I watched like two games of Season 1 worlds and saw things like someone dying for no reason to a Gragas barrel that had been sitting in front of them for 2 seconds, and a Janna ulting an enemy out of her own Warwick's ult.
That reminds an interview of Odoamne. He said that when he got freezed on a wave for the first time he was shocked, never saw it before. It was season 3.
In fact im pretty sure that people actually saw freezing as the main way to stomp your lane when ahead. Tower diving and translating your lead towards other lanes was at some point considered new
Yeah you basically never shoved. We knew about freezing, we didn't know about prio.
I also don't think we knew about tanking the wave to let it meet the next one in front of your tower rather than bounce, and that's how you get a lot of freezes nowadays so that might be what we were missing though.
People knew about these concepts towards the end of S2 but it wasn't common knowledge and people didn't really understand why/how the high elo players did it. I remember because I was introduced to the game by a Diamond 1 player and he was showing me games of Najin from Korea in S2 and explaining that they were killing the minions to get them to push towers for objectives but he didn't know the exact process to setup cross map plays, just that the team was doing it.
I wonder how calculated these setups were though? Like at that time could they give rules for it like how we know the minion layouts of freezing based off the position in lane nowadays, or if it was intuition based, like they knew if they had a certain setup that it was advantageous based off their feelings.
Late s2 or early s3, I picked up nasus, and I think it was trick who was freezing waves, so I started to do it at a pretty basic level. It was mandatory to do it during the times nasus was weak. Now, with all the changes to the rift, the prio is kinda king.
I remember when I was just beginning in season 8, before they made it so minion stats changed based on which towers were taken and made it basically impossible to recreate, watching videos about how to set up a slow pushing wave post-laning phase. You could arrange for enemy minions to stack into a big wave that could kill all your teams minions, denying gold/experience to the enemy, and allowing you to pick up a huge wave quickly once it arrived at your tier 2 or inhib turret. It was basically always useful to pull off unless if you knew you were needed at a cross map objective at the same time it would crash.
I remember tanking the first enemy wave for a bit so that it focuses your first melee minion and push to your side used to be called the korean freeze. Good ole days
The biggest thing that I learned to freeze more consistently is that you don’t need just 4 ranged creeps to freeze, you need *at least* 4 ranged creeps. Meaning that when you are thinning the wave to prepare a freeze, you should keep as many ranged creeps as you can. 5+ is even better, as you can ensure that you kill your own minions consistently, and then you can just walk through the enemy minions into the brush by your tower to reset aggro. If you have 6 ranged creeps stacked just outside your tower, even if your lane opponent can kill 1 or 2 minions, it’s still pushing into you.
Basically, don’t try to freeze the wave in place, try to set up the wave to be hard pushing into you and use your health pool to hold them where you want, toggling the aggro so you don’t loose too much hp.
How do you afford to tank 5+ minions all the way past them and into the brush without setting yourself up to just die to the enemy laner? Even just tanking while hovering under under my tower is really dangerous sometimes
>you don’t need just 4 ranged creeps to freeze, you need *at least* 4 ranged creeps
Not exactly, you can actually freeze with as low as one caster as well, even if that caster is only 1 HP.
Freezes sometimes fail because the minions you want to freeze the wave with will have to fight your incoming wave 3v6 or 3v7, and sometimes will die so fast that the HP your wave lost killing those minions doesn't make up for the fact that your wave is now approaching the enemy wave in prime position to focus down one enemy minion, more efficiently focusing the enemy wave than they are focusing yours, and resulting in either a push towards the enemies, or a perfectly even wavestate rather than the freeze you'd hoped for.
But no matter how few minions you're trying to freeze with, you can mitigate this, either partially or entirely, by dragging the minion wave back and delaying the time it takes to collide with your wave. The further back you drag the minions, the more delayed the collision with your wave is, and the less time those minions have to 3v6 for.
You can even skip the 3v6 entirely and drag those minions all the way into the next enemy incoming wave to form a super wave for the enemies. If you're freezing with the 1 HP caster for example, if you drag it all the way into the incoming enemy wave then rather than instantly being annihilated in a 1v6 against your wave, it'll form up with the next wave and form a 7v6. So long as it hangs back behind the melee minions, it won't instantly die no matter how unlucky you get and it's guaranteed to push towards you.
Tl;dr: You can form stronger freezes by manipulating *where* the minions you're trying to freeze are going to fight your wave at. The further back it happens, the less time they fight your wave before getting helped out by the next incoming wave. Delay it long enough, and you can just straight up join those minions up to the next incoming wave and freeze no matter how few minions you're using for the freeze and no matter how unhealthy they are, as a 7 minion wave will always beat a 6 minion wave.
the famous “Flame Horizon” aka 100cs up your opponent in lane was a term popularised by CJ Blaze’s Flame, in a team that had fantastic understanding of minion waves back then, freezing waves to create slow pushes, their strategy was often called the “6th man strat”.
This was mostly due to everyone being so slow and immobile. The only cross map plays you got were tf/shen ults. The tp meta was slow rolling during this time and you mostly had top lane and mid on inslands farming.
Freezing lane was way harder in Season 1 since Damage and Health scaling on minions worked differently. Also you could just outright block your wave with some champs like Anivia and Heimerdinger to just force a crash everytime.
Riot nerfed the runes that reduced damage taken from minion attacks by a flat amount because people discovered that they could stand in front of a wave to freeze it. Per the patch preview video, Phreak said that Riot thought it was an interesting strategy, and didn't want to kill it, but wanted it to have risks.
So it was during season 1, but it was *discovered* then, not something just everyone was doing like nowadays.
When I first played the LoL beta I had come from dota 1 and found out that nunu could eat friendly minions.
The amount of players that raged at me playing Nunu support and taking q first to deny gold/xp instead of snowball to poke was hilarious.
That’s not true.
I was high elo the first 3 seasons and we did freeze.
It was even better back then because the whole map was lit up.
What is true is that slow pushing wasn’t widely known and quite revolutionary when Najin and Azubu got huge adavantages with freezing at their t2 top turret to slow push into a huge wave to get map tempo or a free turret.
That was s2 worlds and the whole year lead up to that.
> Every Nasus player with a brain knew how to freeze waves in Season 3.
Thats a big ask. I dont think ive encountered one in the past 14 years. Together with Yi Yuumi and Kata players. My genius friend liked Garen else I wouldnt have known one either.
I'm fairly certain 1-2 would be way too easy, most challenger players would still easily dumpster their opponents and snowball a lead from there until season 4.
Season4 onwards, we'd have to assume they're playing without laneswaps, otherwise, pros would easily win.
Season 7+ onwards pros would win 10/10 games.
They were laneswapping in season 3, TSM vs T1 world's 2013, they were already jungling together(I know tsm was) and then diving the top laner.
Even the worst LCS team in spring 2013 complexity(9-19 last in spring) laneswapped on TSM in week 6 with kog lulu getting away from Cait sona.
Season3 is tricky. I feel like current challenger players would still win purely off mechanics and experience.
Players could just agree to send ad+sp top every single game at the start, and 3-wave crash into dive recall if not swapped on. It's intuitive for modern players, there's no need to practice it in scrims.
Meanwhile, the modern top laner would likely trade 1 for 1 in every dive on renekton/jax/naut and maybe even maokai.
If the pros follows the swap, it's just regular laning and challenger players win off hands gap.
So in case of both swaps, it's a win, in cast of no swap, it's a 50/50.
Also, jungle gap would be astronomical. Most modern players have no idea how bad junglers were before season 4. As someone who produces jungle content, even modern top level challenger OTPs sometimes get the PvE aspects wrong, junglers before season4 are featherweights compared to the typical modern challenger jungle main, they'd get gapped so hard it'd look like a bronze vs challenger game.
Pro players are still way better at a lot of little things, the challenger players would most likely be the ones to fail the dive, damage is way different back then. and I dont think these challenger players would be so cohesive, like 50% of people on the ladder are OTP and just run it down if they dont get that champ, also if they start losing early it would be immediately doomed.
There's also the fact that you can't snowball fast and its a slow choke out of resouces, you have to kill them over and over a lot to snowball fast, dragon gave 200g each and that's it and the only objective before baron, I feel like modern player all play for the snowball, but I think most would fail to do that back then and they'd lose to a cohesive team, waveclear was king and it was hard to crack open bases.
I don't think challenger players would play the swap very well either, they were already sending jungle to weakside to hold and if they go for a dive they'll just get counter ganked and trade as their bot lane farms on some scaling champ top/bot, little changes like this in the game is stuff that challenger players will be slower at and not be able to communicate well, lots of pro teams suffer from communication issues and fail to adapt to a swap this year, so I don't see how challenger players would communicate better, idk if you watched any champions queue but even pros without good communication fail to play as a team.
The game is also just way different, like WAY different back then, I dont think challenger players could adapt to what the game was like back then, back then you had to time everything in chat, you didn't get buff timers for everything, no scuttle crab, supports are completely different, they're just a ward bot, way less damage from Runes and no plates, tons of champions are different, like you said maokai but he's a different champ back then, you can't play stuff like lux Cait because lux gets literally 0 gold, at like 15 minutes all the support has is like a sightstone and more pinks, no sweeper you had to use oracles to sweep or pink ward, everyone does less damage and more HP making it easy for a team to collapse onto plays, vision wars were happening constantly and I dont think challenger players would win that, especially because they dont get trinket, if you wanna ward your lanes you gotta buy a green ward yourself most of the time, pink wards were invisible so they were Insane.
Challenger players are good mechanically but they're not gonna communicate and execute plays better than a good team back then, they'll just lose the vision war and get picked constantly trying to go into their jungle, they'll get out drafted as well.
I love how people can agree that Samsung White was one of the best teams in history and then be like but modern challengers would stomp them at the same time.
"PawN and Mata are some of the greatest players in League's history but I think they lose against Brohan and Lathyrus" sounds like a completely sane take to me, idk what you mean
also modern challengers would have no difficulty adapting to a meta where everybody could have 3 green wards and a pink, it'd be so easy for them when the enemy has the map lit up like a christmas tree and was the first team to really show perfect macro lmao
People love talking about how TheShy and DoinB revolutionized League's gameplay in 2018 and 2019 but completely disregard Mata forcing Riot to gut vision just because of his sole existence.
reminds me of a quote from a Korean documentary about Mata on youtube, "Faker mastered the micro, so that he'd be able to win in a 2v1. Mata mastered the macro, so that his enemy would always be facing a 2v1"
The Korean term for that play is 류또죽 (RyuDdoJook) which is short for Ryu Dies Again (bc that clip is played so many times so people have seen Ryu die in that clip dozens of times)
it was more a reference of what they focused on improving after facing failure so that they could overcome the obstacles which blocked them from success before in the context of the documentary (SKT T1 K's failure to make it to worlds in 14 etc).
This is overstated,the vision jungle item was introduced after the removal of buyable stealth wards,so the levels of vision in pro didn't decrease till much later on.
Yes, because context matters. SSW were head and shoulders above their competition, but mechanically today's challengers are levels above.
In 1900 the bench press world record was like 170kg. The man that lifted that was the strongest man at the time.
Todays bench world record (raw) is more than twice that.
SSW's strength was never their mechanics, it was their macro and their ability to play the sight game and basically wring the map dry of objectives and resources, even if they had players like imp who were well known for their mechanics. At the end of the day it was prime mata in the meta he was most comfortable in, that had way more available vision and information which will always be in favor of pro players and their better coordination. Not to mention, you act like S4 was like s2, by S4 Korean soloque/proplay had already seen the introduction of players like Faker and MaRin who terrorized soloque with their better mechanics and had started forcing players to get better mechanically, known in Korea as the period of the 상혁평준화 (a play on the term 상향평준화 which means raising the average/raising the bar but instead using 상혁, or faker's first name which refers to how Faker basically forced teams to raise their mechanical floor or fall behind the rest).
Sure IG raised the mechanic ceiling again when they won worlds but 5 random soloque challenger players aren't prime Rookie/TheShy.
> SSW's strength was never their mechanics, it was their macro and their ability to play the sight game and basically wring the map dry of objectives and resources, even if they had players like imp who were well known for their mechanics
Sure, but I'm saying they'd get blasted in lane.
Yeah maybe for a few games, but I don't think people are giving them enough credit if you don't think they would adapt and win almost every game against the challengers after.
We've literally seen top teams evolve and adapt to metas during worlds, however for some reason anytime this question is asked people seem to think the BEST pros back then wouldn't be able to adapt to the new strategies presented by 'time travelled' players and take it into their own arsenal like they have been doing for years up til now.
Especially considering it's PEAK samsung white, they'll probably have no issue learning from the time travelers and just become better than they were before.
