Even the best League of Legends players in the world have their off days. Or in the case of North American Challenger team Winterfox, three of them do...at the exact same time.
Winterfox was playing against the newly-formed team Renegades last night in a Challenger Series match. Things were going normally for the first three minutes or so. Then four of the Renegades players decided to rush one of Winterfox’s outer turrets.
Three of the opposing players responded to this aggressive push by strolling over to their almost instantaneous deaths.
The segment is painful to watch:
I know that you want to defend all of your team’s turrets and keep them up as long as possible in any given League of Legends match. But come on guys. Did you really have to run headfirst into a fight in which you were outnumbered and had no way of winning? Fighting underneath a tower does give you a serious advantage—enough of a leg up that 3 players could realistically best 4 opponents. But it became very clear before they’d even reach the tower that they weren’t gonna make it there in one piece.
Watching them, I just want to start shouting WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!?! at the screen. Especially the Nautilus player—Nautilus being the humongous dude who looks sort of like a Big Daddy from BioShock.
He just keeps walking! Right past the four Renegades players demolishing his two teammates. Nautilus, my man, what were you thinking?
The play was so bad that players on Reddit started to wonder if the guy was either lagging, or if he’d alt-tabbed out of the game entirely for whatever reason:
To be fair, the Challenger Series (CS) is a step below the best of the best in League’s eSports scene. The real upper crust of players participate in the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS, because those two acronyms aren’t confusing at all). CS is sort of the minor leagues in comparison—it’s where LCS players come from, and where they fall back down to if they have a particularly bad season. But still: Challenger is the highest rank in one of the most popular video games in the world. It’s a level of skill most of us League players will never reach. This is a mistake you’d expect to see happen at my noob level of League of Legends player.
Ah well. Better luck next time, Winterfox.
You can watch the whole game here:
To contact the author of this post, write to yannick.lejacq@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq.