Worlds Season Two
It’s 2012 and you’ve flown from Ohio to Los Angeles to watch America’s sweethearts, Team Solo Mid, attend the largest and most prestigious international tournament to date: Worlds. Despite their unimpressive showing at last year’s world championship, you believe that TSM, and the other two American representatives Counter Logic Gaming (CLG) and Dignitas (DIG) are going to crush their competition and prove USA dominance on the world stage.
As you wait outside the USC campus venue in the crisp October air, your friend Tyler pushes you to defend this position. Your argument is threefold. First, the season 1 world championship last year was not particularly competitive. Teams were bad, the games were barely watched, and America has done a lot of leveling up since their losses to the Europeans.
Second, this year’s tournament would take place at home in Los Angeles instead of stinky Sweden. Team America wouldn’t have to deal with jetlag and sun in their eyes while playing and can show those foreigners how they can really play. Home team advantage baby.
Third, the rosters of TSM and their countrymen on CLG and DIG were composed of the fourteen largest streamers in the English-speaking world and also DIG Patoy. Everyone knows these guys, so obviously they are good. We weren’t about to lose to some no-names from across the pond who say stuff like croissant and ja.
Your lecture to Tyler is interrupted as five nerds step out of their team minivan to cheers from the small gathered crowd. Their musty black t-shirts emblazoned with the letters: TSM. They can’t afford actual jerseys yet. Even so, TSM is a competitive team for their time. They had five college drop outs who could afford to rent a beach house in LA with a semi stable internet connection and enough space to fit five computers and several minifridges of coke zero. In 2012 that put you in the top ten teams in the country instantly. The Americas only had one set of servers located in LA. Any east coast team would be fighting through a 100ms + latency barrier. Moving to LA is typically not an option, given the lack of money in the scene. Sponsorships are practically nonexistent and the biggest tournament of the year (IPL Las Vegas) had paid out just $25k to the winning team. In summary, you needed players already in LA who could afford play video games all day, and TSM had five of them.
They were cool and quirky in a basement-dwelling nerd kind of way. They brought their favorite pillows on stage with them. They ordered chipotle a lot and opinions on the correct chipotle order became very big in the league community. They yell the word baylife a lot. They are quite popular. As they walk into the Worlds venue, the crowd begins to chant. T S M. T S M. T S M. They smile and wave awkwardly, but nerves are calm. As USA’s number #1 seed, they don’t even play for several days.
The format for the two-week tournament is comprised of two parts: a round-robin group stage followed by a knockout bracket. First, the bottom 8 seeds are divided into groups A and B who played round robin best-of-ones, top two advancing from each group. The four winners then join the top four seeds to create a single elimination 8-team bracket. Each bracket-stage match is played as a best-of-three, with the grand finals being best-of-five.
Ten of the attending teams come from what will in the following years be cemented as the four major regions: [1] North America, who has most money to throw around, [2] Europe, who has a larger player base and better racial slurs but less money, [3] China, who has the most players, and [4] Korea (**South if I needed to specify), who has the most existing esport support structures thanks to their history with StarCraft. Additionally, two representatives were invited from the ambiguous SEA region: Saigon Jokers (Vietnam) and the Taipei Assassins (Taiwan).
Living most your life in Ohio, you aren’t very familiar with any of these Asian teams. In your defense, there aren’t any accessible streams with English commentary and they haven’t shown up to western tournaments (which have still been very grassroots without the money and reach to invite eastern teams). Your ignorance and white supremacy can almost be excused. Unfortunately, you will soon be swiftly disabused.
With five regions (and five #1 seeds) and four BYEs, a draw determines which team had to pass through the group stage. Azubu Frost of Korea drew the short straw and was placed into Group A alongside Invictus Gaming (China), as well as CLG and SK (Europe). Teams from Korea and China advance quickly through the group stage, plowing through western teams without dropping matches except to each other. They are more coordinated, disciplined, and their individual player skill consistently outmatches their lane opponents. Both Korean teams advance with 3-0 records, alongside IG and CLG.EU.