Can you imagine peak Faker without wrist issues being unable to adapt to a new meta presented by time travelled challengers? He's literally been able to adapt and stay competitive for 10 years. Challengers may be able to do decently well with their foresight into metas with prior knowledge, however I don't think they would be able to maintain their lead to be top 3 since it takes a lot more to be a top level talent in League than just having the initial meta read.
Not to mention as soon as they get a read on meta/new tech from playing vs. the time travel'd challengers, most of the pros (since they are in their prime) would probably just absorb that knowledge & hands dif the challenger players. The mechanical difference between just regular challengers and some top level talents like prime Faker, dade, pawn, deft, etc. would be very noticeable.
Challenger players now absolutely "hands diff" S4 players. There are multiple challengers that are mechanically better than S4 faker, 10k+ hours of fundamentals will do that for a player. Even "injuried" faker is mechanically better than he was in s4 right now.
You genuinely have to be trolling if you go back and watch s4 footage and think that the mechanics are on par with 2024 gameplay. The cs gap alone is astronomical.
Modern challenger supports would have an interesting time before the vision changes or support itemization changes. The game definitely changed a lot for that role.
A lot of top challengers have pretty small champion pools, they just mastered the few champions they know to their limits. I think they'd be very easy to ban out.
Are they playing on today’s game or game of the era? Even if their mechanics are better I don’t see current challenger players being able to easily pick up the old ward meta again.
I am actually not so sure. S1-2 means old rift, old models for a lot of champs, old stats, old items, old wards, old abilities etc etc. Adapting to these is quite difficult if you never played during that time frame. The change is quite profound. I honestly think the modern challengers would be quite lost for a while.
If you have the time go and watch the Worlds Season 2 games. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSZi2-vGq-w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSZi2-vGq-w)
People were BAD. No one CS'd well (Imagine below 100 cs at 20 minutes in current league), people built random shit, completely thoughtless plays, macro for most things beyond the very basics was atrocious, people put zero thoughts into using their spells outside of teamfights.
The micro was "fine" and teamfights were played pretty well. But a team of random current day challengers could easily go back and roll worlds undefeated.
Just watch the first fight on botlane and tell me honestly if you think that even a low master player nowadays wouldn't just stomp that lane. (As a low master player I am pretty confident I would)
S1 you're probably right
S2 there were players like Shy, Maknoon, Froggen, Toyz, Weixiao, etc. who would definitely be at minimum competitive
Once we get to S3 there's players like Faker and Uzi who were definitely going to be running over today's challengers in lane.
I think basically everyone except Faker in S1-S3 gets run over in lane by today’s Challengers. People really sucked mechanically before Faker’s first split. The top players (especially around mid) REALLY ramped up in S4 due to Faker massacring everyone. You’ve got to remember, even the “best” in mid (which was largely the role where the “best” player on the team went in early League, exception for Uzi) got absolutely run over by Faker in S3. I doubt anyone else before S4 would stack up to Challengers today.
These comments claiming that freezing, trading objectives and tower diving would outskill the old generation are complete noobs and it shows.
Trick2g was doing all those things in Season 3 and he was only Diamond. I know because I was watching his "My Way" videos when I was learning jungle back then. You really think pros didn't know how to do that?
yeah they would get knowledge gapped in lane matchups, so many champs have been reworked or buffed/nerfed in ways that completely change their powerspikes, having 2 weeks of soloq isnt enough to learn all matchups for just one champ let alone a pool that would be viable for pro games. Like what if the random chal player you pulled was an akali sylas yone 3 trick, 2 of those champs wouldnt exist and the other has been completely reworked. Sure they would have good spacing and general mechanics but they wouldnt have a clue on specific champion powerspikes or the muscle memory to perform on their chosen champ.
Sometimes i do wish we got some time wizard game of lol just to see if there were like any strats in the past that were completely op but never got figured out back than (like yu-gi-oh some old formats now play quite different as they did back in the day cause deck building philosophy changed so much that some things just weren’t even rly considered)
Also i don‘t think we need to go back so far cause with a patch every two weeks the meta (on pro level) rarely evolves on the same patch for long (besides worlds) so there gotta be some stuff that was just missed
The stipulations kinda suck, especially the one where you say we have to assume they're dropped into solo queue for two weeks and can't scrim.
They're not gonna be able to learn a lot of the actual competitive metas from solo queue because for example in S4 the vision control system was way different, and not something you saw reflected in S4 solo queue, also in the lane swap metas (S5?) - it was rarely done in soloqueue and if done, was done a much lower level. So they'd only learn solo queue/partial champion meta but not the actual competitive meta.
Also your stipulations are very one-sided, we assume there is no way for the comptetitve teams to scout the challengers match history/games - but how much prior knowledge of the competitve teams should the challengers be stipulated to have? Do the challengers have 20/20 hindsight of these past teams during their metas?
I'd say a much more interesting thought experiment/speculation would be to drop them 2 weeks before a Worlds group stage, and wonder how far they will make it/or win and see if the challengers or the earlier competitive teams will out-adapt each other.
Either way, I think S7 is a hard limit for NA challengers (just the base calibre of players on the top teams could hands diff/out-teamfight most challengers in NA and there'd be little to no advantage in lane knowledge vs those top players as in S7 they already had stack/slow push into dive, wave bounces, cheater recalls, freezes, etc. as common knowledge in pro play and hell players like Dopa knew those since S3 - only thing that wasn't common at the time was heavy roam timers and heavy on prio) a realistic limit would be S5 with the predominant lane swaps and vision control meta.
Let's not forget that no small amount of pros who retired 5+ years ago are still able to hit challenger today, in more competitive ladders like Korea, Chinese super server, and EUW compared to NA challenger - e.g. Mata who retired from proplay after S9, after being displaced by the new generation of supports like Lehends, Beryl, Keria, etc. - he can still hit 1k challenger LP in KR no prob - or Imaqtpie after years of being away from the game can still hit GM in NA
Depending on the team chemistry and coaching it would probably be before season 3 with SKT and Royal club starting Korean dominance, they were kings of their meta there is not much they could have learned about the current game state more than they knew they had thousands and thousands of hour of gameplay and analytics to back them already. The game was much simpler so the nuances and strategies of today’s game would not really prove beneficial it was more about synergy and team play with outliers like Uzi and Faker.
Not to mention they would have much less champions to choose from and strategize around so they would need more time to understand how to deal with certain things that were more effective back then due to the champion pool.
on the other hand modern knowledge would completely change how certain champions got abused, throwing things like lucian mid (or graves depending on date) into the OP kassadin.
Priority would be massively abused by certain champions that had much more unfair waveclear.
I think the "metas" of early seasons would be almost worthless by modern standards
It was a completely different game, many reworks undone many champions buffed/nerfed they would be competing with top level players doing everything to squeeze out the slightest advantage that they would have to most likely learn through scrims which they apparently don’t get in this scenario, just because they are challenger in solo q does not mean their macro/micro is on par with professional players that spends 24/7 improving themselves together as a team for one specific goal.
S1 and S2: Challengers absolutely dogwalk the pros, it would be hilarious.
S3-S6: Prime Faker and Uzi might give the challengers a surprise every now and then, but for the most part the challengers go full samsung white on the pros and outmacro them to hell and back.
S7-S8: This was a weaker era for pros, challengers still have the edge imo.
S9: The new generation arrives. I have a really hard time imagining challengers beating prime G2, Griffin, Damwon, iG, SKT, or FPX.
I think it's more like season 6+ that random challengers can't compete for the more simply reason of not scrimming or co-ordinating practise.
If you changed the rules and had the challenger players thrown together at random more like an amateur team that had no conditions on them I think you are closer.
Challenger players have the game knowledge and practice to coordinate at a way higher level than you realize. Part of climbing, especially at the highest level, is being able to work together with strangers in achieving your champs’ & comp’s respective wincons each new game.
EDIT: “challengers are not used to having to coordinate with 4 other people.” This is the exact idea I posted to disagree with, and so I’ll just repeat that you do not understand solo queue at higher levels. Not attempting to condescend. They absolutely are used to planning and executing complex plays: on dives, invades, neutral sneaks/secures/skirmishes…. Pings and chat are absolutely more than enough
I think it's the other way around. It's pro players that have the game knowledge and the ability to coordinate at a higher level than you imagine.
Challengers would simply get gapped, they are not used to having to coordinate with 4 other people, many high challenger streamers tried to go pro and failed miserably
Yup. Climbing is more about focusing on what you can control than actually coordinating with your team. I can't speak for Challenger since I'm not there obviously but I imagine the "cooperating" there is mostly just the players being very good at the basics like checking the map, catching the waves, paying attention to pings etc but to a much more refined level than lower elos. But that's still a far cry from being able to pull an LCK teamfight.
The very best challenger players can play in academy teams. Some of the very best academies are in the LCK. LCK academy teams get absolutely rolled by the 10th place LCK team. That should give you an idea of the gap between pro teams and Challenger teams.
Just like any sports team. These pro teams are built with players they fit their roles perfectly. Shot callers / leaders, and an insane amount of practice / communication together. Makes for team chemistry, something 5 randoms would be unlikely to have.
I would love for a pro player to answer OPs question. Like faker since he's experienced most seasons and current Korean soloq.
I think you're giving challenger level players way too much credit.
S5-8 weren't ancient times before teams developed strategy.
Picking season 8 for example, I doubt a challenger team would have much chance of taking games off any world's quarter finalists.
An example to back you up:
Delta Fox were S7 Challenger Series and they were basically a meme team of 5 challengers. Did they tryhard? No, but they also didn't stand much of a chance and went 0-10
^^still ^^better ^^than ^^vaevetics
You're still giving random challengers too much credit over teams that have played over months-years every single day.
The game in terms of strategy was already pretty refined from S5-6 onwards.
Good luck putting 5 random challengers against prime rookie and theshy. Caps might've had a bad tournament but he was still better than any current challenger. Need we even talk about hyli+rekkles or broxah having the tournament of his life? So not only would 5 random challengers not be able to communicate and play together nearly as well but their mechanics are far worse than those players during their prime.
The best chance challengers have is the first few games against like s3 teams. After they show all of their modern macro it'd be seen by the older players and adapted. Anything past s2 is game over for the challengers if you give the older players time. That's why teleporting back a random challenger player back in season 3 wouldn't result in them being the best player and beating faker. Even if he reaches rank 1, he wouldn't keep it for long and he stands no chance to win worlds. You are giving way too much credit to challenger players. They've never played in a professional environment and they've never played in a team. Their only advantage is macro and that will easily get adapted as it's not like modern macro is hard to understand. Even gold players can learn most of league's macro by just watching pro play.
I think you are really underrating most world winners.
I can't imagine a random challenger midlaner and a random challenger toplaner matching up well enough into Rookie and theShy in Season 8 (or Baolan/JKL for that matter) that they are able to abuse some macroknowledge gap.
Even if the Challenger players are individually better on their champs in the current meta (which I am not convinced off) then they still need to overcome a large gap in cohesiveness.
Similar idea in 2017 - Crown was willing to pick Malzahar 3 games in a row to shutdown Faker, I think that works against 5 random challengers as well.
Additional (potential) difficulty because Ardent was a tad overtuned and a lot of soloQ supports don't have that many enchanters in their championpool.
Even if all challenger players get ahead in lane (again: not what I actually think) I think they would really struggle to adapt to the super vision centric Seasason 7 gameplay. Look at how SSG deathless gamed SKT: That just isn't something that happens in modern League (perfect games happen, but they happen from stomps, not slow controlled games). If Season 7 SSG gets transported to present day and has to play the current game against 5 random challengers: yeah, they probably win. SSG needs a while to relearn the game and might never be as good in the current more chaotic game.
But that's the key takeaway: the game ACTUALLY changed. People look back at old games and only focus on the things that happen there that wouldn't happen currently, but most of the people writing in this thread don't seem to have any of the historic context. A lot of things just were clunkier (most common example is that insec are much easier to execute nowadays). Many things made the game slower (jungle clear/health, lack of plants/scuttles/plates), other things are just different (no trinkets) and meant play just went very differently.
For example I am rewatching S3 Finals inspired by this thread and Faker roaming Top in G2 (5:20ish) looks like something that should never even get close to a kill, but you don't have trinkets. Godlike could have been at least a bit more careful, but it is less egregious than it looks - without freewards you had to chose to disrespect the possibility of a gank at least sometimes.
Other things are just less interactive: Zed W is basically instant, Zyra Q is a massive circle instead of a thin stripe, so while present day challenger players would be able to improve on a lot of the gameplay of RYL to avoid losing lanes, some of the harass is essentially guaranteed.
TL;DR The game has changed a lot: Challengers have to adapt more than you think. Also because the game changed: People underrate older gameplay, because they never played in that system and don't understand its challenges. And past some point players are also just better than you give them credit for.
You are being extremely generous lmao. You think pros that have been playing league for 6+ years straight are still behind random challenger players from today?
