All-Stars: Cloud 9 the real winners!

All-stars is over and done with but now that we’re living in a world where teams are starting to realize the advantage that having a coach and a analyst brings I think if anything All-Stars showed us that the upcoming LCS/OGN/LPL is going to be extremely interesting. SKT T1 K did an amazing job and really did show that they are back and in top-form, however, there was one team that really flew under the radar and really made huge strides towards their personal growth as a team. This team, of course, was Cloud 9.

Cloud 9 came in as the underdog for the entire tournament. They played in a region riddled with roster changes resulting in below-average team competition. They were down their mid laner and main-shot-caller in Hai who was sidelined only about 2 weeks before All-Stars with a collapsed lung. They had to train and teach-how-to-shot-call a replacement in CLG Link (who did a rather good job). On top of it all, their first game was against their rival EU LCS team in Fnatic with the home crowd heavily against them.

Despite this, Cloud 9 performed remarkably admirably in the tournament walking away 3^rd overall with a 3-1 record in the group stages and ultimately falling 2-0 to the 2^nd place OMG team in the finals. However, this record alone does not tell the story of why this was such an important event for Cloud 9 and why they are the ones who truly got the most out of the tournament.

Throughout the NA LCS Spring split Cloud 9 was one of the only teams who actually showed clear understanding of rotations. Not only were they simply mechanically better than every other team (as a whole) but they also better understood the meta and clearly showed that they could play the movement-central rotate/push style. We even had glimpses their ability to plan ahead and bait other teams into poor fights and ultimately dominate games, the greatest example of which came in their 3-0 domination of TSM in the NA playoffs for their much sought-after spot in the All-Stars tournament.

To understand how this works: you, as the reader, really need to be familiar with how rotations work, and while I am not claiming I am an expert on the subject; I have been playing MOBAs for a few years now and watch A LOT of competitive ESports and do my research where necessary. I hope these articles are proof of that and I hope that you will take this for what it is: a fans educated yet simplified metaphor of what comprises a rotation. While the Riot Shout-Casters would have you believe that rotations have something to do with mathematics, “the act of rotating around a fixed point”, in video games, we like to think of this in terms of objectives and lanes. Essentially, the best way to think about this is to picture each of the lanes (and the jungle I suppose but this is a bit different) as an assembly line, you send workers to each of the lines to do their job (farm, push, defend, assassinate etc.). The idea behind rotating is to change people’s positions and jobs as to further your map position against the other team, that is: rotating around points of interest.

 Now, if the entire game was basically: "who can do their job (farm) the best" we wouldn't need strategy, you would simply find who are the best farmers in the game and we would see DOTA-style teams (old DOTA1 when it was a Warcraft mod) where you have 2-3 farmers and 1 or 2 supports basically just seeing who can get items the fastest and winning team fights. However, in League of Legends, we have highly-coordinated teams thus allowing them to periodically change people’s lanes or jobs again: rotating.

Going back to the assembly line metaphor, you will trade workers in and out of different positions to maintain quality control and to make sure that you are producing at the best possibly efficiency and quality. If you were to leave the same people in the same places all the time this could get very monotonous and the quality of your work will slip. Same thing in League of Legends, if we leave players in the lanes the whole game it will be…well…boring. So when a caster refers to someone as rotating they might mean switching lanes but it could also mean their changing their job. A classic example: a top lane player who is on his island farming will notice that the mid lane player is moving to the bottom lane to help assassinate a player or defend a tower, in either case, he can change his job to pusher on the top lane, push out his lane, and then rotate to the middle lane to defend the middle tower or to push out the mid lane to keep map presence (top is pushed and the team is not losing their middle lane). This is also a rotation for the mid laner as he has moved from farmer in the middle lane to now assassin in the bottom. Either way this is a classic example of a rotation, changing both player’s responsibility and lanes to further your map position and keep the enemy team guessing. The team also advances its map position by preventing an objective from being taken, possibly getting a kill, keeping their lanes pushed out, and possibly setting up another objective as a result (gives them room to take a tower, secure Dragon, or simply get more farm). Now, I understand that rotations in competitive LoL are more advanced than this but this is just a very basic example.

The thing that we are learning, as fans, is why rotations are so important and how crazy the strategy of rotations has become in League of Legends. Teams are now learning to plan ahead with their rotations being able to win their lane in such a way that they can rotate without giving anything up and putting their opponents farther and farther behind and reach the snowball point much faster. Again, one of the main reasons that Cloud 9 dominated the NA scene so much was their very keen understanding of this and their ability to plan a few minutes into the future with their rotations that allowed them to take many objectives from their opponents. They understand how winning your lane can result in the ability to place deep-wards that then sets up their ability to rotate with very little risk and stop other team’s rotations in their tracks by simply being aware of what they were doing and then capitalizing when they fell short. It was no fluke that Cloud 9 was 22-4 on the split and though they lost a few games early that had them behind TSM nearly the entire season, they eventually caught up and then ultimately dominated them in the playoffs. They simply understood rotations better than any other team and were able to push their advantages more; in essence, they were the best team in the entire scene.

We got to see some of this at All-Stars as in their 3 wins in the group stage over Fnatic, TPA, and OMG. Cloud 9 showed their signature style of dominating their own jungle, getting a kill in the top lane, deep ward off their lane advantage in the middle and bottom, and then switch gears at 20 minutes and take quick successive objectives. Once they hit their 20 minute-peak: the team rotations become metronome like as they rotate bottom then middle then top securing all 3 towers in a matter of minutes then baiting the other team into a bad fight and winning the game from there.

In their game vs. Fnatic we can see the impact of this where top and mid did not flat-out win their lane but they were able to generate vision and allow Meteos to be free reign in the top lane and jungle. This resulted in a huge advantage for Balls by 25 minutes and cleared the way for Cloud 9 to out-position Fnatic in the later stages of the game to ultimately win at 37 minutes. In fact, the only reason this game lasted as long as it did was because of their still-forming CLG/Cloud 9 communication and Link getting caught out in the first two big fights in the game. Once Cloud 9 won the fight at 17 minutes in the bottom lane, Cloud 9 flipped that switch and rotated flawlessly into a free middle tower and top tower within 2 minutes of each other as Fnatic were helpless to get anything done. We can further see this in the gold difference between the two teams as the difference remained unchanged (1.5-2k) until about 35 minutes when Cloud 9 won the fight by Fnatic’s blue-buff. After this, Cloud 9 took Baron and then won the game 2 minutes later. While it is true that Fnatic had their own issues with this game; Cloud 9 was able to come from behind and snatch the victory by showing their ability to plan ahead and use their rotations to not allow early mistakes to let the game get out of control. This also shows their mastery of game mechanics, in that, despite Fnatic winning a majority of the early fights; as soon as Cloud 9 gets one favorable fight they use their positioning and ward coverage to easily secure multiple objectives and erase any advantage gained in the early game.

The difference can be seen in their game against SKT where the Korean juggernaut showed them how effective rotations can truly be, as SKT shut down Balls so hard that Cloud 9 could do nothing to stop the snowball. The game started with Cloud 9 doing the early tower push in top lane, but then the game broke down from there. Impact was able to freeze the lane and get very secure farm thus freeing up Bengi to get 3 buffs, freely rotate between mid and bottom lane, and ultimately secure multiple objectives. This also allowed Piglet and Pooh to Balls the bottom lane preventing Cloud 9’s star top laner from being able to rotate and ultimately down in farm. SKT could then dictate every movement on the map even: using Impact to secure jungle buffs for Faker and keeping Meteos fishing for very low-percentage kills. By 15 minutes SKT was up in kills and towers to the tune of 5500 gold and snowballed to a 30 minute win. While it was easily the biggest beating that Cloud 9 would ultimately take the entire tournament they were smiling as they lost and graciously shook hands as they knew they put up the best fight of any team in the group stages (maybe with the exception of OMG).

