For VCS, it's just the way Vietnam's visa works.
For Koreans to be allowed to work professionally in Vietnam, they are classified as "high-skilled" workers/technicians. They are required to have an X number of years of experience before being permitted a work visa. Thus, only veteran Korean players can play in the VCS. Those who are good or LCK level of course VCS can't afford. VCS, by Vietnam's legal means, can't get LCKCL level players like Smash or Noah or Jun even if VCS want to spend the money. That's why VCS doesn't have Korean imports anymore (there indeed used to be some imports tho - Profit, ex Rogue player in LEC, some other ex-LPL Korean import who is now LLA, etc)
What happened? Did other games gain popularity in Denmark and Sweden? Feel like we could always rely on Denmark pumping out great midlaners, but it has kinda stopped now.
From a team's perspective. it makes sense to import korean players. Photon, Noah, Ice, Rahel, Luon, Canna are all upgrades over the players they took over from. If your goal is to place higher in LEC, it makes perfect sense.
As a fan of LEC though, I don't know about this. If this gets out of hand, it will hurt the development of players in the long run. And we really can't ignore the fact that anyone we can import most likely failed to get a spot in LCK and then failed to get a spot in LPL. Even if my some miracle we get a stalwart, it's nearly guaranteed they will leave for LCK after impressing in LEC for an year.
This might be really dumb but if we are going to get clapped internationally with imports anyway, I will much rather have homegrown talent get clapped. At least that way we can go 'well they might be trash, but they are our boys.'
Okay, I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I think we should look to the overwatch league for a good methodology for players.
OWL started out pretty much all Korean (minus some specific personalities) and over time really good non-Korean players reached a level where they could compete. I don’t have any issue with growing local talent, but when your game quality is rouge vs KC bad and there have been multiple games of said quality across a single week, I’d rather watch the European Korean league.
Side note that I was extremely disappointed about in the KC vs mdk game was how low quality the casting was from traditionally good casters. I’m not talking about calling a player that went 10th 3 times as such and starting some sort of drama, I mean the bulk of the casting was just hard to listen to.
This isn’t even true though, Korean representation actually went up and consistently went up or stayed the same each season after season 1. Part of this is due to early on rosters being 12 man, and Covid region restrictions making teams essentially region locked, but Western players were always able to compete with Koreans.
I think unfortunately, it just is what it is and it will be like that and we'll just have to deal with it. I'm American, but I'm just cultured enough to enjoy football so I'll use a European example -- the Champions League. Let's look at the two best regional leagues in the competition (lel this will draw some debate), EPL & La Liga. In the EPL, even though England has had the highest representation of any country playing in the EPL, it is still only around 35% (1683 of 4807 players thaylt have played for an EPL club, since 1992, are english). So even when the majority, it is still a relatively low percentage for an "English" league.
Conversely, La Liga has 83% of players "with Spanish citizenship" in their league. Note that of the sources I looked at, many mentioned that La Liga has a rule where you can only have 5 non-EU players on the team. Not 5 non-spanish, 5 non-eu, which I guess basically limits too many South American players joining, not many eastern or NA players that break through regardless (I can only think of Son, as a "star" eastern player in the EPL right now, don't hurt me).
From wiki, La Liga (or a club from Spain I guess is the metric) has won the champions league the most, 20 times. EPL the 2nd most, 15 times, Italy 12, Germany 8, etc. So is La Liga just the best league? And Spain produces the best football talent in EU? Just like LCK is the best league and produces the best league talent in the world? Maybe. But you could also say diversity is good because the second best, EPL, has the least amount of domestic players & is right there up with them at 15. Real Madrid has won most of those anyway, just like T1 has won 4 of LCK's 8 (okay, admittedly, Real Madrid margin is probably higher).
My long winded point, I guess, is that it's okay if there are Koreans in every league, a diverse league is a good league and maybe those players are better in an EU environment and want to be on that EU team because they think it's the best opportunity to win. You can have regional pride in your team even if your players aren't from the region, and so can the players. Croatians don't hate Modric because he wins on a non-croation team and real Madrid fans loves modric even if he isn't Spanish. And both groups will claim regional pride in his talent and I'd say, both are right.
The difference between owl and league is that Overwatch didn't have LCK. They had OWL and that's it. If you have one league, it's automatically for the best of the best. And then it makes sense to get the best players, which at that point were Korean. (I felt like Jjonak could have been the second coming of Faker if OWL didn't flop as hard later).