Totally unrelated aside – at this time it was quite common for esports organizations to field multiple teams, hence the two-word naming conventions that will be common in the coming years. Most clearly, CLG Prime (NA) and Europe since both attended worlds this year. Other well known ones at the time include Azubu (sister team Azubu Blaze), NaJin (NaJin Shield). They had fun with it. This will become more relevant during the next two years.
TIMEOUT: Meta Snapshot
The metagame at Worlds this year is chaotic, which fits how amateur the scene still is. With no established best strategy, we see teams doing all kinds of things that look more like solo-queue-in-a-suit rather than actually distinguished professional play. Rarely will the entire draft of a team be focused on one particular archetype (e.g., dive-heavy, poke, disengage, etc.). Instead, everyone plays comfort picks that they personally like to use in solo queue. For similar reasons, draft strategy is focused almost entirely on target banning specific opponents’ pocket picks rather than getting rid of dominant generalists or flex picks. A modern draft strategy, involving of combining picks and bans to bait opponents into specific characters, is unheard of and won’t be seen for several years.
One common thread is a focus on early-game strength, particularly in the bot lane where Graves and the triforce carries (Ezreal, Corki) are used to get ahead early. While that can work, most teams aren’t really good enough to consistently leverage early game leads into wins. Given that everyone else is also playing the same carries, it typically ends up as a wash anyway.
Standout performers for the tournament include Orianna who ended 8-1 (though half of those were from Toyz) and Sona who ended an impressive 12-4 record. The latter likely helped by the rather limited champion pool at the time (105 vs todays 171), as Sona was one of only a couple available enchanter-archetype supports, and was far easier to play than engage supports for the (relatively) amateur players.
Looking Ahead to the Knockout Stage
Back in the crowd, the illusion continues to shatter as you chat with the more informed spectators near you in the stands, beginning to understand just how outmatched TSM truly is. While Taiwan’s TPA is a relative unknown and considered mostly ignorable, the rest of the competition is looking scary.
Fears begin with TSM’s first opponent Azubu Frost (AZF). The best team in of Korea for most of the year, Azubu’s roster is stacked with talent. Park “Shy” Sang-myeon is already considered the best all-around top laner in the world by the start of the tournament, and continued to perform during the group stage. While not a flashy player, Shy made few mistakes and could be counted on to stay relevant in any matchup, even when counterpicked. Unfortunately, the rest of the map isn’t looking much better. Hong “Madlife” Min-gi, the first support to carry from the role in league history, is having the greatest season of his life (and retrospectively, the strongest season of play he’d ever have). Lee “CloudTemplar” Hyun-woo in the jungle is likely the third best jungler in the world at this point, and their mid and bot carry players are still solid. The team has no weaknesses.
Even if they can pull off the miracle victory against AZF, TSM will still have a tough path to the finals, having to face the winner of World Elite (WE) vs CLG.EU. WE, China’s #1 seed, are easily as tough a matchup as Azubu. Gao “Weixiao” Xue-Cheng is the best bot lane carry in the world, defended by a frontline of giant meatheads in Feng “FZZF” Zhuo-Jun and Wei “Caomei” Han-Dong. Leading them is jungle shotcaller Ming “Clearlove” Kai. At this time, easily the second best jungler in the world ahead of CloudTemplar. Few players in this tournament would end up competing for international distinction for more than a year or two – well known in their time but ultimately inflexible and would fail to stay relevant. Clearlove is the exception who would continue to make worlds appearances for five out of the next six years until their retirement from play in 2019.
WE and AZF would also introduce the west to a new tech: freezing waves. Before, a winning laner would kill minions to push your wave forward to damage their tower. However, now once they gained a lead, they could walk forward and force their opponent backward out of exp and gold range. Then, by carefully culling specific amounts of minions, you could artificially create a draw in the minions fighting on each side. This would “freeze” the point at which the minion lines crashed to a point near safety of your tower forever. Your opponent would either have to step up and die or stay back and become useless.
Finally, god help them if TSM could make it past WE, a bear waited for them on the other side of the bracket. For as unlucky as it was to pull AZF for the quarterfinals, it’s hard to argue TSM wasn’t blessed by the draw by escaping the tournament favorites: Moscow Five.
The Tournament Favorites
Affectionately known as “Five Men; Nine Eyebrows”, the five Russians were a juggernaut from the moment they entered the scene earlier in 2012, entering Worlds with a 25-5 record for the year. M5 were a distinctly unprofessional team, even considering the grassroots, basement-dweller, group-of-friends atmosphere of the “professional” league scene at the time. They would build items that didn’t do anything for their character (like mana items on a manaless champion) just to show they could still beat you while wasting resources. They would stop and dance and teabag your corpse live on broadcast. They would use chat in-game to call their lane opponents retards with no skill. They got away with a lot of it because they just kept winning, and it was hard not to root for them because they were just so weird and entertaining. In their defense they were also quite creative bringing success with crazy builds (e.g., W-max tank ezreal) and high-risk strategies (e.g., pile five men in a single bush and wait in ambushes for minutes).
Collectively, the team would be known in the scene as:
- Evgeny “Darien” Mazaev: The edgy swaglord
- Danil “Diamondprox”Reshetnikov: The brilliant strategist
- Alexey “Alex Ich” Ichetovkin: The leader
- Evgeny “Genja” Andryushin: The creative theorycrafter
- Edward “GoSu Pepper” Abgaryan: The best at verbal abuse
Moscow Five’s motto was “we go in.” Most of the roster weren’t even particularly great individual players, but they weren’t afraid to try new things and never tilted. Barely make it out of lane, group up as one writhing mass screaming cyka blyat, and force chaotic fights over and over until they won. Additionally, M5 brought two innovations to the scene.
First, they had an excellent shot caller in their mid laner Alex Ich, which was particularly critical to their playstyle. These days it’s become standard that every team needs a dedicated decision maker (and typically multiple to cover different aspects of the game). Back then, it was far more common to have five kids with big egos yelling over the top of each other every play. M5 would wait for Alex to yell go, and go they went. His reputation as an aggressive assassin player helped (or perhaps, caused) his shotcalling style. Other teams’ shotcallers were either their support or jungler, since these roles had some amount of downtime away from their opponents that they could use to observe the map and think. Alex was a laner constantly fighting and didn’t have time for that. He knew two things: waiting to go in, and go in. Following his calls, M5 became the most aggressive team in the world and other teams simply could not hang.
Second, M5 had Diamondprox1Supposed to be pronounced “Diamond Pro X” but no one did that not even the casters, their star jungler. To really understand Diamond’s value, recall that at this period teams did not have very much money. There was no logistical or analytical support staff that players today rely on for endless replay analysis and strategy discussion outside of the game. Back in 2012, if you could come up with a novel idea to win games, that strategy could win you multiple tournaments before other teams were able to adopt and adapt. Before M5, the jungle role was very isolated on the map. You would kill monsters in the jungle until level 3 to gain access to all your basic abilities, then go help other lanes to get them ahead, clearing your own camps only during downtime. Interaction with the opposing jungler during the early and mid game was usually limited to cases where you both show up to help the same lane. In short, you got ahead of your counterpart by killing their teammates better than they could kill yours.
Diamondprox had perhaps the most M5 idea possible. “Hey, what if I just go take all his shit?” And thus, counterjungling was born. Instead of farming your own half of the map, he farmed his opponents half. Then he still has his half to take too. Now, going to kill the opposing jungler in their jungle wasn’t entirely unknown, particularly if you were playing a very early-game damage-oriented champion. But it was risky. It took a lot of time to kill another player and you risked his teammates coming to flank you. So Diamondprox didn’t go kill them and risk the enemy showing up. He picked champs that were specifically fast at PVE but not as good at PVP, characters that were previously considered low-tier. Then, he’d walk up to their jungler as they were about to clear their camp, take their stuff and walk away. Then they would go somewhere else only to find he’d already taken all of their other shit too. Diabolical.
I cannot emphasize enough how disruptive this was to the flow of the game that players were used to. Laners were not used to needing to guard their side of the map from constant invasion, and the big ego laners definitely did not want to leave lane constantly to go scare off Diamondprox and lose a bunch of money or towers to the enemy laners. It wasn’t uncommon for M5’s opponents to be playing a 4v5 after the early game because their jungler had been completed starved of resources.
