FooJee, jungler for Gankstars Sirius © Super Evil Megacorp

No matter what perspective you look at it from, eSports is expanding. Its audience, player base, and cultural relevance have all been steadily increasing, but maybe the most notable example of eSports’ expansion is its transition to mobile gaming. Vainglory, produced by Super Evil Megacorp (A true gaming company name if there ever was one), has built a 3v3 MOBA that has exploded in popularity over the past year. And lately, Vainglory’s competitive scene has hit a new milestone of its own.

Because it is a 3v3 MOBA, players can have a significant impact upon their team’s performance, for better or for worse. Since most teams are only as good as their weakest link, the top teams were often the ones with the most skilled aggregation of individuals. However, pure skill or mechanical aptitude is no longer good enough, and teams have started to take match preparation to the next level.

Preparation is incredibly important for all eSports. Successful teams go far beyond simply playing games. If two teams are equally skilled, the one with more preparation will surely come out on top. FlashX, Alliance Captain and Roamer

Since its inception in 2014,the mobile MOBA Vainglory has been on an extremely rigorous development cycle. On a monthly basis, there are new heroes, changes to existing heroes and items, and even changes to the map and game mechanics. A team that attempts to enter a tournament with last month’s meta, heroes, and strategies will fail. Inversely, teams who keep up with the changes will stay afloat, and the teams who thrive are the ones that assimilate the changes and innovate, enabling them to catch their opponents off guard.

Drafting heroes in Vainglory © Super Evil Megacorp

The perpetually changing - yet cerebral - nature of Vainglory has created a need for competitive teams to have their own analysts. This allows the players to focus on practicing hero mechanics while the analysts focus on maintaining a deeper understanding of the numbers behind the game. One of the top North American teams, GankStars Sirius, has been diligent in recruiting some of the best minds in the community for this purpose.

Vainglory’s hero pool of 22 may seem small in comparison to some of the tenured MOBAs, such as DotA or LoL, but many of these heroes can be played in multiple roles with multiple potential builds incorporating weapon power, crystal power, and support items (Think attack damage, ability power, and active ability items), creating a wide diversity of play styles. As an example, one of the biggest swings in the current meta is the hero, Fortress, who has traditionally been played as a roamer with support items to aid his jungler and laner. As an unforeseen shift in meta, he is now the terror of the jungle as a crystal power build.

As in any other eSport, the idea behind having an analyst or an analyst team is to create the space for the players to be able to focus on the mechanical aspect of the game mostly, and help them answer questions that they wouldn’t be able to answer on their own or questions that would take too much of their focus to find the answer to. It’s always healthy for a player to explore new aspects of the game, but it’s better to have someone that can feed you ideas and help you do it. That’s mostly the advantage our analyst team provides to us in GankStars. IraqiZorro, GankStars Sirius Captain and Laner

FlashX, Alliance team captain © Super Evil Megacorp

Interestingly, another top team in NA, Alliance, has a slightly different philosophy that is worthy of mention. The team captain, FlashX, who also acts as the team’s primary analyst and researcher, rejects the idea of having a dedicated off-team analyst.

Players will always have a deeper understanding if they do research themselves rather than having someone else do it for them. There have been plenty of studies done in how humans learn. If a student takes their own notes, they will have higher performance than if they just study from someone else's notes. If I personally see that an opposing player routinely places a scout trap to the left of the inner heal minion, that information has a much higher chance of being recited during a game rather than if someone else just tells me that he does that. FlashX, Alliance Captain

The ideal scenario is likely a balance between the two extremes, gaining the best benefits of each. There are certainly analysis tasks that might be best accomplished via the players themselves, while other analysis might better off delegated to analysts. Either way, the reality is that the bar has been raised for competitive play and even the most mechanically gifted players cannot just show up and expect to win.

Both GankStars and Alliance agree that Halcyon Hammers Velocity and Liberation X are probably their biggest contenders right now, but that both teams need to spend more time preparing for matches before they can begin to compete for the top spot in NA. This same advice should be extended towards any of the other teams competing in the Live Championships next week.

The competition is only getting fiercer and teams will need to continue to find newer, innovative methods of optimizing and getting an edge over the opposition. Any teams who do not adapt accordingly will cease to remain relevant in the months to come.