Josh · @XenoLeague
17th Apr 2021 from TwitLonger
Final(?) League Update
So I originally told my amateur teammates "see you in my tweetlonger" as an initial joke, but I decided to write one about my thoughts about playing League of Legends competitively and give some closure to the few people that would be wondering what I'm planning on doing.
DISCLAIMER: Long story time just scroll down if u want the TL;DR
After I hit challenger in high school (on my macbook lol), I always wanted to try playing the game "competitively" but never took opportunities that were given due to focusing on school and expectations from my parents.
Until my freshman year of college, I just played the game for fun casually and eventually joined my college's collegiate team. Honestly playing collegiate has it's ups and downs, but I think the biggest issue is the skill gap between teams and players. Certain universities actively recruit for their team (Maryville, CC, etc.), and other schools had to make due with what is given. Luckily my college had enough students, and we were able to create a diamond-challenger roster. Playing and getting flown out to California for top 8 was really fun, and I'm thankful towards Riot for the experience. We ended up upsetting Maryville 2-0, and then getting knocked out the next round (which is honestly insane considering we were losing every scrim and had like 1 scrim game with our replacement jungler).
Sophomore year was basically the same thing (played league/collegiate, went to classes, had my basic college experience), expect my classes were harder and I had to spend time finding an internship for the summer. I originally planned on trying to play league on a higher competitive level (amateur) if I didn't find an internship for the summer, but I luckily (unluckily(?)) found one.
Junior year was the year of COVID. Before COVID occurred, I decided to study abroad and ended up studying in Korea for the fall semester. TFT had just came out and I had a blast playing it with friends from back home, since ping doesn't really matter that much. Since I was playing TFT and doing what students do abroad, I didn't really have motivation or time to play League. I dropped the game entirely, and picked it back up purely for collegiate when I got back home. Halfway through the season, Riot decided to cancel the season and I just dropped league entirely. I mostly just played maplestory and TFT throughout the rest of the semester, and ended up hitting rank 1 in TFT lol. I landed another internship for the summer, so I spent the summer focusing on that.
Senior year I don't know why but I felt really bored and a desire to play League of Legends. After playing a couple games and realizing I still had it, I climbed to Challenger in the last month of the season and ended challenger. My fall semester had just ended, and I would be graduating next semester. I honestly was so bored and had nothing to do before I would graduate. Since I would never get another chance to play League, I decided to say fuck it and try to see how far I could go. My collegiate top laner, Qwacker, and former coach, Ido, referred me to certain amateur teams, and I ended up joining Wildcard Gaming alongside Qwacker.
Honestly playing amateur was a lot of fun. While collegiate teams are very lopsided, amateur was very balanced. Everyone was around similar skill levels, and it felt like macro decisions mattered a lot. My coach ADFX helped me fix my basics, and I felt like I was learning a lot every week. For our first tournament we ended up upsetting Not Academy (Solafida) 2-0, and losing to EGP 2-1. After losing for the first time, our whole team was just lost. Everything that worked for us originally just didn't work anymore, and no one knew how to fix the problems. We lost every series and of course players ended up being frustrated, resulting in the ANEW situation happening (more detail https://lolesports.com/article/competitive-ruling-anew-esports-and-wildcard-gaming/bltd1994c53522b4c4f). This actually ended up fucking us hard for the next tournament since we just didn't have a jungler anymore, and our ad was filling in for CLGA. We honestly sucked dick and it just felt really bad to play every series.
I honestly thought about quitting amateur if I wasn't improving and our team wasn't learning anything, but ADFX brought in his friend Panda to play jungle, which ended up changing our whole team environment. He was so knowledgeable about the game and almost everything I know about macro was learned from him. We were improving fast, and league felt really fun to play. Scrims were going well, but eventually we weren't able to perform when it mattered and was eliminated from the next tournament.
Our team honestly had so many issues with BO3s, it's kinda insane. We would perform really well in scrims, but when it always mattered most, we always lost game 3. We had close to a near perfect winrate against academy teams in scrims before our Giant Slayer tourney, but ended up losing to CLGA and GGA 1-2 in 2 really close game 3s. But even though we lost to GGA, we still qualified for proving grounds and at least we could say we lost to the eventual winners of the tourney.
Proving grounds was honestly disappointing for me personally. I felt like we were given the tools to win in both series against DIGA and IMTA, but I just couldn't perform when it was needed. I never got to prove myself, and honestly still feel like shit whenever I think about those series. If I played a little different or a little better, we would have won both series, but there's nothing I can change about the past.
With the spring amateur spilt coming to a close, I probably will end up not playing in the summer spilt and retire from playing league of legends competitively. I feel like I never got to really prove myself and will never get to, but there is nothing I can do about it. I've already accepted a full time offer starting in the summer, so I'll probably just end up working unless I get an offer worth thinking about.
Anyways I just wanted to say thanks to all my teammates and support staff on Wildcard for believing in me and letting me play for/with you guys. I'm sorry we were never able to beat academy teams but I really enjoyed playing with everyone and learning a lot. Hopefully I was a good teammate and someone that everyone enjoyed playing with. Honestly, all my teammates are insane and if any academy teams are reading this, you should give my teammates a chance to prove themselves.
I'll probably make a short compilation of clips from our games/scrims if I ever end up not being lazy so look forward to that ^_^
TL;DR: Playing amateur/collegiate was a blast, will probably be my last season ever playing competitive league of legends. Wish I had a little more time to play competitively but probably will not be able to. Pickup my teammates for academy teams ^_^