Quarterfinals Drama: The Comcast Incident
The quarterfinals begin along expected lines. First, unfortunately for you, Azubu Frost clears TSM 2-0. While they put up a competitive game 1, TSM is completely shut out in game two after several sloppy plays in a row. On the top side of the bracket, M5 defeats iG in a similar fashion. While not as strong as their brethren on WE, iG was still a strong Chinese competitor. Seeing the Russians beat China’s #2 seed as their debut on the Worlds stage confirms what the commentators suspected going into the event: this was M5’s tournament to lose.
The other half of the quarterfinals brought some exciting drama for fans. First, Taiwan would take a huge dump on Korea’s second seed NaJin Sword. While definitely not as strong as Azubu, NaJin’s roster was well known, even to western audiences. Particularly their toplaner MaKNooN and AD player PraY. The matches look like TPA is playing against highschoolers. The gap is particularly large in mid lane, where TPA Toyz shows off his skill with control mages Ori and Anivia. His opposite, NJS SSONG, can’t do anything, can’t even walk up to play the game. Appropriately, Toyz plays with his food and closes out the series with a personal stat line of 13-0. As they grin at the camera following their win, color caster Jatt puts it best: “the Taipei Assassins have surprised everyone here but themselves.”
Fun fact, Toyz (pictured right) would go on to be sentenced for more than 4 years in prison for selling weed in Taiwan which it turns out is not allowed
The second, larger slice of drama came from the infamous WE vs CLG.EU match on the bottom side of the bracket. Let me set the stage by talking a bit about CLG.EU’s playstyle. The game was slower back then both for player skill (they couldn’t leverage leads and capitalize on mistakes as harshly) and game balance reasons (buildings were tougher, player damage was lower). While today average game time is around 25-30 minutes, it was more like 40 minutes back then. However, CLG.EU was notorious for playing particularly slowly, winning games through late-game scaling picks and incredible patience. No one better exemplifies this than their midlaner Henrik “Froggen” Hansen whose iconic Anivia (aka froggenivia) would throw down walls and delete minion waves safely with almost zero interaction. While Froggen and support player Mitch “Krepo” Voorspoels are considered top tier players for their region, the rest of the team really isn’t that good. However, they work well together, and much like their rivals M5, they know their gameplan and execute it well. It was very annoying to play against. We genuinely felt bad watching their opponents have to play for sometimes more than an hour. The downside of CLG’s playstyle was that while they were very good at not losing, they weren’t necessarily great at winning. While they could crawl back from deficits, they were particularly bad at leveraging a winning position. So, as players loaded onto the rift for the first match, we knew the games were likely to go long.
In game 1, WE banned several of CLG’s comfort picks and pursued them aggressively with pocket pick Blitzcrank, who was an excellent counter to CLG’s playstyle of retreating and stalling. The game began and ended with clutch hooks by FZZF. WE would close out the game “dominantly”, which against CLG meant it still took 42 minutes.
CLG didn’t learn fast enough, and let FZZF get Blitz again in game 2. After a quick hook and kill at 5 minutes in, it seemed like we would have another repeat win for WE. Clearly there was a reason no one played stall strategies in China – they had already solved it. WE followed up with a quick dragon kill and were ahead by about 20% gold at 12 minutes in – a significant margin – when… this happened.
USC’s internet went down. All players were dropped from the match, and the stream went dark. League of Legends was an online-only game, and the tournament was being played on live servers. Apparently, no one considered that comcast might suck in 2012, and they had set up zero contingencies.
After the internet (eventually) came back up, officials had to discuss with teams about how to proceed. WE and CLG elected to redo the entire game including a new draft. The downtime turned out to be long enough for CLG to turn their brains on and ban Blitz. Game 2 (redo) was a very close match that began with a chaotic level 1 brawl in the river. The fight ended in WE’s favor, which they used to catapult into a midgame lead. However, CLG kept stalling and retreating… slowly equalizing the game state. At 40 minutes, CLG would fake a play on baron before turning to catch Clearlove and FZZF who had stepped too far forward to get vision, snowballing into a 54-minute victory.
