Flaresz · @Flareszt
24th Aug 2016 from TwitLonger
My Experience playing for Enemy
I’m just going to say this is an overview of my time in the summer split. I might hold the record for for most death in the split that I played, but I don’t believe that I am the sole reason Enemy lost. One of the team owners recently accused me of doing so, but to blame me alone would be wrong. I know he wants to cash in on the comments made by Tryndamere, but it’s not fair to give me all the blame.
Criticisms of my play:
First of all, as the season progressed the top lane meta changed as the weeks went by. Champions such as Rumble, Irelia, Hecarim, Fizz, and Ryze were good the first half of the summer season. However, champs started to get nerfed because how strong they were. This affected my champion pool largely due to how we practiced, but I’ll get back to that. The many deaths as a top laner is partially my own fault, but is also because the team was not performing well and we were losing in macro play. We simply didn’t know how to play the games or how to pressure the other side of the map. This let the other jungler sit top lane while I received minimal help, which was the most frustrating thing when playing, made worse because we wouldn’t get anything on the other side of the map, either. Especially so when we were playing in the promotion tournament against Coast. I got no resources and I was playing a tank, exactly what I was accused of not doing. Meanwhile the other top laner were playing carry champs like Olaf, Fizz, and Gangplank. The difference in the two is that I was simply a small amount of crowd control while Cris was able to just take over the games, especially since his team helped him get ahead every game.
Another example of not being able to do much is shown in this clip against Zion. A lot of people said how terrible a move it was to dive etc, but if you look closely in the clip, I’m fairly certain there was an unintended interaction with my E. Zion’s E is down and he’s at 200 health, so with me maxing E, it should have been a free kill, a 1 for 1 at worst. Had I traded 1 for 1, he’s denied the creep wave so either way I come out on top. That’s not what happened though. An unintended interaction between Fizz’s Q allowed him to take 0 damage from a rank 3 E that should have easily killed him. Despite not dealing any damage to him, the tower still swapped aggro to me, allowing him to pick up a free kill. Had I known that would have happened, clearly I wouldn’t have dove him, I can’t do anything about that.
Clip: https://youtu.be/qEr1ddl61UI?t=1096
The bug wasn’t the sole reason we lost, but after the death, it put me in the same situation as usual. Behind the free farming enemy laner without any help or resources while they had multiple ganks.
The one thing that Chachi said that bugged me was that I’m not willing to practice tanks in solo queue. It true that I despised playing tanks in solo queue during that meta, especially Maokai and Shen, since it required a lot of coordination to execute. However, I loved Nautilus I started playing him before week 5 because I saw his strengths. Although I didn’t play a lot of tanks in solo queue, this was partially because we also practiced carry tops and I was told I’d have an opportunity to play them. Additionally, I started playing them in Solo queue after we ended the split and were preparing for relegations. I played almost exclusively tanks in solo queue for two weeks because I was frustrated mechanically, especially with how I let the team down with my Riven pick (which was one of my mains and the team and coaches thought it could work in the situation). I did this while waiting to practice again with a new coach that was coming in for the regulation tournament, Youngbuck. The current coach was Fragnatic which decided to scrim a bit before the new coach come in to work on synergy with the team.Yes, I did play Maokai, Shen, and some other tanks during that time. The reason I didn’t want to play tanks in Solo Que is because I been playing them in scrims everyday at least 3-4 games. Even when the new coach arrived we drafted comps with a tank top putting the carry role on mid/bot. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to play tanks. The big problem was despite us playing it all the time, we still built no synergy to use our comps properly. We tried to innovate and play new things instead of staying on a style that we found success with.
As a top laner, When you play those champs you have to know when you can make TP plays. One of the biggest issues in the team was communication; we were not on the same page when I’d TP in for a play, the team didn’t know how to follow up and that was a huge problem for us. Even when we pre-planned it, comms fell apart as soon as we went in and things didn’t go well as a result. I’m not the only reason that we didn’t perform well in the games that I played a tank. The team as a whole didn’t know how to pressure or understand how to play the macro side of the game back then. We would simply lose all the objectives and slowly start losing the game. As a tank player, if your damage dealer can’t do damage then of course you going to die as a sacrifice for the team. All I could do was to do my best to find plays that my team could work with, but with our comms being so bad, I’d just die.. The other macro issue was teleports like I said earlier, we didn’t know how to play around one of the biggest win conditions in the game.
