keep up with the game.  And in every single other sport on the planet you have coaches, you have analysts, and these people are critical to success.  Critiquing a caster or an analyst who watches the game full time, or taking their word above a pros about certain things...  I don't tell the pros what lane matchups are good. I don't tell them how to refine their mechanics.  I don't know that.  But in terms of being debunked by pro players, sometimes it can be a little ridiculous with the community band wagoning, yeah, I would agree with that.



T:
  I'm going to lead into talking some more about the asian scene and this is going to be where very prominent, casting, analyst, et cetera.  But to generally lead in as a topic, I once read this story when people were anthropologists were going into south American rainforests type areas where some of the few tribes who were still cutoff from humanity or have only had limited interaction with the western civilization, still can exist and still can flourish to some degree.  When they would meet these tribes, and they would get to know their cultures, as they would get to know the cultures of this tribe they would find that they have an incredible culture without even written language.  They have oral history that goes back hundreds of years, they know everything about every plant in their specific part of the forest, and they know every animal (and) how to catch it.  They have an incredible vertical knowledge, the depth.
  But then the funny thing is you could say to them “Oh, it's interesting.  You call this plant X, but actually the tribe that's a hundred miles up the river, and they call it Y”, and then the peoples minds would be blown. They would be like “How could you know this?”  Because to them, they had no concept of horizontal knowledge, like knowning a lot about a lot of topics around and how they connected.  And this is the same thing we're talking about here.
  A lot of these pros are experts.  There are certain pros in NA, who with their position with certain champions, they could be amongst the most knowledgeable in the world, or how this particular interaction  takes place.  The problem is that knowledge isn't spread across every area of the game, because they haven't got the hours in the day to think about this way.  And sometimes for their role in the team, it might not having any bearing if they thought about the game in a specific way.
  In real coaching and real games, we have analysts, we have coaches, we have people who study film, and this is their job.  To condense information and give it out.  So when we think of the Asians, we've heard the stories about TPA had like 5 managers who looked at every little detail and they broke everything down like that.  Some of these stories have obviously been exaggerated or built up to be more than they are.
  Can you give us a realistic idea, if you think of Asia as a whole, and Korea as a part of that, really, what role does the analyst, what role does the caster play in this?  Is he just watching the games to give them feedback, is he directly involved in the strategy and the development?  What do you think of this?



MC:
I think it depends on...  I think that the role is dependent on a case-by-case basis with the team.  Some teams need...  Every team has different needs in terms of strategy, and some teams may have analysts who are just there to give the Clif Notes about information, some analysts like.  It's hard to say.  Let's talk about World Elite.
  World Elite has an analyst/coach named Erin, who has been referred to in interviews with World Elite as the 6th member.  So he's integral to their strategy.  In fact he was just here in Korea a couple weeks ago doing some scouting of Korean teams, coming to see and talk to the teams here, and then returned with that information to China.  I would say he's way up there in terms of what he does, integrating with team strategy and team performance.
  Then there's other teams out there that have analysts to a lesser degree.  I'm trying to think of one.  It's so situational as to who the analyst is and how the team reacts to them here.  Maybe old AHQ, they had an analyst and a coach named Scarecrow, who seemed like he was less involved with the strategic working of the team.
  It's also broken up into different things.  For example, let's take Reach with Najin.  Reach is a very famous successful broodwar player.  He's not there to tell the players about the game, he's there to shape their mentality.  He's been through the KeSPA training system, he's there to implement training programs he knows are effective.  He was made into a champion by his old team KT Rolster, or KTF MagicNS or whatever it was at the time he was on it.  So he has a lot of knowledge about keeping players in a good mentality,  how they should be living their lives, how they should practice, how they should analyze their games, because he's living proof.  So he's a unique resource that KT Rolster has whereas other teams  say, the CJ teams.
  They've got managers now through KeSPA, but before when they were Azubu, when they were MiG they had a coach named Onair,.  Onair is good about maintaining his players life, but he doesn't have the same insight into mentality that Reach does, but then he has other coaches underneath him that are specific player coaches that help with strategy and stuff like that.
 Then you have a team like SK Telecom, where they have KkOma, who is a former professional LoL player for Star Tale who is now the main strategy coach for that team, specifically for Fakers SK Telecom team, Judgement Day, which is now the only one.  But that's his team.  He selected that team, he recruited that team, he coaches that team.  They also have an analyst named  L.i.E.S. Who I think does more ktraditional gathering information and presenting it.