Game 3 was extremely tense, with everyone playing extremely cautiously. By now both teams had been on stage for several hours and no one wanted to throw away their chance at the semifinals. 40 minutes in, CLG had the map control and gold advantage but couldn’t get WE to commit to a fight. They kept trying to start Baron, but each time when they turned to fight the arriving WE members, WE would retreat and everything would reset. Each team would return to base to buy wards and restock on potions and then the dance began anew. The impatient crowd began to scream at every ward kill and boo the teams retreating. After 10 minutes of this nonstop nothing, CLG finally managed to take baron, but still couldn’t end the game. They were clearly afraid that any push into WE’s base would be an overextension, just hoping that WE would come out to meet them. At 59 minutes, CLG finally took a fight. It looked good. Clearlove, Caomei, and Misaya were all low, with slivers of health left. They might finally do it!
Then the internet crashed, all players dropped from the match, and the stream went dark.
It was now roughly 7 hours into the broadcast day and they were still on the first matchup. Officially, the day’s events were supposed end at 6:00 pm. It was now 5:42. And they still had both semifinal best-of-threes to play after this quarterfinal. When the stream came back up, the players, staff, and commentators were looking haggard. The crowd was going ballistic. After a series of arguments on stage, the teams decided to remake the game with the exact same picks, skipping the draft.
Game 3 (redo) began explosively, fooling those of us watching from our dorms into waking up, but soon stalled. All players afraid to throw what had become an 8 hour slog. Ward and cannon minion kills began getting standing ovations from the crowd. Someone started playing a trumpet. People began honking their car horns from the parking lot, which you can hear on broadcast. At the 25 minute mark, there was a particularly loud honk and
Then the internet crashed, all players dropped from the match, and the stream went dark.
Offline, things were chaotic as reported by attendees on reddit. Players looked pale. Riot staff worked tirelessly to keep people entertained, taking everything from the merch booth and throwing it at the crowds. Commentators interviewed random people from the audience as folks online waited to see what the fuck was going on.
When the stream came back up, viewers were presented with a simple wait screen, and a loop of one of the few music tracks that Riot could pay the license for, SILVER SCRAPES. With all stream staff attention apparently focused elsewhere, Scrapes would be played on loop endlessly for hours while IT staff tried to bring the tournament back online.2In years to come, League would begin playing the song during the transition to the fifth game of any best-of-five, as a callback to the event for dedicated fans. It became so popular that even today casters will refer to the fifth game as simply “going to silver scrapes”.
Eventually, DJWheat would come out to announce the internet was too unstable to continue the event. The remaining games would be postponed four days to give the venue time to figure their shit out. Discourse online pretty rapidly turned to “this is why esports will never work”. This event was exhibit A for how the entire ecosystem was unprofessional and run by idiots.
Bonus Drama: CHEATING SCANDAL EDITION
During the CLG v WE matches, WE Weixiao would be caught sneaking peeks at the audience screen. At this time, players didn’t have any kind of sound-proof booth or headphones, and the main viewing screen for the crowd was… directly behind the players.
So Weixiao would hear the audience start to get excited (knowing it meant he might be walking into an ambush), and just…turn around and look at the screen. We were all quite upset about this online but ultimately CLG would end up winning the series 2-1 when the tournament resumed later in the week. Probably the only reason it didn’t blow up more than it did. However, the scandal certainly inflamed anti-Chinese sentiment in the west for some years.
Closing out the Tournament
The much-anticipated semifinal between the Taipei Assassins and Moscow 5 began as expected. Game 1 would go to M5 after a dominant performance by Alex Ich and Diamondprox, but everyone played well. Clearly, TPA’s success against iG was a fluke. As it would turn out, Toyz just wasn’t that good of a Karthus player.
TPA would rebound hard in games 2 and 3. While they were not quick games, don’t mistake that for them being close. Toyz would carry his team to a 2-1 victory on the back of his control mage play on Anivia and Ori, with zero deaths during the back two games.
TPA would mirror the performance in the finals against Azubu Frost, dropping the first game before sweeping the Koreans in a series of genuinely uncompetitive stomps. Most TPA players would end each match with one or fewer deaths.
Commentators, the crowd, and those of us online were more than a little shocked. No one had Taiwan on their radar, including it turned out the Russians and Koreans.
