It’s a cliché about League of Legends: Asian teams dominate the game and again last night, in the first quarter-final of Worlds 2022, JD Gaming proved it against Rogue, thus eliminating the only European team in contention, and the last Western team still qualified. Unsurprisingly, some will say: the final will necessarily be Asianand everything is still possible for the meeting, either a Chinese match, or a Korean match, or an LCK-LPL clash. Is the level gap between the two sides of the world insurmountable?
According Rekklesthe Karmine Corp botlaner, it is not so much a fundamental difference in competence as an accumulation of small human errors. After the meeting, the player shared his opinion on the outcome of this first quarter, and, once again, the impossibility for a Western team to reach the semi-finals, like at Worlds 2021. We have to go back to 2020 now to see the LEC at this level, with G2 who had succumbed to future champion Damwon. However, the LCS have never reached this level since 2018 and the confrontation Cloud9 against Fnatic (in favor of the LEC champion).
During his stream, Rekkles gives his opinion on the level difference:
I think there are a lot of little things that make it that way. Eastern teams are in top form individually, and it almost always feels like they know how to play all the champions in the game, so they can always make good drafts. […] Mistakes are not because opponents push you to make mistakes, it’s just you misjudging the situation or playing the wrong game. I think we see more unforced errors in Western players than in Asian players.
A gap that the teams can therefore correct? For Rekkles, these are “lots of little things” but these make all the difference in the aggregate: at the level of the draft, in the individual game, in the collective gameand necessarily “if you add it all up, it becomes… yeah, it becomes a gap“. However, basically Asian teams are notso better than the West that we can say“he believes. In the meantime, the world final will be very Asian.