Understanding North America’s large influx of international players by Branson Chan.
With the recent news that Golden Guardians would be starting Tanner “Damonte” Damonte as their LCS mid-laner to kick off the season, many fans are left wondering what would happen to the fan favorite mid-laner, Greyson “GoldenGlue” Gilmer. The organization announced via Twitter that the team would be adding Damonte to “strengthen” their LCS team and mid-lane situation. Time after time GoldenGlue has proven to North America that he is not only a solid mid-lane option capable of performing week in and week out, but also a valuable member of any organization. This very situation is indicative to one of North America’s biggest problems, the lack of home-grown North American talent.
The current landscape of the LCS is dominated by international players mainly from regions such as Europe and Korea. Typically, when you think about standout LCS mid-laners you think of players like Søren “Bjergsen” Bjerg from TSM, Nicolaj “Jensen” Jensen from Team Liquid, and Yasin “Nisqy” Dinçer from Cloud9, but what’s missing here is the lack of North American mid-laners. Even more so, North American players find it difficult to secure a roster spot especially when there are so many talented players being recruited from other competitive regions. The current split is a prime example of this, with a mere 3 out of the 10 mid-lane players being only native North American talent.
In an anonymous survey conducted at the start of 2020 by Lolesports writer Kein Lam, the writer asked 86 LCS and academy players a variety of questions including — which role is the most impactful in professional play? — the results were split, but unsurprisingly taking first place with 43% is the mid-lane position. Often regarded as the leadership role due to the high level of communication and technical skill required to play, the mid-lane is universally recognized as the most impactful role in the League of Legends world. As possibly the most vital role to any League of Legends team, it’s no wonder that LCS teams find themselves opting out of developing their own mid-lane talent and instead prefer to scout outside of the region, preferring more polished and established talent from abroad.
But the question here is: if the mid-lane position is so important, why aren’t North American organizations focusing their attention on developing rising NA mid-laners? The easy answer is that North America has a significant skill gap in their developmental system compared to their regional counterparts.
Most League of Legends players are a product of their own regional solo queue and it’s no secret that North America has provided players with the weakest solo queue experience out of the 4 major regions. This situation is evident and backed up in an interview posted by Travis Gafford where G2 mid-laner Perkz stated that “NA solo queue is really horrible” and the state of North American solo queue is extremely poor. Because of this, North American teams would often travel to the other powerhouse regions such as China, Korea, and Europe to hold a bootcamp for their players during their off-season. Just last year top North American teams such as TSM, Cloud9 and Team Liquid held their bootcamps in Korea, and the reason for doing this was to improve the level of play amongst their own players. The sheer level of competition, mechanics and macro-level gameplay in other major regions far surpasses that of North America.
This situation extends beyond just the scarcity of mid-laners in North America and speaks to North American League of Legends as a whole. Because solo queue serves as a training ground for most LCS players and rising stars, many North American players have a difficult time developing their technical skills and competitive mentality, a difficulty not experienced by their overseas counterparts. This is one of the many reasons why North America has been so unsuccessful in tournaments such as the Mid-Season Invitationals and even Worlds. Notable exceptions are Team Liquid making it to MSI finals in 2019 and Cloud9 making it to the semi-finals at Worlds 2018, which GoldenGlue was an integral part of. To put it bluntly, North American organizations struggle to develop their players to the same standard as those of Korea, China and Europe because the quality of the NA’s solo queue is so poor.
With only 2 import slots open to international talent, North America needs to improve their developmental system and the state of its solo queue. Having players from the other 3 regions compete in North America is great, but at the end of the day North America is running away from its own deficiencies. In a recent interview Twitter update GoldenGlue opened up about his recent experiences with Golden Guardians and how he and the organization have mutually agreed to part ways for the foreseeable future. In his Twitlonger, GoldenGlue explains the difficulties of being dropped from the main roster, to academy, and then ultimately to a free agent.
With the erratic nature of competitive League of Legends, players have to constantly maintain high-quality performances week-in and week-out to prove that they’re an asset to their team. There have been numerous reports over the past couple of splits about players losing motivation and disliking certain North American organizations’ team environments. For someone like GoldenGlue, the lack of motivation has never been an issue. Even in his recent Twitlonger, he explains that he is still extremely motivated, but as a player he believes that it’s unlikely for him to get on a team this late into the split. Only time will tell whether GoldenGlue’s perseverance and motivation will bring him back onto a starting spot in the LCS again. I know that I, not unlike many other NA League of Legends fans, hope that he does. After all, I can’t think of a better way to hold the LCS together than with some super GoldenGlue.
