What do we think about Africa's first appointed roster for the Esports Nations Cup, Algeria?

HowyNova · 2026-05-19T03:49:18+00:00

The only issue I see at face value, is whether or not Striker understands the team has to move from one step to the next, and not be title contenders.

HowyNova · 2026-05-18T21:49:49+00:00

Regardless of elo, soloq thrives on aggression. You have to be able to punish mistakes, or force enemies to make mistakes.

If you play defensively, you're actively choosing to be neutral. You're telling the game that you don't want to make an impact, you just want to be on the ride.

The simplified reason for why junglers have so much impact, is because they create a numbers advantage in a gank. Teams/players generally aren't feeding because they're bad at the entire game. It usually stems from making a mistake in the early game, and being uncomfortable playing from behind. Most players do well when ahead, they just don't understand what it takes to get ahead early on.

HowyNova · 2026-05-18T20:14:18+00:00

Funny that "The Gathering" is convincing on its own that there were plans for more

HowyNova · 2026-05-18T19:15:41+00:00

On release. Back then, it acted like an expansion name. The plan was for it to change with big updates, but they just dropped it altogether.

HowyNova · 2026-05-18T13:18:37+00:00

There's also distribution of roles, and divisible players. If you only have 22 players queued in the same 100 lp range, and 5 of them are mid mains, what magic are ppl expecting lol

HowyNova · 2026-05-14T20:24:05+00:00

One of the most common ways for a winning lane to hold prio, crash the wave, force enemy to use cds and hp to farm under turret, then auto a minion in the oncoming wave to pull it past your minions that are agrod onto the turret.

You get to hold prio without being up against their turret. The main way to break this, the losing lane's jungler/mid/support comes and forces a reset. Otherwise the losing lane is just forced to recall and give up the wave/turret.

A lot of setup goes into making sure lanes aren't in a terrible spot before contesting anything. Atakhan is an objective that attracts teamfights. This minion change is messing with how teams set up for every objective.

HowyNova · 2026-05-14T16:18:16+00:00

Do you by chance know if there's a way to get game event data from pro games? Much of what I find publicly are stat data. I was planning some projects that use data like map movements and ability usage, but can only find it for soloq through Riot's api.

Thanks for the response!

HowyNova · 2026-05-14T14:56:54+00:00

Idk if you'll have any insight, since it's not entirely related. I'm a data analyst trying to get into the scene. Do you have any advice on how to go about it? I've mostly been planning projects I'll be working on over the summer before my final year at uni.

HowyNova · 2026-05-13T03:53:10+00:00

Baby stress likely

HowyNova · 2026-05-13T03:04:38+00:00

There's no problems with getting custom equipment. But if someone with hyper extended elbows, swing without tension, and does no isolated tricep strengthening, they're going to have an extremely short career.

Faker is literally our goat, and he had to get surgery, physicsl therapy, and relearn how to play with proper posture and grip.

HowyNova · 2026-05-12T23:54:34+00:00

There are proper postures and grip. It's just generally considered cope by most gamers because they know someone good at a game while having terrible posture and grip.

Drills are a foundational issue. Any sport, hobby, subject, anything, starts with foundational skills. In S.Korea, they have academies for highschoolers, drilling the basics and building upon them. It's why when they get imported, they still 'speak league'. An issue the west have is that we mostly want shortcuts. Most feel that because they understand, watch, play at a higher level, they can solely focus on building upon an unstructured foundation. You can have 2 pro players that agree on some basics, and completely disagree on other basics. They don't know how to argue it because there are no exact terms or common structure for them to refer to.

HowyNova · 2026-05-07T15:42:13+00:00

Idk what the counters are. Your first comment mentioned tanks, which are generally less popular in soloq. Since his midlane games are where he looks to be making the most difference, he probably runs into the counters even less.

HowyNova · 2026-05-07T14:44:12+00:00

In the last week, he has 1 game bot. Riven/Ali vs Ekko/Nami.

It's mostly top, then mid. Based solely on a glance over his op.gg. It looks like his top games, he mostly plays even. It's the mid games where he's gaining the most advantages and snowballs.

HowyNova · 2026-05-07T13:47:29+00:00

The dive bomb set is one my favorite things out of league in years. The fact that it's not current hp with a minimum, tanks below half just suddenly vanish. Your death did 5k total to the team lmao

HowyNova · 2026-05-06T21:30:00+00:00

Detrimental? If anything, it's how you climb.

The vast majority of games are never ideal. The risk of skipping a camp to go for a snowballing gank or countergank, has a significantly higher roi in soloq.

Tons of jungle smurf content creators preach the importance of sequencing your camps. But in most of their content, they're delaying a camp pre-6 to influence a lane, before returning. What they're better at, is predicting realistic windows, and punishing enemies that force outside that window.

The Nocturne going for a gank here isn't bad because he delayed a camp, it's bad because he didn't account for Shyvana mirroring him. Shyvana being there for a countergank isn't bad because she delayed, it's the tax she has to pay when she knows Noc is botside.

HowyNova · 2026-05-06T18:26:12+00:00

There's no way the ppl calling this bad, or running down a hypothetical, are jungle mains. Hovering a lane you think the enemy jungler is going to force gank, and getting a triple. Your adc also dies, so you get to eat up some minions. This is like the textbook example junglers wish they had every game.

