The fame of League of Legends players largely depends on their achievements and performances on the Summoner’s Rift. Aside from Faker, who remains a timeless name, in the last three years, Doinb has also garnered a significantly larger fan base.
Recently, Chinese media conducted a survey on Reddit – the largest online forum in the world today, to explore the fandom trends within the global League of Legends community (and of course, among Reddit members). This survey identified the 20 most admired players of 2020, based on criteria such as: the number of posts, topics, popularity (upvotes, comments, positive feedback) related to that player. And of course, the top position still belongs to one and only one name: Faker.
It is quite understandable that Reddit is favored in Europe and North America, so the number of Western players appearing on this list also constitutes the majority. Most of them are familiar names like Rekkles, Jankos, Caps, and Perkz.
From the LPL side, this region contributes 6 names, including: SofM, Doinb, Kanavi, Tarzan, Nuguri, and Ppgod. Quite surprisingly, Rookie and TheShy – two top stars of this league, are not particularly hot names on Reddit. Huanfeng also attracted considerable attention, but a significant part was due to the controversies surrounding the “multi-timer” issue after the World Championship.
Among the 6 names from the LPL, 5 stars have achieved numerous successes on the professional stage over the past two years. SofM is the reigning World Championship runner-up, Doinb and Nuguri have both held the Summoner’s Cup, Tarzan has been a two-time LCK runner-up, while Kanavi has also claimed victory in the LPL.
However, there are also some quite interesting rare cases, such as Ppgod. Compared to the other 19 names, the Victory Five support player is clearly far less accomplished. But the 2000-born player has garnered significant interest from the Western community, due to… his name. As we know, “God” in English has a broad meaning referring to the deity, and many Western gamers feel that the player’s choice to include “God” in his name is a very… cool act.
Of course, Ppgod, like many other Asian gamers, only started to gain widespread recognition thanks to his achievements on the battlefield. His spectacular transformation with V5, from the bottom of the LPL Spring 2020 to a position contending for a spot at the World Championship in the Summer split has made their name known widely. In fact, the Reddit community even created a dedicated topic for Ppgod’s fan club.
Naturally, as this is a community-based survey, it means that their preferences are heavily subjective. The appearance of the aforementioned names does not imply that they are the 20 best players in the world at this moment.
For SofM personally, the fact is that before the 2020 World Championship, Duy Cau Giay was primarily known in the LPL, LMS, and somewhat in the LCK. He is famous in the East as a jungle god of the Chinese League of Legends tournament, consistently shaking up Korean ranks and was once a “rookie drop-out” in the LMS. But with just his first appearance at an international tournament, SofM has truly conquered the world with his outstanding performance.