Froggen has had one of the longest careers in professional League of Legends . The current mid laner for Echo Fox has been playing professionally since Season One and hasn’t stopped kicking ass since.
How League of Legends Has Changed?
Froggen has seen the rise of eSports first hand and says that the biggest difference in pro gaming between now and when he started is the structure of the tournaments: “Back in the day there were a bunch of online tournaments and events all over the world and now you kind of know what’s going on and what to expect, it’s easier to prepare for the LCS.”
When you don’t have to travel far, there’s a whole lot less that can go wrong, like a flight delay or a whole day being ruined because of a server crash.
Having a set place for tournaments, like the LCS, is also less stressful on the players:
“At tournaments all over, there would be big delays,” said Froggen. “Sometimes we would play from early morning to late night to make sure the schedule was fair, getting through all the games of the day was stressful and hard to deal with for the players.”
On Vladimir...
Froggen has the record for highest CS in one game, only to lose it to himself again years later. Very few professional mid laners have anywhere near as diverse a champion pool as Froggen, playing everything that’s strong in the meta.
Currently, the strongest champion is Vladimir, a blood mage who uses health as a resource.
“(Vladimir) is very oppressive, he can just stay in lane forever, it’s really hard to bully him out because he just lanes better than people. Even if he loses a trade, he can just sustain back up. On top of that, he scales really well late game and his team fighting is insane,” Froggen said.
There are other strong champions, like Viktor, Swain and Ryze that can do well against Vlad by just farming up. Still, Froggen thinks, “Vladimir is still a bit stronger than all of them.” Right now, Vladimir is a bit too overpowering. The EU played turned NA thinks that: “his E damage is just too strong, but it costs 10 percent of his health, so he would get really low, but then his ultimate and his Q give him a ton of health back. The way he works is very strong for the current meta.” In order to bring him in line with other mid laners, Froggen thinks that his E damage and ultimate healing should be nerfed.
On Dynamic Queue...
There’s been a lot of complaining about how “busted” Dynamic Queu e is for high ELO players, but Froggen doesn't think it's as terrible as people are claiming.
“The queue times are much longer, but I still try to play as many games. Still, it’s better than it used to be. Autofill isn’t that bad, though getting support is annoying, I just like faster queue times and just being able to play more games. It’s not bad as it was many months ago.”
On Tournament Realm...
For a while, people were freaking out on sites like Reddit about pros creating their own in-house version of solo queue. They would just play each other and the whole pro LOL system would crumble under its own weight. Froggen assures that these games are uncommon.
“In house solo queue games didn’t happen as much as people think. It’s hard to structure for the pros. We had a document and you had to write your names, like a solo queue list.”
“Then you had to balance it out where every game had two mids, two junglers, two of everything, so whoever wants to play on the tournament realm had to write their names and then they had to wait for the document to fill up so they can start the game.”
The pros would play solo queue, then whenever the Google Doc would fill up, they’d switch to a custom game. It just proved to be too slow and ineffective.