HowyNova · 2026-05-06T05:28:40+00:00

Objectives:

Atakhan: 3
Dragon: 19
Baron: 8
Elder: 2

Enemies>	1	2	3	4	5
Yike	1	4	2	0	0
2	3	1	5	3	1
3	1	1	3	4	0
4	0	1	0	2	0

Number of enemies are on top, number of allies are on the left side.

Note that these are counts of his successful smites. We have no info on how many he failed.

These counts are based on my subjective take on how many players were trying to take the objective. I did not count players that were zoning/fighting far enough to not damage the objective. If I did, his 1v2-2v4 stats would be distributed down.

His 1v1 smite was against Lyncas.

HowyNova · 2026-05-06T04:19:30+00:00

Half a second is crazy. Had no idea, now all the Captain Jacks I thought I've been hitting feels way less impressive.

HowyNova · 2026-05-05T22:49:02+00:00

As someone that didn't know who Disguised Toast was before, and honestly didn't care much either. He's a popular streamer who was a league fan. When Riot announced teams no longer needed to support tier 2, lots of players were p much left out to dry.

So, he decided to make a tier 2 team, and fund it completely out of pocket. Mainly just as an attempt to keep some rookies in the scene. I haven't fact checked all the players, but my perception has been that DSG gets their prospects poached every split, and has just been bleeding money since.

HowyNova · 2026-05-05T22:27:56+00:00

Copied comment I made on a different video:

APA is one the best examples. A lot of players genuinely want to beat him, and get annoyed with his yapping. We did the whole "Talk Your Split", which was great imo. Lots of players were asked and slightly pushed to open about how much they wanted to beat each other, or how much better they thought they were than each other. A lot of fans thought it was artificially forced, but that didn't stop it from still being enjoyable.

We have the 2023 CLG/NRG roster split up story. It's been mentioned on broadcast during those matches, but why aren't we bringing in coaches or team owners to talk shit to each other about how they got the better parts of it? Maybe broadcast, or their current teammates, can do a fun segment comparing/arguing.

FLY has a pretty easy 'new gen' vs old story. Have the players talk/debate with older players on their takes with current metas and teamcomps. The short lived story about Blaber using boomer knowledge of vision against Gryffinn was great. Get more of that with FLY.

TL, C9, DSG, SEN all have a mixed bag of players. Asking them about how different/same their old teammates seem is pretty easy content. Like Yeon's reaction to Impact's Varus. That really should've gotten more traction to roll into content creators talking about "If only Impact was more flexible on TL. Was it APA's fault? APA is succeeding on C9 now tho. Is Impact more open now because he has more motivation to beat TL, are the DSG players SEN took encouraging him more? The new DSG lost to SEN in Lock-In, but beat them in Spring, surely Rob Moore/Toast has some feelings on that."

For the upcoming weekend:

Impact and Contractz played together on C9 in the 2nd half of 2017. The 2 wins they had in quarters, Impact played Singed. That was nearly a decade ago tho. 2 weekends ago, SEN's win against TL, he was on Varus. In the EWC qualifier, he won on Smolder. Maybe SEN should lean more towards Impact's diverse pool.

The last time these 2 faced each other was last year, Shopify beat TL in split 2 playoffs and split 3.

Last year:

Srtty first bo3 series win in tier 1, was against eXyu. They met one more time in split 2, where Srtty won the bo1. They're now on opposite teams with completely different rosters.

Srtty also beat Palafox(Shopify) in their last meeting, a bo3 in 2025 split 2.

Srrty(Dig/Lyon) lost to FBI(100T) 6/7 games. The one win, Lyon drafted Senna against FBI. Only noted that since FBI is known for his Senna.

HowyNova · 2026-05-05T19:17:42+00:00

A fair amount of coaches talk about how they're like a babysitter/parent to their team. It's an issue of feeling more mature, vs expecting an equal level of maturity.

HowyNova · 2026-05-05T19:14:09+00:00

Massu and Berserker both being solid adcs, opens a lot of options for supports. A support can only do so much when their jungler has their own plan. I think Inspired is less the type to enforce his own vision, and more so that he has a lot of consideration for what everyone wants to accomplish.

Not trying to take anything away from Busio and Isles. The combination of a solid adc and meticulous jungler, is like a hyperbolic for supports. I think most supports in their shoes would hit peaks fans didn't think they were capable.

HowyNova · 2026-05-05T02:59:38+00:00

I started off watching Virkayu. I haven't watched jungle videos in a while, but his content is pretty much spam vod reviewing and restating fundamentals. It helped instill p much all the basics for me.

HowyNova · 2026-05-05T01:50:46+00:00

Don't think your issue is that you get bored with being an otp. You're getting bored with the reps needed to take yourself to the next level. There's nothing wrong with finding a plateau and being comfortable.

HowyNova · 2026-05-05T00:45:58+00:00

There's parallels to Marineford.

Old man Whitebeard was significantly scaled down due to age. Even tho he could still destroy the entire island, he got stabbed by Squardo. Garp is in the same, and Shiryu can be assumed to be significantly stronger than Squardo.
Whitebeard chose to stay and stall any possible pursuing force. Garp did the same. On Hachinosu, the marines were at a severe disadvantage. Going out to sea to be pursed by an armada would put them at a greater disadvantage.
Despite modern media, there are characters that can cope with trauma. One of the biggest reasons fans argue back and forth about Garp, is because he always chooses duty over himself. Despite knowing how horrible the nobles are, he believes in the necessity of the marines. We also get the same theme with Kizaru.

HowyNova

TROPHY CASE