- At 2017 League Of Legends World
Europe's team Fnatic executed a breakneck comeback,
recovering from a crushing zero four deficit,
making it to the quarter finals
and securing a healthy chunk of prize money
and cementing themselves as one of the best teams
in the sport.
Hey folks.
I know I just said a bunch of eSports stuff
and if you don't follow league,
you probably don't know what any of that means.
But I promise it's pretty cool and here's why.
League of Legends is indisputably one
of the most complex games on the competitive scene today.
To untrained eyes it just looks like a bunch of numbers
and colors and little dudes running around on the computer.
But a pro player needs an astounding level of knowledge,
intuition, skill and decision making.
In the case of Fnatics 2017 comeback
they needed something more.
Mastery of their feelings.
Damn.
But before they could truly contend with the limits
of endurance, self esteem and their belief in themselves,
they had to play a bunch of League of Legends
and that's pretty hard too.
To interface with League, there's a lot of information
that you need to account for beyond what you can see
on your screen.
You need to know the abilities and details
of more than 140 playable characters.
You need to know 175 items that can be purchased
from an in-game shop or built from components.
You need to know the precise layout of the map.
And you need a perfect understanding of the game's rules
and systems.
This deep knowledge affects every action you take,
and on a higher level,
understanding and manipulating this knowledge
can be used to develop surprising strategies.
League of Legends Worlds is the Superbowl
of real time Fantasy Football chess Warcraft
and Fnatic kicked it off with a loss to a team
that turned the game's rules against them.
Their opponent, Gigabyte Marines,
leveraged some arcane game knowledge,
drafted an unconventional line-up,
and then instead
of distributing their team's resources conventionally,
dedicated all of their efforts
to making one player very strong very early.
This is like if the Houston Rockets
secretly diverted their entire supply of Gatorade
and power bars to James Harden,
making him impossibly large and powerful
and then unleashing him on his foes.
Or as actual League expert and caster Azael puts it--
- They were not expecting Levi to be level six
on this Nocturne.
They were not expecting him to have his ultimate.
And so all of a sudden you're making this play
that looks like a good play
and Levi comes in out of nowhere.
He's level six.
He's able to pick up multiple kills
and turn around a fight.
And put himself in a position to carry a game
that Fnatic just wasn't expecting,
because this is not something
that anyone they practiced against would've done.
Or anyone would have played like.
- It was a clever strategy, expert game knowledge.
There's no other way to put it.
- Cheesing I guess is the term that a lot of people use.
Right, they lost that game 'cause they got cheesed.
- Okay, yeah, you could also call it cheesing.
Travis Gafford is a journalist who covers League
for a living.
- It's just that they hadn't
got their feet underneath them yet
and they needed that chance to just find really
what they were capable of.
- Fnatic didn't get that chance
because Gigabyte Marines manipulated the rules
and turned the tables.
Fnatic didn't see it coming and the game was over
before it even started.
There's really no way to prepare for that kind of loss.
But a player's ability to read and react are vital
to staying alive.
And there is a lot to read and react to in League.
- Within the game itself,
there's multiple different visual displays
that you're getting information from.
So what's the rate limiting factors
is how fast can this person ingest all this information,
process it, and then execute an action?
And the amount of information some of the best players
in the world are able to just assimilate
and execute on is just profound.
- This is Amine Issa, a PHD who studied the extremes
of human performance in athletes, fighter pilots
and now gamers.
He also founded Mobalytics, a service that examines
how players play and use a science
to show them the path to improving.
He's dedicated to figuring out
what makes eSports pros excel.
In one experiment, Amine tested pro players
against serious hobbyists
with the help of eye-tracking technology.
If we look at this example each red dot
represents a point
where the particular player's eyes focused.
The bigger the dot, the longer they spent looking at it.
If you look at enough of these overlays,
a pattern begins to emerge.
Amateur players tend to fixate on the closest enemy
or threat.
Even if you don't play League, you know this feeling.
It's the old wasp in the car dilemma.
The driving phenomenon
where you're brain's visual processing centers
lose the ability to read road signs
and traffic patterns,
and instead focus on the only thing that matters.
The wasp in the motherfucking car.
And while you or I may careen our Honda Fit into a fruit cart,
pro players can see past the wasp.
They look everywhere.
Their recordings are peppered with tiny red dots
constantly scanning and never landing on any one place
for more than a few milliseconds.
- When a professional and a seasoned veteran
looks at a lot of information,
they understand very clearly what is important
and what isn't.
Discerning what information is critical
and what information is not critical at that moment in time
is one of the actual skillsets of an expert.
- If you fail to observe something
or discard the wrong information
it can have terrible consequences.
Like in the second game of the group stage.
Fnatic star player, Rekkles,
made a bad read and it cost his team the game.
- He finds Pobelter, the opposing midlaner
and he's trying to get a quick kill and then back off.
But his mistake here is losing track
of where the other team could be.
- Rekkles doesn't see the enemy team waiting in the wings.
And while he's a skilled player,
he can't fight his way out.
He goes down, a teammate gets caught in the chaos
and the rest of the team has to run away
to avoid getting snowballed.
Rekkles acted on an incomplete picture.
And it led to Fnatic's second straight loss.
League at it's heart is a game about decision making.
But it's not just knowing what moves to make.
Actually executing on them is a whole other skillset.
