LCS SUMMER is BACK! Will TL ACTUALLY go UNDEFEATED?! SR's ROSTER SWAP and more! | Hotline League 327

[@TravisGafford]

00:00:00 Intro 00:21:40 yami's take: Steve was right, TL can go undefeated in the regular split. 00:38:15 Prize Picks break! 00:42:29 Ezekiel's take: DIG will come back from break and finish top 3, maybe top 2 01:00:59 icebreaker's take: Fearless should be the standard for all pro LoL multigame series 01:26:30 human boy's take: LCS will swap places with LEC as the third best major region 01:46:12 KIA break! 01:50:35 Andrew's take: the current Top 3 LCS teams are the best Top 3 in LCS history 02:04:25 NZXT break! 02:07:00 Shalom's take: Shopify Rebellion should've never dropped Bugi 02:21:35 Outro

[@shinyy5184]

Cubbys outfit is giving Perry the Platypus

[@theelectricant98]

Holy

[@Cubbyxx]

Secret Agent C

[@itsharuko1538]

I dont see a hat. Hes giving just a regular platypus

[@cupidok2768]

Who's the blond guy with the glasses in the thumb

[@MRTHICKUS]

@@cupidok2768no one is blonde but the glasses on right is vulcan and on left is umti

[@shinyy5184]

Also I love the pop girls discussion at the end 😭 all of the albums mentioned are sooo good

[@timpayne166]

about the format differences in pro, college basketball and pro basketball have different game lengths, quarters vs halves and the three point line has changed differences, more differences are applied if you go international as well

[@thanatos113]

Yeah i don't know how no one on call was able to point this out to travis, there are tons of format differences in pro sports. And on top of that, its not equivalent to compare competitive league to solo queue while comparing pro sports to college/high school sports. Solo queue would be more like playing pickup games at your local gym/court/park/etc and those games are often wildly different from any type of organized team sports. Its just kind of a poorly thought out take from travis

[@ObiWanShinobi917]

LCS isnt going to replace LEC as the 3rd best region. LCS already has replaced them.

[@vince5456]

Yea LEC just looks pretty shit now and LCS is looking good.

[@jayhoegh3472]

Regarding fearless draft: I think it is a great option for a developmental league, but I am vehemently against it for top pro leagues. To borrow a comparison to traditional sports, you need depth amongst your players and position. Preseason football is all about playing your 2nd, 3rd, 4th string players for evaluation purposes of who you might need to tap into later on. That being said, I don't want a team in the 4th quarter of the Super Bowl to be playing their back-up quarterback and 4th best wide receiver because of some forced variety rule. I want the best players to be playing their best champions (after bans of course)

[@copypasta1585]

And on top of that, fearless just totally removes the concept of power picks in draft that make high level series' really interesting, especially near the end of international tournaments. It's super interesting to see how teams adapt in draft when the opponent can pick something that they are specifically very good at. With fearless, all of those cool draft adaptation moments go out the window

[@CouskousGO]

Rolling bans is the best middle ground for variety and power picks. Bans from game 1 continue into game 2 and you get to ban another set of 10 champs next game and so forth. Bans + fearless is too much.

[@prominis8625]

The TL quote about wanting to become the G2 of North America was from a CoreJJ interview. Cubby was right that it wasn't about stomping NA; he specifically wanted TL to become a team that NA fans could have genuine hope for in international events, much like how G2 is EU's hope.

[@XykloneHL]

To address Travis’ questions/arguments on the Fearless draft take: The main issue is that players tend to overindex on specific portions of the patch or meta and rarely attempt to stray past the “flavor of the month”. For example, often times lane match ups compose of 2-3 priority picks that get traded away from both drafts. This results in a stale viewing experience where we often don’t get to see league of legends at the highest level but rather, specific match ups at the pro level. “If one team is good on control mages and keeps winning but the meta swaps and all of a sudden, they suck”. Is that not precisely the benefit of Fearless draft? We don’t get situations where a team is good only because of the meta. Since draft will (in theory) constantly evolve throughout the series played, we should have standings that better represent a team’s ability to adapt and improve as opposed to a only knowing how to make play Azir/Corki (or in this meta, trist/corki)

[@TheHyterion]

Solo q isnt fearless, but pro play is nothing like solo q. champs that are good in pro are not necessarily good in solo q... and fearless would add more champs that are played in solo q to the pro scene.

[@spaghettivase4808]

Yeah I don’t understand his argument at all. Solo queue is never best of.

[@RizampGaming]

Just primed on twitch again, even though I don't use that platform. Just finished Oathbringer btw, loving that series. Check out Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erickson sometime. It's complex like Game of Thrones, but has interesting magic mechanics and is the best series I've ever read.

[@NeenyoCareenyo]

My state doesn’t let me bet on esports 😡 but I tried!

[@CB38096]

Feels bad for Tomio only playing 3 pro series but he definitely seemed like more of a soloq player

[@PlsDontReadThis123]

I think he needs more time in the lcs to get into his groove. The games last week with Jojo v apa teams really showed his mechanical prowess

[@shawnreedm]

Travis if you want 90’s rock homage throwback vibes check out Taking Meds latest album! Feels like a new, old record.

[@RiftRaft]

Can’t wait to curl my toes for the rest of this episode

[@Matt-S-D]

On the DIG note, on Pros zven mentioned they clearly didn't have a good read on the meta. They were picking Hwei and Taliyah into Tristana/Corki The nerfs coming to those champions, and Jensens champion pool will make up for the losses they had early. I think they have a strong chance for LCS finals, and 2nd/3rd is a very good prediction. There is a world where they beat C9 in the lower bracket finals to face TL in the finals

[@gregpartridge7554]

Pro play is already a different format than soloqueue, because soloqueue is entirely best-of-1s. Even in Spring when regular season was Bo1, the fact that playoffs was not makes it fundamentally different from how people are playing at home, because there is no element of adapting to the opposing team's draft and strategies in soloqueue. Even the bans are different, since they're blind in soloqueue. Not to mention of course that the champions and strategies that are best in organized play, with preparation for your opponent, with comms, and at the highest level of play, are very different from the ones that win you games at home. In comparison to all those, fearless draft is a pretty negligible difference and I don't think will break the perceived connection between watching pro and playing yourself. Also, the caller mentioned this early on but I thought he should have brought it up more in defense of his take: it's not that having a broad champion pool is inherently better or more important than being able to pick up and master the meta champions on any patch. It's that the need for a deeper repertoire of champions at any given time forces the player to practice identifying and mastering strong champs more than in the present format, and ultimately should make them stronger in both of those areas.

[@TitoTVComedy]

I get Travis point but the player base never plays best of 3’s we also don’t have ban order, and pro teams don’t randomly get picked by the client like solo queue so there are quite far from one another. Fearless would make it further. At that point if no fearless then Riot should lock the two strongest champions by WR in Emerald + for the entire game for one patch while also target nerf buff who ever. They have the data to move to that model

[@szabel.]

2:26:38 i saw Say Anything at the Red Rocks in CO! it was cool

[@tl4195]

What about TL, TSM, and C9 in Spring 2019? That was the year TL beat IG and ended 2nd in MSI. The playoff series between TSM and TL that year was down to the wire and C9 also put up a good fight against TSM.

[@jal-kx6tm]

TL winning 4 splits in a row with both core and impact on that roster doesn't count towards building a dynasty?

[@Avbv1204]

Core wasn’t there for the first two splits so, no?

[@rudiferr]

re: the EWC/MSI thing, it was started from people construing a clip from Monte+Thorin's show. I know Travis probably didn't watch any of EWC, but just to further support his claims - from the broadcasting/licensing perspective, they were very deliberate the whole weekend about saying "EWC presenting League of Legends", showing that Riot has been very specific with them about how LoL is to be represented at the tournament... more to add that they are outwardly showcasing the bare minimum with letting LoL the game and the LoL teams be there (still while probably getting a huge grab of money). Heck, I'd be even more surprised that Riot would not just let a third party handle one of their major tournaments, but one where other games they don't develop are being showcased.

[@salvadorguzman403]

I think the strongest argument for fearless draft is the meta is no longer strictly dictated by patches. It is based on players ability to find better match ups. Obviously you will still have really good OP picks at the top for game 1, but after that, you open up the ability for more champs to be picked. There is a bunch of A tier champions that are never picked, which would argueably make the game more interesting, because someone is always going to pick the Blind S tier champ and they will counter with the S Counter tier champ if they are not banned.

[@salvadorguzman403]

I think you get diminishing returns once you have played a matchup enough times. It's about quality not quantity. If you understand how the matchup works after 25 games. Why play 125 games in this new format? Obviously one side has the advantage, play that one game, try your best on the losing side, because there is always a losing side, and then move on to the next game. It puts more weight on the picks, either you take advantage of your better pick or suffer from only playing one champion 125 times.

[@salvadorguzman403]

NFL football you need 2 feet down for a catch to count, in College it is only 1 foot. In high school I believe it is 1 foot as well. The kick off in football is completely different now because the players at that level are much better than College and HS. In Soccer they offer 7 v 7 leagues and 5 v 5 rec leagues because 11 v 11 is sometimes too much to organize because of the size of teams. In college soccer there is unlimited subs so players can constantly be fresh. In pro soccer there is 6 subs per team per game. Plenty of traditional sports have differing rule sets or league structures for their regular or non professional leagues.