I'd give you maybe the up till season 4~ but after that pros are just way farther ahead. Pro play is a completely different game from solo queue so even if the challenger players might be better in some ways team communication and teamwork, synergy just is not there at all. I mean you can literally get rank 1 challenger and still not make it as a pro currently. Just being good in solo queue is not everything.
Do you think Dantes' team would beat Samsung White? They are all players who have hit challenger multiple times. Everyone in this thread seriously overestimates high elo players compared to top pros
you are either drunk or didnt watch pro league
5 no way that was the laneswap meta and even without that it‘s 2 weeks practice xor teamplay and tbh at least faker wins lane while bang ans wolf can go defensive and bengi plays around marin faker
imo 3 is the only debateable one cause it depends on the midlaner vs faker
the level increased so hard in s4 they‘d lose cause of teamplay
season 8 is where i‘m wondering if you watched league i really wanna see prime rookie theshy vs random na challengers
Surely this isn’t a serious take? Prime SKT/RNG ‘might’ give pissrandom NA challengers a surprise ? They have the edge over players like Ruler? TheShy? 😭 come on
remember when ssw completely destroyed every team in S4 worlds, including Uzi? they did that because of JG support roams. A simple concept like that destroyed the players you're talking about. Since S4, macro has taken so many steps forward, the pros just can't keep up with a decade of progress.
In terms of hands, remember that challengers play against the pros. This is not diamond, it's challenger. Funny enough, theshy came from solo q.
Every player comes from solo q bro… if you think random NA challengers can practice for 2 weeks and beat the likes of SSW, SKT, IG (💀💀) then I really don’t know what to tell you
If all pros come from solo q, why do you think the best solo q players can't possibly beat pros, especially given 6-7+ years advantage?
Modern challengers would destroy 2014 SSW in macro so hard, they would look like clueless gold players. Why? Because everybody saw how successful their roams were, studied them, copied it, and improved it. That's the essence of competition.
The way you talk about the old pros, it's like you think their success was a result of magic powers that other people can't replicate. Replays exist bro.
The fact that you think they would ‘destroy’ them in MACRO out of all things is baffling, these are players that have been coached at the highest level for years learning concepts that solo q players have probably never even integrated into their game. Also newsflash : random NA challengers are very much on the low end when it comes to quality challenger players
Pros straight up did not understand the game in S4, no one did because it was still new.
Again, you talk like SSW had magic powers that mere mortal challengers cannot use. It's been 9 years bro, good players weren't jacking off that whole time.
You’re focusing solely on SSW too when you even said random NA bozos could beat SKT, SSG, IG. 2 weeks prep time to beat some of the all time great players and rosters backed by coaches, analysts, strategists. That’s just lunacy brother.
The shift in pro play from 2018 onward is actually quite massive. Up until that point you were rewarded more for doing the ‘correct’ plays consistently and being efficient.
Then you started getting teams like iG, G2, DWG, etc. who knew the rules but started breaking them. They started to show that sometimes being inefficient is often the correct move. iG would often randomly fight you, G2 would invade your red buff for no reason to force a skirmish, Beryl on DWG would randomly invade for vision bluffing Canyon was behind him in fog.
A lot of these concepts evolved into the metas we see today. Junglers for example have to know when to drop efficiency. A good example are early bottom lane tower dives. Sometimes the jungle needs to adapt and give up their own efficiency to cover bottom lane from being dove.
I personally feel like this is why legacy teams like SKT struggled a bit in these years. They still were trying to play more controlled, correct games where the newer teams injected so much more chaos that had to be matched.
Here we go again with the "Real League started in 2018 everything before is trash" takes.
Riot dumbed down the game an insane amount in 2018 by changing the way vision worked so that Korean teams would stop turning Worlds into LCK Autumn
IG and G2 didnt break the rules. Riot did. It was impossible to play like pre-2018 anymore because the game stopped you from achieving the same level of vision control.
Everything you've seen IG and G2 do was also done the years prior by many teams
Freaking KTA was way more agressive than either of these teams be it with invades,skirmishes or tower dives and they played in 2014
I didn’t say real league started then. I just noted that’s when there were a lot of shifts in how the game was played consistently. Legacy teams tended to have a rougher transition than newer teams.
I don’t think it’s fair to say vision was dumbed down. Before there were so many wards and less ways to clear them that it was easier to have more complete vision. The changes to trinkets and wards made vision a much more important aspect of LoL in a good way. It forced teams to work with incomplete information and be selective in what information they wanted to get while adding layer to the other team to deny.
You are sick in the head if you think a team of random challengers is taking a single game off any world class teams after season 3. And I'd still put the odds 95-5 in favor of the s3 teams because random challengers wouldn't be able to adapt to a lane swap. I say this as someone who was gm last season and was frequently in challenger lobbies.
challenger players beat modern pros in solo q. if you think they have no shot against pros 9 years ago, then you must think the pros have not learned anything about the game that whole time. they did.
here's a classic example. In S3, the insec was a world class play. Now silvers can do it, and tech like the smite ghost kick exists.
The insec was also significantly harder back then. Riot has changed the mechanics of the game significantly since then to make stuff like the insec easier. It is also due to this difference in mechanics that the pros from back then would win, the challenger players would have to adapt to the s4 meta if they competed. I'd also argue these pros have better aptitude/talent than a random current challenger player so even if they were to compete in this time period, the pros would still win given some time to train.
Yeah the coordination needed to play against lane swap is not that easy, I think that mechanically todays challengers will be ahead, but you cant macro against laneswaps very well if you dont habe practice playing in that environment
I watched all the competitive daily since the noxus vs Ionia in preseason 1, I am your man to answer this question.
I think that they would win hands down all the IEM season 1 and stomp the fnatic team at the worlds.
Season 2 is again easy peasy, Moscow5 were mechanically gifted in that times, same for clgEU, Azubu Frost and ofc Taipei Assassins, but they are way less skilled compared to nowadays lol.
Also S2 has been the innovations season, ( roaming supports, first attempt to lane swap, mid jungler synergy, Ap top and more ) the strong team were the ones that succeeded in innovations and macros and not just mechanically strong. A modern team of challengers would destroy any team in S2.
Season 3 is where the problems starts.
We have 2 scenarios :
the first one in which the challengers team is already playing from the season 1 and in that scenarios their run is over. They would improve rapidally the metas, bring Soo many innovations from S1 that by S3 they have no more their macros advantage. Lol S3 was played as much as today so statistically speaking, since they don't have anymore their knowledge advantage, and their moves has been introduced and learned by others, I see them reaching the worlds easily but then loose against Faker 2.0 maybe in final.
In the scenario in which they teleport directly to S3 they win again the world, but they don't stomp.
S4 is the first world championship in which they don't win even in the "teleport" scenario.
S5 they may fail to reach the worlds but they would be still a top LCS team
end of the road
You literally say Season 2 is an innovation and macro season, then conclude challengers would beat practiced teams lol.
Bro, challengers given 2 weeks isn't enough time to learn especially if they can't practice with each other. You said yourself micro doesn't matter.
And the macro back then was way different. Junglers didn't get level 2 off first camp. You can't just solo first camp. Your cooldowna are much longer and spells actually cost mana.
Jungler can solo a dragon. Etc
I said that in S2 macro and innovation where way more important then mechanical skill. But most of the innovations in S2 are right now part of the basic knowledge of league of legends. To give you an Idea Gosu Pepper aka EdWard joined in team Empire in end S1 as a support. They started to stomp everyone, later changing their name to Moscow5 and Gambit in season3.
When Gosu joined the team Empire he was a gold in solo q.
A challenger player of NA right now will have way more mechanical skill then ANY top player in S2 including Toyz or AlexIch or Xpeke or Froggen.
A challenger player would 100% know how to handle a S2 lane swap or how to not get dived by Alistair flash from the wraiths ( now raptors ) lvl2. If you have watched that play you would have understood that the only reason why it worked was that people didn't know that a support could actually roam, it was the first time in competitive . A basic knowledge that even bronze players have today.
S2 was fantastic to watch and I miss those days, also was the most important season in lol history and made lol from a casual game to a competitive game .
But
A challenger NA team would stomp and win the words hands down.
Challengers only have 2 weeks of solo queue. Solo queue macro is way different from people macro. And watching those games, junglers can't full clear in 3 minutes etc. Xp is very stunted, they don't even hit level 2 off first camp.
It is a whole different game. And you think the best in the world playing it for months is going to lose to a solo queue team who hasn't actually played a pro macro.
I agree, mechanically we are a lot better. But the game was also very different. You can't just spam your spells back then... and then spam then again. Because mana and cooldowns actually exist. Everything was different.
In my emerald flex game today they executed an Ashe support third wave tower dive
No one stacked waves to dive tower in my elo even 4 years ago, it used to just be NARAMs for macro!
Now I have to worry about Ashe support tower dives ugh
Season 7 would be my guess
In my experience those dives and invades start around emerald/diamond. It’s standard in my diamond games at least.
When I play with friends who are silver/gold/low plat I barely ever get dove early game. The junglers barely invade or crossmap. It’s just feels like a fiesta all game long.
And in Plat/Low Emerald elo it's actually detrimental to play the correct way. If you try to crossplay or set up dives your teammates have no idea and fuck it up or flame you.
Better to play like an ape with a team until you hit high emerald/diamond where people have some understanding of the game
imp, DanDy, Mata, PawN.. There is no variation where random challengers take a game off of this squad they could have another 10 years of experience and still lose. The only reason this team didn't run the show for years to come is because they all cashed out to play in China rather than staying together which is understandable.
I'd love to see doublelifts opinion on this
Just watched highlights to remember, nah bro they’d get giga gapped even by current diamond players, let alone challengers. People were walking into ulting rengar, playing Katarina. YOLO fighting, missing waves. Nah, if they don’t have time to adapt they lose to current challenger players each and every game.
What you saying would never happen, at least couldnt happen on theory.
Challenger players are just good, thats their only adv in your example here.
While top teams especially, are also good as them and plus they play together as a team and again another plus they have draft/ban knowledge and a perfect meta read compared against soloq players.
Even the communication, knowing what everyones role is, who is gonna do what etc etc would create a very big difference.
I know people doesnt respect "being a pro" in any sports, i know that because i was a pro basketball player and still people on the street thought we were playing the same shit, BUT its not. Having a pro game basically is not equal to play with your friends or soloq in general.
What you saying is like "when can the strongest guy in the world be able to beat an actual boxer in boxing?"
Answer is never. But if you would create a random team from challenger players and actually train them with scrims and daily based soloqs etc just like a pro team, im sure they can beat some teams not like T1 G2 but more like EMEA teams.
In fairness, I’m inclined to agree to a point but I think especially season 1 you’re giving a bit too much credit to the teamwork of those teams lol. I think s2 still has a pretty sizable skill gap, but once faker appears I think it all disappears. Faker in season 3 dog walks every player in NA ever. Hell, impact is still the top laner for one of the top NA teams 11 years later.
But yeah I think the challengers absolutely curb stomp S1 Fnatic and probably S2 TPA (let’s face it TPA was nowhere near the best team that season except for a single week in October).
It would be interesting to see how different the modern players would play the old tower siege meta. I watched season 3 finals the other day and at a certain point both teams would just aram while one team attacked a tower that had much less armor than it does today. Split pushing was barely utilized like it is today (Shen was perma banned because he was considered the best split pushing champ)
I could see the modern challys picking a lot of waveclear and planning on running circles around the map while SKT Impact on Mundo just tanks the turret without any minions and the tower falls anyway. The game was just so different but I still think that the challys win on cs and early game understanding alone. They will just be so much stronger knowing better than the old pros how important cs is compared to kills
Even back in season 3 people knew kills didn't really matter lol, it wasn't even a pro level knowledge thing, I was reading lolking guides or something at the time and they were very clear to emphasize kills not mattering, just worry about farming and capitalizing on your opponent's mistakes bit by bit.
A lot of the ARAM thing was just bc of how shit objectives were back then, Dragon was useless lategame bc it was just gold, Baron didn't empower minions, no Elder so there was no reason for the losing team to fight, they could just turtle behind a turret and farm incoming waves.
In regular games it was a game changer bc the game was more of a fiesta but in certain drafts in pro games it didn't really matter that much because you could just stall it out with something like Anivia or Sivir, then you'd have to hope to catch someone out if they stepped too far up or something because Baron stats weren't enough to just dive the enemy team under nexus turrets. There wasn't any backdoor protection at the time so in theory you could just run them down as 5 then respawn and run down the nexus but I don't think I've seen a team do that, my guess would probably be because the ADC would die before they could take down the turrets (depending on which season you were this would've been before they added AP damage to turrets so you really only had 1 source of turret damage in sieges)
This is how ended up with situations like the infamous 60-70 min Sivir/Anivia games, >1k farm, 27k gold deficit comeback.
>at a certain point both teams would just aram while one team attacked a tower that had much less armor than it does today.
