League of Legends star Yiliang ‘Doublelift’ Peng has revealed his concerns over LCS teams and their attitudes towards improvement and practice.
Following a rough 2020 spring split which led to their all-star team finishing in 9th, it was reported that Team Liquid have plans to trade Doublelift before returning to action on May 16 for the summer split.
With the popular ADC’s future up in the air, Doublelift reflected on the current state of LCS teams and outlined some of his major concerns for the region, particularly around their quality of practice.
During his co-stream of the LCS semifinals alongside LCK commentator LS, he revealed that many teams were unwilling to scrim against the dominant Cloud9 roster, who have become heavy favorites to win the playoffs following their 17-1 record in the regular season.
“We’ve heard that other teams would cancel on Cloud9 because they’re smacking them too hard in scrims,” he shared.
Doublelift explained that teams would often lose by such a wide margin that they even would lose motivation, “No one wants to scrim C9 because it’s too demoralizing, so they’re getting punished for being too good.”
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“In Korea, everyone would want to scrim C9, it’s like ‘please give me an extra game, let me get sh*t on,'” he added, suggesting that some of the current LCS teams had the wrong approach.
He also highlighted how this would affect the region’s improvement as a whole, expressing concern for the level of North American League of Legends ahead of future international competitions.
“There’s like some really f**ked up American mindset where losing is the enemy, do anything you can do to avoid losing but sometimes you need to get sh*t on to improve and it’s pretty bad honestly, mentality-wise,” Doublelift explained.
Although it is unclear what the future holds for Doublelift, he still remains hopeful around seeing his region improve to a level where they are consistently looked at as international title contenders.