Growing Talent is the first instalment in a series of articles about China, Challenger League of Legends and cultural differences.

There’s a dispute on the topic of growing talent in North America, ignited in tandem with the global migration of Korean pros to China. Outside the rise of Cloud9, there hasn't been another dominant semi-professional team that has entered into the professional circuit — the majority of these teams tend to flounder in the bottom of the bracket before collapsing in relegations.

There are comeback stories, of course, but the statistics don’t favor the success of new blood, especially without the injection of some foreign or veteran talent. A very apparent line is drawn in the sand regarding potential and execution.

But this appears less of an issue in China. Snake, a newly-cemented professional team from the League of Legends Secondary Professional League (LSPL), tore through a schedule frontloaded with OMG, Edward Gaming, and LGD. They thrive in a league when competition is at its highest with a pedigree not meant for success.

The question is: why?

My answer begins with a trip to China under the umbrella of a North American Challenger team, Roar.

I had only been in Shanghai two days before tryouts started; it was a blur of manual labor and exhaustion between the 16-hour flight, 12-hour time difference, and careful assembly of knock-off brand work spaces. I was resting at one of three adjacent desks when the entourage arrived.

The group was small — two boys slouched in matching dark jackets, and one lanky, dangerously thin, older boy — two players and their manager. The three of them entered with a single “ni hao” and polite handshakes, generously bending at the neck while meekly returning my greetings.

Any pleasantries we exchanged were directed to the older manager. Both players made an obvious point to turn their head and check the lankier boy’s lead before answering how the weather was. Only when he gave the players a flick of his wrist towards the desks did they unroot from the entryway.

With wordless obligation, they set-up their equipment at our machines, keeping their heads down and looking only to their superior periodically. He was leaning against the wall, overseeing their progress with a cell-phone at attention. This was not the stiff control of a tyrant, but the ingrained discipline of a chain of command.

My own players casually and loudly chatted away at their computers, stumbling through customs, before I tried to herd them into a scrim.

Those tryouts were only two of an army of players the team met with before making a decision. Hordes of them in every shape, size, and position were tested; some with jackets and peripherals stencilled with big-name organizations, but always with a quiet and respectful demeanor.

I am not unique in the opportunity to work with both Western and Eastern-grown talent, majorly in part to that Korean Migration that flooded the global scene within the last year. I am fairly unique in my brush with the intimacies of the Chinese scrim culture, having worked with one of two teams to have Chinese, Korean, and North American talents on one roster — the other being Team Impulse, formally LMQ.

Through the gracious coordination of one of the Energy Pacemaker managers, we faced a gauntlet of teams every day at 2 p.m., 4 p.m., and 7 p.m: League of Legends Professional League (LPL), League of Legends Secondary Professional League (LSPL), and Tencent Games Arena (TGA) teams were all participants. No player was too high or too low profile. We faced everyone from the current iteration of LGD, with a World Champion, as well as a third-string, all-female team.

Likewise, these teams were taking time to face an unproven and unknown North American Challenger team.

I'm unsure if the Chinese teams understood what our stance was in the domestic context, but everyone understood “Chaox's Team”, and that was good enough for them.

The Chinese circuit in 2014 worked with a point system in a set of two. A 2-0 would give three points, a draw would give one point, and nothing was awarded to losers. Due to this league structure, the scrimmage culture mirrored the sets — each team facing twice before moving on to the next set.

In scrims, you never complete the game; this is in order to avoid leaking strategies. You "gg" out in All Chat, signalling the end of the game, which prompts every player to kill the client. This means there is no replay feature available — everything is recorded typically with third-party broadcasting software from a player’s point of view.

In North America, you can use the spectate feature to record scrims, but the Chinese client is controlled by Tencent. Tencent is not only vastly different in its patch timings, but in finer features like the Spectate ability. Due to sheer volume of players on the Ionian Server (the most competitive of 20 servers that cover China) the Spectate function often crashes.

Simply put, there is a discrepancy in review quality due to the inability to view the other team’s movements and wards. It was a noticeable handicap in practice and review. This was only the beginning of the problems soon to follow Roar.

I was fortunate enough to not be present during the tender process of letting a player go, especially one that had been living on the Shanghai property with us during trial. But I did hear of the aftermath: there were tears, which is to be expected on either side of regional lines.

It was never the intended or ideal situation to be trying out players in a foreign country. And though we did eventually settle on Korean and Chinese talent, other prospects were turned away.

One was a barely-competitively-legal boy who had dropped out of school due to his family’s inability to afford the cost of an education. He’d left for one of the major League of Legends clubs that offered a future and living arrangement through their networks. Though he wasn't a starter on a five-man roster, he was one of many agents shuffled through the fold with similar stories.

There were more unhappy endings. The eSports media frames ridiculous contracts leaking from China — hundred of thousands of dollars that bid for the top names while buying publicity alongside talent. But under that reputation were the echos of Royal Club’s (now Stand Point Gaming) Pak Kan "Tabe" Wong’s Season 3 complaints; an abundance of talent sold to streaming contracts and team benches for little personal gain.

I'm not an investigative journalist. It wasn't my intention or business to dig around the underside of Shanghai’s League clubs. But I observed enough from a visitor’s position to understand the weight of the repeated "thank you" when we did sign players.

These observations outlined a very real difference in my interactions with the team. The foreign talent was quiet and attentive — almost to a fault — only speaking up when addressed or when visually upset with results. And this is no means a backhanded compliment to the North American talent to say they weren't respectful, because that’s false.

However, there was a clear communication difference outside the thin language barrier between the players and support staff.

It affected the team negatively and positively.

Growing Talent will be continued on theScore eSports.

Ryanne "Froskurinn" Mohr is a League of Legends caster for the LJL and hosts China Talk, a podcast about Chinese League of Legends. You can follow her on Twitter.



