It’s been six years since then 19-year-old Vincent ‘BioFrost’ Wang debuted on the LCS stage. Now the 25-year-old veteran support has posted his 200th win — and he’s confident he can push for 200 more after a break from pro play filled him with determination.
By any marker in League of Legends, pushing to 200 wins is no small achievement. After all, for a player like Biofrost, it took basically six straight years (minus the 2021 break) to get there — and he was on top teams for his early days.
A lot has changed in that time; no less the state of the game, which has vastly evolved since Bio’s LCS debut in Summer 2016. Thirty champions have been released since, and Stoneweaver Taliyah was the new kid on the block back then. Metas have come and gone, from the copious amounts of Lulu and Karma during 2017’s Ardent meta to the engage supports of the modern day.
Even Wang’s steadfast determination to reach the heights of competition ebbed and flowed across those six years as success and capitulation came in waves.
However, he’s finally put the runs on the board with a big win against Immortals to reach the big 200 in the North American domestic league. Biofrost’s Dignitas wiped the floor with the struggling side, locking them out in a near-perfect game that saw only one dragon fall away from the then-winless side in Summer.
It took a lot longer, and a bit more effort, to get that dub than BioFrost was honestly expecting.
“For the first week we were really confident going into it but the results from scrims didn’t translate to stage performance,” he told Dexerto. “It’s a meme saying you lose then you improve — ideally you don’t lose that many games in order to improve.
“Immortals had a really bad draft. They picked scaling in almost every single role and just hoped we wouldn’t do anything. We had all of the agency in our hands so they just looked really bad as a result because they had no playmaking ability outside of, ‘Hopefully, Dignitas play poorly, then we can capitalize on that.’”
Explosive Cask + Last Breath 🤩 #DIGWIN pic.twitter.com/RQWXj0piQh
— Dignitas LoL (@DignitasLoL) June 27, 2022
And while the number doesn’t mean much in the big scheme of things for Dignitas’ season, it does give a bit of motivation to push that bit harder for the next milestone.
“Hopefully there are many more wins to come. I think I got a lot of those wins early on in my career because they were best-of-threes and I was winning more back then. Ideally, I’m here for 400, 500,” he asserted.
“I love playing competitively, it’s definitely my passion. Taking a break made me realize that. I think a lot of players who do take a break realize that they are just addicted to this game and they want to keep coming back not just because the game is fun to play but everything behind the scenes. You have a common goal with your teammates, there’s a lot of passion involved. You’re all striving for something better every split. There’s always something to work on.”
Biofrost’s hiatus in 2021 put things into perspective for the veteran support. That perspective? He still loved competing, especially in League of Legends, and needed to scratch that itch of having to constantly improve and keep up with the ever-evolving meta. But he had to find a new way to channel that passion.
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It led him down the path of maturing as a player, and as a leader. As his body was giving out on him — he admitted “it actually physically hurts” to spam the game like the old days — he refined his style as a cool, composed leader on the Rift.
“Taking a break made me appreciate playing pro a lot more. I have a higher tolerance for everything playing pro entails. If we have a bad game, it’s okay. That’s not to say we take the approach of, ‘Whatever, I’m just here’, it’s more so you don’t get upset by that and you’re driven to improve and find solutions rather than making an emotional response,” he explained.
“There are other things that have come up in my life that take away from spamming the game non-stop. My limbs just hurt, so it’s hard for me to spend as much time doing that. I use different methods — looking at VODs and I try to study what people are doing on a team level, or I read a leadership book.
“These ways are less conventional ways of improving, but they can be more effective than the traditional method.”
However, it’ll be a long road to 400 if Dignitas’ current form continues. The team started their Summer campaign stumbling out of the blocks with four straight losses, ending that streak with the aforementioned win against Immortals.
Fingers have been pointed at new top laner Noh ‘Gamsu’ Yeong-jin, who is back with his old side after taking a detour past competitive Overwatch for a few years back in 2016 and then grinding back up through the Academy ranks when he returned for 2021.
It’s not one sole person to blame though, with Dignitas still trying to figure out what their wider team identity is like with the 27-year-old Korean in their ranks.
“A lot of it is just figuring out the small details that are hurting us on stage so we can get a bigger team identity. What was really easy about Spring was a lot of our focus was on bot lane and we just put all of our resources there. Currently, we don’t have a style set in place and we’re trying to find our team color,” Biofrost admitted.
The team isn’t rushing to any random solution, though. Biofrost wants to do things by the book and lay the fundamentals out so they can win clean and have the best chance of making it beyond playoffs and towards Worlds.
“If we’re cheesing out wins, we’re not going to make it very far in playoffs. Even if we make it to sixth or seventh [in the regular season] by cheesing out wins and not really learning much, it would mean a lot more if we were eighth and we had good fundamentals heading into playoffs and a good idea of how to play so we can make a deep run.
“Look at Cloud9 a couple of years ago, or even Clutch, who were really awful and then they made it to Worlds. No one remembers how you do in the regular season if you play well in the playoffs [so that’s our goal].”