For those who followed the LMS closely you guys might have seen me during the spring split coaching team Fireball. I'm Jensen, a guy from Singapore who started out as a shoutcaster for Garena covering the GPL from season 3 before transitioning over to coaching. My esports journey has been a rather challenging one thus far and I wanted to share more about the state of things in the wildcard regions and give a little more insight into the LMS and what coaching is like.
I started out helping teams out in the Singaporean TLC tournament after repeatedly criticizing their gameplay during the casts, wanting to be more than just another armchair critic of the game to the players. The concept of coaching in s4 was a rather foreign thing to much of the esports scene back then, much less so for a scene without any full time teams. Helping out in the capacity of an advisor to the team captain of Team Fat Rabbit, I would go through scrims with the team, point out mistakes the team made at certain points of the game, and go through with them some set pieces that would become very basic common knowledge subsequently. (How to ward up Baron given the type of team composition, how to execute a 4-1 split push etc.)
With my interactions with the rest of the team being mainly through the team captain, I got the false impression that the team was a rather well motivated unit that worked well together, it didnt help that most of the limited scrims we got was restricted to the local server where we would crush the other local teams. It was only when we lost in the domestic finals that things suddenly exploded, with many of the players on the team coming forward and expressing frustrations with the other players not putting in their fair share of work, having some scrims cancelled due to certain players wanting to go out with their girlfriend instead.
While the problems seemed rather typical of players who did pursue competitive league as a serious hobby rather than an aspiring profession, how these things blindsided me made me realize that an advisory position with these teams would not be very effective as I needed a form of direct engagement to help them work around these issues. More so than providing in game knowledge, the players in the scene needed mentoring, guidance and stability.
Despite a 2nd place finish, the domestic performance was enoguh to earn the team a spot in the GPL (It was a 16 team format then) where we rebuilt the team by pulling together some of the star players in the scene. Wanting to have a more direct impact on the players, we would book a LAN cafe and hold practice there. While I was able to have a more direct approach with the players under this team, it constantly felt like the players were very set in their way of thinking and wanted me to take over aspects that they were not familiar with/found interesting such as coordinating scrims and handling planning for the draft. Back then coaches weren't allowed to communicate with the team during b/p and how the players ended up drafting however they pleased despite the plans made was rather indicative of such mentality. What they wanted was validation for their own ideas over their peers through the medium of a coach, and when it didn't match they just went with their own ideas anyways. Despite my efforts to have a more direct and engaged approach, the players' expactations would prove otherwise.
Similar trends would continue to pop up as I went through several other teams through 2015 and 2016. On top of those, GPL expeditions were always particularly difficult, having to lead a team that could piece together 6 hours a week of team practice at best and compete against the full time organizations in the rest of South East Asia that had easily over 40-60 hours a week of practice.
Constantly finding solutions to these problems was always of high priority. Juggling school, shoutcasting and coaching was no easy task, I spent most of my university life focusing on developing League, finishing lessons in the afternoon before preparing the lesson or content I wanted to go through with the players that evening, having a scrim or activity block before watching the EULCS or whatever VoDs I had queued up on a playlist to sleep. I have very clear memories of dozing off only to be awoken by the crowd yelling STEEEVEEEE.
I got an opportunity to take on a full time team in 2017 with Fireball in the LMS, running the team together with my team leader (or what would be known as a manager in the West) as a 2 man support staff team as we brought a roster many people thought was destined for relegations to a 6th place finish in the regular split of LMS.
It felt good to see the structures that I had developed while working with the amateur teams not only be applicable, but very helpful in developing Fireball as a team and the players individually. But some of the players did feel that my approach to the game where we would go into each match with our strategy prescribed beforehand a little too rigid.
The Summer split... Its hard to write this as I type, the feeling of failure, not living up to expectations and the overall difficulty of the decisions I had to make still make me doubt myself even as I move on to another team. Things started to make a downturn at the end of spring, as I headed back to Singapore to finish up my final year poject and complete my degree. I received a call from the team owner about a staff and roster swap between HKES, which would soon rebrand into HKA, and Fireball.
The details of the call put me in a spot, informing me that my close friend, who was the coach of HKA would be released by their company and he was looking to me as the replacement. The choice was between staying on Fireball, under which my current team leader who had been doubling as an assistant coach would be released by the company and that the other staff on HKA might face potential termination as well, or moving to HKA where I would get to decide who would stay on in terms of support staff as well as decide the roster for the 2017 split.
The call ended with him telling me that the company had a strong appraisal of the work and reports I had done in spring, and that I could think of the move to HKA as a promotion of sorts. Reflecting back on this experience, I felt very uncomfortable being forced to choose between my friends and felt that I had been set up to be the villain in determining who gets to keep their job in summer and who doesn’t. Getting that little bit of approval from management felt like a bittersweet twist and I actually feel silly in hindsight not seeing past the bigger political game that was going on in the organization.
