League Analysis — Strengths and weaknesses
16 OCTOBER 2020 - by League Analyst
NA is out of worlds 2020 and it’s time to point out exactly everything wrong about the region. Soloq, ping, playerbase, infrastructure, the list continues. And sure, there is definitely a discussion to be had about these topics. Today however, I want to spark discussion about something else.
LCS teams in 2020 had some very clear strengths and identified them well, but what has been concerning is that most teams also had very clear weaknesses. One example of this has been FlyQuest. The team in many ways have a stable roster and bring some very interesting flare to the game with the addition of their support Ignar. But when talking about the team it is hard to avoid the topic of “Solo”, the toplaner of the team.
During the 2020 season Solo was “forced” to play weak side for the team and was often left out to dry whilst the rest of the team played around the other side of the map. One worrying stat showing the effect of this is from the recent worlds group stage where Solo averaged a -904 gold diff at 15 min. This playstyle has resulted in Solo usually being pointed to as the weak point of the team.
To be very clear, Solo is in no shape or form a bad player compared to his counterparts, at least in NA. But the position his team puts him in doesn’t exactly put him up for success.
Another example of a team with clear weaknesses and strengths is TSM, who in 2020 heavily relied on their toplaner “Broken Blade” to bring success to the team. His counter pick rate of 61% in the 2020 summer split is one clear hint of this, being the highest percentage out of any toplaner in the league. Arguably BB is also the biggest weakness of TSM. Because when he doesn’t win, his team doesn’t win either as he pretty much is the only win condition for the team. TSM ended their season with a shocking departure from worlds with a 0–6 scoreline after what can’t be described as anything else than a total collapse of the team.
The worrying trend is that teams in general focus to much on their win conditions, aka their strengths The effect becomes very one dimensional playstyles and weaknesses seem to never be fixed resulting in easy to spot “loose conditions”. I personally would argue that the ignorance and lack of willingness to work on these factors is one of the biggest reasons why we have seen big teams boom so insanely hard recently.
It doesn’t matter how well a team plays if they have obvious weaknesses, because when the opponents eventually figure them out, they are doomed to fail. FlyQuest who was mentioned earlier is one of the teams who managed to mask their weakness quite well with picks like Ornn and Sett allowing the team to “play bad” and still be okay. On the other hand we have teams like Cloud9 who played a heavy roaming style throughout the year, and when their style of playing eventually rotated out of the meta, we saw a total collapse of the team.
The point is that teams can’t ignore these factors, in 2020 you need to have more than one win condition and you can’t have obvious weaknesses if you expect to win against the rest of the world. If a team is winning with a certain playstyle, good. Now analyze everything wrong with what you are doing and change that, simple problem solving (it’s obviously harder to do in practice but the point remains).You need to be ready when it doesn’t work anymore. TL is the perfect example of this, changing their entire playstyle at worlds, realizing that their passive and controlled style wasn’t good enough.