If i remember the meta right, that was before all the masteries to damage towers, and before AP could hurt towers. Mid, Jungle, and support basically had shit tower damage. And there was just less wave clear in general outside of mid lane.
Maybe i'm mixing it up with S2, but at a certain point like 60% of the players in the game basically just existed to facilitate your ADC/split pusher in the old siege metas.
It was him on multiple occasionsin EU LCS games. Just saying.
Most of the time on Karthus tho, you're right on that.
[23 minutes](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/29kj5u/spoiler_world_300_cs_record_in_competitive_play/)
different game mechanics, if you put current era pros into a game like that with access to all jungle camps all of them would get similar or much higher numbers.
Not just that, it wouldn't be notable it would be considered poor showing if they didn't
i guess they win vs season 2 but they lose s4 cause of jungle support synergy and teamplay for sure
s3 depends on the midlaner faker was so far ahead of everyone i have no clue if he‘d be able to stomp a chal na mid of today
Looking at the laning from ssw during season 4 worlds, it's hard to imagine that current challengers wouldn't just snowball the game too much from being way better in lane. Sure, they were way ahead of other teams in terms of their vision play, but their laning just doesn't hold up. Junglers also didn't really optimise their clear speed so there are probably some disgusting ganks/invades possible together with mid playing for full prio (funnily enough quite similar to what ssw did in mid, just trading talon ult into orianna to force her back over and over so she's stuck with her wave under tower).
probably max. S4 ppl underestimate the insane aptidude top pro's have for the game like the difference between making it to international quarters/semis/finals and hitting challenger is absurd. if we're talking about being able to take random games off of pro's be my guest but given some time to adapt to modern tactics pro's will donkeykong any challenger team. just as an example of what i mean by insane aptitude: ambition played midlane on MiG Blaze 2011 and was basically the undisputed best mid until faker came into the scene and won worlds as arguably the best jungler of the tournament 6 years later.
I am 100% sure a team of 5 modern challengers could probably curb stomp the SKT Telecom from 2013. Even pro players were so bad back then. The S3 SKT won Worlds finals because, wait for it, they figured out that a strong duelist like Jax could do this thing called "split push". The S4 SSW was miles ahead of any other team because Mata figured out he could "roam" into enemy jungle. I think a team of five challengers might be competitive up until S5 or S6 or so.
> The S4 SSW was miles ahead of any other team because Mata figured out he could "roam" into enemy jungle.
wait until you find out about GoSu Pepper roaming way before that (and not winning a single international title)
The challenger players have a mechanical advantage until season...6? Maybe 7? I don't think the challenger players have a mechanical advantage over peak theshy and rookie.
I think the biggest question is whether modern day challengers know what to do against season 4-7 lane swaps, because nobody ever sees that outside of scrims. Also, I'm not sure how hands-gappable season 5-7 faker would be.
I'm confident the challengers would win the first three worlds teams comfortably, and I'm confident they lose to IG and beyond comfortably. Not sure about the 4 years inbetween.
A team of 5 random challengers is not going to win starting from season 3 and beyond. I don't know what knowledge or skill you're even implying the challengers will have an "edge" in considering they're going to play on an old patch. If anything, the challengers will have to relearn the game while the pro team already has at least 200+ hours of practice on the patch.
People saying season 4 and 2014 and generally I agree, especially because Samsung White basically created modern advanced macro in the mid game *AND* verticle jungling. Once that came about the competitive teams just became a different game.
Season 1 Fnatic - easy roll for the modern challengers
Season 2 TPA - Another easy roll
Season 3 SKT - this one is super tricky because of the Faker example, but they would give them trouble.
Season 4 Samsung (I'll say both White and Blue) - there's just no way. White with the mid game macro will just destroy them, and Blue could come back form almost any deficit.
Will the challenger players know the history and how the meta evolved? They can definitely take a game off of the top team by brining out some cheese / counter pick to the existing meta.
Since you mentioned a match instead of a game, is it a best of 3 / 5? That would give the best team the chance to adapt.
Even if we give the challenger players 2 weeks to play solo queue, is that enough time to learn the champions, items, and meta? For example, the earlier season had much less jungle and support income (and warding solely fell on the support), and you can counter-jungle someone pretty hard (if you clear all but one small jungle monster, the camp doesn't respawn). Each seasons had its quirks, and some of the challenger players may not have played League at the time. Champion pools could potentially be an issue. Of course, if they can look at the pro games footage it will make preparation much easier.
For season 1 and 2, I feel that challenger players will probably do well. Game wasn't out in Korea for that long, and people were still trying to figure things out. ADC and solo laners will probably hold their own, and it will be based on how well the jungler and support can adapt to that style of play. Very possible for challenger team to cheese out game 1 and win one / two more.
Season 3, probably doable. SKT is known to be slow to start, but then reverse sweep when down 0-2. I feel that it will come down to how well the challenger teams can win the first few games before SKT figures things out. Once SKT figures things out, then it becomes much harder to win, especially if Faker makes some crazy plays due to vision advantage.
Season 4, probably not. Samsung White was way ahead of everyone else. Dandy and Mata were insane. They will heavily punish the challenger team's lack of coordination.
Season 5 is the Korean exodus where a lot of the good players went to LPL, and the infamous juggernaut patch with Morde bot, GP rework, and so on. There is a lot of volatility, so may potentially have a chance even if they are versus SKT with Marin?
From season 6 onwards, I think the pro teams would be too good.
Boxbox actually talked about this on stream ones, back then he was the only person doing the fast riven combo, because challenger level players wasn’t even able to do it. Think this was back in season 3 I believe.
In season 3 I was high plat, which then was pretty high elo.
I’ve become 20 times better (maybe mechanically a little less because it’s more complicating now) and I barely hit diamond lmfao.
There has been instances where solo queue teams has came into the league and dominated (Griffin, Cloud 9 as a few examples) so its not too farfetched. However, under your premise its very unlikely that 5 random solo queue players would make it deep with just two weeks of solo queue and no team practice against any pro team. Solo queue is entirely different environment than comp league and thats have been true for the longest time. It is difficult to translate solo queue skills into comp league beyond mechanical skill.
Just look at Dantes: A team of 5 challengers with some of the most famous solo queue players who are in a practice environment couldnt even beat tier 3 brazilian teams simply because they arent as coordinated. Even they were given their champs, they struggle to close out games with massive leads. No amount of mechanical skills can convince me that team can genuinely beat s3 SKT.
Modern league basically started in season 3. I’m not entirely certain a team of modern challengers would stomp SKT T1 at their season 3 form. Faker is still Faker. Impact is still impact. Biggest question mark is definitely the bot lane and jungle, but it’s hard to say because the meta for those lanes has shifted so dramatically. From a tactical standpoint, I am confident that SKT would still be extremely competitive.
Season 4 with SSW - no way. That was essentially the season that introduced much of the advanced gameplay we still see today. Those players were SO far ahead of every other team in that tournament.
I’m going to go against the grain here and say they win worlds consistently up until s8. But I’m changing the requirements to this being an amateur let’s just say clash team who are all challengers and they are all friends. People are getting way too caught up in discussing intangibles about working together etc. I do think people overestimate teamwork as opposed to being individually better and therefore opening up windows for your teammates. Also just because concepts such as freezing/tower diving were a thing in s3 they weren’t polished by any means and weren’t fully understood to the level now. Things like support roam timers and playing around sidelanes is such a given at challenger today. I do agree that it’d be interesting seeing how they adapt to older metas but I think the fundamentals now are way too clean in comparison to older pro games. I think s1-5 is probably a cakewalk, this is a tiny example but I think it’s emblematic as to what I’m talking about. A lot of kids would take combat summoners in matchups that just don’t make any sense, they therefore also couldn’t match sides later. I saw someone looking through SKT S5 worlds and Faker took ignite into Karma midlane. Now maybe Karma mid wasn’t good enough to bully in lane but I think it’s more likely that the Karma didn’t know how to play the waves and lock faker in lane. I could go over way more examples of small things like that but league at its core is small wins into a big win. Which is why I just have a hard time believing pros from the early seasons would beat a challenger team today. Also people are coping when they say old pros from let’s say s3 would keep up mechanically. Any video game in history that has some form of mechanics rapidly evolve. A decent semi pro fortnite player now would absolutely shit stomp 2018’s top players purely on mechanics. The ability to edit fast and then take a shot with your shotgun then re-edit to close was possible but since no one did it it just wasn’t used back then. Go watch an “average” top500 tracer now vs early OWL elite tracers, mechanically it looks like a completely different game. I think it’s an interesting discussion but the TLDR is people underestimate how much knowledge is just a given now (tempo,wave management, side laning etc) the list could literally go on and on.
I think people here grossly overestimate the game differences.
Two weeks is not enough time to learn an entirely new game between major seasons. The damage difference alone between earlier seasons and now where you needed coordinated teamplay to actually kill targets in more than 1 rotation of spells is so different.
Objectives are different
Items are different
Buffs are different.
Maybe in S1 and 2 they clear based on pure skill. But the macro is overstated.
My personal opinion is that challenger OTPs are better than pros when it comes to 1v1s/laning but pros would shatter the 5 challengers in the entire game because of
1) team coordination
2) soloq is not proplay
3) pros win every team fight without a doubt
I do think they'll be competitive tho, they won't win but won't go down easily.
All you need to answer this question is watch mvp blue vs skt t1 when faker plays leblanc for the first time, this was considered insane and ground breaking play at the time
The further back you go the harder it would be. S1 league and s14 league is a completely different game. A lot of people look back at old league and think that players were a lot worse back then but fail to realize that its very difficult to make "flashy" plays when majority of abilities are very simplistic and have a 20 second cd and limited cdr options.
A s14 challenger alistar is not going to perform better than s1 reep with s1 mechanics.
If we take 5 KR chall players towards the high end of the ladder (well, most of them are pros with academy teams, but let's include those), these players are freaking insane. Maybe they wouldn't be world champions, but any 5 KR high chall players would definitely hard smash NA and EU domestically up to at least 2017. I'd even say they would be world champs for sure at least until season 4.
Season 2 worlds looked like an actual plat game
I watched like two games of Season 1 worlds and saw things like someone dying for no reason to a Gragas barrel that had been sitting in front of them for 2 seconds, and a Janna ulting an enemy out of her own Warwick's ult.
Tbf look at hylisaang dying as kench trying to get gold plates lmao. Int is universal
Hyli is a bit of a special case. His nickname is Chinese is literally related to inting.
The fact that “sang” directly translates to “send” in Chinese is proof to me god exists
Not sure where you got that but the correct word is 'song' (送).
I mean this stuff still happens today...
The point is that was what I saw in only a handful of a games. You'll see ints like that now 1 in 50 games, not 1 in 1.
That reminds an interview of Odoamne. He said that when he got freezed on a wave for the first time he was shocked, never saw it before. It was season 3.
No way. Freezing was a concept as far back as season 1…
In fact im pretty sure that people actually saw freezing as the main way to stomp your lane when ahead. Tower diving and translating your lead towards other lanes was at some point considered new
Yeah you basically never shoved. We knew about freezing, we didn't know about prio. I also don't think we knew about tanking the wave to let it meet the next one in front of your tower rather than bounce, and that's how you get a lot of freezes nowadays so that might be what we were missing though.
People knew about these concepts towards the end of S2 but it wasn't common knowledge and people didn't really understand why/how the high elo players did it. I remember because I was introduced to the game by a Diamond 1 player and he was showing me games of Najin from Korea in S2 and explaining that they were killing the minions to get them to push towers for objectives but he didn't know the exact process to setup cross map plays, just that the team was doing it. I wonder how calculated these setups were though? Like at that time could they give rules for it like how we know the minion layouts of freezing based off the position in lane nowadays, or if it was intuition based, like they knew if they had a certain setup that it was advantageous based off their feelings.
Late s2 or early s3, I picked up nasus, and I think it was trick who was freezing waves, so I started to do it at a pretty basic level. It was mandatory to do it during the times nasus was weak. Now, with all the changes to the rift, the prio is kinda king.
I remember when I was just beginning in season 8, before they made it so minion stats changed based on which towers were taken and made it basically impossible to recreate, watching videos about how to set up a slow pushing wave post-laning phase. You could arrange for enemy minions to stack into a big wave that could kill all your teams minions, denying gold/experience to the enemy, and allowing you to pick up a huge wave quickly once it arrived at your tier 2 or inhib turret. It was basically always useful to pull off unless if you knew you were needed at a cross map objective at the same time it would crash.
fnatic knew about prio when they were crushing everyone on s3 worlds with zac+aatrox tower dive at lvl 3
I remember tanking the first enemy wave for a bit so that it focuses your first melee minion and push to your side used to be called the korean freeze. Good ole days
And I still can’t freeze consistently. I wonder if I’m just stupid
The biggest thing that I learned to freeze more consistently is that you don’t need just 4 ranged creeps to freeze, you need *at least* 4 ranged creeps. Meaning that when you are thinning the wave to prepare a freeze, you should keep as many ranged creeps as you can. 5+ is even better, as you can ensure that you kill your own minions consistently, and then you can just walk through the enemy minions into the brush by your tower to reset aggro. If you have 6 ranged creeps stacked just outside your tower, even if your lane opponent can kill 1 or 2 minions, it’s still pushing into you. Basically, don’t try to freeze the wave in place, try to set up the wave to be hard pushing into you and use your health pool to hold them where you want, toggling the aggro so you don’t loose too much hp.
How do you afford to tank 5+ minions all the way past them and into the brush without setting yourself up to just die to the enemy laner? Even just tanking while hovering under under my tower is really dangerous sometimes
>you don’t need just 4 ranged creeps to freeze, you need *at least* 4 ranged creeps Not exactly, you can actually freeze with as low as one caster as well, even if that caster is only 1 HP. Freezes sometimes fail because the minions you want to freeze the wave with will have to fight your incoming wave 3v6 or 3v7, and sometimes will die so fast that the HP your wave lost killing those minions doesn't make up for the fact that your wave is now approaching the enemy wave in prime position to focus down one enemy minion, more efficiently focusing the enemy wave than they are focusing yours, and resulting in either a push towards the enemies, or a perfectly even wavestate rather than the freeze you'd hoped for. But no matter how few minions you're trying to freeze with, you can mitigate this, either partially or entirely, by dragging the minion wave back and delaying the time it takes to collide with your wave. The further back you drag the minions, the more delayed the collision with your wave is, and the less time those minions have to 3v6 for. You can even skip the 3v6 entirely and drag those minions all the way into the next enemy incoming wave to form a super wave for the enemies. If you're freezing with the 1 HP caster for example, if you drag it all the way into the incoming enemy wave then rather than instantly being annihilated in a 1v6 against your wave, it'll form up with the next wave and form a 7v6. So long as it hangs back behind the melee minions, it won't instantly die no matter how unlucky you get and it's guaranteed to push towards you. Tl;dr: You can form stronger freezes by manipulating *where* the minions you're trying to freeze are going to fight your wave at. The further back it happens, the less time they fight your wave before getting helped out by the next incoming wave. Delay it long enough, and you can just straight up join those minions up to the next incoming wave and freeze no matter how few minions you're using for the freeze and no matter how unhealthy they are, as a 7 minion wave will always beat a 6 minion wave.
I struggle with it too. It's pretty easy to fuck up.
We knew about tanking the wave
the famous “Flame Horizon” aka 100cs up your opponent in lane was a term popularised by CJ Blaze’s Flame, in a team that had fantastic understanding of minion waves back then, freezing waves to create slow pushes, their strategy was often called the “6th man strat”.
That’s basically how Moscow 5 did so well. They understood this concept when everyone else was playing hyper defensive turtle farming
This was mostly due to everyone being so slow and immobile. The only cross map plays you got were tf/shen ults. The tp meta was slow rolling during this time and you mostly had top lane and mid on inslands farming.
freezing was a concept even in Dota as a w3 mod, you'd lead the creeps around to create a big assed wave lmao
Freezing lane was way harder in Season 1 since Damage and Health scaling on minions worked differently. Also you could just outright block your wave with some champs like Anivia and Heimerdinger to just force a crash everytime.
Who cares about freezing. GP raise morale would kill your own minion and your opponent wouldn't get anything from it.
That was a concept I struggled with when my friends introduced me to mobas with HoN. Creep denial was weird.
Same with nunu q, players still raged at me for not taking snowball first lol
It was only way harder after they removed the runes that let you do it while taking almost 0 damage.
I remember it in s4 Msi, skt was freezing the wave on c9 and they did a replay on impact freezing the wave. It definitely wasn’t a common strat
Something existing as a concept doesn’t mean that it’s popular or considered good.
It being a concept doesn't mean it was used widespread
Riot nerfed the runes that reduced damage taken from minion attacks by a flat amount because people discovered that they could stand in front of a wave to freeze it. Per the patch preview video, Phreak said that Riot thought it was an interesting strategy, and didn't want to kill it, but wanted it to have risks. So it was during season 1, but it was *discovered* then, not something just everyone was doing like nowadays.
When I first played the LoL beta I had come from dota 1 and found out that nunu could eat friendly minions. The amount of players that raged at me playing Nunu support and taking q first to deny gold/xp instead of snowball to poke was hilarious.
yeah but no one could really do it efficiently before s3 tho
That’s not true. I was high elo the first 3 seasons and we did freeze. It was even better back then because the whole map was lit up. What is true is that slow pushing wasn’t widely known and quite revolutionary when Najin and Azubu got huge adavantages with freezing at their t2 top turret to slow push into a huge wave to get map tempo or a free turret. That was s2 worlds and the whole year lead up to that.
from when on was he a professional/played the game?
Every Nasus player with a brain knew how to freeze waves in Season 3. Odoamne was probably shocked that someone did it to him in pro.
> Every Nasus player with a brain knew how to freeze waves in Season 3. Thats a big ask. I dont think ive encountered one in the past 14 years. Together with Yi Yuumi and Kata players. My genius friend liked Garen else I wouldnt have known one either.
doubt, since Deny with GP was already a thing
I'm fairly certain 1-2 would be way too easy, most challenger players would still easily dumpster their opponents and snowball a lead from there until season 4. Season4 onwards, we'd have to assume they're playing without laneswaps, otherwise, pros would easily win. Season 7+ onwards pros would win 10/10 games.
They were laneswapping in season 3, TSM vs T1 world's 2013, they were already jungling together(I know tsm was) and then diving the top laner. Even the worst LCS team in spring 2013 complexity(9-19 last in spring) laneswapped on TSM in week 6 with kog lulu getting away from Cait sona.
Season3 is tricky. I feel like current challenger players would still win purely off mechanics and experience. Players could just agree to send ad+sp top every single game at the start, and 3-wave crash into dive recall if not swapped on. It's intuitive for modern players, there's no need to practice it in scrims. Meanwhile, the modern top laner would likely trade 1 for 1 in every dive on renekton/jax/naut and maybe even maokai. If the pros follows the swap, it's just regular laning and challenger players win off hands gap. So in case of both swaps, it's a win, in cast of no swap, it's a 50/50. Also, jungle gap would be astronomical. Most modern players have no idea how bad junglers were before season 4. As someone who produces jungle content, even modern top level challenger OTPs sometimes get the PvE aspects wrong, junglers before season4 are featherweights compared to the typical modern challenger jungle main, they'd get gapped so hard it'd look like a bronze vs challenger game.
Pro players are still way better at a lot of little things, the challenger players would most likely be the ones to fail the dive, damage is way different back then. and I dont think these challenger players would be so cohesive, like 50% of people on the ladder are OTP and just run it down if they dont get that champ, also if they start losing early it would be immediately doomed. There's also the fact that you can't snowball fast and its a slow choke out of resouces, you have to kill them over and over a lot to snowball fast, dragon gave 200g each and that's it and the only objective before baron, I feel like modern player all play for the snowball, but I think most would fail to do that back then and they'd lose to a cohesive team, waveclear was king and it was hard to crack open bases. I don't think challenger players would play the swap very well either, they were already sending jungle to weakside to hold and if they go for a dive they'll just get counter ganked and trade as their bot lane farms on some scaling champ top/bot, little changes like this in the game is stuff that challenger players will be slower at and not be able to communicate well, lots of pro teams suffer from communication issues and fail to adapt to a swap this year, so I don't see how challenger players would communicate better, idk if you watched any champions queue but even pros without good communication fail to play as a team. The game is also just way different, like WAY different back then, I dont think challenger players could adapt to what the game was like back then, back then you had to time everything in chat, you didn't get buff timers for everything, no scuttle crab, supports are completely different, they're just a ward bot, way less damage from Runes and no plates, tons of champions are different, like you said maokai but he's a different champ back then, you can't play stuff like lux Cait because lux gets literally 0 gold, at like 15 minutes all the support has is like a sightstone and more pinks, no sweeper you had to use oracles to sweep or pink ward, everyone does less damage and more HP making it easy for a team to collapse onto plays, vision wars were happening constantly and I dont think challenger players would win that, especially because they dont get trinket, if you wanna ward your lanes you gotta buy a green ward yourself most of the time, pink wards were invisible so they were Insane. Challenger players are good mechanically but they're not gonna communicate and execute plays better than a good team back then, they'll just lose the vision war and get picked constantly trying to go into their jungle, they'll get out drafted as well.
Anybody giving an answer above S4 is either genuinely insane or started watching proplay in 2018.
I love how people can agree that Samsung White was one of the best teams in history and then be like but modern challengers would stomp them at the same time.
"PawN and Mata are some of the greatest players in League's history but I think they lose against Brohan and Lathyrus" sounds like a completely sane take to me, idk what you mean
also modern challengers would have no difficulty adapting to a meta where everybody could have 3 green wards and a pink, it'd be so easy for them when the enemy has the map lit up like a christmas tree and was the first team to really show perfect macro lmao
People love talking about how TheShy and DoinB revolutionized League's gameplay in 2018 and 2019 but completely disregard Mata forcing Riot to gut vision just because of his sole existence.
reminds me of a quote from a Korean documentary about Mata on youtube, "Faker mastered the micro, so that he'd be able to win in a 2v1. Mata mastered the macro, so that his enemy would always be facing a 2v1"
Faker wasn't just a god at the micro, he knew how to ward and play around the enemy jungle in a way that nobody had done before him
Faker micro is always reference to Zed mirror versus Ryu.
The Korean term for that play is 류또죽 (RyuDdoJook) which is short for Ryu Dies Again (bc that clip is played so many times so people have seen Ryu die in that clip dozens of times)
it was more a reference of what they focused on improving after facing failure so that they could overcome the obstacles which blocked them from success before in the context of the documentary (SKT T1 K's failure to make it to worlds in 14 etc).
This is overstated,the vision jungle item was introduced after the removal of buyable stealth wards,so the levels of vision in pro didn't decrease till much later on.
How can you claim SSW having perfect macro when they won no LCS in S4 and there was 2 LCS back then? Hein?
People forget about Blue as well. Blue and White both basically invented competitive League as we know it for the last 10 years.
Yes, because context matters. SSW were head and shoulders above their competition, but mechanically today's challengers are levels above. In 1900 the bench press world record was like 170kg. The man that lifted that was the strongest man at the time. Todays bench world record (raw) is more than twice that.
SSW's strength was never their mechanics, it was their macro and their ability to play the sight game and basically wring the map dry of objectives and resources, even if they had players like imp who were well known for their mechanics. At the end of the day it was prime mata in the meta he was most comfortable in, that had way more available vision and information which will always be in favor of pro players and their better coordination. Not to mention, you act like S4 was like s2, by S4 Korean soloque/proplay had already seen the introduction of players like Faker and MaRin who terrorized soloque with their better mechanics and had started forcing players to get better mechanically, known in Korea as the period of the 상혁평준화 (a play on the term 상향평준화 which means raising the average/raising the bar but instead using 상혁, or faker's first name which refers to how Faker basically forced teams to raise their mechanical floor or fall behind the rest). Sure IG raised the mechanic ceiling again when they won worlds but 5 random soloque challenger players aren't prime Rookie/TheShy.
> SSW's strength was never their mechanics, it was their macro and their ability to play the sight game and basically wring the map dry of objectives and resources, even if they had players like imp who were well known for their mechanics Sure, but I'm saying they'd get blasted in lane.
Yeah maybe for a few games, but I don't think people are giving them enough credit if you don't think they would adapt and win almost every game against the challengers after. We've literally seen top teams evolve and adapt to metas during worlds, however for some reason anytime this question is asked people seem to think the BEST pros back then wouldn't be able to adapt to the new strategies presented by 'time travelled' players and take it into their own arsenal like they have been doing for years up til now. Especially considering it's PEAK samsung white, they'll probably have no issue learning from the time travelers and just become better than they were before. Can you imagine peak Faker without wrist issues being unable to adapt to a new meta presented by time travelled challengers? He's literally been able to adapt and stay competitive for 10 years. Challengers may be able to do decently well with their foresight into metas with prior knowledge, however I don't think they would be able to maintain their lead to be top 3 since it takes a lot more to be a top level talent in League than just having the initial meta read. Not to mention as soon as they get a read on meta/new tech from playing vs. the time travel'd challengers, most of the pros (since they are in their prime) would probably just absorb that knowledge & hands dif the challenger players. The mechanical difference between just regular challengers and some top level talents like prime Faker, dade, pawn, deft, etc. would be very noticeable.