T:
This is something I wanted to bring up, you just mentioned that SK Telecom, what was interesting is that the key element of their coaching staff was with the second team.  So when we saw that SK Telecomm pick up their teams, okay,  initially the storyline is, Reapered has this awesome team he's built from solo queue players, and he goes and wins the IEM tournament, so that's the first storyline.  And then it sounds like the typical Korean thing.  “Oh, we have a second team as well”
 Maybe they'll swap players in and out, maybe they'll build them up, but actually from talking to you it sounds like they have the Reapered team, and that was the star player built his team how he wanted it.  And then the other team was a management experiment, like “We will pick the players, we've got our strategy in mind”.  And this, to people in the west, is an alien concept,  that players don't even pick who is in the team.
  I've noticed that in Korea in general, this either seems to be a trend, or a growing trend, that the management has a huge role in who goes in and out of the team.  That a player might be very good, but they decide they can get someone better for that position, or “he didn't live up to our expectations”.  It's almost more like a real sports franchise where they have cap space and they decide whether they're going to bring someone in or out.
 What do you think about this method compared to the old style, like we're thinking of in the West where players decide everything?  Can the management guys, presumably in line with what we said before about understanding meta strategy and thinking about the game on a higher level, can they really put teams together themselves, and put pieces in and out, as opposed to just players getting a group that they enjoy playing with, what do you think of the difference between these two positions?

MC:
  I think it's a much stonger position when you have a series of coaches and analysts and managers.   The other part of SK Telecomm that we didn't talk about is that they also have managers.  They have the same kind of “Reach style” people who have been in these positions for years, sometimes a decade, so they've gone through who knows how many pro gamers.  They look for things like attitude, work ethic, ability to be coached in the first place.  Because you're never going to  reach your full potential without some sort of outside perspective.  You can't just play in a vacuum and expect to be the best player ever.  No one has ever done that in the history of sports, right?
  There are a series of managers at SK Telecomm 2 who contribute to this.  It's a sticky situation, because in Western teams, I think, I know it's true with some teams, I think it's true with MOST teams, it's hard to say because I'm not on the inside.  But I have heard this is true from specific teams, that it is difficult to remove members because the sponsorships that they acquire depend on certain famous people being part of these teams in order to continue to get money.  That presents a lot of complications.  Whereas in Korea, the only thing that matters is the performance of that franchise.  SK Telecomm is like Verizon, or what is it, Meteor in the UK, or these other big telecommunications providers.  They are in for branding of course.
  Part of it is a difference in culture, where the Korean fans only care about winners, literally they will not care about you until you win champions or post some REALLY REALLY good results.  So when you have that in mind, SK Telecomm has been a franchise that has been around a long time.  When you've been around for 10 years, what matters is how many first place trophies across brood war, across any other games that you've been involved in.  So it becomes much easier just to say “This guy, not responding to coaching, he's sneaking out of the gaming house, <finger snap> Goodbye.  We can find another player.  There are always more players in Korea to take their spot”.
  When you create a team with a specific goal in mind where you have some sort of overarching philosophy or strategic guidelines or coaching guidelines, you can actually find players that fit that very well.  Not to say that it doesn't come together naturally too, because like people will gravitate towards like people, and a lot of the teams we have seen stick together in the west are because there is a system there that is working.
  But there is not the same kind of structure that surrounds it that continues to push people to be their best.  I think that the most successful teams, typically, there will be anomalies, but typically, will have the structure where you perform or you are out and the management, in conjunction with feedback from the players, will select new players in order to be part of that team.  I just don't see, in terms of infastructure, another way that you could make a better team.  That's kind of been optimized for a long time in professional sports.  There's a reason why it's been around for so long, it's because it works.



