My thoughts on coaching, the Esports ecosystem and plans for 2022.

One of my favourite quotes of all time is by Elon Musk -
“Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.”

In a way, the world of Esports is very much like starting your own company in the sense that - due to the highly competitive market for top talent, you need to run yourself and your brand no differently to a start up. A lot of the time it only feels like there's no way up and a long way down.

There are very few golden standards to model yourself off, and simply mimicking a product can only get you so far. I would say the majority of Esports professions comes down to developing an art form, not mastering one; and there is a constant need to innovate, systemise and integrate other successful models to create edges for your team.

This is why I believe having a fundamental grasp on not just the game, but performance science, psychology, data, and efficient teaching theorems is of paramount importance in this space.

For context, I am from Oceania. You are fundamentally anchored by the region's lack in infrastructure, talent, networking capabilities and resources. Most coaches and managers in this space are oblivious or unwilling to commit time in their day to network with people in lower positions than them and Oceania is at the very bottom. Additionally, I would say the majority of coaches are extremely useless. The difference is, are they intelligent in the way they approach improvement and do they work hard? How are their communication skills?

The derogatory title of ‘paycheck stealer’ is not just something that appeared out of thin air. It is a title created by years of abuse of power, lack in ability and complacency. Although you can argue this for most regions the difference is there is basically no bar or no example that you can model yourself off of. The perfect example of this is that in the history of Oceania, no coach (other than me) has ever been exported outside of the region in a year that wasn't a well respected ex professional player of many years. I can confidently say that despite being terrible at my job relative to the professionals at the top, there wasn’t really anyone I could model or learn from.

What can we do to change this and what needs to change in what could be perceived as a toxic system?

First comes structure in developmental leagues and the general mindset behind this.

Academy right now has two forms in both Europe and North America. The first is the 2020~2021 @Cloud9 system, with a strong emphasis on player scouting. They scout and pay for the best players available, and use them as strong replacements in the case that the main idea behind a player in the main team fails. Additionally, from an economic standpoint they are able to almost break even or profit through the sale of these players to other teams that don’t have a systemic developmental program (The majority). Most of the coaching is done through a small staff, predominately a Head Coach and realistically speaking these players aren’t going to be playing in the LCS unless something catastrophic happens.

This model is generally successful but not necessarily for the right reasons. The level of players in Academy and ERL’s is the same, if not lower than the top leagues in minor regions like Oceania with an almost on average triple cost of operation. The exception is the top 2~3 teams in the LCS and top 2~3 teams in Academy where there is a significant and noticeable difference.

This leads to a clamping in talent pool, excessive inflation in player markets and ridiculous premiums on Free Agent players that are native to the region. Making Oceania a native region to North America has given some breathing room but this was a small band aid to a much larger problem initiated by the wrong party. The general player base and talent pool is ever so shrinking in Oceania and it simply isn’t enough to be sustainable. What needs to change is not Riot but the general approach by all teams in the League.

I don’t blame C9 for approaching the academy league this way - I do believe it was probably the best system given the environment but in the future I hope more teams shift towards an alternative approach that is currently being practiced heavily in teams like EG, MAD Lions and the majority of Chinese/Korean teams.

Look at the difference between traditional sports and Esports when it comes to development. In the US professional basketball players generally go through a prudent system of talent selection and value development throughout schooling, and an extremely competitive collegiate system. Nothing of the sort exists here so it becomes difficult to find any kind of talent that has the right personality to be the next superstar. Opening up borders by allowing Oceanic players to be native is a bandaid to a much larger problem that should be fixed by organisations, not Riot Games. The drop in the general level of play in the LCO relative to the peak years of the OPL after all the top players were exported is the best example of this.

The second system emphasizes player fluidity between teams, talent development and active scouting rather than picking from the best performing ones. I think more and more western teams have realized this and have shifted toward this system for two reasons. The first is the reasons mentioned above, and the second being the general cost of coaches.

The average top tier coach is approximately 20 percent of the cost of a top tier player. The ratio is closer to 1:7 when it comes to free agent players in the market now. It only makes sense to diversify equity in having a larger coaching staff - with coaching staff having specific niche skills like data analytics, lane coaching and performance coaching. By focusing on the process of development and my investing in resources to find the next top talent you get a truly competitive roster because if the processes are efficient these players improve exponentially.