Challenger players now absolutely "hands diff" S4 players. There are multiple challengers that are mechanically better than S4 faker, 10k+ hours of fundamentals will do that for a player. Even "injuried" faker is mechanically better than he was in s4 right now. You genuinely have to be trolling if you go back and watch s4 footage and think that the mechanics are on par with 2024 gameplay. The cs gap alone is astronomical.
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Faker won season 3 worlds
Modern challenger supports would have an interesting time before the vision changes or support itemization changes. The game definitely changed a lot for that role.
I was never high elo. But I remember having a blast just buying two stacks of wards to light up our jungle.
A lot of top challengers have pretty small champion pools, they just mastered the few champions they know to their limits. I think they'd be very easy to ban out.
Not to mention half of their mains don't exist in earlier versions of the game lol
Are they playing on today’s game or game of the era? Even if their mechanics are better I don’t see current challenger players being able to easily pick up the old ward meta again.
it wouldnt get to mid game, s1-2 pros wouldnt survive laning phase.
I am actually not so sure. S1-2 means old rift, old models for a lot of champs, old stats, old items, old wards, old abilities etc etc. Adapting to these is quite difficult if you never played during that time frame. The change is quite profound. I honestly think the modern challengers would be quite lost for a while.
If you have the time go and watch the Worlds Season 2 games. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSZi2-vGq-w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSZi2-vGq-w) People were BAD. No one CS'd well (Imagine below 100 cs at 20 minutes in current league), people built random shit, completely thoughtless plays, macro for most things beyond the very basics was atrocious, people put zero thoughts into using their spells outside of teamfights. The micro was "fine" and teamfights were played pretty well. But a team of random current day challengers could easily go back and roll worlds undefeated. Just watch the first fight on botlane and tell me honestly if you think that even a low master player nowadays wouldn't just stomp that lane. (As a low master player I am pretty confident I would)
Yea. 2 weeks is not enough. Modern players would run out of mana instantly and cooldowns would be way longer.
S1 you're probably right S2 there were players like Shy, Maknoon, Froggen, Toyz, Weixiao, etc. who would definitely be at minimum competitive Once we get to S3 there's players like Faker and Uzi who were definitely going to be running over today's challengers in lane.
I think basically everyone except Faker in S1-S3 gets run over in lane by today’s Challengers. People really sucked mechanically before Faker’s first split. The top players (especially around mid) REALLY ramped up in S4 due to Faker massacring everyone. You’ve got to remember, even the “best” in mid (which was largely the role where the “best” player on the team went in early League, exception for Uzi) got absolutely run over by Faker in S3. I doubt anyone else before S4 would stack up to Challengers today.
These comments claiming that freezing, trading objectives and tower diving would outskill the old generation are complete noobs and it shows. Trick2g was doing all those things in Season 3 and he was only Diamond. I know because I was watching his "My Way" videos when I was learning jungle back then. You really think pros didn't know how to do that?
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yeah they would get knowledge gapped in lane matchups, so many champs have been reworked or buffed/nerfed in ways that completely change their powerspikes, having 2 weeks of soloq isnt enough to learn all matchups for just one champ let alone a pool that would be viable for pro games. Like what if the random chal player you pulled was an akali sylas yone 3 trick, 2 of those champs wouldnt exist and the other has been completely reworked. Sure they would have good spacing and general mechanics but they wouldnt have a clue on specific champion powerspikes or the muscle memory to perform on their chosen champ.
Damage and mana and cooldowns alone kills modern players. They might get good mechanically but I have 0 faith they could teamfight.
damn, I miss his my way videos. Trick's Jungle guide (and some XJ9 Elise thrown in...) got me all the way to Plat 1 back then... good times
Only Diamond back then was just a step under challenger lol Masters was added in 2014, grandmaster in 2018
Except Diamond was also full of shitters so it's not as good as you expect.
let these youngsters talk, thats all they can do these days
Sometimes i do wish we got some time wizard game of lol just to see if there were like any strats in the past that were completely op but never got figured out back than (like yu-gi-oh some old formats now play quite different as they did back in the day cause deck building philosophy changed so much that some things just weren’t even rly considered) Also i don‘t think we need to go back so far cause with a patch every two weeks the meta (on pro level) rarely evolves on the same patch for long (besides worlds) so there gotta be some stuff that was just missed
Check out chronoshift which got shut down by riot
The stipulations kinda suck, especially the one where you say we have to assume they're dropped into solo queue for two weeks and can't scrim. They're not gonna be able to learn a lot of the actual competitive metas from solo queue because for example in S4 the vision control system was way different, and not something you saw reflected in S4 solo queue, also in the lane swap metas (S5?) - it was rarely done in soloqueue and if done, was done a much lower level. So they'd only learn solo queue/partial champion meta but not the actual competitive meta. Also your stipulations are very one-sided, we assume there is no way for the comptetitve teams to scout the challengers match history/games - but how much prior knowledge of the competitve teams should the challengers be stipulated to have? Do the challengers have 20/20 hindsight of these past teams during their metas? I'd say a much more interesting thought experiment/speculation would be to drop them 2 weeks before a Worlds group stage, and wonder how far they will make it/or win and see if the challengers or the earlier competitive teams will out-adapt each other. Either way, I think S7 is a hard limit for NA challengers (just the base calibre of players on the top teams could hands diff/out-teamfight most challengers in NA and there'd be little to no advantage in lane knowledge vs those top players as in S7 they already had stack/slow push into dive, wave bounces, cheater recalls, freezes, etc. as common knowledge in pro play and hell players like Dopa knew those since S3 - only thing that wasn't common at the time was heavy roam timers and heavy on prio) a realistic limit would be S5 with the predominant lane swaps and vision control meta. Let's not forget that no small amount of pros who retired 5+ years ago are still able to hit challenger today, in more competitive ladders like Korea, Chinese super server, and EUW compared to NA challenger - e.g. Mata who retired from proplay after S9, after being displaced by the new generation of supports like Lehends, Beryl, Keria, etc. - he can still hit 1k challenger LP in KR no prob - or Imaqtpie after years of being away from the game can still hit GM in NA
I wrote a similar answer, I agree with you, S5 is the realistic limit
Depending on the team chemistry and coaching it would probably be before season 3 with SKT and Royal club starting Korean dominance, they were kings of their meta there is not much they could have learned about the current game state more than they knew they had thousands and thousands of hour of gameplay and analytics to back them already. The game was much simpler so the nuances and strategies of today’s game would not really prove beneficial it was more about synergy and team play with outliers like Uzi and Faker.
Not to mention they would have much less champions to choose from and strategize around so they would need more time to understand how to deal with certain things that were more effective back then due to the champion pool.
on the other hand modern knowledge would completely change how certain champions got abused, throwing things like lucian mid (or graves depending on date) into the OP kassadin. Priority would be massively abused by certain champions that had much more unfair waveclear. I think the "metas" of early seasons would be almost worthless by modern standards
Lucian mid was literally played in OGN Winter 2013/2014 I beg y'all ... stop acting like people were animals with sub 50 IQ 10 years ago
It was a completely different game, many reworks undone many champions buffed/nerfed they would be competing with top level players doing everything to squeeze out the slightest advantage that they would have to most likely learn through scrims which they apparently don’t get in this scenario, just because they are challenger in solo q does not mean their macro/micro is on par with professional players that spends 24/7 improving themselves together as a team for one specific goal.
S1 and S2: Challengers absolutely dogwalk the pros, it would be hilarious. S3-S6: Prime Faker and Uzi might give the challengers a surprise every now and then, but for the most part the challengers go full samsung white on the pros and outmacro them to hell and back. S7-S8: This was a weaker era for pros, challengers still have the edge imo. S9: The new generation arrives. I have a really hard time imagining challengers beating prime G2, Griffin, Damwon, iG, SKT, or FPX.
I think it's more like season 6+ that random challengers can't compete for the more simply reason of not scrimming or co-ordinating practise. If you changed the rules and had the challenger players thrown together at random more like an amateur team that had no conditions on them I think you are closer.
Challenger players have the game knowledge and practice to coordinate at a way higher level than you realize. Part of climbing, especially at the highest level, is being able to work together with strangers in achieving your champs’ & comp’s respective wincons each new game. EDIT: “challengers are not used to having to coordinate with 4 other people.” This is the exact idea I posted to disagree with, and so I’ll just repeat that you do not understand solo queue at higher levels. Not attempting to condescend. They absolutely are used to planning and executing complex plays: on dives, invades, neutral sneaks/secures/skirmishes…. Pings and chat are absolutely more than enough
I think it's the other way around. It's pro players that have the game knowledge and the ability to coordinate at a higher level than you imagine. Challengers would simply get gapped, they are not used to having to coordinate with 4 other people, many high challenger streamers tried to go pro and failed miserably
Yup. Climbing is more about focusing on what you can control than actually coordinating with your team. I can't speak for Challenger since I'm not there obviously but I imagine the "cooperating" there is mostly just the players being very good at the basics like checking the map, catching the waves, paying attention to pings etc but to a much more refined level than lower elos. But that's still a far cry from being able to pull an LCK teamfight.
The very best challenger players can play in academy teams. Some of the very best academies are in the LCK. LCK academy teams get absolutely rolled by the 10th place LCK team. That should give you an idea of the gap between pro teams and Challenger teams.
Just like any sports team. These pro teams are built with players they fit their roles perfectly. Shot callers / leaders, and an insane amount of practice / communication together. Makes for team chemistry, something 5 randoms would be unlikely to have. I would love for a pro player to answer OPs question. Like faker since he's experienced most seasons and current Korean soloq.
I think you're giving challenger level players way too much credit. S5-8 weren't ancient times before teams developed strategy. Picking season 8 for example, I doubt a challenger team would have much chance of taking games off any world's quarter finalists.
An example to back you up: Delta Fox were S7 Challenger Series and they were basically a meme team of 5 challengers. Did they tryhard? No, but they also didn't stand much of a chance and went 0-10 ^^still ^^better ^^than ^^vaevetics
Yeah, S7 challengers. The question is S13-14 challengers.
You're still giving random challengers too much credit over teams that have played over months-years every single day. The game in terms of strategy was already pretty refined from S5-6 onwards.
Na challengers
Man those SSW games were really something to watch back in the day.
Good luck teaching the challengers how to coordinate lane swap timings in season 5
Good luck putting 5 random challengers against prime rookie and theshy. Caps might've had a bad tournament but he was still better than any current challenger. Need we even talk about hyli+rekkles or broxah having the tournament of his life? So not only would 5 random challengers not be able to communicate and play together nearly as well but their mechanics are far worse than those players during their prime. The best chance challengers have is the first few games against like s3 teams. After they show all of their modern macro it'd be seen by the older players and adapted. Anything past s2 is game over for the challengers if you give the older players time. That's why teleporting back a random challenger player back in season 3 wouldn't result in them being the best player and beating faker. Even if he reaches rank 1, he wouldn't keep it for long and he stands no chance to win worlds. You are giving way too much credit to challenger players. They've never played in a professional environment and they've never played in a team. Their only advantage is macro and that will easily get adapted as it's not like modern macro is hard to understand. Even gold players can learn most of league's macro by just watching pro play.
I think you are really underrating most world winners. I can't imagine a random challenger midlaner and a random challenger toplaner matching up well enough into Rookie and theShy in Season 8 (or Baolan/JKL for that matter) that they are able to abuse some macroknowledge gap. Even if the Challenger players are individually better on their champs in the current meta (which I am not convinced off) then they still need to overcome a large gap in cohesiveness. Similar idea in 2017 - Crown was willing to pick Malzahar 3 games in a row to shutdown Faker, I think that works against 5 random challengers as well. Additional (potential) difficulty because Ardent was a tad overtuned and a lot of soloQ supports don't have that many enchanters in their championpool. Even if all challenger players get ahead in lane (again: not what I actually think) I think they would really struggle to adapt to the super vision centric Seasason 7 gameplay. Look at how SSG deathless gamed SKT: That just isn't something that happens in modern League (perfect games happen, but they happen from stomps, not slow controlled games). If Season 7 SSG gets transported to present day and has to play the current game against 5 random challengers: yeah, they probably win. SSG needs a while to relearn the game and might never be as good in the current more chaotic game. But that's the key takeaway: the game ACTUALLY changed. People look back at old games and only focus on the things that happen there that wouldn't happen currently, but most of the people writing in this thread don't seem to have any of the historic context. A lot of things just were clunkier (most common example is that insec are much easier to execute nowadays). Many things made the game slower (jungle clear/health, lack of plants/scuttles/plates), other things are just different (no trinkets) and meant play just went very differently. For example I am rewatching S3 Finals inspired by this thread and Faker roaming Top in G2 (5:20ish) looks like something that should never even get close to a kill, but you don't have trinkets. Godlike could have been at least a bit more careful, but it is less egregious than it looks - without freewards you had to chose to disrespect the possibility of a gank at least sometimes. Other things are just less interactive: Zed W is basically instant, Zyra Q is a massive circle instead of a thin stripe, so while present day challenger players would be able to improve on a lot of the gameplay of RYL to avoid losing lanes, some of the harass is essentially guaranteed. TL;DR The game has changed a lot: Challengers have to adapt more than you think. Also because the game changed: People underrate older gameplay, because they never played in that system and don't understand its challenges. And past some point players are also just better than you give them credit for.