T:
  To relate it both to real sports, and to the western scene of Esports in particular, one of the key problems is when you do it from an organizational point of view, you recruit with something in mind.  I follow basketball, so when people are putting together their teams, when they lose a specific player, they will literally go to the the numbers.  They will go “Okay, so we just lost 10 rebounds a season there.  We either need a player who is similar to that, or we need two players who can play off the bench and they have this many minutes and they'll contribute...”  They even mathematically calculate it all so they know roughly where they're gonna be at, and what the potential is.
  But, if you look in the NA League of Legends scene, I've seen a number of teams... The obvious example is going to be CLG, because of the lot of recruitment that they've done over the years, where sometimes it looks like they make a recruitment because in a vacuum that player they think will be very good and his potential is very high, or they think he will work socially within the team overall. It doesn't look like they've identified “What was the one thing we needed from this position” and “Does that player fufill that position”.
  Because sometimes there might be a player who is not a star who could fill that one little thing that you needed, but if you didn't look for it in that manner then you'd always value the other player over him, the star player.  So if we look at CLGs history, they've had all these star players, but they've done these strange things.  They've changed their position to a totally different position where the player might never have played before, or they've recruited people where at the time it doesn't make sense, but they say “No no, in the future, this is a long term goal”, but then in six months it breaks down and doesn't work anyways.
 What can you say to this topic, because it's a radically different way of thinking about how you're going to get players.



MC:
Well, I think CLG hasn't had results, so if you're looking at it purely on results that maybe CLG should reevaluate how they pick players.  Everything is about results, right?  We're talking about Esports as sports, and I think that...


T:
As an approach though, not as NA in general.  Do you see this as the  approach (something something) taking?


MC:
  It's hard to generalize that from team to team, because some teams have stricter management than others.  It's not like KeSPA where all the teams have equivalent management here in Korea.  You're really talking about more of a wild west situation, where each team has grown organically in different ways and there's not an overarching organization like KeSPA that is controlling all of the teams.  It's not like the NFLs player association, or anything like that, there's no NFL, there's no governing body.  You can't even consider Riot a governing body either, because there are new teams in the LCS every season, so it's like which team Riot governs in any given season, whereas they can make these changes, and there are no rules about it anyway.  Okay, let's just get all that out...
  But in general, I think there are some problems in NA in terms of that kind of selection, but I think that part of the mentality behind that is that also, that teams, for whatever reason, whether true or not, I don't know, I don't know the NA amateur scene, may feel that there isn't a very deep talent pool for people in NA too.  So if they feel that way and they need to change a player, maybe they have to say “well, this isn't ideal, but this is the best we feel we can do given the resources available to us”.  But I agree.
  I think that finding that specific players that can fill your needs are going to be much better, like you were talking about with your NBA example.  It's like with any sports team, if you have a star player, and the star player plays a certain way, and he's really good at playing that one way, you just need to surround him with people who will enable him to reach that maximum potential.  That's how I feel about MakNooN a lot of ways in League of Legends, and certain other players as well.
  MakNooN looks bad sometimes, but it's only because he plays in an extremely bizarre way that is VERY GOOD when he has a team that can fully support him in that.  I think we saw that potential bigtime in champions winter when MakNooN went berserk on everybody and Najin sword just went on a roll.  I would agree with that, it's kind of a rambling response, but I would agree with saying...
  I do think  it's more effective to identify weaknesses and then trying to fill them rather than haphazardly have people switch roles or make decisions that from the outside can seem rather arbitrary.  It's hard to say, because I'm not privy to all of the inside information about how those decisions were made in the first place.  But from my perspective they do seem illogical.





T:
  Because whenever people will cite problems that one scene has compared to another I notice one of the problems is they never give any solutions.  It's always just “This is a problem” and it sounds like complaining because it's like “This is a problem, and so we can't overcome it”.  So I was trying to think of possible solutions.
  People have made these two claims, which is that the talent scene isn't deep enough in NA compared to Korea, because Korea has this incredible amount of amateur players who are very very good et cetera.  That's why they can't recruit these players from NA into the top teams, and then that just becomes a “well, there's nothing you can do about that.  There's just more players there, there's not enough here, so there's nothing you can do to make that happen.”  Because they're making it seem like an organic thing, there's just organically more players in Korea who are amateurs.
  But I think there's two ways to think of it.  Either, there's a component where because they are so quick to move people out and give someone else a chance who has potential in Korea, that's creating more pros over and over.  Now look at the bottom teams in OGN now, or the top teams in NLB, a number of those players used to be top players in the scene, but they're not anymore.  That's the point.  The players who have proven themselves when they got their chance have displaced them moved them down a bit.  And if they hadn't, they'd have disappeared anyways.  So it kind of takes care of itself.



