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What a profoundly disappointing weekend in the North American LCS. Well, for me at least. I’m going to go straight to the standings before I can think about it too much.
1. Team SoloMid (TSM): 9-3 in matches; 20-7 in games
1. Immortals (IMT): 9-3; 19-11
1. CounterLogic Gaming (CLG): 9-3; 19-12
4. Team Dignitas (DIG): 7-5; 19-15
4. Team EnvyUs (NV): 7-5; 17-15
6. Cloud9 (C9): 6-6; 16-14
7. Echo Fox (FOX): 4-8; 12-17
7. FlyQuest (FLY): 4-8; 11-18
9. Phoenix1 (P1): 3-9; 12-20
10. Team Liquid (TL): 2-10; 6-22
Really not a great week from where I’m sitting; my teams went a collective 1-5, with only FLY taking a win over TL. Speaking of TL, this was their third week this split where they didn’t pick up a single game win; remember, we’re only six weeks into the split!
P1 had an unexpectedly poor week; I don’t think many expected them to beat TSM, but their game against DIG was pretty important if they want to get into playoffs. They are still likely to make it into the gauntlet on points, but a good playoff run would be a lot less stressful on them, especially if they could qualify as NA’s second seed.
Things are looking up for some teams. DIG, NV, TSM and IMT all had 2-0 weeks, with TSM not dropping any games. TSM’s series against P1 was closer than the scoreline belies, although it was still a 2-0. NV looked pretty solid too; they weren’t as dominant as TSM, and did drop a game to FOX, but the whole team is playing impressively, individually and together.
I’m going to take a bit of a departure from the usual team updates and game previews this week to look at something that has become a point of some contention lately. Over the course of the split, various casters have released player rankings, and a couple of the recent ones have been pretty controversial. Some of it is just unhappy TSM fans, but there are plenty of valid criticisms of the tier lists too.
Before I dive into them, I feel like it bears repeating that lists like this cannot be entirely objective or absolute. When you’re ranking individuals in a game that is so team-centric, different people will consider different things important, which really affects the entire ranking. Whether you or I agree or disagree with a placement, it’s not inherently wrong or bad, it’s just coming from a different perspective.
Riv’s Support List
This is the older of the three tier lists I want to look at; it aired back in week four, so it was early days in the split by comparison. His list was:
IMT Olleh: A Tier
CLG Aphromoo: A Tier
C9 Smoothie: B Tier
TSM Biofrost: B Tier
DIG Big: B Tier
NV Hakhuo: B Tier
P1 Xpecial: B Tier
FOX Gate: C Tier
TL Matt: C Tier
FLY LemonNation: D Tier
This was the least controversial of the recenttier lists, but there were still plenty of people unhappy with it. Probably the biggest issue was Biofrost being so far down the tier list, although at the time TSM were sitting around fourth place anyway.
In discussing his reasoning, Riv puts this placement down mostly to Biofrost’s positioning, and him needing to get his feet back under him with Doublelift. Things have changed a lot since this list was created, and I would definitely expect to see Biofrost up in the A Tier if this list were redone, but even back in week three I would have expected to see him above Smoothie.
Beyond that, I don’t take much contention with the list; I’d maybe bump Hakhuo and Xpecial up a little, and at this point FOX were still doing reasonably well, but broadly speaking I would say Riv’s analysis was good considering where we were in the split. It does seem that he started from a point of stats and tweaked from there, but he did move things around.
Phreak’s AD Carry List
Now, this one was juicy, and set off a lot of discussion during week five; this is the list that really brought them to the broader community’s attention. The 742 comments in the main reddit thread were pretty heated, and it’s not super hard to see why:
C9 Sneaky: A Tier
NV Apollo: A Tier
TL Piglet: A Tier
IMT Cody Sun: B Tier
CLG Stixxay: B Tier
TSM Doublelift: B Tier
P1 Arrow: C Tier
DIG Altec: C Tier
FLY Wildturtle: D Tier
FOX Keith: D Tier
DIG LOD: D Tier
Now, some of these seem on first glance like a bad rank, but make some more sense if you watch more of their games. Doublelift hadn’t been playing top of his game early in the split, although by the time this ranking came out he was much stronger and I still would consider him much. Apollo seems like a really odd choice to be so high up, but watching his games this split, he seems almost like a different player.
The thing is though, so much of this list seems to be based on stats that are calculated numerically rather than taking into account other aspects of play. Phreak’s comments after the list was released back this up; although he said that the thing he looked at was how each player impacts the game, his entire list of justifications were based on stats like damage output compared to gold.
While these are useful stats, on their own they don’t take into account the broader game. Similarly, Phreak said explicitly that thay he didn’t take things like shotcalling or motivation into account, which is a huge part of what makes a good player. Ultimately, this tier list feels like a starting point for player rankings rather than any sort of final ranking.
Jatt’s Midlaner List
While this list has had even more activity, I feel like the vast majority of the criticism is levied at the placement of the first and second players:
C9 Jensen: S Tier
TSM Bjergsen: S Tier
FOX Froggen: A Tier
CLG Huhi: A Tier
IMT Pobelter: A Tier
NV Pirean: B Tier
P1 Ryu: B Tier
DIG Keane: C Tier
FLY Hai: C Tier
TL Goldenglue: D Tier
Putting Jensen over Bjergsen is massivley controversial. For many years now, Bjergsen has been considered one of the best players in the west, fully stop.
We can look at stats and outcomes until the cows come home, but I think it comes back down to these lists being inherently subjective; while personally I would consider Jensen better mechanically and individually, I would put Bjergsen on top for his team play, game knowledge, breadth of champ pool… he has a lot of things up on Jensen.
Still, Jatt would still have been roasted as biased if he put TSM at the top of the table, so at least this made for some discussion. I am much, much more confused by Froggen being listed over Huhi and Pobelter. Froggen is a very strong laner, and he’s got great stats, but as Jatt acknowledged his play around the rest of the map is lacking. For Jatt that takes him from an S to a high A, but personally, I don’t see that stats alone can ever make a player S tier, which would drag Froggen down to low A/high B.
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While a team is absolutely more than the sum of it’s parts, I want to close out with the cumulative ranking based on these three tier lists per game. The rank values have a minimum of three (three #1s) and max of 30 (three #10s), and where a team is tied I’ve taken the team with the better letter grading:
C9: 5 pts
IMT: 10 pts
CLG: 11 pts
TSM: 12 pts
NV: 14 pts
P1: 21 pts
FOX: 21 pts
DIG: 22 pts
TL: 22 pts
FLY: 27 pts
These results are obviously shiftted around by different casters’ perceptions, but it’s an indicator of where they, as a whole, see the teams.
Regardless of my opinion of the lists themselves, I’ve really enjoyed all the discussion that’s come out of them, and now that the lists are getting more attention, I’m really keen to see where the revisited Top and Jungle lists that should come out over the next couple of weeks.
Which list so far has been the most accurate? Which was furthest off?