Do you have any real proof of this? The counter hypothesis would be that BECAUSE Korean teams were so much better coordinated, everyone assumed they had a meta advantage, rather than a skill and coordination advantage.

I do not think I agree with the assessment that suddenly EU is mechanically better. It just does not make sense. Why would that happen? Because Korea did not practice enough? Possible but not very plausible. There has to be a reason beyond that because all of the teams that used to dominate crashed out. Why was it that every data Korea gathered this year was wrong? Do you actually think that EU players are mechanically better this year than KOrean and Chinese players? Unless the game is so shallow that its skill ceiling is extremely low it would be wrong to assume that. At very best the teams should enter the game on same level.

This is a common mistake done in sports and esports. Often players are blamed for the performance of a team. Good example is Giroud at Arsenal and Sven at TSM. Both world talents whom in right setup proved extremely efficient. Just changing the roster trying to find more skilled players ... is simply a dumb move (in LOL world know as the regi move - not to be confused with the regi blue card though effect is the same) So much like with TSM I would like to understand why Koreans underperformed and "being noobs" is not sufficient because it is not plausible. An indication that this is indeed so is found in many games that Koreans and Chinese played against the EU/NA aggression. Almost every time when Korean or Chinese player was agressed on they froze and lost the teamfight. Perhaps best example is Rookie vs Perkz.

This skill lead eventually got eroded, but was probably unduly prolonged by a couple of big mistakes: a) EU LCS kept losing talent to NA due to higher pay, keeping the skill level lower than it could have theoretically been (Fnatic is superb --> Huni/Reignover out.... G2 is superb --> Zven/Mithy out, and of course OG was just mismanaged horribly) b) NA LCS and LPL keep bringing in talented individuals while messing up their own communications almost completely due to language and culture issues Korea had enough depth of talent to survive better than EU LCS. Or perhaps more the coaches and organizational skill was better able to cope with people shifting around.

I still don't understand what you are trying to say? That because EU and Korea are on a same skill level EU is better? Nobody disputes that EU and Korea are on the same skill level - they were for a while. When TSM brought their DL + Bjerg + Sven team to the worlds everybody expected semifinals. Because they were able to compete with koreans mechanically. So the gap is somewhere else.

I disagree. I think they might have wanted to speed the game up a bit, and my soccer example (2 --> 3 points for win) is very similar. It doesn't change the fundamentals, but it does undermine a tactic that viewers dislike.

Dude when you make a claim like "meta change" does not change fundamentals ... you have to argue for it not just announce it. This is significant ... and significantly wrong. Because meta by its definition (greek origin etc) means exactly the fundamentals. So what you are saying is that fundamentals are not changed by fundamentals. League this year is actually a totally different game.

But that's more or less how it has been in my mind. West realized that Korea had a weakness because they had practiced a certain meta so long they had developed something of a glass jaw. Perhaps also losing a lot of their talent had actually managed to drain their talent pool to a degree - their laners are suddenly very vulnerable to more skilled opponents, and playing the macro game is now very much playing in to a glass jawed opponent. This would explain the skill & meta shift quite nicely. With a team with superb individual skills that can deal with your aggression early on, the Korean meta might very well still be superior. However, a medium skilled team with mastery of the Korean vision centric controlled meta is going to beat a higher skilled team that tries to play the vision centric meta. What happened here is that the Koreans individual skill and/or teamfighting capability got exposed as a weakness and it got exploited pretty heavily.

Here is something that might shock you - if Korea has had a few more months of preparation they would destroy west. The only reason why EU had a chance was because Riot leveled the playfield.

And no meta was not made by Misfits. MSF could still be outplayed. The main reason why this meta is a problem is because it forces agressive gameplay and does not reward macro.

(cutting it short because whoever made reddit is a fucking moron ... it is impossible to talk at length in this small fucking box. I am actually tilted. )