Currently, the world championships, the Worlds 2022, are taking place in League of Legends . However, as every year, there is already a huge disappointment after the first week. Out of 12 teams that started in the Play-Ins, 8 are eliminated. Many feel sorry for the Brazilian team LOUD. They impressed with passionate gameplay. Their jungler, Park “Croc” Jong-hoon (24), could barely cope with the elimination, and tears were seen on stage.
The Worlds in League of Legends are harsh:
- League of Legends has 4 major regions: Korea, China, Europe, and North America. Their teams play championships, and each region sends its best 3 to 4 teams to the Worlds.
- There are also smaller regions like Brazil or Japan, which only send one team, their best, to the Worlds.
- The best teams from the smaller regions and the weaker teams from the major regions must go through a preliminary round, the “Play-Ins”: 12 teams start, only 4 advance. Almost always, the representatives from the smaller regions are eliminated.
Brazilians beat European top team, win fans’ hearts
This year, this team was particularly disappointing: The Brazilian team LOUD achieved a significant success at the Worlds 2022: With passionate gameplay, they surpassed the favored Europeans from Fnatic. However, because they lost seemingly easy matches, they ended up only in 3rd place in the group and had to play a qualification match.
LOUD impressed in the match against Fnatic with fiery but also controlled gameplay: Particularly strong was the 24-year-old South Korean Croc, who took an excellent role in the jungle on Maokai.
The Brazilians put on quite a show when they won. The 18-year-old botlaner Brance flexed his biceps after a good play against the German star Upset:
Brazil vs Japan is the “Final of the Small Regions”
This was the deciding match: LOUD faced the team “DetonatioN FocusMe” from Japan in the qualification: The Japanese did not play the currently popular meta, but rather “comfort picks” that the team felt comfortable with.
For LOUD, this was a big opportunity to win a best-of-5: After all, they had already defeated DetonatioN FocusMe in the preliminary match.
But now things went wrong: They lost 3-1 to the Japanese.
This was the most touching scene: After the match, it was seen that the passionate players of LOUD were collapsing.
Especially jungler Croc was a bundle of misery.
Why is he so sad? As tweets indicate, this could have been Croc’s last game with the team, perhaps even his last professional game ever. He writes:
I love my teammates so much that I wondered if I could meet better teammates and coaching staff during my playing career. […] Now I am in tears at the thought that I might not be able to be with these teammates anymore.
[…] I tried hard to end with a smile, but it didn’t work as well as I thought.
What’s behind this? Fans in Brazil speculate that the South Korean Croc could be called for military service. Military service is mandatory for South Koreans and has abruptly interrupted the careers of many professionals.
Others think his contract might be expiring, or Croc might have received an offer from another team and therefore switch of his own accord.
In League of Legends, it is common for teams to be assembled “for a run” and reassembled the next year. It’s rare for players to stay with a team for more than 2 or 3 years – careers are simply too short.
Who survived the preliminary round? The team that defeated LOUD, “DetonatioN FocusMe”, also fell apart in a game after that: However, they managed to win at least one game against the heavily favored Chinese team RNG. This is already a great success for the Japanese.
At the Worlds 2022, all teams from smaller regions have been eliminated again: Only representatives from China, South Korea, Europe, and the USA progressed. In the main round, there are still 2 representatives from smaller regions, GAM Esports (Vietnam) and CTBC Flying Oyster (Taiwan), but anything other than elimination in the group stage would be a sensation.
The only surprise in the Play-Ins was that with MAD Lions, one of the 4 European teams is already going home:
