Recently, the League of Legends community has been looking towards major regions, especially the LCK, after the organization held a Kick-Off event in preparation for the 2024 season. This year, LCK will also be one of the regions hosting the Spring 2024 tournament quite early (on January 17). At the same time, T1, as the new champion of the League of Legends scene, will be the most scrutinized team, and surely any team would want to defeat T1. Moreover, with the championship of Worlds 2023 as a prelude, T1 is expected to complete an unprecedented “Golden Road” in League of Legends history.
During this time, players will also frequently continue to climb ranks on the Korean server, as well as practice on the APAC super server. Recently, after Riot reset all ranks for the new season, Faker and his T1 teammates started their first rank matches. However, Faker’s climb was not going smoothly as of the evening of January 10 (Vietnam time), he had lost 3 matches in a row and continuously faced “getting beat.” Notably, in one match, Faker’s bot lane had died 5 times within just a few minutes of the game.
After a series of continuous defeats, Faker lamented: “This ranking is five times harder than the Worlds matches”. This was met with enthusiastic support from T1 fans but made some LPL viewers feel even more humiliated. Perhaps everyone knows that LPL suffered almost a clean sweep against T1 at the recent Worlds 2023. Only JD Gaming managed to win a single game and had some back-and-forth with T1. The rest, including Bilibili Gaming, LNG Esports, and especially Weibo Gaming in the finals, were utterly destroyed without any resistance.
Of course, Faker certainly did not intend to belittle the LPL. But clearly, given that he (and his teammates) have been continuously “getting beat” in rank, while LPL players cannot do the same, it is entirely understandable that ranking is harder than the Worlds matches.