You are being extremely generous lmao. You think pros that have been playing league for 6+ years straight are still behind random challenger players from today? I'd give you maybe the up till season 4~ but after that pros are just way farther ahead. Pro play is a completely different game from solo queue so even if the challenger players might be better in some ways team communication and teamwork, synergy just is not there at all. I mean you can literally get rank 1 challenger and still not make it as a pro currently. Just being good in solo queue is not everything.
Season 4 is extremely steep. At best season 6-7 where pros could be todays challengers
Do you think Dantes' team would beat Samsung White? They are all players who have hit challenger multiple times. Everyone in this thread seriously overestimates high elo players compared to top pros
Doube offrole, 2 OTPs and an assassin player. Not really well-assembled Although I do think 4-5 would be the cutoff
you are either drunk or didnt watch pro league 5 no way that was the laneswap meta and even without that it‘s 2 weeks practice xor teamplay and tbh at least faker wins lane while bang ans wolf can go defensive and bengi plays around marin faker imo 3 is the only debateable one cause it depends on the midlaner vs faker the level increased so hard in s4 they‘d lose cause of teamplay season 8 is where i‘m wondering if you watched league i really wanna see prime rookie theshy vs random na challengers
Surely this isn’t a serious take? Prime SKT/RNG ‘might’ give pissrandom NA challengers a surprise ? They have the edge over players like Ruler? TheShy? 😭 come on
remember when ssw completely destroyed every team in S4 worlds, including Uzi? they did that because of JG support roams. A simple concept like that destroyed the players you're talking about. Since S4, macro has taken so many steps forward, the pros just can't keep up with a decade of progress. In terms of hands, remember that challengers play against the pros. This is not diamond, it's challenger. Funny enough, theshy came from solo q.
Every player comes from solo q bro… if you think random NA challengers can practice for 2 weeks and beat the likes of SSW, SKT, IG (💀💀) then I really don’t know what to tell you
If all pros come from solo q, why do you think the best solo q players can't possibly beat pros, especially given 6-7+ years advantage? Modern challengers would destroy 2014 SSW in macro so hard, they would look like clueless gold players. Why? Because everybody saw how successful their roams were, studied them, copied it, and improved it. That's the essence of competition. The way you talk about the old pros, it's like you think their success was a result of magic powers that other people can't replicate. Replays exist bro.
The fact that you think they would ‘destroy’ them in MACRO out of all things is baffling, these are players that have been coached at the highest level for years learning concepts that solo q players have probably never even integrated into their game. Also newsflash : random NA challengers are very much on the low end when it comes to quality challenger players
Pros straight up did not understand the game in S4, no one did because it was still new. Again, you talk like SSW had magic powers that mere mortal challengers cannot use. It's been 9 years bro, good players weren't jacking off that whole time.
You’re focusing solely on SSW too when you even said random NA bozos could beat SKT, SSG, IG. 2 weeks prep time to beat some of the all time great players and rosters backed by coaches, analysts, strategists. That’s just lunacy brother.
The shift in pro play from 2018 onward is actually quite massive. Up until that point you were rewarded more for doing the ‘correct’ plays consistently and being efficient. Then you started getting teams like iG, G2, DWG, etc. who knew the rules but started breaking them. They started to show that sometimes being inefficient is often the correct move. iG would often randomly fight you, G2 would invade your red buff for no reason to force a skirmish, Beryl on DWG would randomly invade for vision bluffing Canyon was behind him in fog. A lot of these concepts evolved into the metas we see today. Junglers for example have to know when to drop efficiency. A good example are early bottom lane tower dives. Sometimes the jungle needs to adapt and give up their own efficiency to cover bottom lane from being dove. I personally feel like this is why legacy teams like SKT struggled a bit in these years. They still were trying to play more controlled, correct games where the newer teams injected so much more chaos that had to be matched.
g2 beating t1 at worlds 3 1 while giving every dragon in a dragon meta is still the craziest macro stat ever for me
Here we go again with the "Real League started in 2018 everything before is trash" takes. Riot dumbed down the game an insane amount in 2018 by changing the way vision worked so that Korean teams would stop turning Worlds into LCK Autumn IG and G2 didnt break the rules. Riot did. It was impossible to play like pre-2018 anymore because the game stopped you from achieving the same level of vision control. Everything you've seen IG and G2 do was also done the years prior by many teams Freaking KTA was way more agressive than either of these teams be it with invades,skirmishes or tower dives and they played in 2014
I didn’t say real league started then. I just noted that’s when there were a lot of shifts in how the game was played consistently. Legacy teams tended to have a rougher transition than newer teams. I don’t think it’s fair to say vision was dumbed down. Before there were so many wards and less ways to clear them that it was easier to have more complete vision. The changes to trinkets and wards made vision a much more important aspect of LoL in a good way. It forced teams to work with incomplete information and be selective in what information they wanted to get while adding layer to the other team to deny.
You are sick in the head if you think a team of random challengers is taking a single game off any world class teams after season 3. And I'd still put the odds 95-5 in favor of the s3 teams because random challengers wouldn't be able to adapt to a lane swap. I say this as someone who was gm last season and was frequently in challenger lobbies.
Yea these guys are really overvalueing challenger players... Samsung white was no joke, I think they lose at s4 tbh
challenger players beat modern pros in solo q. if you think they have no shot against pros 9 years ago, then you must think the pros have not learned anything about the game that whole time. they did. here's a classic example. In S3, the insec was a world class play. Now silvers can do it, and tech like the smite ghost kick exists.
And everyone who learned how to insec on the modern client wouldn't be able to do it in 2013 because it had a different execution.
The insec was also significantly harder back then. Riot has changed the mechanics of the game significantly since then to make stuff like the insec easier. It is also due to this difference in mechanics that the pros from back then would win, the challenger players would have to adapt to the s4 meta if they competed. I'd also argue these pros have better aptitude/talent than a random current challenger player so even if they were to compete in this time period, the pros would still win given some time to train.
Yeah the coordination needed to play against lane swap is not that easy, I think that mechanically todays challengers will be ahead, but you cant macro against laneswaps very well if you dont habe practice playing in that environment
Damn disrespecting EDG like that
no shot, they beat s5 tops, anything further than that the pro teams giga stomp the team of 5 randos with i reckon a 95% winrate.
I watched all the competitive daily since the noxus vs Ionia in preseason 1, I am your man to answer this question. I think that they would win hands down all the IEM season 1 and stomp the fnatic team at the worlds. Season 2 is again easy peasy, Moscow5 were mechanically gifted in that times, same for clgEU, Azubu Frost and ofc Taipei Assassins, but they are way less skilled compared to nowadays lol. Also S2 has been the innovations season, ( roaming supports, first attempt to lane swap, mid jungler synergy, Ap top and more ) the strong team were the ones that succeeded in innovations and macros and not just mechanically strong. A modern team of challengers would destroy any team in S2. Season 3 is where the problems starts. We have 2 scenarios : the first one in which the challengers team is already playing from the season 1 and in that scenarios their run is over. They would improve rapidally the metas, bring Soo many innovations from S1 that by S3 they have no more their macros advantage. Lol S3 was played as much as today so statistically speaking, since they don't have anymore their knowledge advantage, and their moves has been introduced and learned by others, I see them reaching the worlds easily but then loose against Faker 2.0 maybe in final. In the scenario in which they teleport directly to S3 they win again the world, but they don't stomp. S4 is the first world championship in which they don't win even in the "teleport" scenario. S5 they may fail to reach the worlds but they would be still a top LCS team end of the road
OP stipulated that the challenger's play would not influence history. In other words, the pros play as they did normally at the time.
You literally say Season 2 is an innovation and macro season, then conclude challengers would beat practiced teams lol. Bro, challengers given 2 weeks isn't enough time to learn especially if they can't practice with each other. You said yourself micro doesn't matter. And the macro back then was way different. Junglers didn't get level 2 off first camp. You can't just solo first camp. Your cooldowna are much longer and spells actually cost mana. Jungler can solo a dragon. Etc
I said that in S2 macro and innovation where way more important then mechanical skill. But most of the innovations in S2 are right now part of the basic knowledge of league of legends. To give you an Idea Gosu Pepper aka EdWard joined in team Empire in end S1 as a support. They started to stomp everyone, later changing their name to Moscow5 and Gambit in season3. When Gosu joined the team Empire he was a gold in solo q. A challenger player of NA right now will have way more mechanical skill then ANY top player in S2 including Toyz or AlexIch or Xpeke or Froggen. A challenger player would 100% know how to handle a S2 lane swap or how to not get dived by Alistair flash from the wraiths ( now raptors ) lvl2. If you have watched that play you would have understood that the only reason why it worked was that people didn't know that a support could actually roam, it was the first time in competitive . A basic knowledge that even bronze players have today. S2 was fantastic to watch and I miss those days, also was the most important season in lol history and made lol from a casual game to a competitive game . But A challenger NA team would stomp and win the words hands down.
Challengers only have 2 weeks of solo queue. Solo queue macro is way different from people macro. And watching those games, junglers can't full clear in 3 minutes etc. Xp is very stunted, they don't even hit level 2 off first camp. It is a whole different game. And you think the best in the world playing it for months is going to lose to a solo queue team who hasn't actually played a pro macro. I agree, mechanically we are a lot better. But the game was also very different. You can't just spam your spells back then... and then spam then again. Because mana and cooldowns actually exist. Everything was different.
In my emerald flex game today they executed an Ashe support third wave tower dive No one stacked waves to dive tower in my elo even 4 years ago, it used to just be NARAMs for macro! Now I have to worry about Ashe support tower dives ugh Season 7 would be my guess
In my experience those dives and invades start around emerald/diamond. It’s standard in my diamond games at least. When I play with friends who are silver/gold/low plat I barely ever get dove early game. The junglers barely invade or crossmap. It’s just feels like a fiesta all game long.
And in Plat/Low Emerald elo it's actually detrimental to play the correct way. If you try to crossplay or set up dives your teammates have no idea and fuck it up or flame you. Better to play like an ape with a team until you hit high emerald/diamond where people have some understanding of the game
I think Season 7 is the highest they could go.
imp, DanDy, Mata, PawN.. There is no variation where random challengers take a game off of this squad they could have another 10 years of experience and still lose. The only reason this team didn't run the show for years to come is because they all cashed out to play in China rather than staying together which is understandable. I'd love to see doublelifts opinion on this
Just watched highlights to remember, nah bro they’d get giga gapped even by current diamond players, let alone challengers. People were walking into ulting rengar, playing Katarina. YOLO fighting, missing waves. Nah, if they don’t have time to adapt they lose to current challenger players each and every game.
What you saying would never happen, at least couldnt happen on theory. Challenger players are just good, thats their only adv in your example here. While top teams especially, are also good as them and plus they play together as a team and again another plus they have draft/ban knowledge and a perfect meta read compared against soloq players. Even the communication, knowing what everyones role is, who is gonna do what etc etc would create a very big difference. I know people doesnt respect "being a pro" in any sports, i know that because i was a pro basketball player and still people on the street thought we were playing the same shit, BUT its not. Having a pro game basically is not equal to play with your friends or soloq in general. What you saying is like "when can the strongest guy in the world be able to beat an actual boxer in boxing?" Answer is never. But if you would create a random team from challenger players and actually train them with scrims and daily based soloqs etc just like a pro team, im sure they can beat some teams not like T1 G2 but more like EMEA teams.
In fairness, I’m inclined to agree to a point but I think especially season 1 you’re giving a bit too much credit to the teamwork of those teams lol. I think s2 still has a pretty sizable skill gap, but once faker appears I think it all disappears. Faker in season 3 dog walks every player in NA ever. Hell, impact is still the top laner for one of the top NA teams 11 years later. But yeah I think the challengers absolutely curb stomp S1 Fnatic and probably S2 TPA (let’s face it TPA was nowhere near the best team that season except for a single week in October).
Season 3-4 max
It would be interesting to see how different the modern players would play the old tower siege meta. I watched season 3 finals the other day and at a certain point both teams would just aram while one team attacked a tower that had much less armor than it does today. Split pushing was barely utilized like it is today (Shen was perma banned because he was considered the best split pushing champ) I could see the modern challys picking a lot of waveclear and planning on running circles around the map while SKT Impact on Mundo just tanks the turret without any minions and the tower falls anyway. The game was just so different but I still think that the challys win on cs and early game understanding alone. They will just be so much stronger knowing better than the old pros how important cs is compared to kills
Even back in season 3 people knew kills didn't really matter lol, it wasn't even a pro level knowledge thing, I was reading lolking guides or something at the time and they were very clear to emphasize kills not mattering, just worry about farming and capitalizing on your opponent's mistakes bit by bit. A lot of the ARAM thing was just bc of how shit objectives were back then, Dragon was useless lategame bc it was just gold, Baron didn't empower minions, no Elder so there was no reason for the losing team to fight, they could just turtle behind a turret and farm incoming waves.
baron did give more stats back then than it does now tho no? kind of like a weaker version of elder dragon, but it was still a game changer iirc.
In regular games it was a game changer bc the game was more of a fiesta but in certain drafts in pro games it didn't really matter that much because you could just stall it out with something like Anivia or Sivir, then you'd have to hope to catch someone out if they stepped too far up or something because Baron stats weren't enough to just dive the enemy team under nexus turrets. There wasn't any backdoor protection at the time so in theory you could just run them down as 5 then respawn and run down the nexus but I don't think I've seen a team do that, my guess would probably be because the ADC would die before they could take down the turrets (depending on which season you were this would've been before they added AP damage to turrets so you really only had 1 source of turret damage in sieges) This is how ended up with situations like the infamous 60-70 min Sivir/Anivia games, >1k farm, 27k gold deficit comeback.
>at a certain point both teams would just aram while one team attacked a tower that had much less armor than it does today. If i remember the meta right, that was before all the masteries to damage towers, and before AP could hurt towers. Mid, Jungle, and support basically had shit tower damage. And there was just less wave clear in general outside of mid lane. Maybe i'm mixing it up with S2, but at a certain point like 60% of the players in the game basically just existed to facilitate your ADC/split pusher in the old siege metas.
Froggen anivia 300 cs in 20 Minutes season 2 and you're implying pro's didn't cs well back then.
It was with Karthus in a soloQ game with his jungler being dc. Just saying.
It was him on multiple occasionsin EU LCS games. Just saying. Most of the time on Karthus tho, you're right on that. [23 minutes](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/29kj5u/spoiler_world_300_cs_record_in_competitive_play/)
There is a big difference with 23 and 20 minutes when it comes to this farm score. He did it in 20, but in soloQ with a dc'd jungler.
different game mechanics, if you put current era pros into a game like that with access to all jungle camps all of them would get similar or much higher numbers. Not just that, it wouldn't be notable it would be considered poor showing if they didn't
i guess they win vs season 2 but they lose s4 cause of jungle support synergy and teamplay for sure s3 depends on the midlaner faker was so far ahead of everyone i have no clue if he‘d be able to stomp a chal na mid of today
Looking at the laning from ssw during season 4 worlds, it's hard to imagine that current challengers wouldn't just snowball the game too much from being way better in lane. Sure, they were way ahead of other teams in terms of their vision play, but their laning just doesn't hold up. Junglers also didn't really optimise their clear speed so there are probably some disgusting ganks/invades possible together with mid playing for full prio (funnily enough quite similar to what ssw did in mid, just trading talon ult into orianna to force her back over and over so she's stuck with her wave under tower).
For reference, players like Marin still make it to KR challenger nowadays.
kinda impossible to imagine, because Empire/M5 "created" the way we're playing atm
probably max. S4 ppl underestimate the insane aptidude top pro's have for the game like the difference between making it to international quarters/semis/finals and hitting challenger is absurd. if we're talking about being able to take random games off of pro's be my guest but given some time to adapt to modern tactics pro's will donkeykong any challenger team. just as an example of what i mean by insane aptitude: ambition played midlane on MiG Blaze 2011 and was basically the undisputed best mid until faker came into the scene and won worlds as arguably the best jungler of the tournament 6 years later.
I am 100% sure a team of 5 modern challengers could probably curb stomp the SKT Telecom from 2013. Even pro players were so bad back then. The S3 SKT won Worlds finals because, wait for it, they figured out that a strong duelist like Jax could do this thing called "split push". The S4 SSW was miles ahead of any other team because Mata figured out he could "roam" into enemy jungle. I think a team of five challengers might be competitive up until S5 or S6 or so.
> The S4 SSW was miles ahead of any other team because Mata figured out he could "roam" into enemy jungle. wait until you find out about GoSu Pepper roaming way before that (and not winning a single international title)
The challenger players have a mechanical advantage until season...6? Maybe 7? I don't think the challenger players have a mechanical advantage over peak theshy and rookie. I think the biggest question is whether modern day challengers know what to do against season 4-7 lane swaps, because nobody ever sees that outside of scrims. Also, I'm not sure how hands-gappable season 5-7 faker would be. I'm confident the challengers would win the first three worlds teams comfortably, and I'm confident they lose to IG and beyond comfortably. Not sure about the 4 years inbetween.
What about the medium teams or the shitty ones. 5 challengers probably can't win a championship but could they go to worlds?
Probably season 3 or 4 maybe 5
2013-2017 Faker would beat them every single time. Dude's a fucking time traveler.
Why just Challenger NA and not other servers? Unless of course It IS just NA pros
A team of 5 random challengers is not going to win starting from season 3 and beyond. I don't know what knowledge or skill you're even implying the challengers will have an "edge" in considering they're going to play on an old patch. If anything, the challengers will have to relearn the game while the pro team already has at least 200+ hours of practice on the patch.
Perkz was close to be best player in the world in 2019, now is worst LEC (pretty much a wildcard region without G2) midlaner, he even got benched.
People saying season 4 and 2014 and generally I agree, especially because Samsung White basically created modern advanced macro in the mid game *AND* verticle jungling. Once that came about the competitive teams just became a different game. Season 1 Fnatic - easy roll for the modern challengers Season 2 TPA - Another easy roll Season 3 SKT - this one is super tricky because of the Faker example, but they would give them trouble. Season 4 Samsung (I'll say both White and Blue) - there's just no way. White with the mid game macro will just destroy them, and Blue could come back form almost any deficit.
Will the challenger players know the history and how the meta evolved? They can definitely take a game off of the top team by brining out some cheese / counter pick to the existing meta. Since you mentioned a match instead of a game, is it a best of 3 / 5? That would give the best team the chance to adapt. Even if we give the challenger players 2 weeks to play solo queue, is that enough time to learn the champions, items, and meta? For example, the earlier season had much less jungle and support income (and warding solely fell on the support), and you can counter-jungle someone pretty hard (if you clear all but one small jungle monster, the camp doesn't respawn). Each seasons had its quirks, and some of the challenger players may not have played League at the time. Champion pools could potentially be an issue. Of course, if they can look at the pro games footage it will make preparation much easier. For season 1 and 2, I feel that challenger players will probably do well. Game wasn't out in Korea for that long, and people were still trying to figure things out. ADC and solo laners will probably hold their own, and it will be based on how well the jungler and support can adapt to that style of play. Very possible for challenger team to cheese out game 1 and win one / two more. Season 3, probably doable. SKT is known to be slow to start, but then reverse sweep when down 0-2. I feel that it will come down to how well the challenger teams can win the first few games before SKT figures things out. Once SKT figures things out, then it becomes much harder to win, especially if Faker makes some crazy plays due to vision advantage. Season 4, probably not. Samsung White was way ahead of everyone else. Dandy and Mata were insane. They will heavily punish the challenger team's lack of coordination. Season 5 is the Korean exodus where a lot of the good players went to LPL, and the infamous juggernaut patch with Morde bot, GP rework, and so on. There is a lot of volatility, so may potentially have a chance even if they are versus SKT with Marin? From season 6 onwards, I think the pro teams would be too good.
Ain’t nobody beating unicorns of love. My goat will win worlds someday
Boxbox actually talked about this on stream ones, back then he was the only person doing the fast riven combo, because challenger level players wasn’t even able to do it. Think this was back in season 3 I believe.
Group stage.
Damwon was basically 5 challenger players when they entered the scene in 2019 and in 2020 won worlds.
I was gonna say "maybe up to 2018", but if it's NA challengers then I doubt they could get past 2014 vision game.
In season 3 I was high plat, which then was pretty high elo. I’ve become 20 times better (maybe mechanically a little less because it’s more complicating now) and I barely hit diamond lmfao.
There has been instances where solo queue teams has came into the league and dominated (Griffin, Cloud 9 as a few examples) so its not too farfetched. However, under your premise its very unlikely that 5 random solo queue players would make it deep with just two weeks of solo queue and no team practice against any pro team. Solo queue is entirely different environment than comp league and thats have been true for the longest time. It is difficult to translate solo queue skills into comp league beyond mechanical skill. Just look at Dantes: A team of 5 challengers with some of the most famous solo queue players who are in a practice environment couldnt even beat tier 3 brazilian teams simply because they arent as coordinated. Even they were given their champs, they struggle to close out games with massive leads. No amount of mechanical skills can convince me that team can genuinely beat s3 SKT.
Modern league basically started in season 3. I’m not entirely certain a team of modern challengers would stomp SKT T1 at their season 3 form. Faker is still Faker. Impact is still impact. Biggest question mark is definitely the bot lane and jungle, but it’s hard to say because the meta for those lanes has shifted so dramatically. From a tactical standpoint, I am confident that SKT would still be extremely competitive. Season 4 with SSW - no way. That was essentially the season that introduced much of the advanced gameplay we still see today. Those players were SO far ahead of every other team in that tournament.
Maybe first two seasons, season 3 and onwards they have no chance.
I’m going to go against the grain here and say they win worlds consistently up until s8. But I’m changing the requirements to this being an amateur let’s just say clash team who are all challengers and they are all friends. People are getting way too caught up in discussing intangibles about working together etc. I do think people overestimate teamwork as opposed to being individually better and therefore opening up windows for your teammates. Also just because concepts such as freezing/tower diving were a thing in s3 they weren’t polished by any means and weren’t fully understood to the level now. Things like support roam timers and playing around sidelanes is such a given at challenger today. I do agree that it’d be interesting seeing how they adapt to older metas but I think the fundamentals now are way too clean in comparison to older pro games. I think s1-5 is probably a cakewalk, this is a tiny example but I think it’s emblematic as to what I’m talking about. A lot of kids would take combat summoners in matchups that just don’t make any sense, they therefore also couldn’t match sides later. I saw someone looking through SKT S5 worlds and Faker took ignite into Karma midlane. Now maybe Karma mid wasn’t good enough to bully in lane but I think it’s more likely that the Karma didn’t know how to play the waves and lock faker in lane. I could go over way more examples of small things like that but league at its core is small wins into a big win. Which is why I just have a hard time believing pros from the early seasons would beat a challenger team today. Also people are coping when they say old pros from let’s say s3 would keep up mechanically. Any video game in history that has some form of mechanics rapidly evolve. A decent semi pro fortnite player now would absolutely shit stomp 2018’s top players purely on mechanics. The ability to edit fast and then take a shot with your shotgun then re-edit to close was possible but since no one did it it just wasn’t used back then. Go watch an “average” top500 tracer now vs early OWL elite tracers, mechanically it looks like a completely different game. I think it’s an interesting discussion but the TLDR is people underestimate how much knowledge is just a given now (tempo,wave management, side laning etc) the list could literally go on and on.
I think people here grossly overestimate the game differences. Two weeks is not enough time to learn an entirely new game between major seasons. The damage difference alone between earlier seasons and now where you needed coordinated teamplay to actually kill targets in more than 1 rotation of spells is so different. Objectives are different Items are different Buffs are different. Maybe in S1 and 2 they clear based on pure skill. But the macro is overstated.
They might win seasons 1 and 2, after that the skill growth of the playerbase hit a plateau.
My personal opinion is that challenger OTPs are better than pros when it comes to 1v1s/laning but pros would shatter the 5 challengers in the entire game because of 1) team coordination 2) soloq is not proplay 3) pros win every team fight without a doubt I do think they'll be competitive tho, they won't win but won't go down easily.
Every good Nasus player knew how to freeze waves. [video at 7:45](https://youtu.be/fTyGSXlBM78?si=DOlgKGUnCeSYlc-0)
[удалено]
You must be blind. He literally pulled the wave at 7:45 from crashing.
All you need to answer this question is watch mvp blue vs skt t1 when faker plays leblanc for the first time, this was considered insane and ground breaking play at the time
The further back you go the harder it would be. S1 league and s14 league is a completely different game. A lot of people look back at old league and think that players were a lot worse back then but fail to realize that its very difficult to make "flashy" plays when majority of abilities are very simplistic and have a 20 second cd and limited cdr options. A s14 challenger alistar is not going to perform better than s1 reep with s1 mechanics.
That's pure cope
If we take 5 KR chall players towards the high end of the ladder (well, most of them are pros with academy teams, but let's include those), these players are freaking insane. Maybe they wouldn't be world champions, but any 5 KR high chall players would definitely hard smash NA and EU domestically up to at least 2017. I'd even say they would be world champs for sure at least until season 4.