Faker’s Average Opponents in EUW Rank
Currently, all teams participating in Worlds 2024 have fully arrived to prepare for the Swiss stage of the tournament. Of course, during the competition at Worlds 2024, players will be provided with accounts to rank up on the European server so they can try hard to practice for matches. However, there are some issues that have arisen, namely that these accounts still have to play enough ranked matches and cannot be directly placed at a suitable rank by Riot. Simply put, players will spend some time climbing to the appropriate rank to start practicing and trying hard.
Recently, Faker himself highlighted the clear shortcomings of Riot’s account provisioning policy. Specifically, with only a few short days left before T1 has to enter their first match of the Swiss round, they have arrived in Berlin very early. However, as of now, Faker is still playing on an “unranked” account and is even matched with players ranked from Iron to Silver. This inadvertently wastes a significant amount of time that Faker or other players could utilize to practice a bit more.
Not Only Faker but BLG Also Raised Concerns
Before Faker’s situation, Bilibili Gaming, upon moving to Europe, had to request Riot to restore all data from their normal match accounts on the Chinese server, and apply it to their EUW accounts to save time. Of course, after that, BLG would still have to play the required 10 matches, but at least with the updated data, they could be placed in higher quality lobbies rather than being matched with players from all rank tiers.
In reality, players can easily surpass these ranked matches. However, the time they have from when they arrive at the venue for the Worlds/MSI matches until they start their first match is not very much. The players’ schedule includes not only practicing and ranking up but also strategy meetings, interacting with the media and fans… Therefore, perhaps in the future, Riot needs to change its account provisioning policies so that players’ practices can be as effective as possible.