MC:
  Not only that, but the displacement of good players from other teams has actually created better amateur teams because you take that veteran knowledge, and yeah, they may not be good enough for a champions team anymore, they may have been a weak link, or maybe they just didn't work with their teammates and their teams and were a perfectly good player.
  So when they drop down into NLB, like you see a team like former AHQ,  now Hoon's Good Day which is going to be in the next season of champions, they BARELY missed the champions playoffs.  But they had Hoon from Najin Shield, who had been there since the beginning with Najin Empire, went down, got his own crew of amateur players and then raised them up into champions to nearly make the playoffs and make a second season of champions in a row.  So in a way it's actually spreading knowledge to the amateur scene.
  Part of the problem in NA at least is there's not  a robust amateur scene like there is here in Korea.  There are  always amateur tounaments here.  NLB is a big deal, because, the great thing about NLB and I think the most fun thing about it is that it starts out as very amateur,.  Then the bottom 8 teams from champions last season and for the last two seasons have dropped into it.  So if you make anything less than the semifinals you end up in the NLB with a higher seed.  So the amateur teams go at it, they whittle each other down, and then you end up with a situation where effectively NLB is the thing that sets 5th and 6th place for champions. The final of NLB is effectively, since the bottom 8 teams of champions are all in there, you can decide 5th and 6th place that way, which I think is cool.
  That also allows an amateur team to start out and then effectively rise into the top 6 positions in champions.  I think that's really awesome and that provides a lot more mobility for amateur teams.  The amateur scene continues to grow out here too, so it's not like there's nothing regular to play in once your drop out of the highest league.  There's always NLB, there's always other minor tournaments as well.
  We're going to see a lot more of KT Arrows with MakNooN, even though he's not in Champions, even though he's not in NLB, he's in a tournament right now called AMD-INVEN gamExperience with a lot of the Champions teams and he'll continue to get invites to these minor tournments because it's a KT Rolster team.  They're recognized as good, they had a bad day, but they're still going to get regular competition and regular performance.  And they'll probably get a lot of scrim time with the Champions teams, certainly with KTB as a sister team, but also with a lot of the other teams because no one has to compete against them in champions.  So they're going to be an ideal scrim partner.



T:
  So if we just talk for a moment about Korean players in general, another one of the complaints that people will make is that people either try to say because Korea has so many players they have the luxury of being able to pick out the ones who are very skilled and then fit them into strategy and tactics, whereas NA is working with a few skilled players and then they're putting people in around them.  That's one way people describe it.
  Or people go the other extreme and they try to say “No, there's no difference.  The best NA players are just as good as the players from every other region and that it's the infrastructure making them look better.”  And so the implication used to be, and I've seen this a number of times, was that before the Korean teams had this super-duper infrastructure and all the coaches and everything, that skillwise when they would play in solo queue with NA player they'd be similar.  So really, they want to believe that's what gives the NA scene it's potential, or the EU scene it's potential.
  So what I wanted to ask you was <CUT> my best (agreet?) from seeing the people who seem like the experts, who know a lot about the Korean scene, like the inidividual players, is that basically to have good mechanics isn't an attribute like a skillset, like “oh, one of my skills is to have very good mechanics.”  You have to have good mechanics at a base level otherwise you just simply can't be a top pro, because there's so many people who have the good mechanics, that the other skills will be counted out, because some of them have strategic knowledge as well, or good team play or whatever.  Whereas we see in NA it is the case that people say “Oh, that guy has very good mechanics, but this guy has good strategy.”   It sounds more like one or the other, and they even each other out more.
 From your experience, is it the case that the Korean players as a whole, everyone has good mechanics?



MC:
  My observations as a caster are that in general, the Korean scene has a higher level of mechanics than any other scene in the world.  Although the Chinese are very close I would say, they're actually much better...  I would say Chinese mechanics and Korean mechanics are comparable, but that the Korean strategy is more advanced than the Chinese.
 But in terms of comparing it to North America, I think yeah, there is a certain expectation of mechanical prowess.  It's really interesting to me, I think the greatest example of this is LG IM #1, The first team with MidKing, because they've been known as high solo queue players for a long time <CUT> very good mechanically, but they've always lacked that strategy really.  They haven't ever clicked in terms of understanding tactics or being able to execute team compositions at the top level.  So they've kind of been in the bottom of champions, just like barely scraping in due to their experience and high mechanical skill season after season.  And because LG IM hasn't changed that lineup for a really long time, or not changed it much, they really illustrate where they were once a lot better and they have slowly slid, but it's not that they've gotten worse, it's mostly just that LG IM hasn't changed.  So I think that as the rest of the Korean scene rises and you saw people meeting the mechanics of LG IM #1 but then beating them in terms of tactics and strategy, LG IM started slipping out and having to requalify for Champions, even thought they're one of the older teams now in LoL in Korea.
  In general,  I would say we see the average skill level rising and I would use LG IM #1 as a benchmark of the Korean scene.



T:
  That's going to lead to another area where people are going to be divergent on how they read that.  They'll either say if they want to be defeatist “Oh, that's just because Korea has all these mechanical players and NA doesn't.” therefore again there's nothing you can do.  Or the other option you can go with is there might be an element to how the Asian scene practice or train where they're solidfying good mechanics or improving the players who are mechanically weaker.
  And I've actually heard some things about this, that's why I wanted to bring it up.  For example, In StarCraft, I know that a lot of the players, that's part of what you do in KeSPA teams et cetera.  You do a lot of drills, and you do a lot of things.  Just so that even if you're the top player you have to make sure that element of your game is up to date.  And it reminds me of real sports, because they'll shoot certain shots over and over.  Even if you're the best player in the world, you still do basic training over and over. You never take it for granted that I'm the best, so I don't have to do that.   That does seem to be a mentality in the West, where if you're already very good, you just keep your skills in check, but you don't have to grind away at it like that.
  Is it true that they have more specific training in that sense in Korea?



MC:
As far as I know they do.  I'm not sure about the intricacies or particular drills that they do for League of Legends, I just don't know.  But I would say that having two teams allows you to drill very easily, just from a theoretical perspective, because then you have two midlaners to drill against each other,  you have two bot lane duos to drill against each other.  In other regions where you don't have two teams that at a drop of a hat<finger snap>can just start drills, you can't just..  When you live separately with other teams, when you're competing with them or against them rather on a wek to week basis.
  There's something really valuable about being able for your coach to get you out of bed in the morning, serve you a healthy breakfast, and say “Okay, drill time.  We're on CJ Eentus”  For example, CJ Entus is a great team to talk about this, because they have Space and Muse, now we see Korean teams expanding their gaming houses to people who are substitutes, or even players who aren't substitutes in Korean houses who are top level solo queue players who are only there to drill.  I know this is true.
  In fact, MVP had CrumbleCookies one of the most notorious solo queue players in Korea for his raging, he was in the MVP house for a while before they actually announced him recently, and now they announced he's not going to be in the house anymore, but he was there for a long time just running drills against the players.  That was his entire purpose in the team house.  But when you're on CJ Entus, you say, okay, we have Space and Muse,  we got 7 guys on Frost, and then they're going to drill against Madlife and Hermes, and then they can all drill against Captain Jack and Lustboy.  You just send them in there right after they wake up, warm 'em up with drills, say okay, try trading in bot lane, try Csing under these conditions, you're going to play this duo pair<left hand>, you're going to play this duo pair<right hand>, now go at it.  And then you also have them constantly sharing their information about how to play champions, I think that it just increases mechanical skill significantly.   You don't have to wait for a scrim.
  I think that a lot of the problems in other parts of the world come from the fact that when you don't have two teams living together, you have to wait so...  there like, you have to sit on the internet, and like some guys eating lunch, and then you have to wait for him to get back, or everybody takes a bathroom break, and some guys goes on to check his e-mail in the other house, you can't control both schedules at the same time, and so that makes it very difficult to train as efficiently as possible.
  Which, considering that EVERY single team in Champion last season had a sister team, I think is just increasing the competitiveness of the scene in general, makes that drilling and really raises the mechanics.  And then once you have the mechanics of those players, then they go into solo queue,  and that raises the mechanical level of all the players in solo queue too, because everyone else is just racing to catch up.  There's also a model too, there's something to aspire towards. You can't get to the top of solo queue unless you have better mechanics than Shy.