Starting with Zaozi Ge, a dream lineup

Chapter 18 sparks trending searches
A lot happened tonight.

Tonight, LPL fans and RNG fans are celebrating like it's Chinese New Year, pouring their youthful energy onto Weibo.

The text following "Rng wins 3-2 against SKT" at the top of Weibo's trending topics has turned completely dark red, with a popularity score of 2100 million.

"Uzi's pentakill against Yu" ranked second, also with 1500 million views.

The "Tiger-style fortress" ad ranked fourth, following the third ad, with 900 million views.

Putting aside the advertisements, RNG's performance today has completely dominated the top of Weibo's charts and garnered a lot of attention.

All the old Royal Club fans stood up, and countless middle-aged fans announced their return at this moment. After two years, it was this Royal Club team that made it to the S-series finals again.

In the seven years since the start of the S-series, only Royal Club has made it through three attempts, failing twice.

However, given the form this time, we're sure to win the championship.

The entire best-of-five series was incredibly exciting, especially the final game.

Many players of other games who had never played League of Legends also gained their first impression of this game.

The once wildly popular battle royale game saw nearly half of its traffic disappear tonight, and the queue times on the Ionia server exceeded two hours.

The most heated discussions on this topic took place on Baidu Tieba's two most famous troll hotspots: the Backblame Bar and the Anti-Pressure Bar, both known as the "Louvre of Esports."

Right after the fifth draft, someone posted a thread saying, "That idiot Feng let Galio through five times and even gave Uzi Xayah. If Uzi can play Xayah, I'll eat shit on live stream." The thread immediately went viral.

The person who posted the thread had a high level on the forum, a full level 13. Before this, his predictions of the S-series results were basically accurate, and his analysis was also very logical. When people saw that it was his post, it was immediately pushed to the top.

Within the time it takes to finish a match, there are already over three thousand replies below.

Several of the top comments even received thousands of replies.

"Holy crap, what kind of brain-dead coach gave Uzi Xayah? Uzi doesn't even know how to play her!"

"Letme is a complete idiot, he should just retire already. Why bother playing professionally? All he knows is picking tank top laners to coast along."

"Wow, Peanut is so handsome! Peanut's mom loves you!"

"The dog upstairs clicked in and found out it was a man. Aren't you disgusted?"

"What's the use of being handsome if you're so bad at this game? Once you start playing professionally, your true colors are revealed. You're so bad you can't even watch. And you're still bragging? My Xiangguo is better than him in every way!"

"It's confirmed that the female dog bit someone. Are there any dog ​​lovers who can do something about this?"

"NMSL, WSND".

"I just love watching the royal and Korean fans fight, hahaha."

"Stop arguing, no matter how much you argue, the Koreans will still win this game."

"The Korean and royal supporters are at odds, so they've come here to deliver their own 'suicide'?"

"I'm not a K-pop fanboy, haha, trash LoL."

……

At first, they joked around, but it quickly turned into a huge online war of words, involving uninformed bystanders, trolls, die-hard fans of professional gamers, and K-pop fans.

There are even gamers at the top of the esports hierarchy, such as Dota players.
All sorts of people gather together and engage in heated debates in a single thread—this is the daily routine of the Guo Kang Liang Bar, and everyone is used to it.

But I have to say, it's quite interesting.

Even many professional players enjoy visiting this place, but as professional players who are currently competing, everyone's phones were handed in before the semi-finals and can only be retrieved after the competition ends.

This was done partly to prevent the contestants from having a mental breakdown after seeing these negative comments.

Secondly, they were afraid of being influenced by others to perform normally, since being criticized and having an inflated ego is the same as being praised to death.

Although we've secured tickets to the Bird's Nest stadium, we need to be careful not to let our egos get too big.

Meanwhile, the Korean League of Legends forums were even more lively than the Chinese forums.

In the S7 bot lane meta, everyone had high hopes for Bang, Ruler, and others, as Korean teams had dominated the game for several years.

In the previous semi-final match, not only did kkoma allow Xayah and Rakan to be released, but Bang was also completely dominated by Uzi throughout the game, which caused the twisted nationalistic feelings of the Korean players to erupt.

"Damn it, shouldn't we investigate a player of Bang's caliber?"

"Next year's Nobel Peace Prize: The God Who May Create Killing: Bae Joon-sik (bang)"

"The world's best ADC is Bang, because Uzi, Pray, and Ruler didn't beat Faker, but he mentally crushed Faker."

"Just look at Bang's individual stats and streams, and you'll know he's gone crazy playing PUBG. When Bang and Wolf were interviewed before, he said that we'd practiced enough and didn't need to practice anymore. From that moment on, I knew he'd gone mad."

Aside from these civilized Korean guys who are still being factual, there are many more typical Korean trolls.

"Bae Jun-sik was in a hurry to end the match so he could go back to mourn his deceased horse; there must have been a reason. Let us mourn for him."

"We strongly demand that Skt conduct an internal investigation into whether Bae Jun-sik accepted bribes; this is blatant match-fixing!"

The extent to which the collective sense of honor and national pride of the Korean people is distorted and fragile is something that most people in the know understand, and the entire Inven forum erupted in criticism.

Chinese gamers often think that there are a lot of trolls in China, but in reality, most keyboard warriors in China are "giants online, but cowards in real life." They keep their insults and slanders online, but are incredibly timid in real life.

The situation is different in South Korea. Because the K-pop fandom system is very mature, their esports scene is very similar to that fandom culture. Many professional players have received razor blades, dead rats, and rotten banana peels mailed to them by anti-fans.

Basically, apart from the remaining SSG members who were the last hope for the Korean team and were spared from disaster, all the other professional players, whether they had not yet returned to their home countries or were professional players from the LCK staying at home, were all labeled as 'incompetent' and 'useless' because of this.

Losing is not shameful; what is shameful is the completely unprofessional attitude of those who lost, who were practically sleepwalking throughout the entire competition!
LCK professional players were inexplicably blamed and suffered greatly.

The fact that the World Championship could cause such a heated argument is enough to prove just how popular the S-series tournament, which was held entirely in China this year, is.

Having made it to the finals, RNG has become the target of countless players.

Success! Then you'll be crowned a god in this one battle!
Defeat! And you will be despised by all!
Recommendations needed! I'm sending out the contract right away! Those who have already invested can invest with confidence.



(End of this chapter)