re: 2014 WCS, I'm seeing some derping from foreigners about "oh no the Koreans will never leave AM". I think they're ignoring that this situation appears substantially better and higher-variance (which is a good thing for underdogs) for foreigners than the old Challenger League system. Idra wrote
this article with his thoughts:
Quote:
Now instead of watching mid-level Koreans compete with each other, occasionally producing good games even if the players themselves weren’t very personable, we’ll get a handful of Koreans who were lucky enough to get grandfathered in from last year bashing on the non-Koreans who now get to progress a little bit further before getting knocked out.
and quoted this tweet from Huk:
Quote:
The BAD part is that the koreans and especially top koreans already in WCS AM will practically never leave.
Well, let's look at some history. In the new system, challenger league means you play one bo5 and either you advance to premier or you're out of WCS entirely and have to re-qualify. Based on what we saw in AM Challenger League last season, that actually seems perfectly reasonable:
Season 1, round of 40
- Sage loses to Vibe
- Oz (who came from premier) loses to Jim
- Jaedong loses to theognis (2-0!)
- Heart (who came from premier) loses to Taeja
- HwangSin loses to Goswser
So, right away, if we pretend that these are instead the bo5 matches (yes, they were bo3, but whatever) of the current system - that's 5 Koreans who are not playing premier league and have to re-qualify next season, when a max of 2 Koreans can qualify to CL each season. 2 of those Koreans hypothetically dropping out came straight from premier league.
But, in the old system, with the group stage of challenger being a fallback for whoever got knocked out of the bracket stage -
4 of those 5 Koreans that would have dropped out in the new system qualified for premier league. HwangSin won his group 2-0, Jaedong finished 2nd in his group to Jim, Sage and Oz were in the same group and both qualified in the top two. Only Heart failed and dropped out.
Season 2, ro40
- Hyun loses to Puck
- Arthur loses to Huk
- Center loses to Apocalypse
- Select loses to Hero
- TheStc (from premier) loses to State
5 Koreans that would be knocked out in the new system (1 of whom was from Premier); instead, Hyun/Arthur/TheStc all qualified for premier in the group stage. Only Center and Select (both of whom were in an all-Korean group, lolz) did not finish top two to move on to premier.
Don't think it's too useful to look at S3 since very few people took challenger league that seriously. Point is, foreigners are like "wahhh Koreans are gonna beat on foreigners and never leave", but it looks like the new system will actually make it far more likely that Koreans will drop out of WCS AM entirely by losing their challenger match. The group stage of CL was such a massive variance reducer for them vs foreigners.