grilled-montecristo-sixty_to_eighty

01:00:46
T:
So to talk about some of the actual teams from Korea, an obvious one to start with is Frost.  In Europe and the international scene, we all marveled at the fact that Gambit could never place below the top 4.  They always got these placings.  So the idea was even on their off day they were so consistently good they would still at least reach the semis.
  You could marvel at that, it was incredible, but at the same time they were competing in Europe, they were competing sometimes on an  international level.  But the idea is Frost made every final of OGN, this is the first season where they didn't, and they still made the semis, even here.  So they had this incredible consistency.   But in theory, in the most cutthroat scene,  where every season someone else is making a semi final, or making the final, or whatever, and you've had a few different champions, so what about this one team in the Korean scene made them stand out above all the others in terms of consistency?
 What did they have or what was different from the other teams that allowed this?

MC:
With Frost in particular, I think they were one of the first teams to really master teamfighting.  And in season 2 they could play a long game, and there wasn't as much early aggression at the time, and so that allowed CloudTemplar's less ganking/more farming/focus on teamfighting in the late game (to be) much more effective.  They were also very strategically sound.  I think a lot of that was due to Woong at the time.  They had better communication, better team fighting.  They got that because they'd been playing League of Legends for years now, they were playing on the NA server.  They were also, Frost and Blaze were two of the first teams... Onair, their coach.... they were living off I think Woong's dad is very wealthy,  and so he invested, this is what I've heard, is that he invested in the team.  They setup a very tiny tiny apartment.
 But they were really some of the first League of Legends teams in the world to move in together, and start training in anticipation of the professional scene.  They just had a huge head start in terms of a structured environment and living conditions, as well as I think their strategies were  optimal for that time period.  Because they had a huge head start, you have to realize too, that I've been watching Champions since it's first season, and the Korean scene at one point was nowhere near as competitive as it is now, before the KeSPA teams got into it and everything else.
  Also, I think the critical thing that happened in Champions Spring, was that we always had this crop, there's an interesting phenomenon that's happeneing in Korea right now, and started happening in Champions Spring.  Which is that we had all these old players who had been playing since beta, since release, Korean players and they just played on the NA servers.  Now when Champions Spring launch the Korean server had been around for just a little bit more than a year.  All of the really good players that had switched from a Korean MOBA called Chaos, or other Korean games, including some brood wars players, there's now an ex-brood war KeSPA player Grape on Najin Shield for this season.  They started playing when the Korean server was launched, and then it took them about a year to get their skills up, most of them.  So in Champions Spring we saw SK Telecomm Judgement day with Faker, who is just this phenomenal talent, who's very young, he's 16/17 years old.  So it just took that time, so now we're getting a 2nd wave of really high talent players.  Because it was like hardcore gamers from Korea played it in NA, then it came to the Korea general population, and now we're getting some really good up-and-coming guys too.
  So, that's also boosting the level of competitiveness here in the Korean scene.  But in terms of Frost's success, I think the other factors...  But frankly now I think Frost is on a downswing, and will continue to be for a while.  Because everybody else is catching up in terms of the infastructure they started with.



T:
So if we mention Frost an obvious player you need to talk about is Madlife.  So everyone, the consensus is that Madlife is very good.  Well, he's god is what everyone says.  He's a very good player, I think everyone in the world agrees this, but at the same time I think there are degrees to which people will think of this topic.
  Some people think “Well, he's god because he plays support and yet he's carrying from this position.”  So set it up like that and it sounds like because he's playing a weaker position, or a position that isn't used to carrying, so it's incredible what he's able to do from that position.
  But then at the same time, I've heard other people, there's this story that got out on Reddit recently, supposedly Woong said that Madlife could actually play AD carry better than Woong could but that Frost needed a support and that's why he played that.  And then supposedly  Rapidstar also had  said if he wanted to he can play mid as well and he's just as good as me.  So the notion then was this guys just a star player, but who has decided to play support.  It's not that he's just a support and he's always  been groomed that way.
  From talking to you, I get the impression that you actually think that Madlife is the best player period, forget positions.  How do you explain any of this from your perspective?



MC:
Well, I have said that, but it difficult to judge ultimately who is “the” best in League of Legends, that's just my opinion from being involved in the scene.