[@falsearbitrator2560]

I hate when callers have a really good take, but then can't explain them well. Caller 3 was right imo about players getting better. Forcing players to play and play agaisnt different styles consistently should make them all around better. Playing corki and Tristana all the time makes them better at the matchup. And it's honestly more of a meta read to be able to play a few strong champions than playing the same character the entire world has been playing for weeks

[@Carolyn17204]

Cubbyxx always has at least one comment that has me truly amused. The two weeks comment at the start was good.

[@ChooChooToValhalla]

2:16:39 OK! Can someone explain to me why Srrty is getting glazed so much? I've watched all of his games and tbh he's eatin D a lot. He sucked against Philip, he sucked against Tenacity, he got absolutely D-ed by Zamudo who's a player that got 0 coaching from an LCS affiliated team and I'm quite sure he's gonna get D-ed by Faisal in a few days. What makes Cubby think that a toplaner that's looking extremely shaky against NACL toplaners make SR a better team? I'm pretty sure in 2023 Fakegod looked *way* better in the NACL than how Srrty has looked in 2024. Even last split Srrty was getting carried hard by Quad. And he always fumbled against good toplaners. EDIT: Also the Reven thing sounds like nepohire. Sticking to what you know isn't bad but to compete in tier1 you have to be better than that.

[@normancraytor6749]

because srrty has a high rank in na solo queue, which barely even has any pro players on it because na pros are lazy. Most 'scouts' or 'experts' in NA dont know anything about how to judge players sadly.

[@NyangisKhan]

@@normancraytor6749 Also pros treat soloqueue differently. Some actually practices with champs that they can't play. Some actually autofills to understand matchups of their teammates better. Some just limit tests all the time so they throw like half their games but becomes better as pros. A challenger toplaner actually commented on rival's video that toplaners that actually does good as pros like Bwipo and Sniper always limit tests and are constantly trying to outplay but ends up losing LP because of it. But players like Srrty and Fakegod play very safe and try to have perfect games. So he predicted that Srrty won't do that good as a pro. And he was kinda right. One of the limit test types, Zamudo is by far looking like the better toplaner in the NACL. He's also 2 years younger. EDIT: Also in this video when Cubby described Fakegod and how he did good in the NACL, it almost felt like he was describing Srrty as well. As an avid NACL/Academy watcher Srrty *is* kinda similar to Fakegod tbh.

[@benozkleenex]

I mean have not lost a series, but undefeated kinda mean you have not been defeated. I don't think anyone ever said they went undefeated in playoff if they won all their series 3-2.

[@Fidilisfool]

The dig cope call was wild. Fly demolishes dig and plays close against G2 yet somehow they are going to be way worse than dig?

[@TheNewdex]

Travis I am here again to request you give House of the Dragon a chance, honestly man its phenomenal

[@Powerserg97]

1:57:45 HUGE disagree. 2016 summers had TSM with doublelift, IMT with Huni and Reignover, C9 with Impact in the league, even CLG was a huge contender. This was the best top 4 region.

[@Powerserg97]

2:00:21 thank you Travis for being the true historian here. I felt so disgraced for a minute there.

[@TheNekuClan]

I'm not sure how much of these comments Travis reads after the video is posted but I wanted to talk about the format discussion a bit more. First its worth calling out that there are differences between formats in traditional sports. Even in League the draft format is not the same as what most people play every day anymore. All of the champions are banned at the same time when people play draft games. The only exception to this is clash which are BO1 and would still be exactly the same because Fearless cannot apply to them.. And of course everything that happens post draft will still be fully representative and identical to what can happen in any normal game of League on summoners rift. All this to say I'm not sure how much the "Divergence from games people can play on their own" argument really has an important foundation. Whether or not Fearless draft and the skills it incentivizes are ones that we want to highlight in professional league over the system we have now is a different more nuanced question that I don't have a definitive answer to but I do think there's a variation of this format that is healthier for the league than the draft system we have now. (e.g I like the revert bans for Game 5 proposal that cubby mentioned). Lets remember that OGN (Old LCK) used to have game 5 be blind pick and it was (and of course still is) heralded as both one of the most exciting aspects while still being the peak of competition. The iconic faker zed play that everyone knows was a mirror match in mid.(which arguably made it even more hype) Hopefully this at least provides some interesting context/perspective about the merits of fearless that you may not have considered

[@TravisGafford]

Thank you!

[@Shatswell]

Partnering with prize picks that has a current affect on the crippling gambling addiction in the US, but worrying about a foreign countries government is wild to me. Seems more pandering but thats just one guys opinion.

[@gregpartridge7554]

I don't like gambling either but at least it's not going out and murdering people for dissenting or being gay, etc. They're not really on the same level.

[@TheHyterion]

Playing the meta has been bad imo because people just look for something that is as powerful or can just match it, I would much rather see a player find something that can beat the meta like licorice did when he brought out the hecarim against the AAtrox meta. Makes the ingenuity and game/champ knowledge more on the players themselves rather than results based analysis.