Knowing when to run or fight,
whether to use a powerful ability or hold onto it,
even where to stand,
everything is a decision
that can affect the outcome of the game.
And there's really only one way to hone that skill.
- The only way to get better at decision making
in my opinion is playing and reviewing lots of games.
There is really no substitute I feel like
for time spent in game.
- This is Sam Hartman-Kenzler, better known as Kobe.
He's been playing League since the very beginning
and now he calls pro matches.
- When you're in a situation
and there's so many different things that will come up
in League of Legends,
and you experience that in game,
then the next time when you're in a similar situation,
you will react instantly
'cause you'll know what has happened before.
You'll know the possible outcomes.
- Once you've made a decision
you need to be able to mechanically execute it.
On a crowded screen, a player has to accurately click
to select targets, control their own view,
fire off the correct abilities,
navigate menus.
Your hands need to do what your brain tells them to do
without a moment of hesitation.
- In League of Legends there's two parts
to make you a successful hold.
It's making the right decision,
and then it's performing that action in the correct way,
right?
Your decision making, execution.
And to really perform at the absolute level, you need both.
- It's not just about making the right decisions
in the moment though.
Much like chess or really any other professional sport,
so much of League is about anticipating what your opponent
is going to do next.
- You and I we think of a game like,
oh, this is what's happening now.
But a player sees this entire geospatial area
and they see all the ways the game,
a great player, sees all the way the game can play out.
- In their third and fourth matches,
Fnatic just wasn't able to do that.
They were handily outplayed by Longzhu
who seemed to always be a step ahead,
dictating the pace of the game
and constantly making decisions that kept Fnatic
on their back foot.
Now they were sitting at zero and four.
If they had any hope of making it to the quarter finals,
they needed to win every single game from here on out.
- It's one of those situations where all right,
that's it, pack it up.
You really had never seen a team make it out of groups
with that kind of a start before.
- It's hard to have faith that you can win four games
when you're still trying to win your first.
But there's more than just money and sponsorship deals
at stake.
Remember, these players are representing their countries,
their teams and themselves.
And they're doing it live in front of millions of players
and fans around the world.
The psychological pressure to perform in this scenario
would be intense for anyone,
but the terror of doing it
in the wake of four consecutive failures,
is just incalculable.
- Most people who have played this game
have experienced intense losing streaks
where you kill for another game,
you lose again, you keep losing.
It feels like you start to question everything
about the game that you're playing.
Am I doing this right?
You start to question.
And is the champion I'm playing wrong?
All these things, this self doubt creeps in.
- Let's be clear.
Every single player at the 2017 championships
possess the skills and knowledge we talked about earlier.
But the thing that set Fnatic apart
and that allowed them to shift their momentum
and eventually pull out their first win,
was their ability to do all of that under extreme pressure.
When things look their darkest,
the best players find a way to stay positive.
- Most people would think that after you go zero three,
and especially when you then start your final day
by losing again, that it's all over.
But I actually had the opportunity to talk to Rekkles
at the end of that day
and it turned out that they were able to look back
on the games they had lost,
and feel as though it was not that bad.
That the games themselves were winnable in some ways.
- In their fifth match,
Fnatic had another shot against Immortals.
Fnatic held up under the pressure.
Immortals didn't.
They were treating from an engagement with Fnatic,
and in a split second misplay,
Immortals' Cody Sun teleported direction
into the enemy team,
punted a deadly opponent onto his vulnerable teammate
and then died.
He tried to spin move
and a smashed Mcdouble flew out of his pocket.
And that one mistake gave Fnatic the momentum they needed.
They capitalized and took the win.
One four.
In their next match against Gigabyte Marines,
Fnatic leveraged their knowledge of the game
and their opponents, banding out their strongest champions.
They landed another win, two four.
After that they went head to head with Immortals
for the third time.
This time they didn't have to bank on their competitors
making catastrophic misplays.
They adapted their strategy
and (mumbles) the tanky enemies
that had previously undercut their own line-up.
It worked.
Three four.
And in a final tiebreaker against Gigabyte Marine,
Fnatics showed one last time that they knew how to stand up
under pressure when other teams couldn't.
Gigabyte Marines misfired one
of their most valuable ultimates three times.
(crowd cheering)
- [Announcer] He missed a shutdown.
- [Commentator] Shockwave missed!
- Fnatic played cleaner and smarter and they won.
They became the first team to come back
from a zero four losing streak in the group stage.
That's amazing.
They were pretty quickly eliminated from the quarter finals,
but just getting there was a huge deal.
- I think that any team that makes it past the group stage
should be incredibly happy.
Even being invited to Worlds, these are the best teams
from all regions from around the world.
And there are many teams, many players
that have gone multiple years to Worlds.
And haven't been able to get out of the group stages,
but to be able to win enough games,
to get out of a group stage regardless
of what the group draw gave you,
is definitely an incredible feat.
- At any given point, the pressure could've gotten to them.
They could've stewed in their losses
and locked up but they didn't.
The world of professional League
is full of high stakes comebacks and underdogs.
But Fnatics story is great
because it's not just about mechanics or strategy or skill.
It's about people believing in themselves.
They came as close to failure as a team possibly can
and still found their way to a victory.
You don't need to know the ins and outs of League
to understand how difficult and how admirable that is.
(smooth electronic music)