I had found good success on Fireball by crafting a planned curriculum that gave the team a very solid first month on prep during spring, understanding how to execute utility Marksmen with aggressive junglers to convert lane pressure into map control to get objectives. Weekly one on one discussions I had with the players were rather effective in scoping out what each player needed to work on individually, while providing empathy to their difficulties and insight into the way they perceived their upcoming opponents.
Sticking along the same formula to approach the summer split with HKA was the plan I had in mind, but the task at hand would be to rebuild the roster first, to which I would be a week late due to my graduation commitments back in Singapore.
With my flight back to Taiwan the same night as my FYP presentation which would conclude my university degree, I found myself spending time downloading VoDs of the spring LCK finals between SKT and KT to create a lesson on the topic of spell ordering and responsibilities, in particular how Mata’s over zealous use of Malzahar’s Nether Grasp cost KT some very major fights, using it as an engage tool when he needed to have the threat of it to deter Faker’s Fizz from wiping out his own backline.
I had a good lineup of topics, sectioning the map and opponent’s jungler into bounds, understanding how lane pressure and vision affects each other on the offense and subsequently on the defense, the importance of planning level 1 tactics and jungle pathing, questions to ask and information that needs to be communicated during the period between champion select and the start of the game, spell ordering and understanding teamfighting. On top of those I had spent some time compiling a small library of little tactics that were used in the LCK and EULCS. ( I mainly watch those 2 regions)
As I missed out on the first week, the staff present had already began to trial players, setting up scrims against KR CS teams and then alternating between players. Their teammates were then required to score them based on their performance that game, the other support staff were also then required to give their input. I found this system rather inaccurate when I heard about it, as we were loking to finish up trials and start working towards the summer split as soon as possible, I felt that too many of these games had a very big luck factor in it and it was highly prone to bias. There were very clear circles of friends among the players and I felt that it might be a possible avenue. I was slightly unhappy about this trialing method as it would diminish the input and vision I wanted to build the team with, however I continued to follow along with it as it was the wishes of the management to adopt such an approach in trialing the players.
Reflecting back on that period where we were trialing players with such a system, I felt that I was not prepared to take on that role as I had not set aside a clear rubric for what I was looking for. I did attempt a mass trial previously back in Singapore where I booked an entire LAN center for the day and had 40 players come in. The idea back then was based off a very different context, searching for players on a pro-am team in a wildcard region where I valued attitude and work ethic above individual skill, believing that my guidance and coaching would be a suitable substitute to overcome current skill gaps the players faced.
The experience was not very transferrable to this trialing system and I felt that my methods in Singapore were subject to my own set of biases. I remember some people suggesting that I had already made up my mind on who I wanted to bring on to the roster even before the trial. It was true to a certain extent. I think this might have been where things took a slight downturn for myself, with there being no reviews for scrims as the management felt that it was unfair. I actually was particularly unhappy with this point as a palyers reception towards coaching and ability to learn and understand the concepts, tactics and strategy I would want to instill in the game was a rather important trait to me. This was further aggravated when I realized that the trailing system was simply a front, and that the management had already decided who they wanted to be fielding in the starter position for the summer split. The trialing process was simply a data collection from which they would nitpick and influence decisions to achieve the results they wanted. I became slightly more disengaged with my work, spending less time watching VoDs despite MSI going on and playing more solo queue, which I found a rather silly activity for support staff to be doing. I would simply pick a tank in the toplane and just attempt to survive to the teamfighting phase of the game, I wasn’t actively thinking about improving my own individual skill through such gameplay and was simply hitting the play button to kill time.
Perhaps my disengagement from the entire trialing process was something I could have tackled better. Feeling sidelined by the trialing process I decided to let the management decide which players would be the starters for HKA and take a back seat and follow with their plan, executing some of the broader more general lesson plans through VoD reviews when scrims were not available. I think this was a mistake in hindsight. Dropping in singular concepts with players who were not familiar with the overall structure I wish to shape games in resulted in them not being able to follow with the entire process.
Eventually Tabe was brought in to coach HKA in part of a decision by the management of HKES to achieve results in summer and I was shifted back onto Fireball, where I was only given my roster 3 days before the start of the split, and no serviceable midlaner to work with.
While there was more staff for me to work with, I often got into quarrels with them as it felt that they weren't really interested in winning and they had resigned to the team's fate and were only interested in surviving relegations.
I decided to resign at that point, feeling too stressed out and too upset about the way things were handled and had a short stint on HKA helping Tabe out before I left Taiwan for a short break.
I did a two month stint in the LSPL with MSC subsequently, and if people are interested about that I don't mind sharing more, but I think this wall of text is long enough xD