Despite this, in interviews with Cloud 9, Meteos spoke to how they understood that SKT were “a million times better” than them but; just the practice they had received against them and the video they would acquire playing against teams as strong as them, would be invaluable in advancing their play and really taking their teamwork to the next level. The Shout Casters then even took this farther speaking to how Cloud 9 was saying in earlier interviews that they were learning lots of little things such as: freezing lanes, using rotations to create plays a few minutes into the future in the game, and even better understanding pick and ban phase to play to a set of champions’ strengths. SKT was, in return, very complimentary of Cloud 9 in their interviews and showed a lot of respect to how far they have come despite their international experience. Remember, Cloud 9 as an organization has had 4, yes, 4 international matches, and now these matches are hard to count as it was not with their whole line-up. Faker even admitted in an interview that he wanted to play Cloud 9 for a very long time and was upset he could not play them at their full strength.

While Cloud 9 did ultimately fall to OMG in the finals, we can see a little bit of this learning about early rotations starting to come into play but ultimately they lost the vision game as OMG simply rotated much better than they did and shut down their vision control in every phase of the game. OMG pushed this into an advantage that was simply unbeatable and then seemed to have had a slight mental advantage in game 2.

Talk in interviews and the caster desk the entire weekend was about rotations, lane freezes, and other map movements which, really was, the story of each of the wins. The entire weekend, SKT T1 K dominated due to their new-found heavy-map-movement strategy and just pushed other teams all around the map setting up dives and engagements wherever they needed to. To think that Cloud 9 was practicing against this over the whole weekend, even without Hai, is going to be invaluable for them as a team. It is hard to think that everyone in the Cloud 9 organization: their players, their coach and especially their analyst wouldn't see this as a huge opportunity to be able to learn from this and further develop their own play and understand the differences between the games they won and the games they lost.

What is most interesting is that we, as fans, can learn something from this too in that, in reality, many times, victories can come down to farming and movement. It really does come back to what the loading screen tips say, players who coordinate with their team to secure objectives have higher win percentages. SKT T1 K dominated most of their matches because of the massive disparity in farm for one of their lanes at 10 and 20 minutes into the game and were able to adapt their rotations and strategy around this. SKT T1 K were excellent at planning who is going to be in what lane a few minutes from now and planning objectives based on how the other team moves and what objectives are available if they rotate to a different part of the map. This understanding is ultimately what every team in League of Legends will need to live up to in order to have any chance at worlds against the Koreans, especially teams in NA and EU who are just now finding their footing internationally.

Moving forward, if Cloud 9 continues to do what they've been doing: improving and adapting strategies the way they have, we will again see a NA scene dominated by Cloud 9 with no team being close to them again record. Even Fnatic is beginning to admit that they haven't adapted the way they need to and are now looking into getting an analyst. YellowStar and Rekkles both posted on social media and Reddit apologizing to their fans for being “under prepared” and about their coming team changes (getting an analyst not changing players). We also see this coming to fruition in the amazing season put up by SK Gaming in EU and CLG in NA: each of these teams has shown their understanding of the rotation-style gaming and their ability to draft a team comp around the concept of pushing, poking, and movement to gain an advantage. While none of the teams at All-Stars looked nearly as polished as the Korean juggernaut, this tournament was really a stepping stone for the rest of the world to understanding how to take their League of Legends game to the next level and we will see much more competitive international events in the future.

Get ready for exciting summer splits in all 5 regions, and be ready for a clash of the titans like we have never seen at Worlds 2014. With teams beginning to acquire coaches, analysts, mentors, psychologists, and other support staff to help with their gaming, the level of competition is going to increase, and just get better for the fans.