This week’s hottest eSports news and highlights for LoL, CS:GO, and Dota 2. Expect spoilers!
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League of Legends
- NA LCS: Immortals look like the team to beat as other teams struggle to have synergy with their new rosters.
- EU LCS: Fnatic and Origen, despite being favorites to dominate, showed signs of weakness as H2k and Team Vitality showed strong potential.
- LCK: SKT T1 lose in an upset against Jin Air Green Wings but should contend for first place. KT Rolster, Longzhu Gaming, and especially ROX Tigers show potential but they have only played against weaker teams.
- LPL: Qiao Gu Reapers and Royal Never Give Up show the most promise, winning all of their games while LGD Gaming continues to disappoint.
NA LCS Recap and Rankings
North American teams have new rosters with the potential to become great teams. Almost every team has at least one proven star player and, incidentally, almost every team seems to be suffering from coordination issues. The following tier list is largely tentative and is only based on two games per team. Nevertheless, it should give a good idea of what teams to pay attention to next week and which games to watch if you missed this weekend's action.
- Top Tier
1. Immortals: While it is true that they played against a Cloud9 in Hai-less disarray and the ragtag Team Impulse, the Immortals take the number one seed because of their fantastic synergy, clean macro play, and many mechanical outplays. Achieving the shortest game and 2nd perfect game in NA LCS history is a testament that this team is the one to beat in North America.
2. NRG Esports: Saturday's NRG and Sunday's NRG seem like different teams, with Impact and Moon coming in only for the second day. NRG has shown a triple threat roster in Impact, GBM, and Altec that will be a formidable force. - Middle Tier
3. Counter Logic Gaming: This is where it gets hard. CLG demonstrated great synergy and teamfighting in the first game but lost to Dignitas in the second. Inconsistency is consistent with CLG's history but, out of all of other mid-tier teams, CLG seems the most put together so far.
4. TSM: Team Solo Mid is a close fourth because of their sheer talent in their roster. Honestly, both of their games demonstrated that TSM severely lacks in synergy, shot-calling, and macro-level plays. It was only due to Team Liquid's fatal mistake that TSM is not 0-2 right now. Nevertheless, TSM has all the pieces to make a top tier team. Unfortunately, synergy is something incredibly difficult to manufacture and may not surface in time for TSM to regain their spot as the premier NA LCS team.5. Cloud9: The effect of Hai has never been clearer. On Saturday, Cloud9 was steamrolled by Immortals (a strong team in their own right) and looked like a headless chicken. On Sunday, Hai plays and Cloud9 showed the rotation and synergy that completely dominated LCS in the past. While that game was against Echo Fox, a Cloud9 with Hai is a higher mid-class team, and a Cloud9 without is a lower mid-class team.
6. Team Liquid: Having a 10-man roster makes it extremely difficult to predict how Team Liquid will perform next week. Saturday's Team Liquid was the most frustrating team to watch as the team ran away from any engagement towards their slow and painful death. Sunday's TL demonstrated why Team Liquid Academy's roster was hyped as Dardoch and Matt debuted with a fantastic performance. While the team lost, Team Liquid did look better with this particular roster iteration. Historically, Team Liquid has been debtably good but ultimately suffered from inconsistency and tilted seasons progressed.
7. Renegades: Renegades is a team with decent talent (with the likes of Alex Ich, Freeze, and Remi), decent shot-calling, and decent synergy. However, decent is not enough for Renegades to beat the top four teams. Seeing RF Legendary get decimated by Impact highlights a different class of player. Furthermore, Remi demonstrated a weakness in champion pool as her Morgana pick was practically guaranteed with the Thresh and Alistar ban. Some of these weaknesses are fixable but others are not. For Renegades to do well next week, they will need to prove that their talent and teamwork is more than decent but is world-class.
8. Team Dignitas: If Team Dignitas wins a game, casters are usually in mild shock and the team's players celebrate emphatically. Strangely enough, this phenomenon seems to occur quite often in the NA LCS. It is usually seen as a tragic under-performance from the opposing favorite team and an over-performance from the likes of Shiphtur and KiWiKiD. No one expects anything out of this roster but they continue to surprise. Therefore, expect them to take a game from top teams but not be consistently good enough to rise through the standings.
9. Echo Fox: Out of all of the other teams, Echo Fox has the most to work on. While they have more talent and synergy than Impulse, Echo Fox still seems signifcantly behind the other 8 teams. I expect Echo Fox to improve to the level of Renegades and Dignitas in the coming weeks. However, this will not be enough to catch up with all of the other mid-tier teams who will also have considerable improvements. - Bottom Tier
10. Team Impulse: The free win of the league. Team Impulse has such a little chance of winning that teams might be accurately judged by how dominantly they can defeat them.
EU LCS Recap and Rankings
Europe has four top teams, three contending mid-tier teams, and three definitively lower teams given this week of games. The following tier list is largely tentative and is only based on two games per team. Nevertheless, it should give a good idea of what teams to pay attention to next week and which games to watch if you missed this weekend's action. Notably, the EU list is less descriptive than NA's due to the more segmented difference between teams and less particulars with individual teams.
- Top Tier: All four of these teams demonstrated room for improvement. Nevertheless, they also all have the most potential to bring their rosters together to make a world-class team.
1. H2k
2. Fnatic
3. Origen
4. Vitality - Middle Tier: While these middle teams are decent and may take an odd game, they do not have much chance against the top teams and have little chance to perform well on the international stage.
5. Unicorns of Love
6. G2 Esports
7. ROCCAT - Bottom Tier: These last three teams will struggle to not be relegated and are in need of massive growth.
8. Elements
9. Giants
10. Splyce
LCK Recap and Rankings
The world's strongest region has shown some of the highest quality League of Legends games this week. Given each team's performance, here's a tier list of the top Korean teams so far.
- Top Tier
1. SKT T1
2. ROX Tigers
3. KT Rolster
4. Longzhu Gaming - Middle Tier
5. Jin Air Green Wings
6. Samsung Galaxy
7. SBENU SONICBOOM - Bottom Tier
8. e-mFire
9. Afreeca Freecs
10. CJ ENTUS
LPL Recap
Lastly, this week of Chinese games has demonstrated that the previously strong LGD and EDG have been left in shambles from the last season. So far, Qiao Gu Reapers and Royal Never Give Up are the most dominant. While Snake Esports and Vici Gaming show promise, China seems to remain hard to predict. With an array of top talent across the board, the team that figures out how to play high level League of Legends consistently and gain synergy despite language barriers will become the top team in China.
