League of Legends: League of Unknowns

E-sports had always been one of Korea’s strong suits. They had an incredible number of clubs, sometimes, a single club might come out with two opposing yet extremely powerful teams.

Their e-sports community was already fully established, allowing important e-sports news to spread quickly throughout the whole country.

Of course, some local pro-players that could understand Korean also joined these groups through some of their personal connections to help them learn more about the Korean e-sports scene.

During the afternoon of this Saturday, some news was spreading through the Korean e-sports groups like wildfire.

The news was first brought up by Park Yisheng as he had gotten word of some very important information from one of his Chinese friends, that Luocheng was going to start streaming tonight at 7 o’clock.

Yisheng still had his own grievances with Luocheng. He was beaten to an absolute pulp on one of the most popular LoL programmes by this guy, he wanted revenge, he needed revenge!

“The leader of the China Pro League’s champion team is going to stream his games in our server tonight, I wonder if anyone is interested in getting the chance to play against him? By the way, this guy’s the one that criticized our e-sports skills here in Korea.

He knew that Koreans had a certain amount of pride over their e-sports skills. If others threatened their title as number one in the e-sports world, small sparks like that could start uncontrollable wildfires of rage!

“This is the guy that did us wrong, I don’t like this kid’s style,” Team Vic’s S Team Jungler, Li Jingsiong, said straightforwardly.

Jingsiong hadn’t actually met Luocheng before, it was just that the video that he had made really irked him. Koreans didn’t even care enough to play in the China servers after all.

“These Chinese people are honestly pretty funny. They think of our Korean servers as some form of ‘hard mode’ for League of Legends, so from their self-centered perspective, performing well on our side makes them feel good about themselves. However, isn’t that just them admitting that we’re better than them?” Team STG’s Xue He said.

Xue He and Yisheng were teammates. Yisheng usually played ADC while Xue He mained top lane, the two of them often duo-ed with each other in ranked games.

“We need to teach them a lesson. Let him know what Korean e-sports pro-players are really like!” Yisheng said.

“That’s easy! He’s going to be streaming his games on our territory this Saturday, that’s when we’ll strike!” Jingsiong laughed.

“Haha, sounds interesting! I’m in! Once our attack is a success, someone should make a video of it and put it on the internet. We’ll title it ‘Chinese E-sports Champion Team Leader Gets Tortured In Korea’, we’ll drive China’s e-sports into the ground!” Team Bok’s Li Jinai said.

“Simida!”

“Simida!!”

(T/N: A (pretty) racist way to describe Korean, akin to describing Chinese as ‘Ching Chong Ling Long”)

Korea had always been on top of the international e-sports scene, with the peak of their power being shown by Korea’s Team Vic’s recent victory in the S International League.

Team Vic had two sub-teams, a K Team, and an S Team, and Li Jingsiong was the S Team’s Jungler.

Team K was even stronger, winning the title of champion at the S International League the year before. Any random member of their team was a world-class professional e-sports player, be it glory or pure strength, no other LoL team could even begin to hope to compare to them.

Their Team 2, or as they called themselves, Team S, were extremely strong as well.

This “backup team” had even managed to make it into the S International League, beating out many other teams during the group stage and almost making their way into the global Top 8.

Team Vic were the true kings of e-sports in Korea, and on the highest ranks of the Korean server, you couldn’t go two games without seeing a challenger player with the “Vic” ID tag hanging over their heads!

In the world of Korean e-sports, you would only be recognized as a truly strong player if you queued against Team Vic during ranked games.

In Luocheng’s video of his one-sided game against the Koreans, not a single Team Vic member had shown up. This caused a lot of pro-players to merely scoff at Luocheng’s skills, but for some reason, the video had gone viral all around Korea, and even a year later, people would still occasionally bring it up.

The Korean pro-players couldn’t let it go, they had to get their revenge on Luocheng for disrespecting them like that. And so, after Luocheng’s video, Korean player VVV had made a Chinese account and started climbing solo-queue on the Ionian server, recording every match he played. It only took 50 games for VVV to break his way into Ionia’s Challenger rank! But his crusade didn’t stop there, rushing his way into China’s top 10!!!

Getting to Challenger in just 50 games, he was showing off skills of the highest caliber with win-rates your average player could only dream of.

When VVV released his video along with his sarcastic commentary and editing, he was met with the wrath of LoL fans from all around China.

Luocheng’s original video had been edited by JX, he hadn’t intentionally bad-mouthed the Koreans in any way, only prefacing his games with the fact that he was on the Korean server. It was the netizens that had stirred up all the unnecessary drama.

But VVV didn’t hold back, commenting in his video on how the overall professional e-sports community in China was severely lacking in all aspects, going on to say how the Ionian Challengers would only be able to make it to Diamond II or III in Korea. As for all the other servers, VVV arrogantly claimed that even most Platinum players from Korea could make it to Challenger in China.

Netizens protested loudly, wanting the conceited VVV to take the video down, but they only got this response from him: I’ll give you Chinese pro-players 200 games, if a single player from China makes it into the top 50 of Korea, I’ll delete the video and make a full public apology, bowing to show my sincerity. If none of you can do it, then the video stays up, I’m afraid I don’t apologize to weaklings.

Shallow Dream had previously mentioned this to Luocheng, but back then, Team Skycrown was in the midst of training for competitions, they hadn’t had any spare time to deal with it. Plus, Luocheng wasn’t going to help fix someone else’s problems.

Of course, he couldn’t possibly have known that his impact on Korea never really dissipated, he couldn’t have known that the Korean e-sports community created a team of the top 50 pro-players to all queue against him while he was streaming!

Oh, you wanted to stream?

You wanted to play three games?

I’ll have you begging on the floor for all three!!!

Before Team Skycrown had taken on the title of the LPL champion, there wasn’t much of a point for Korea to attack Luocheng like this, but now that he wasn’t just the leader of some team from China, he represented the entire Chinese e-sports community, if he were to get slaughtered three games in a row, he would be a cultural disgrace!

Quite obviously, for news from China to get to Korea, there was definitely a middle-man pulling the strings.

That person was none other than Bin Bin from Xuhui district’s Team Sunlight.

After their run-in with the media, stream viewership for Team Sunlight was decreasing by the day. Their income took a huge hit, and they had no other choice but to change their ID’s and go stream some lower level games on the Korean server.

They were nothing if not good businessmen, getting the contacts of a Chinese exchange student in Korea who played LoL. Bin Bin got him to help write out a post sharing all the details about Luocheng’s schedule to the man that hated him the most, Park Yisheng.

Once Yisheng got wind of it, it didn’t take long for the entire Korean e-sports community to get up to date too.

It was the weekend so everyone was planning on playing some ranked games either way. Even some more out of the loop Korean players joined in the fun once they knew they were going to stop the leader of China’s champion team.

Thus, the Korean resistance amassed an army of 50 people in no time.

That being said, LoL wasn’t an MMORPG or anything, how could they continuously kill a single player?

Actually, it wasn’t as hard as you’d expect. There were only so many high-ranked players, most of them had to queue for quite a while before they could finally play a game with a full set of 10 people.

Luocheng’s Korean account was Diamond I, almost Challenger, it wouldn’t be easy for him to queue into a game. So, all they needed to do was have all 50 people at the ready, wait until they got news from China that this champion leader was queuing up, and all start queuing as well. The likelihood that they would get into the same game was extremely high…

Among the 50 people, the more notable ones included Team STG’s Park Yisheng, a world-class player, Team Stg’s Xue He, also a globally recognized powerhouse, Vic Team S’ Li Jingsiong, as well as Team Bok’s Li Jinai.

STG, Vic-S, and Bok were all in Korea’s OGN’s top 8 LoL teams; more than half of the 50 people were also pro-players in Korea’s top 16 teams. That meant that on Saturday, once the clock struck 7 pm in Beijing, a war amongst pro-players was going to break out in Korea with their main target being the insolent Chinese champion team leader who dared mock their power, Yu Luocheng!

News of the stream spread around Korea on Saturday around four or five in the evening, and many Korean players were tuning in to many of these pro-players’ streams, hoping to be able to finally exact revenge on the player from China. They were certainly in for a treat.

***

Over in China, the Chinese e-sports community didn’t have a care in the world, completely oblivious to the Koreans waiting for this champion leader to fall into their trap. All they knew was that Luocheng was going to be streaming on the Korean server tonight, it wasn’t everyday that they had the chance to watch something like that…

Viewership far exceeded Luocheng’s expectations, even a hundred thousand would’ve been a huge milestone for the Thunder Club, but even before Luocheng had even gone live, the QT channel already had 80,000 viewers waiting.

You should know, the viewer count usually doubled after the streamer officially went live, that meant that their stream could quite possibly break over 160,000 online viewers!

Even his personal streams could reach such incredible numbers, almost rivaling Hades’ record of 200,000!

***

“Holy crap, I’m telling you man, if you retired from competitions and went into streaming, you’d be living the good life!” Lin Dong looked at the viewer count and raised his eyebrows high.

“That’s a lot of f*cking people. Hopefully you won’t get some horrible feeding teammates, it’ll be pretty embarrassing if you lose,” Da Luo teased.

Luocheng let out a small laugh. “Of course I came prepared.”

The two boys looked at the smirk Luocheng had on his face, understanding in an instant that the guy had gotten Shallow Dream to duo with him!

With her, there was no freaking way Luocheng could lose!