Interview

How do you feel about the season so far? Obviously good, but give me some details.

By doing this well at the start of the season I feel assured that we made the right changes during the off season. I think there was a strong sense of trepidation, and also a bit of anxiety, that after winning back to back championships in 2018 making any changes to the roster, especially making two, may be seen as risky. You always plan that these things work out and sometimes they don’t. So to see not just the results in terms of our 11-1 start but also the way that we are winning these games, in listening to the communication in the back room while the team is playing, is significantly better than it was in any previous iteration of the roster is pretty exciting! I think it’s indicative of a good starting spot where, if given these next 3 months or so before worlds, the thought of ‘what sort of team can we become?’ is pretty exciting. Especially when you consider the kind of team we are right now.

Have last year’s successes impacted your goals for this year’s team? Have your expectations changed for Team Liquid LoL as a whole?

Yes they have changed. We had our sights first set on winning a North American Championship. You know, a walk-before-you-run kind of strategy. In 2018 after winning two Championships we started to long for what’s next, which for us was a good Worlds performance. And we fell short. We identified why we fell short and we looked to improve on that. If we were content on another Worlds performance where we just kind of see how we do then we would have kept a similar roster, but we decided as a company that we would strive for a World Championship. And that’s something that I promised the players, that they promised me, and that we decided we would strive for. Ultimately I know that it's just words, its an agreement, but it really does have meaning in terms of being a commitment because with that commitment comes a great deal of sacrifice on the part of the players and the org in order to achieve that. Being the absolute best in your discipline requires a lot and we’re committed to that. So this year, anything short of a World Championship would be considered a failure. I don’t think I would have even considered that in any previous year, but this year I think it would be.

There were extensive international roster shakeups this past off season. Some have worked out and some have not. Who do you think was over hyped, who do you think struck gold? And how do you avoid over hyping a team that could fail? Both internal pressure wise and externally to fans.

Domestically I would say that there was a lot of hype built around the rivalry between Doublelift and Bang. Bang being a previous World Champion, coming to a team that performed well in its first year in the LCS was exciting. I think that the first match where Bang ended up playing Victor and literally getting smashed by CoreJJ and Doublelift, it was almost depressing to watch. Like you wanted to see this brilliant exchange between two great players and you just saw this… There was a part of it where, of course I’m rooting for Doublelift and I’m wanting to see him win, but at the same time I also wanted to see this brilliant display, right? This great match. When I didn’t see that it was obviously disappointing and since then Bang continued to play one of his most famous champions, Ezreal, and continued to play worse than Doublelift has shown on Ezreal is also a disappointment. So I have total respect for Bang, all his accomplishments, and all that he’s been able to do, but in terms of overhype I think that he is the one that comes to mind.



In terms of expectations and their effect, I think that when you perform well, and this goes for any game that we are involved in, when you perform well consistently over time its human nature for fans to expect you to continue doing that. It comes with the territory. It's not anything that you can really shy away from, its inherent with winning. All that you can do is to continue to deliver on that. There are some things that are said in interviews, either by the players themselves or by the org, to try and curb some of those expectations and sometimes it's to contribute to them. I think that some of the best players in each of their respective fields are able to not let the noise of social media and fandom affect their play. They see it as a complete disconnect to how they perform and they are able to shut it out. There was a female gymnast, whose name escapes me at the moment, that said while competing at the Olympics even though there is a ton of noise, the floor routine music is going on, people screaming, etc. to her it's completely silent. She doesn’t hear the noise and is able to just block it all out. That mentality is something that some of the best athletes I’ve seen are able to turn on. So all of the talk and overhype on social media is just noise. Just kind of like a content play. It's the outward facing personality, but when it comes time for competition, training, and practice all of that is just not even part of the equation.



Speaking of roster change ups, the TL fam had a few growing pains ourselves. I know that the process of obtaining players has been explained over and over again in other interviews, but I was more curious as to how choosing players from a personality/synergistic standpoint goes?

