After six games, its time to see how the boys in Green and Yellow stack up against the competition. This is Stat Check: FlyQuest.

The Good News

One of the most interesting things about FlyQuest is their emphasis on midlane; Tristan “PowerOfEvil” Schrage takes the most gold share of any midlaner in the LCS, at 26.1% of his team’s total gold share. PowerOfEvil has made the most out of this fortune, outputting 532 Damage per Minute, the highest DPM for any midlaner in LCS.

Omran “V1per” Shoura has been a consistent laner, and his performance on Riven in the first game of the split perfectly demonstrated his ability to take over a game if given the chance. He’s a great teamfighter, and FlyQuest do well when he’s allowed to show off his skills.

Interestingly, the team has been the least bot-centric team in all of the LCS, with Jason “WildTurtle” Tran receiving only 23.9% of his team’s goldshare. No other team’s botlaner takes less than 26% of his team’s gold, so to have Turtle take less than a quarter of the team’s total gold is unique.

Part of Turtle’s gold shortage is due to the fact that his support Lee “IgNar” Dong-geun roams quite a bit, making plays around the map with Lucas “Santorin” Tao Kilmer Larsen. This early playmaking puts IgNar in the Top 2 for all supports in the League for experience and Gold differential at 10 minutes (GD@10). Similarly, Santorin leads the league in GD@10, and is Top 3 in XPD@10.

Trouble in Paradise

So FlyQuest have a good early game, but given that the meta skews towards early game junglers, by the time midgame rolls around, sacrificing the botlane begins to cause problems. Given that WildTurtle is usually pushed under his turret, opposing teams generally gain control over the first dragon. FlyQuest has only taken the first drake once this split. Normally, teams would trade first drake for Herald, but FlyQuest doesn’t seem to be able to do this effectively. Out of all teams in the league, FlyQuest sits with the lowest Herald percentage at 25%.

The issues don’t stop there, however. FlyQuest struggles with objective control in late and midgame as well. They rank last in 1st tower percentage and Baron control, and FlyQuest has yet to secure Elder Drake after 6 games. Objective control is not this team’s focus.

FlyQuest’s Focus

FlyQuest fights. A lot. They boast the highest Combined Kills per Minute score out of any LCS team; FQ like their games bloody. Their low vision scores means that they often run into fights with limited information, resulting in occasionally subpar macro movement and suboptimal fights. Combine this with the fact that by sacrificing botlane, FlyQuest accelerates opposing ADC’s power spikes while delaying WildTurtle’s, making teamfighting much more difficult, as they lack a consistent damage source early on. PowerOfEvil can deal all the damage he wants, but if the opposing ADC has a completed item in that first fight while Turtle only has pieces, FlyQuest are in for a rough teamfight.

Together, these statistics and observations paint an image of FlyQuest as a team that is still searching for an identity and a consistent game plan. The coaching staff, lead by Anand “Curry” Agarwal, will have to pick one of the issues plaguing the team and work on improving it. Dignitas showed everyone last year when they turned around their struggling roster and made it to Worlds that even just doing one thing very well can turn a team into a contender.

A Path to Victory?

For Dignitas, controlling Herald and using it to build an early lead was that one thing; there’s no reason that FlyQuest can’t do something similar. They have shown that they know how to close out games if they have an early lead (just look at their match against Dignitas in Week 2 for proof), so it would make sense for Curry to look for ways to optimize FlyQuest’s early game. Given that Santorin is consistently able to get early leads over other junglers, Curry and FlyQuest already have a good base to build upon. Will it be easy or simple? No. But it is possible, and it can be done.

Next Steps

There’s certainly no easy fix for FlyQuest’s struggles, and statistics certainly don’t tell the whole story for as to why they struggled in Week 3. It would be easy to go, “Oh, every expected us to do poorly. So what if we finish 9th or 10th? We got some wins under our belt already. That’s enough.” But FlyQuest don’t have players that would be satisfied by that attitude, and one can’t imagine Curry would be, either. FlyQuest have to pick themselves up from their stumble in Week 3, dust themselves off, and keep grinding. The team motto is Showcase Greatness. Time to fly high.