The Environment
When I first started living in the house, we had two different managers which was the general manager and house manager. This meant that we’d have two different people to help make our living conditions and practice area acceptable, mainly the house manager, but also the general manager if we really needed anything. My first thought of living with other players was that it could be fun, but the house environment was much worse than imagined. I stayed at the house for a bit during challenger series for important matches but I slept on the floor during that time and I didn’t get a mattress until a 2 weeks later after I moved in. More importantly there was a problem with the air condition during the summer when it was 100 degrees all the time which started causing a lot of stress to all of us players since it was so hot, and we had to practice for hours in the heat. We lived in the middle of nowhere which was an hour ride from the house to the studio and sometime 3 hour to get back when there is traffic. Eating was also a problem in the house since we never had someone to cook everyday, but every now and then one of our managers would cook. Most of the time we ended up going to get fast food at Mcdonald's in between scrims. Not only was this expensive, but it also was unhealthy and didn’t really contribute to a good environment. We finally moved out to a new house around week 6 of LCS. The house condition was much better than before, but we still ended up going to eat out a lot since you have to cook for yourself if you want to eat due to the lack of our house manager doing it. I don’t usually cook a lot but I can make basic food like eggs and sandwiches. I usually like eating the same thing over and over, but it was either go out to spend money or make the food you can at the house. If this were to compare Renegades housing environment, it was much worse, and they were banned for supposedly mistreating their players. However, the time I spend there was much better than my time in Enemy house since they have someone to do the cooking and player chores. It feel so much better to enable the players to focus on their scrim and solo queue instead of worrying about doing dishes and other menial chores. I know there were financial issues, but there was three support staff members in the house. It was doable.
Coaching Staff:
The only coaching staff that lived in the house at the start of the split was Brad, the head coach during that time. Since the meta was changing in a rapid pace with new champions like Ryze rising to the front, there were some disagreements about how to play the game. Some of the players didn’t agree with the way he was teaching us to play the game and in the end, we ended up playing a different style that wasn’t fit for us. The jungler meta changed from sejuani to more of aggressive jungler that had early priority such as Rek'sai and Nidalee. It caused conflicts on what champs we prioritized for our draft. Because of this, we started losing and got desperate to stop our losing streak. Enemy tried to resolve this by bringing in a new coach like Fragnatic but it didn’t work out much since we still played how we were before. Nothing changed and we simply had all the same problems with just a different person. We didn’t adapt well enough, and communication was falling apart. This also led to arguments between players including myself and we didn’t have an authority figureto tell us what was right and wrong. Whenever we scrimmed, we just mindlessly played the scrim because it was our job and we rarely, if ever, learned anything from it.. The scrim set is usually 6 hours total which consisted of 2 blocks which was normal. However, we didn’t learn anything in scrim after the split ended until the new coach arrived and at that point it was too late.
As a player, I think that Youngbuck’s coaching helped the team a lot in term of macro plays and helped players setup a goal for each scrim. The scrim blocks got toned down to just 1 per day since we wanted to have quality scrims over quantity. I think that was the most effective way to practice since we were winning a lot, but a new patch come in with the rework of Gangplank and Fiora. The game changed to a different meta, but we still drafted blind pick top and gave the counter pick to mid, which no other team did, and put me at a huge disadvantage against Coast, who always made sure to give Cris the lane he wanted.
Conclusion:
I’m aware that my play wasn’t always up to the standard expected of me and I accept responsibility for that. My own play needed improvement and I practiced constantly to try and help save my team. I worked one on one with our analyst Chase in free time to fix my mistakes and I saw improvement. I recognize that I made mistakes just like everyone else on the team, but I don’t think it’s fair for Chachi or anyone else to put the majority of the blame on any of the players, especially considering the inconsistent coaching staff and the problems with the support staff. There’s plenty of blame for all of us to share.