In terms of player synergy, I think there are a lot of different recipes to create winning teams. For most games, both League and others, you need someone to be the voice of the team. That voice will basically be the decision maker and therefore need to be armed with the right information from the rest of the map so that they are able to make good decisions. That is, at the core, what I think synergy is in a team competitive game. It's how effective that message gets from one player to another while also being able to reduce the unnecessary noise in that message. I think when some players have a predisposition to being emotional they tend to overstate things, overhype things, get overly emotional, provide irrelevant information, and generally distract from the message that is going from point A to point B. To me this is inherently the issue with synergy. In game communication needs to have fluidity like in the way a conversation with a very close friend at lunch would. You’re kind of finishing each other’s sentences, you can easily pick up where you left off, etc. So we look for that ability in prospective players. Likewise, improving synergy is working on reducing the noise in the message being sent to the voice of the team.

Most LoL esports fans know that you can’t really test synergy without playing together and that sometimes rosters just don’t work out because people just end up not working well together. How do you go about minimizing this risk and what do you do if you realize “ah shit this just isn’t gonna work” part way through a split?

So I think Team Liquid, as an organization, has always demonstrated an effort to resolve the issue(s) of either a player or the team that is leading to poor performance. So we will always attempt to resolve that. There are multiple ways to go about that, counselors, sport psychologists, a coach, analytics, etc, and so you use those resources to approach and solve a problem. If it were ever to get to a point where that isn’t working, then I feel like it’s the responsibility of the org to look for alternatives. If its a single player, for instance, then it’s the responsibility of the org to look for an alternative player both for the sake of the other 4 players and the future performance of the team. If we were to do that we would look first at our academy team. Our academy team is already here on site at the Alienware Training Facility, are already competing, and are familiar with our culture. If that doesn’t work, we may look to other teams and trades in the marketplace. It’s unfortunate, obviously, for the player that isn’t performing well but sometimes change is needed. Both for their sake and ours. I kind of think back to our performance in 2017, which was obviously pretty rough, and I think to myself, ‘would we be as successful as we’ve been to date if we didn’t dig in as hard as we did that year?’ Right? We felt the pain of all those losses and came out the other side just so motivated, even more motivated than the competition. We took the time to rebuild and redo, and took the lessons from that time and applied them to not make future mistakes. I honestly think the failures of 2017 were an instrumental component in our current successes

I have heard from pros on other teams (both in NA and EU) that roster longevity is becoming increasingly important to both pros and orgs. With one pro player in particular stating that he’d rather have a tough establishing year this year if it meant keeping their current roster roster through 2020. Is roster longevity something that you consider while signing players as well? If so, how important is it to your signing process?

When we build a roster we realize that synergy takes time, and therefore we lean in on longer contracts with players. This is evidenced in the contract lengths of our current players. When we signed Impact it was for 3 years, Doublelift was for 3 years, Jensen and Xmithie are on 2 year contracts, and CoreJJ signed a 3 year contract with Team Liquid as well. I think that the alignment of most athletes is similar to that mindset you just described and we agree with it too. So we always look to design the length of our contracts with when we feel like we’re going to have enough time to build that synergy. It feels great to me that even in the acquisition phase for CoreJJ he already believed so heavily in the organization and trusted us so much that he was willing to commit to 3 years. Which is substantial! That just goes to show that that alignment you were talking about is important.

Think back to the early days of League. Back when you were Cursing it up on the rift as a pro. If you could have an old version of a champion from those early days become relevant in today’s meta, who would you pick and why?

I would say I had a lot of fun playing Heimer mid. This was back in the day when you had unlimited turrets and his rocket ability at level 1 would half health anybody. It was the most broken thing. It was pretty broken and it was a lot of fun and even though I know he’s been reworked, I think it would be fun to bring him back with unlimited turrets. It would be pretty annoying, but pretty fun!

If you had to design a new champion, what role would they be and why?

If I could make a new champion I’d probably make an AD carry. I’ve been playing a lot of AD carry in solo queue lately and it’s a lot of fun. I’m not as good at it as I am support, but I think it would be kind of cool to make something just SUPER op. Something like double the range of double any AD carry or something (laughs) but half the damage maybe. Sounds completely broken!

Anything you’d like to say to the fans? Anything you’d like to say to the players?

TL the fuck up!

After months of attempting to squeeze into his ridiculously packed schedule, we FINALLY managed to pin Steve down for a bit to talk shop about our League team, roster acquisition, synergy, and, among other things, Steve’s boba order (spoiler alert: he doesn’t have one because he doesn’t drink sweet drinks).