The Aftermath
Despite the back half of the tournament ending in the way it did, without any hometown heroes to root for, pro League’s popularity among both fans and orgs had exploded. Official viewership for Worlds jumped from 1.6 million in 2011 to over 8 million in 2012, with concurrent viewership peaking at 1.1 million during the grand final between Azubu Frost and TPA. The event prizepool being a staggering (for the time) $2,000,000, with $1M paid out to the winning Taipei Assassins, would encourage the creation of new orgs and push existing semi-professional teams to actually make a push for future Worlds attendance.
Riot Games would see an opportunity to control all this advertising money and sculpt marketing opportunities by taking firmer control of the growing esport scene, in part due to the popularity of Worlds Season 2. With few exceptions (like Worlds), all international and regional tournaments for professional League had been put on by either larger third parties (ESL, IEM, MLG, and IPL) or invitationals put on by wealthier teams (Curse, TSM, CLG). No longer. Riot would leverage their intellectual rights over their games to stop broadcast of tournaments put on by anyone but themselves, killing them practically overnight. In their place, Riot would fund the creation of developer-sponsored professional league: the League Championship Series (LCS) under which all further play would mostly be contained beginning in the Spring of 2013. Performance in your regional LCS would become the only way to attend that year’s Worlds. While some extra tournaments run by IEM would be whitelisted by Riot in the immediate years, they would become increasingly rare, and eventually completely replaced by the LCS > Worlds circuit.
The Fall of M5
The great Moscow Five would be one terrible victim of the new format in the coming year. Despite their loss in the Worlds semifinals, they were still considered to be in contention for the best team in the world. Due to the BYE + single elimination format of the tournament, they had only played two series, and had thus only dropped games to the eventual tournament winner TPA. Though invited to participate in the newly created EU LCS (under the new and inferior name Gambit Gaming), the Russians would face a series of struggles. Games were played every single week on location at the EU LCS studio in Berlin. Moscow Five would struggle to commute from Russia to Berlin and back every Saturday. Even when not plagued with constant visa issues, players would understandably show up exhausted, jetlagged, and under practiced.
Another blow would come when, in 2013, the American government would announce the capture of an international hacking ring which had stolen more than 160 MM credit cards from several financial institutions totaling over $300MM in damages. At the time, called the largest cyber fraud case in history. Four Russians and a Ukranian would be imprisoned pending trial, including one Dimitry Smilianets – founder and owner of the Moscow Five esports organization. While M5 would put up valiant efforts in their first SPRING LCS seasons, behind the scenes the org would begin struggling with solvency issues as their financial accounts were frozen by the FBI. Lack of funds would only further exacerbate travel issues and late or missed salary payments would decimate team morale.
Despite all of this mounting trouble behind the scenes, M5 would still end the Spring season with a 21-7 record (2nd). Unfortunately, this would be their last high point, as the org began to fold. Their record would drop throughout the year, making one last push to the quarterfinals at Worlds in 2013 before eventually getting relegated and disbanding.
Happier Memories
Worlds 2012 would be the peak for a few players who are still remembered fondly.
- Madlife would go on to be known as the father of the support role, and his name is still eponymously used to describe flashy predictive plays, particularly from Blitz and Thresh players. He would play a few more seasons at a respectable level, but nothing like his peak in 2012.
- His teammate CloudTemplar would retire after just one season to become the most popular Korean League commentator. Even today if we tune in to the Korean stream and hear Woooaaahhhhhh! It’s him!
- Alex Ich, after a brief stint in the American LCS, would go on to work for Riot as a developer.
- Several European players including CLG.EU yellowpete and Froggen, M5 GoSu Pepper, and SK YellowStar would leverage their localized fame from this period to get fat retirement checking playing a season or two in America.
Tune in next time for History of LoL Part 3: We found God and He lives in Korea.
Notes
- 1Supposed to be pronounced “Diamond Pro X” but no one did that not even the casters
- 2In years to come, League would begin playing the song during the transition to the fifth game of any best-of-five, as a callback to the event for dedicated fans. It became so popular that even today casters will refer to the fifth game as simply “going to silver scrapes”.