[@xUncledonnie]

Im ready for an episode where travis doesnt constantly talk over coby or the callers.

[@timobrien4190]

My wife and I were in an accident and our car was totaled so we got a Kia telluride, it’s amazing!

[@TravisGafford]

Hope you're both okay!

[@MrSlade138]

@@TravisGafford I drunk drove my car through the gaurd rail, rolled 50 meters off a mountain cliff straight into the ocean, so I got a Kia XCeed. It's amazing!

[@timobrien4190]

@@TravisGafford yes us my 2 year old and my wife is pregnant so our unborn child are all A-Okay. But after we found out our car was totaled I made sure we test drove a Kia and was really impressed by the smooth drive, additional safety features and space. Thanks Kia

[@vince5456]

Travis a NIKKE streamer?

[@marksaum8904]

The guy talking about fly falling apart is smoking fetanyl lmfao

[@rotcoke652]

Dude ofc Shopify isn't going to be a successful team. This is a corporation who INVESTED money into an LCS team. They are going to manage their team like an asset on their books. They aren't going to put in more money to become more competitive. There is 100% someone at that company analyzing the funds allocated to this venture, and they have an expected return and an actual return. This isn't someone like Jack or Steve that actually cares about winning championships.

[@RandomStuff-zw7uh]

Solo queue has been divorced from competitive since there has been a competitive scene. The popular competitive champions have almost never been the same as the popular solo queue champions.

[@GlippyLotion]

I like bacon 🥓 🥓 😋

[@Jimmy69jimmy]

Cubby needs to screen these callers a bit more lol, second caller was horrible

[@Sunshinus]

1:42:19 yeah, LCS broadcast sucked compared to LEC, but was generally alright. LEC as a product is basically dead now, cold opens are gone, music videos are gone, funny skit ideas disappeared with Quickshot, even cool spectator angles are gone. All that's left are nice casters, shitty 15 minutes of obvious analysis before game day and terrible quizes because the guy who replaced Shakarez is completely clueless. And i feel like teams that are not G2, FNC and BDS reflect that, they are just quietly trying to not be last. Well, there's also Vitality exception who are kinda trying but my god they are just cursed.

[@MrSlade138]

Well, they laid off like 70% of the staff, so Riot's getting what they pay for.

[@panda93247]

$5 million is NOT enough money to entice someone like Theshy to come to America and ruin what's left of his career.

[@muveemania]

omg the second caller is on so much copium

[@KrowFPS]

Travis been giving these DIG fans too much hopium lmao

[@theelectricant98]

​@@KrowFPSas they mentioned, it's a compelling narrative so people want it to come true

[@julyfirstz]

LEC is downgrading for sure

[@Mach7Michael]

Cubby the acolyte writing is garbage. For a 180 million dollar series, the script is terrible.

[@flakey9155]

fearless is so dogshit

[@spreak2623]

Fearless is just a novelty. It’s fun for the draft and is bad for gameplay. I want to see the best players play the way they think will win, not be forced to play sub optimally. If a mid laner wins both sides of a matchup it is a strategy

[@theelectricant98]

I dont think requiring a deeper champ pool necessarily means PLAYING suboptimal, its just a different skillset / approach to competitive sets. Though ultimately players/teams should have already been putting more effort into thinking about underused counters to the current meta

[@NyangisKhan]

You mean the _current_ best players. Because if fearless becomes the norm, the _best_ players that cannot adapt will not be the best anymore and we'll just have new _best_ players to replace them. In the end even the best players are expendable. What fearless will bring is a lot more views making the esport more marketable. With the current format a team's success if more about the meta than the actual skill level of the players. For example DRX wouldn't have won worlds if it wasn't a Sylas/Akali meta. Now look at Zeka. The guy's been a tool for almost 2 years now. Fearless will change this.

[@Darkstormsun9865]

​@theelectricant98 it is playing suboptimal because fearless is self sabotage, win or lose. You are banning your own best champion in a series. That isn't fun to watch. Can you imagine faker not being able to play azir in game 3 to make that series changing shuffle onto ruler because he played it in game 1 or game 2. Which also may or may not have carried the game. Pros should be able to use their best strategy to win as much as possible not be force to regulated to only use it only once.

[@Darkstormsun9865]

​@@NyangisKhanI don't think fearless will please anyone but hardcore fans. It will not get more views. LPL has less views than previous years despite going fearless.

[@NyangisKhan]

@@Darkstormsun9865 Well whether you like it or not tier1 *is* going fearless next year. So us arguing here doesn't matter. Riot is a billion dollar company with analysts who are smarter than us. And they've got all the data. So what they're doing is probably right or at least way more logical than w/e argument we can come up with.