Some of the best examples of this is @PapaSmithy 100 Thieves Tenacity, EG Jojopyun/Danny and Inspired/Szygenda/Zanzarah from AGO Rogue. What’s important to note is that the change came from top down. Either a Head Coach like Peter Dun/Macc or a GM like Flyy/PapaSmithy.

One of my goals for 2022 is to continue to improve my own system and find more solutions that are more realistic for regions with a much less dense population. Amateur teams and having a third team makes sense in regions like Korea due to the dense urban sprawls, easier and greater access to players in person and generally larger player population. North America needs to focus on importing, finding creative ways to develop young talent (both native and abroad), integrating them into western team culture and getting these talented kids a green card.

Europe needs to have a more integrated academy system focused on highly populated countries like France or Germany so that teams like Vitality can use their existing resources in France for a third amateur team or Rogues German offices.

The second issue I want to talk about is the importance of Performance science and how this can help fix our broken Esports ecosystem.

Right now, there is an industry ‘standard’ that most teams have resorted to inorder to achieve performance (not all teams are like this). Work hard like Korean Esports teams, have an extremely short career and shelf life and have exceptional performance. The issue with this is severe burnout, economic inefficiency due to the resources poured into these players, and general mental health. You see many Esports careers ending early even without army issues specifically due to this, and it disturbs me that many Western teams think that this is the role model to follow.

As a Korean, I was raised by Korean values and understand the necessity of hard work - however the nature of performance based jobs is more about how efficiently time is used rather than how many hours you put in. There is a huge amount of science behind this and we should be utilizing it like many of the other professional sports teams around the world. The average practice time in Korea is 14~16 hours a day. 3 sets of scrims and solo queue until 2~5am.

At the moment if it isn’t this system it’s the complete complacency system where players play other games off cooldown, go out and drink every weekend and have less games than an amateur player in solo queue. The right way that I intend to approach my 2022 is an increase in efficiency through relative communication (I will talk more about this later), focus on work life balance, and usage of performance coaching metrics which all lead to a performance based, championship process.

An example of relative communication is data and how it is conveyed.

Data usage is not well understood and often poorly used not just because we haven’t explored all the different uses of data yet, but also because players don’t really care nor do not have the patience to understand. I am no data scientist but I believe there is a huge amount of potential in this field, similar to how baseball mostly relies on statistics rather than plain old textbook coaching nowadays. With TR API integration, all of this becomes a lot easier.

What’s important is to use and communicate metrics that are easily and well understood by the player, and effectively integrating them from Day 1. This is important to create standards and a process that players can be sold on and can take confidence in. I won’t share any of my specific edges here but to give you an example, even having champion specific scrim winrate is a huge boost to morale and an extremely easy way to sell a game plan to players.

The main point here is that all communication needs to be relative to what a player finds useful, from a player perspective - and all scheduling in the day needs to be based on this. If it is difficult for a player to understand a plan, it needs to at least be easily sellable. A coach is as much of a salesman as much as he is a diplomat. Excessively long meetings, long reviews are all symptoms of poor organisation and leadership, not good communication and collaboration.

Work life balance is something that I’ve found incredibly important in an Esports players life. Esports being a competitive sport, I don’t believe this should be treated like your average job. In a way, work is apart of a competitive players everyday life. This is all the more reason to force this separation. For example, at Vitality - no matter what I pushed for players to go home soon after scrims, and to play solo queue from home. I followed through this concept by leading by example.

Happiness derives from not just success and winning. It comes from personal development and a healthy relationship with work. Having your identity tied entirely to your job can only be exhausting especially if that job is on a timer that is age. Ironically European work culture, for me more specifically French work culture in which emphasizes the need to enjoy weekends (literally illegal to work on weekends there) only cemented my belief that this is what creates a happy lifestyle and meaningful career.

Giving players alone time and setting a championship process of expectations allows for teams to have control over their players behaviour and how they spend their time without directly influencing their lives. Professional basketball players are another great example of this, spending tremendous amounts of time at the gym alone, cryotherapy and massages paid out of their own expense. General player salaries are enough for them to create their own routines and have space that they can call their own. The only thing to watch out for here is to manage these players to make sure they are not out of line and hungry to practice and improve.

I truly believe all these things should be an industry standard.

For me, 2022 will be a year of development, application and innovation. I thank you all for your support and I will continue to grind to be the best one day.

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