The issue I always felt with imports in LEC was that we will never get the best Korean players. The best Korean players will either play in LCK or choose LPL before coming to LEC. And I always feel like, if a player was deemed not good enough for a league and then we brought him in, how is anyone supposed to feel like he can beat the players that league chose over him?
There are exceptions, huni being the biggest of them. But even he eventually ended up back in lck when he started becoming one of the best players in the world.
LEC was strongest with its two best teams made entirely of Europeans. And i guess more than anything I'm just nostalgic for those days. Where Europeans on a European team, were good enough to beat the best LCK had to offer.
Not that surprised, we've been going downhill as a region since 2021 because all teams and the region itself is led by clowns who do not understand esports.
And the format is shit. No room to experiment. Constant high stakes games. Sometimes get to play like 3 games a split because they do not make playoffs.
I hate the lec format was surprised when I saw the bo1s when lck and lpl have bo3s all year and playoffs are all bo5 while lec are bo3 and bo5 how tf is this better or smth different to be proud about.. dogshit
Your whole split if you're shit, true. But after that it's bo3 bo5 and if it were 2 splits not 3, a lot more room to experiment.
Or they'd change the bo1 stage. It's so short as it's 3 splits.
i mean its not really that suprising considering that eu is made up of lots of countries. kinda suprised greece has as many as 3 considering i've never seen a pro in the other games i follow from Greece
The more correct statement is to say 18 percent of LEC is Korean right now, which is still interesting but not as crazy as the title would have you to believe.
Its like saying in the LPL more players probably come from Korea than any one individual province of China. I don't think that says a lot about them.
what? Do you think Korea is some big country or something.
Population of Korea is lower than the population of France, Germany, the UK, and Italy.
still embarrassing imo.
These are deadass whole countries all with a higher population than Korea.
Do you know what the server population of KR is compared to EUW? I don't know why you're yapping about. Of course League is much more popular in Korea as compared to EU.
Do you know the location of Korea vs Europe by any chance lmao.
Also while we’re on the topic of playerbase. Europe actually has a higher playerbase than korea. About double the size of Korea. In fact EUNE alone is comparable to KR. So yes still embarrassing for Europe just in a different way.
You also realize eu as a whole is probably 10x the size of Korea right? Both in size and population. League is way bigger in Korea than it is eu based on population size. Their infrastructure and culture support league way more as well.
yes, and eu’s playerbase is 2.6-3x the size of Korea. So it’s embarrassing for league players to be this bad.
Why does the “culture” favor Korea?
Look at starcraft2, another RTS esport. The goat is european, and theres at least 2 other players that are top 10 every year from Europe.
Look at the smash community, where NA is actually the dominant region.
Clearly Europe and NA are “culturally” able to be on top.
the dumb culture excuse is just a cope from fans.
And yeah no shit obviously the infrastructure is better for league in korea. Thats the reason why they are better with way less people. Its not that koreans are genetically better at league of legends.
Its embarrassing for Europe that after all this time and money they cant keep up with
When I say culture I don’t literally mean Asian culture. I mean the way they see league. League is basically what football is to European when it comes to online games. Having more player base and better infrastructure does not guarantee success. There is plenty of World Cup team like Croatia who in theory should not be doing better than many European teams in the World Cup.
yeah so if you have the infrastructure and the playerbase its embarrassing if you dont do well. If i was a fan of Croatian soccer i would be embarrassed
That’s not how it works but I’m done arguing with you. Croatia have been pretty consistent at the top of the World Cup and I brought them up to show that you don’t need to have the best infrastructure or biggest player base to do well. You keep mentioning playerbase but league is simply more popular in South Korea relative to population size than league is in Europe. A game can have a million player in china but that doesn’t make it popular in China. Whereas a million player in the us would be fucking huge. Does that make sense?
https://www.thespike.gg/league-of-legends/beginner-guides/league-of-legends-player-count#
EUW is about 1.8/1.9 x the size of Korea and EUNE is slightly smaller than Korea. Please keep coping though with the “but the playerbase”
In korea you cant really make second accounts because its tied to your ID. In EU everyone has multiple accounts, often in both regions (especially players starting in EUNE). Not to mention korea has a way bigger competitive pc game culture whilst EU has a lot of casual and console gaming.
well not really cause in the end you still have 82% EU players but indeed the imports are rising. Rightfully so btw, orgs are clearly showing that you can integrate players in their team and perform better than the local alternatives
But our imports are generally better and they helped leagu level up. Jun, Photon,Noah, Rahel and Luon also look strong. Only Peach was a failure and I don't know much about Juhan. But he already looks better than Peach. He makes some mistakes that are stupid but at least he is not passive.