T:
So what makes you say that then?

MC
What makes me say it is that...  Part of it's watching him play.  I'm obviously saying he can carry from the support position, His mechanics, nobody can argue against his mechanics.  But what really amazes me about Madlife is his decision making.  He seems to know the limits of champions, he does things with champions that I didn't even know was possible.  He always knows that precise limit of what a champion can do in a particular circumstance, and then he hits that limit and doesn't die, or doesn't screw it up.
  That's so impressive, and also his calls must be very clear as well, and his team really trusts him.  Because if he does something crazy as Thresh, and he's like “hold on”, he just tosses the lantern behind him and dives in over walls, and then feeds Shy a kill or whatever, we've seen these kind of plays from him.  There's obviously extremely good communication and a high level of trust that his teammates have just to be like “when Madlife says go we go”, and then the follow up from that is perfect as well.  And as I understand it too, his ability to memorize cooldown timers is exceptional, he's able to keep a lot of different summoner and ult timers in his head, so he's constantly checking about that.  If you watch the way Frost plays, they execute plays mere seconds before cooldowns come up, so they will actually ride the razors edge of engagements which is really interesting.
  Finally, there is his vision control.  There's a reason Madlife is so good at Blitzcrank and Thresh.  It's not just because he has great mechanics and great decision making.  It's because he has a knowledge advantage because he has exceptional map control in terms of his vision warding.  The only other support, in the world, who can ward the map as efficiently as Madlife is now Mata, maybe.  Mata is very good at that as well.  But everybody else is second tier when it comes to vision control.  In a strategy game of course, the more knowledge you have, the better you are going to play.
Madlife is just a total package.  That's the crazy thing.  Lane presence, check.  Mechanics, check.  Decision making, check.  Play calling, check.  Information/knowledge, check.  Cooldown timers, check.  He brings so much to a team just by himself.  I think to a lot of less hardcore fans all of these factors aren't as obvious, they don't see the difference between when Madlife decides to play Blitzcrank and how he decides to ward the map and why that's extraodinary, they just see the plays in lane.  And in that case, sure, there are other great support players who can make the same kind of plays in lane that Madlife can, but they can't do everything Madlife can, and that's why he's so amazing.



T:
Whenever you talk about someone who is a genius level player at a game, not necessarily like a mental genius but in terms of how they play the game, there's always going to be this thing of “how much is just their ability” and “how much is something they developed through a method?”
  So I've heard these interesting stories about Madlife where he has all the timers written down next to his computer, so he can look at them and remember...  it's reminding him of these things.
  And then there's also this story that brought out that he uses a special client of the game where he can play Blitzcrank and someone else controls the minions, it's like a way of ultra-training beyond just playing in solo queue.
  Is this just Madlife specific stuff do you think, these stories, he's the only one thinking these things up?  Are Koreans in general doing these secret training methods do you think?  What effect could these things really have?




MC:
I think that having all the cooldown timers around his monitor is absolutely brilliant, because as he encounters them in day-to-day he will then instant know and it helps him for the pro matches.  It wouldn't suprise me at all if he did that, I think that that's a great training technique.
 I've heard the stuff about the client, I don't know if that's true about his special client where it just spits minion waves or someone else is controlling the minion waves so he has to try and hook Blitzcrank hooks through minions.  It wouldn't suprise me given the fact that he has the most accurate Blitzcrank pulls out of anybody I've ever seen, there's got to be a reason for that, and it comes down to training.
  And as for other secret stuff, it's really actually quite hard.  This is what a lot of people don't understand.  Even though I'm here, even though I talk to a lot of these players, the KeSPA teams are REALLY secretive.  They won't even tell you.    This is why Korean players don't stream.  The Korean players are so secretive they don't even want anyone to know what champions they are playing.  They give out as little information as possible.  So when you're talking about these Esports organizations that have been training plays and have their own techniques or whatever for many many years, over a decade now, I have NO IDEA what they do and they're not about to tell me.  They're not about to tell anyone.  It's all very secretive.



T:
This topic actually lead into another way I wanted to contrast the Western scene, EU and NA, as well as Korea and Asia.  This Asia scene that we think has some advantages over their head in some ways.  When I thought about the ways players have answered my questions in other interviews, when I talked to Western players, not only do they try and... Like I noted the mechanics thing, where some of them might have good mechanics but it sounded like they didn't think you needed to work on them or drill them.  As a result, you can see that on a level, the Asian players are higher in this respect, because even the best players are keeping that level incredibly high.
  There's also this element of how the individual player practices, so when we talk about having all these cooldowns of every element, he's already in theory the best support, but he still has all these things, he's putting all this extra work in.  I've done some interviews with other players who actually said stuff like “Well, that's not that different.  You know people in the west try to memorize cooldowns.”  When we think of overall strategy of the Korean teams, they have the very specific ideas of what the composition is going to do, and what it can do, and what out objectives are at each point in the game, Western teams are going to tell you again “No, no, we know why we picked these champions, and we know roughly what we want to do”.  But again, it sounds like each time they're trying to make a direct equivalency, where really it's getting a bit muddied as it goes over to the west.  They're sort of doing it, but not really a systematic approach to it.
  In terms of individual play and the strategical element is this the case?  Do you think that they're sort of doing some of it, but they don't have the precision in all of these areas?



MC:
I would agree with that from my own observations.  I'm not in the gaming houses day in/day out, but from my experiences with both Koreans and being in gaming houses in North America, and knowing pro players in regions all around the world, I feel similarly.  But like I said, it's hard to judge specifically because I'm not there all the time.  It's the impression I get.

T:
So when we talked before, not just the specific tactics of what you'll do to win one game but the meta strategy of how you're going to defeat...
  Actually, Scarra talked about this in terms of “You can beat someone conceptionally”, so just even the concept of what you were doing already sort of beat them before they did it, before you played out the scenario, because you had a better idea of what you were going to do in this scenario, and so even if they do something good in that case, maybe it doesn't work because overall you have the better concept of how to win this scenario.(Wot? )
  An obvious topic to go into now, from your job, is to talk about this OGN final, because here we had a team where on paper, okay Blaze from the whole season, everybody is going to put their house down that Blaze is going to win this final, it's going to go in a certain way where we're all expecting how it's going to go.  We kind of know the script, but then suddenly MVP Ozone not only beats them but throws a complete wrench in the works, now everything, the day after the final, the whole world just seems different from how League of Legends was played.
  Talk to it from, not just individually this guy had great kills here, but what was going on at a strategic level that allowed this team to just derail the team who were destined to win the whole thing?

MC:
How technical do you want me to get?

T:
something something something something.  (speak into the mic Thoooooooorin!)




MC:
I'm writing an article about MVP Ozone's season, so this will be a whole lot of repeats.  I talked a lot about this during the cast itself.  So the big thing was you have Blaze who is on a 13 game winning streak heading into the finals, the heavy favorites for the tournament definitely.  I said before the finals “I will be happy, I will consider this a good final, if MVP Ozone wins ONE game”.  That's what I said.
  So I believe that that final was won before the games were even played because the coaching and strategy was so in Ozone's favor from the get-go, and I've since talked to the MVP coaches, who speak very good English by the way, and confirmed a lot of what I was thinking about those games in terms of their strategy and analysis.  Blaze, before those games, both Blaze and Frost, but mostly Blaze, Blaze had displayed a really remarkable and innovative way to control minion wave pushes inside the game and slowly accrue giant minion waves.  That's been done for a long while, yes that's true.  But they did it with interesting picks that allowed them to have an enormous, nearly unbeatable, power spike past about 25 minutes if they went even with a team up until then, or even if they were down maybe 5000 gold, anymore than that would be problematic.  Blaze had developed a strategy over the course of Champions spring that grew out of the fact that they had pretty much resigned themselves to losing lane.
 Captain Jack and Lustboy had a weak laning phase so they said “How can we deal with this?”  We have Flame and Ambition who are just amazing, and Helios who doesn't have a deep champion pool but can apply lane pressure or some gank pressure with Lee Sin sometimes, but really the key to the wave pressure with Helios was Nasus and that's why we saw it banned in the finals which was one of the things I said.  “This Nasus ban was enormously important” and I think that went over people's heads a little bit because Nasus is just a jungle champion that allows you to control minion pressure better than pretty much every other jungler in the game at the moment.
  So then they would pick things like top lane Ryze, Jayce, Vladimir, these picks that really have, well Jayce doesn't have a weaker early game, but we'll talk about Ryze, he's kind of vunerable to ganks early on, Vlad is weak in lane in general until he starts to scale up, they don't a lot of wave pressure early on.  So you can abuse them with good ganks and roaming from mid lane.
  So we come into the finals and Blaze has a split pushing tactic that relies on late game champions to win teamfights, so they kind of just sit there and farm for a while, and try and put minion pressure on knock down some turrets, and then wait it out til they get to a point where any time you try to stop the split push they have a duelist like Ryze, and it will take two people up there, and they can just coordinate wave pushes across the map, and they're always going to take a tower.
  Ozone knows this and in fact Ozone tailored their playstyle in every stage of the Champions spring playoffs to brilliantly counteract their opponent, so it's kind of amazing, the level of strategy that went on from Ozone from the quarters, to the semis, to the finals.  So Ozone shows up in the playoffs and, this is what's brilliant, they also use a split pushing strategy.  So it's not like they countered split push with something else, they did it with a faster split push.   They read Blaze really well.  They let them have the picks Blaze  wanted  with the exception of Nasus, because Nasus' wave clear would prevent their own split push.  So they get rid of Nasus, don't worry about Helios' Lee Sin, and then they run this Zed mid pick.  I don't think anyone expected this because of the Zed nerfs, and they showed that with blue, Zeds CDR nerfs were actually inconsequential with regards to his ability to assassinate people, a single target very quickly.
  So, then what they did was they abused Captain Jack and Lustboy's weak laning phase again, and they picked some very powerful pushing combinations in lane, such as Caitlyn/Fiddlesticks, which is one of the best lanes if you want to kill a tower early right now, and got the kills in lane still because of either Dade roaming or DanDy's aggressive counterganking.  You'll notice too that DanDy pretty much just follows Helios around the map and just counterganks the entire time, he's not really putting pressure on he's just trying to prevent Helios from putting pressure on.  Dade starts roaming, they get the mid turret, they get the outer turrets down really quickly, Mata engages in some brilliant forward warding in the jungles, and there's just nowhere they're safe.  They accrue such a big lead they abuse these late game champions so much that there's no chance of coming back, though these champions like Ryze have a big late game power spike.
 What's funny to me is that Blaze must have gone entirely on tilt, because after game 1,  it was obvious their strategy wasn't going to work, and they didn't have a backup plan.  What was so funny to me about game 2 is that Blaze just did their own strategy , but moreso, they set themselves up for an EVEN BIGGER late game power spike.  They bought 3 tears.  The funniest thing is they bought 3 tears, which of course take time to stack and build over time, so they were in essence surrendering the early game.  But with how fast the towers were getting knocked down they couldn't do that.  The funniest thing too was Captain Jack and Lustboy get killed in lane and Captain Jack is playing Ezreal, and he goes back and buys a tear, while his laning opponent imp comes back into lane with a bunch of items after killing him that do immediate damage, and Captain Jack's just like “I'm not even going to try and touch you anymore.  I'm just going to try to stack this tear”.  That's the point that, after that game where Blaze is like “game 1 okay, we're going to play the slow.  We're going to light the slow fuse.  There's a big bomb on the end of it.”  And MVP Ozone comes and snuffs it out.  And then they're like “Okay, we're going to light an EVEN SLOWER fuse, with an EVEN BIGGER bomb, and see if you can get to that one before it goes off.”  At that point I think Blaze was so emotionally screwed up that they couldn't even win game 3.  Ever.
It was really gamechanging in a lot of ways,  because what Blaze was doing was already innovative and how fast MVP Ozone managed to counteract that was pretty inspiring.  I think that there isn't enough hype about MVP Ozone win right there.  In my mind and time in Esports, that series is one of the most unlikely series for a team to win, and not only that it showed such strategic innovation on such a short timeline that it was just a triumph of coaching.  That series should go down as a classic and people should have been more hyped about it afterwards than they were.  I think it was very important.

01:21:56