Chapter 175 (1)
The LPL region had always been considered second place, right behind the LCK. Because of that, not only CK but Tong Yao and her teammates all put in more effort studying Koream teams than European and North American teams…… They now found that they didn’t know how to handle a team like G4.
They suddenly realized that though LCK teams were the leaders in discipline, technique, and executing standard tactics; in terms of movement and the diversity of tactics…… they had to learn from LCS regions.
The play style of the LCS players corresponded to their ethnic traits, spontaneous and optimistic. For them, the entertaining aspect of even professional competitions was as important as winning the game. Therefore, they would use some high risk, high reward tactics from time to time which shocked the audience…… During this competition, teams from these two LCS regions often used unorthodox champions which no one had used before in any official competition. For those new champions in the current patch of game, it seemed to always be the LCS regions which developed new tactics for those new champions and start using them in real games-- --
Though they might not be very skilled in playing those champions, their surprise moves might very well catch other teams by surprise and defeat teams better than them.
…………………………….At present time, CK could be the one to face defeat.
G4’s mid, Bigboom, was a veteran player who had played from S2 all the way to S6. His career stretched over almost the entire span of the history of League of Legends. His deep champion pool and understanding of the lanes and Summoner's Rift were also unsurpassed-- --With such a mature player as the core of the team, G4 showed off the spirit of the LCS regions for the fans on this day.
-- --Four different tactics were used in four different rounds.
The choice of mid champion in every round could change G4’s overall game plan. In all four rounds, except the second one, CK almost had no strategy to counter G4’s ever changing tactics! CK only won the second round because they could tell that G4 was playing with a double carry lineup for that round and Jiang Yang stayed put at mid pinning the enemy mid to the lane and helped the team win through a rough round.
During the third round, Bigboom took Lulu to secure the safety of his own mid lane and also used Lulu’s strengths to support the top lane on several occasions, helping his team gain an advantage at top…… Their bot took the recently reworked Ziggs, nicknamed “turret destroying devil” as his AD champion, to create an unusual lineup-- --25 minutes into the game, G4, with Ziggs as its core, split into two groups, with 4 players in one and 1 player by themself. CK lost turrets in no time and quickly lost the economic advantage they had created in the early game.
Jiang Yang originally had the advantage, with three kills, but at this point he was pinned down and couldn’t initiate a fight even though he was still at a slight advantage left…… CK kept losing ground in the jungle and even let G4’s jungler, Arun, have total control of it.
By this point, G4 had total control of the tempo of the game. At last, at the 45th minute, CK lost its nexus after a hard battle…… Amidst the wild cheering of the audience, Tong Yao could clearly see the dazed expressions on the faces of the five CK players who had just taken off their headphones.
In the fourth round, CK’s overall condition…… Or to put in another way, the morale of the players had been crushed-- --Before this match, CK was considered to be one of the stronger LPL teams that could take down G4, 3:0. Now facing mounting pressure, CK seemed to not know how to relieve the pressure.
Tong Yao took out her cell phone to check Tieba. The fans all thought CK had the best of luck in the quarter-finals to go against an European team. Now faced with the fact that CK was about to lose this match, the fans were all moaning and groaning-- --
[Wait for a 3:1 loss…… I thought CK would defeat G4 3:1. Never thought CK would be the one to be defeated 3:1.]
[This time LPL will have three teams stopped at quarter-finals again. Very well, really strong.]
[When did European teams become this strong? ? ? Unconventional strategies one after another! Even using Ziggs!]
[What a joke. LPL, the best second region, was crushed by European nooby…… Oh, no, it’s not a European nooby, a European daddy?]
[Hahahahaha, just buy them. LPL is the richest, go ahead and buy foreign helpers. How about we buy Bigboom over next year! The only thing is we don’t know whether he’ll be willing to come here like the Koreans to earn RMB instead of US dollars.]
[LPL is always like this; copying Korean’s macro, copying Europe’s tactics, but forgetting that we’re a fighty region. At last, we end up with teams with mishmashed playstyles-- --No wonder we stop at the quarter-finals every year.]
[I see Butterfly and Old Wang look quite confused. This fourth round is probably a goner as well.]
[......I thought we had put the ‘nooby’ hat on those European teams already. Didn’t expect them to put it back on us at the quarter-finals!]
Tong Yao: “......”