An oft-repeated comment on Reddit, especially with regard to why Western teams have not succeeded in international competition, is the assertion that the top Western teams are merely aping the ‘Korean meta’, and that they will never win playing like the Koreans when Koreans are obviously going to be better at playing standard.

Before we can get into debunking this myth — it is in fact a myth, for this has never been shown to be true in League of Legends — we have to consider first what the Korea meta is and why everyone is right to be watching and learning from it.

It is a known fact that many Western teams bootcamp in Korea prior to major tournaments, and just about every player and analyst watches the LCK, mainly to find out what the Korean teams are playing. In other words, what ends up getting played in the LCK on a weekly basis ends up being the meta; upon the completion of a series, solo queue explodes with players clamoring to try these champions out, especially if they are new.  

What some — especially proponents of the West — fail to understand is this: the LCK is in reality dictated by Korean solo queue (especially at night, when the LCK pros are playing) and not necessarily the other way round, and this has been the case for ages. While I do not claim to have insider knowledge, the following is an approximation of how champions end up being ‘meta’ in pro play in Korea: coaches have players test out recently-changed champions in solo queue. Pros do research on the optimal champions for their role, and the coaches assess their players’ performances on these champions through scrims and solo queue. The coaches then decide, on game day, the draft for the match based on scrims and other practice results.

At least two categories exists when it comes to champions in pro play. Category 1 consists of champions which are considered indispensable or overpowered. They are the must-ban or must-picks, and as a result are the most played and banned, both in pro play and at the highest level of solo queue. Pros in the top teams or league are expected to be proficient on these champions, which will change according to balance patches, or otherwise remain in contention if they are untouched by the nerf bat. Examples of these for the current season are: Ashe, Kha’zix, Varus, Camille, Rengar, Malzahar, Graves, Ryze. All of these champions have been contested (either picked or banned) in at least 60% of games in the Spring split, within the five regions (Credits: Oracle’s Elixir). The more a champion is banned, the more likely it is that this champion is in some way overpowered or uncounterable.

Category 2 consists of champions which we will label "pocket picks". These are champions who do not fall within what is expected or contested in the current meta. Some champion picks are deliberately hidden by coaches by asking their players to practice them on smurfs (the first layer of intelligence). These are the "pocket picks’; if they succeed in pro play, they go from being a mere pocket pick of a single player to a widely-contested pick in solo queue and possibly competitive play, though the latter does not necessarily make these champions part of the meta. Famous examples include AD Kennen, support Miss Fortune, and Lee Sin. Lee Sin is a special case as there are enough players who consider the Blind Monk a go-to pick that it appears frequently (47.6% P+B), but in reality, is only contested amongst players who are known to be proficient on the champion.

Scrims, along with solo queue, form the two layers of practice regimes, which shape the LCK landscape. The results and VODs are agreed to be kept in secrecy partly so that pros can practice champions they may not have otherwise played in solo queue on their main accounts, and partly to hide any strategies they may be developing. As a result, gaining the trust of scrim partners is not only paramount, but they also have to prove themselves ‘worthy’ of the intel these teams are potentially giving up.

The latter is so valuable that breaking scrim rules (such as with leaks) is tantamount to a contract-breaker; that team will in all likelihood cease scrims with the involved team. Such is the need to guard this intel.

The West are only able to observe the champions in the first category on a weekly basis while they are playing in the LCS (this does not apply to bootcamps). The first time they’ll know of these pocket picks is when they debut in pro play. As a result, during these weeks, what Western teams should be doing instead of only watching pro matches is gather as much information about Korean solo queue as possible — what non-meta picks are suddenly getting picked a lot, whether a certain pro is practicing a weird champion and getting good results, etc.

Korean solo queue has its own ecosystem where the fundamentals of teamwork are drilled into players whether they like it or not, despite the system ostensibly consisting of 10 individuals who may or may not know each other. There is a tacit agreement that in order to win, everyone on the team must play their role perfectly, or at least be close to doing so. If a champion rarely seen in pro play excels in solo queue, one or two things may be true: one, that this champion is overpowered and well-suited to pro play but has not been picked in the LCK yet, or two, that it takes advantage of the relative chaos that is solo queue and would not work in a coordinated team setting. Given the relatively high level of coordination in Korean solo queue, the latter is far less likely to be the case, though obviously not impossible. Korean pros frequently cite solo queue as inspiration for off-kilter picks, and it is thus in the world’s best interest to monitor developments there.

A word of note at this point: Korean imports are often sought after because of their star quality and perceived higher level of work ethic. As a result, most of them tend to be proficient in playing meta champions as well as what they are most comfortable playing historically.

But without the Korean solo queue environment to practice in, these players inevitably lose an advantage that they used to hold over players from other regions. This is not a criticism of imports, but of a real phenomenon: solo queue is a normalizing environment over long periods because the players at the top only have so many others to play with and against. The numbers in other regions is not small enough that those imports will positively impact the environment; instead, as we have seen with many NA imports, they see themselves as getting less meaningful practice on the solo queue ladder as NA solo queue is a far less coordinated environment than what they are used to. Additionally, because there are fewer Challengers on the NA server, queue times are not only longer, but also tend to be imbalanced. These factors, in comparison to Korea where the pool of players is significantly larger, compound and may adversely affect pros. 