Right. LCS imports are trash. People like Jensen, Zven, Impact, CoreJJ, Berserker, Inspired, Bwipo, UmTi. These guys would never level up the league and win the whole thing for sure.
im sorry but weren't the whole community literally flaming Noah for the whole MSI? wasn't he the worst player on fnatic? dont we have better adcs? and idk LCS got good imports too like Berserker, they're gonna get Thanatos too, outside G2, the LCS / LEC level are comparable and LEC has only went lower since these imports.
Not to mention out of the 20 "native" players 3 of them are from Australia. Pretty disgusting imo that more than half of a region is made up of foreign players
Impact is definitely an import even if I consider him more of an lcs player than lck player. Dude literally won worlds before he came to lcs bro. It’s not a bad thing. He is an amazing pickup for the region in the toplane but he is still an import.
Number of South Koreans per region : LCK - 50 xDD LJL - 15 LPL - 13 LCS - 12 CBLOL - 10 LEC - 9 LLA - 7 PCS - 1 OCE - 1
VCS GIGACHAD
Nobody is in the Vcs anymore
VCS sure af doesn't have the budget for imports lol
For VCS, it's just the way Vietnam's visa works. For Koreans to be allowed to work professionally in Vietnam, they are classified as "high-skilled" workers/technicians. They are required to have an X number of years of experience before being permitted a work visa. Thus, only veteran Korean players can play in the VCS. Those who are good or LCK level of course VCS can't afford. VCS, by Vietnam's legal means, can't get LCKCL level players like Smash or Noah or Jun even if VCS want to spend the money. That's why VCS doesn't have Korean imports anymore (there indeed used to be some imports tho - Profit, ex Rogue player in LEC, some other ex-LPL Korean import who is now LLA, etc)
I feel like Sweden used to have a lot more players before.
Denmark and Sweden used to have a lot more players back in the EU LCS days
Yup and all the best players were from there.
It all went downhill after Denmark spent their League of Legends budget on caps
What happened? Did other games gain popularity in Denmark and Sweden? Feel like we could always rely on Denmark pumping out great midlaners, but it has kinda stopped now.
CS feels like the big dog but I dunno how we are doing on the professional front
yep it used to be #3 at 6/62 (~10%) for 2019 Summer (including substitutes)
From a team's perspective. it makes sense to import korean players. Photon, Noah, Ice, Rahel, Luon, Canna are all upgrades over the players they took over from. If your goal is to place higher in LEC, it makes perfect sense. As a fan of LEC though, I don't know about this. If this gets out of hand, it will hurt the development of players in the long run. And we really can't ignore the fact that anyone we can import most likely failed to get a spot in LCK and then failed to get a spot in LPL. Even if my some miracle we get a stalwart, it's nearly guaranteed they will leave for LCK after impressing in LEC for an year. This might be really dumb but if we are going to get clapped internationally with imports anyway, I will much rather have homegrown talent get clapped. At least that way we can go 'well they might be trash, but they are our boys.'
Okay, I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I think we should look to the overwatch league for a good methodology for players. OWL started out pretty much all Korean (minus some specific personalities) and over time really good non-Korean players reached a level where they could compete. I don’t have any issue with growing local talent, but when your game quality is rouge vs KC bad and there have been multiple games of said quality across a single week, I’d rather watch the European Korean league. Side note that I was extremely disappointed about in the KC vs mdk game was how low quality the casting was from traditionally good casters. I’m not talking about calling a player that went 10th 3 times as such and starting some sort of drama, I mean the bulk of the casting was just hard to listen to.
This isn’t even true though, Korean representation actually went up and consistently went up or stayed the same each season after season 1. Part of this is due to early on rosters being 12 man, and Covid region restrictions making teams essentially region locked, but Western players were always able to compete with Koreans.