Without such a solo queue environment, it also becomes far more difficult to ascertain what works in solo queue and can be used in pro play as well.

This is not to say that Western teams do not already have contacts or scouts who monitor solo queue (many teams do), and neither am I insinuating that Western teams are not — or cannot — be innovative. In fact, the West is responsible for several innovations, which Korean teams have picked up upon. The latest fad is a resurgence of AD Kennen, which was started way back in Season 3 and has seen a comeback in recent times, both in the top and bottom lanes.

Lest we forget, the current metagame, which we are all familiar with, was an innovation of European teams, way back in Season 1. What they started off with was slightly different, in that mages were also assigned to the top lane in addition to the mid lane, but the idea that an AD carry and a support should lane together was seen as quirky and inferior, especially in North America. This was not until the Season 1 Championship at DreamHack proved once and for all that the EU metagame was superior to what was more prevalent in other regions, and so it has been till this day.

What some observers like to suggest is that Western teams, or in fact any team at all, should attempt to break out of the mold and seek a counter to the 1-1-1-2 set-up that has remained dominant over seven seasons in an effort to ‘beat the Koreans’. An alternative version of this argument is the assertion that Western teams should come up with their own pocket picks, or play ‘what they are good at and not conform to Korean picks’. The first is impossible or at least sub-optimal given the current balancing climate, and the second has been tried in the past.

Given the Riot balance team’s belief that the five roles in League of Legends should be preserved in all levels of play, an alternative meta — for example, forgoing a traditional jungler in favor of a laner with Smite who would switch between the jungle and the lane — may still lose out to a team which plays a standard metagame, given a large enough sample size. Without the means to test this with two top-tier teams, however, this argument is difficult to prove.

Of course, even Riot do not know with absolute certainty the full effects of their patch changes. There is a certain blind spot available on occasion when a champion ends up buffed to an overwhelming degree and it is abused in solo queue, but competitive patches are normally a patch behind what is available on the public server and taking advantage of these exploits only lasts for as long as that patch remains used in competitive play.

Over the course of a two-week tournament, though? Sure, bring out the unknown picks. The short time-span and real risk of elimination after losing two to three games makes the strategy viable in say, a play-off series where there is less time to react to a new pick and often the only recourse is to use a ban. As was observed in the now-legendary semi-final between SKT T1 and ROX Tigers at Worlds 2016, a previously-unknown Miss Fortune pick in the support role heavily threw SKT off and they ended up having to ban the pick as ROX won two straight games. It turned out that the MF pick was really their trump card against a team they otherwise had no answer to while playing normally, as they lost three games without the MF support pick. Of course, causation does not imply correlation, and ROX probably did not lose solely because they lacked the MF support, but due to a multitude of other reasons, which we will not go into.

But the example still stands as an indication that there are factors which go into winning a world championship beyond merely ‘playing better than your opponents’ or ‘playing your own style’.

It appears then, that the solution might be a mix of developing pocket picks in the right environment, i.e. Korean solo queue, or scrims. The second? To use a manner of speech popular in internet parlance, Western teams simply have to ‘git gud’. Be it by bringing out pocket picks or ‘playing their own style’ (a high-risk maneuver with less potential reward than just playing the game normally), one thing is for sure: the matter is not simple indeed. A team can win one game while exploiting a weakness, but will not enjoy sustained success unless new exploits can be found consistently. It is purely unrealistic to rely on exploits, and in the first place, exploits are most utilized by players or teams who have to make up for disadvantages elsewhere. There has to be a backup plan for when pocket picks inevitably become countered or banned out, and the best way to do that is by learning to play from the best players in the game.

There may come a day in League of Legends esports when a Western team wins a tournament and they become the new trend-setters in competitive play. Arguably, in order for that to happen, they will still have to play within the rules of the current trend-setters: the Koreans. Westerners will either have to ‘close the gap’, or find a balance between what works for them and what has been proven to work.

The wish for a truly subversive team, such as FlyQuest or Unicorns of Love, to finally topple the Korean overlords, is far less likely than the possibility of a team like G2, Fnatic, H2K, TSM or Cloud 9, all of whom take many of their cues from Korea but still retain their own team identity, doing the same. This is because FlyQuest is, on an individual basis, not at the standard of top Koreans, and playing standard with them is tantamount to conceding defeat even before the game has started. These latter teams, on the other hand, have a foundation of mechanically gifted players who are able to master Category 1 champions and still have a few Category 2 champions up their sleeves.

Couple this with Korean bootcamps before major international events (when they are the most effective due to patch changes), and there may be a shot of a Western team kissing the Summoners’ Cup after all. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be because they renounced the Korean style or that they stopped bootcamping in Korea.