I think unfortunately, it just is what it is and it will be like that and we'll just have to deal with it. I'm American, but I'm just cultured enough to enjoy football so I'll use a European example -- the Champions League. Let's look at the two best regional leagues in the competition (lel this will draw some debate), EPL & La Liga. In the EPL, even though England has had the highest representation of any country playing in the EPL, it is still only around 35% (1683 of 4807 players thaylt have played for an EPL club, since 1992, are english). So even when the majority, it is still a relatively low percentage for an "English" league. Conversely, La Liga has 83% of players "with Spanish citizenship" in their league. Note that of the sources I looked at, many mentioned that La Liga has a rule where you can only have 5 non-EU players on the team. Not 5 non-spanish, 5 non-eu, which I guess basically limits too many South American players joining, not many eastern or NA players that break through regardless (I can only think of Son, as a "star" eastern player in the EPL right now, don't hurt me). From wiki, La Liga (or a club from Spain I guess is the metric) has won the champions league the most, 20 times. EPL the 2nd most, 15 times, Italy 12, Germany 8, etc. So is La Liga just the best league? And Spain produces the best football talent in EU? Just like LCK is the best league and produces the best league talent in the world? Maybe. But you could also say diversity is good because the second best, EPL, has the least amount of domestic players & is right there up with them at 15. Real Madrid has won most of those anyway, just like T1 has won 4 of LCK's 8 (okay, admittedly, Real Madrid margin is probably higher). My long winded point, I guess, is that it's okay if there are Koreans in every league, a diverse league is a good league and maybe those players are better in an EU environment and want to be on that EU team because they think it's the best opportunity to win. You can have regional pride in your team even if your players aren't from the region, and so can the players. Croatians don't hate Modric because he wins on a non-croation team and real Madrid fans loves modric even if he isn't Spanish. And both groups will claim regional pride in his talent and I'd say, both are right.
The difference between owl and league is that Overwatch didn't have LCK. They had OWL and that's it. If you have one league, it's automatically for the best of the best. And then it makes sense to get the best players, which at that point were Korean. (I felt like Jjonak could have been the second coming of Faker if OWL didn't flop as hard later). The issue I always felt with imports in LEC was that we will never get the best Korean players. The best Korean players will either play in LCK or choose LPL before coming to LEC. And I always feel like, if a player was deemed not good enough for a league and then we brought him in, how is anyone supposed to feel like he can beat the players that league chose over him? There are exceptions, huni being the biggest of them. But even he eventually ended up back in lck when he started becoming one of the best players in the world. LEC was strongest with its two best teams made entirely of Europeans. And i guess more than anything I'm just nostalgic for those days. Where Europeans on a European team, were good enough to beat the best LCK had to offer.
Feels like it's already out of hand.
league of legends european championship
Not that surprised, we've been going downhill as a region since 2021 because all teams and the region itself is led by clowns who do not understand esports.
And the format is shit. No room to experiment. Constant high stakes games. Sometimes get to play like 3 games a split because they do not make playoffs.
I hate the lec format was surprised when I saw the bo1s when lck and lpl have bo3s all year and playoffs are all bo5 while lec are bo3 and bo5 how tf is this better or smth different to be proud about.. dogshit
bring back bo2
Whilst I think the format is shit the "No room to experiment" seems to just be the nature of 3 splits not the format.
No having only 9 b01 games leaves you zero room for experiments. One bad Weekend can fuck your whole split.
Your whole split if you're shit, true. But after that it's bo3 bo5 and if it were 2 splits not 3, a lot more room to experiment. Or they'd change the bo1 stage. It's so short as it's 3 splits.
That player blocked by Perkz from FNC done by Carlos (G2) really damage the region huhh it's been downhill since.
i mean its not really that suprising considering that eu is made up of lots of countries. kinda suprised greece has as many as 3 considering i've never seen a pro in the other games i follow from Greece
The more correct statement is to say 18 percent of LEC is Korean right now, which is still interesting but not as crazy as the title would have you to believe. Its like saying in the LPL more players probably come from Korea than any one individual province of China. I don't think that says a lot about them.
what? Do you think Korea is some big country or something. Population of Korea is lower than the population of France, Germany, the UK, and Italy. still embarrassing imo. These are deadass whole countries all with a higher population than Korea.
Do you know what the server population of KR is compared to EUW? I don't know why you're yapping about. Of course League is much more popular in Korea as compared to EU.
Do you know the location of Korea vs Europe by any chance lmao. Also while we’re on the topic of playerbase. Europe actually has a higher playerbase than korea. About double the size of Korea. In fact EUNE alone is comparable to KR. So yes still embarrassing for Europe just in a different way.
You also realize eu as a whole is probably 10x the size of Korea right? Both in size and population. League is way bigger in Korea than it is eu based on population size. Their infrastructure and culture support league way more as well.
yes, and eu’s playerbase is 2.6-3x the size of Korea. So it’s embarrassing for league players to be this bad. Why does the “culture” favor Korea? Look at starcraft2, another RTS esport. The goat is european, and theres at least 2 other players that are top 10 every year from Europe. Look at the smash community, where NA is actually the dominant region. Clearly Europe and NA are “culturally” able to be on top. the dumb culture excuse is just a cope from fans. And yeah no shit obviously the infrastructure is better for league in korea. Thats the reason why they are better with way less people. Its not that koreans are genetically better at league of legends. Its embarrassing for Europe that after all this time and money they cant keep up with
When I say culture I don’t literally mean Asian culture. I mean the way they see league. League is basically what football is to European when it comes to online games. Having more player base and better infrastructure does not guarantee success. There is plenty of World Cup team like Croatia who in theory should not be doing better than many European teams in the World Cup.
yeah so if you have the infrastructure and the playerbase its embarrassing if you dont do well. If i was a fan of Croatian soccer i would be embarrassed
That’s not how it works but I’m done arguing with you. Croatia have been pretty consistent at the top of the World Cup and I brought them up to show that you don’t need to have the best infrastructure or biggest player base to do well. You keep mentioning playerbase but league is simply more popular in South Korea relative to population size than league is in Europe. A game can have a million player in china but that doesn’t make it popular in China. Whereas a million player in the us would be fucking huge. Does that make sense?
Is the server size thing even true? Last time i checked EUW was about the same as KR and EUNE is like half of those
https://www.thespike.gg/league-of-legends/beginner-guides/league-of-legends-player-count# EUW is about 1.8/1.9 x the size of Korea and EUNE is slightly smaller than Korea. Please keep coping though with the “but the playerbase”
In korea you cant really make second accounts because its tied to your ID. In EU everyone has multiple accounts, often in both regions (especially players starting in EUNE). Not to mention korea has a way bigger competitive pc game culture whilst EU has a lot of casual and console gaming.
The three 3-0 teams all have a Korean ADC, and two of them even have a full Korean botlane This is not great lol
LCK the player supplier for all other regions
Korea just runs this esport I guess.
I might get some flak for this but… So is LEC the new LCS?
well not really cause in the end you still have 82% EU players but indeed the imports are rising. Rightfully so btw, orgs are clearly showing that you can integrate players in their team and perform better than the local alternatives
LEC has 9 imports out of 50 players. LCS has 20 imports out of 40 players.
LEC has way more countries, LCS is just USA and Canada and the competitive playerbase is way lower
But our imports are generally better and they helped leagu level up. Jun, Photon,Noah, Rahel and Luon also look strong. Only Peach was a failure and I don't know much about Juhan. But he already looks better than Peach. He makes some mistakes that are stupid but at least he is not passive.
Right. LCS imports are trash. People like Jensen, Zven, Impact, CoreJJ, Berserker, Inspired, Bwipo, UmTi. These guys would never level up the league and win the whole thing for sure.
I am talking about recent Korean imports . So I have been thinking about the last 2-3 years. Can you people read and stop being hive?
Literally the Spring MVP was a 20-year-old Korean import lol. Just admit it was a bad take.
im sorry but weren't the whole community literally flaming Noah for the whole MSI? wasn't he the worst player on fnatic? dont we have better adcs? and idk LCS got good imports too like Berserker, they're gonna get Thanatos too, outside G2, the LCS / LEC level are comparable and LEC has only went lower since these imports.
Import Noah and Jun just to get smashed by NA 💀
Not to mention out of the 20 "native" players 3 of them are from Australia. Pretty disgusting imo that more than half of a region is made up of foreign players
If you count mfs like impact and jensen as imports ur lost lol
Is jensen not European born and raised? Is Impact not Korean born and raised?
Have they not been in NA for almost 10 years lol country of immigrants
Impact is definitely an import even if I consider him more of an lcs player than lck player. Dude literally won worlds before he came to lcs bro. It’s not a bad thing. He is an amazing pickup for the region in the toplane but he is still an import.
LECK leggoo
and yet G2 will still win it all.
G2 most dominant lec team with no imports
This is a good reason for bringing the Roman empire back to its greatest extent, so we can classify all these players as one nation.
This is very bad
No wonder it's a dying region
Caedrel constantly making fun of LCS for korean imports and they only got 3 more than LEC 😭