novelODS 029 The Talented Hard-Worker
029 The Talented Hard-Worker
As time went by and the year 2013 approached, the formation of the Rise team progressed step by step.
The club configurations are not significantly different.
Li Zhixing's main principle is to save money where possible and spend it where appropriate. Apart from signing five players with high salaries, the club doesn't employ any other staff such as chefs, drivers, or cleaners. The players themselves are responsible for cleaning the club.
After all, he had already spent a lot of money to select a location for the base, choosing one with such convenient transportation.
Several teammates can take the subway home in less than half an hour. Under these circumstances, who needs a cook? What a waste!
Therefore, the contestants have to take care of their own meals every day, either ordering takeout or simply taking the subway home to eat.
This made several contestants quite suspicious, as if they had been tricked.
However, Li Zhixing has indeed been making continuous efforts in promoting the team.
A few days later, Li Zhixing uploaded the team roster to the NLB official website.
This super team, composed of the top four and seventh-place finishers from Season 2, is exactly the kind of top team NLB needs, so naturally they encountered no obstacles and passed through smoothly.
Even the NLB official website was updated immediately, listing the five members of RISE on its homepage to boost the popularity of the NLB event.
Of course, this still doesn't help much, since even the OGN league has only recently started, and the entry threshold for the secondary league is not high, as you only need 2000 points or more to register.
Fortunately, an external force brought tremendous vitality to this previously neglected league – Li Zhixing's self-media channel.
As the most popular educational channel in South Korea, each of Lee Ji-hyung's videos has over a million views.
After the team was established, he quickly made several related videos, which immediately sparked a huge discussion.
No one expected that Neo, who is rarely seen, would not choose to join a top team, but instead build his own team!
All I can say is that they have great ambitions.
Even many teams that had previously extended offers to Mapo 3C have started paying attention to the NLB league.
They really wanted to see what kind of tricks this prodigy, who dominated the server with high scores last season, could pull off.
However, NLB races are not broadcast live until the offline stages.
Before the long online stage ended, countless people could only wait quietly, at most obtaining information about RISE's advancement from the official schedule.
As a massive online tournament with 128 teams, NLB's format is naturally not complicated; in fact, it can be described as simple and straightforward.
All teams are randomly drawn to face off, and the teams advance through a best-of-one single-elimination format.
The four teams that advance to the finals, along with the bottom four teams from the OGN Winter Regular Season, will form the quarterfinals and begin a best-of-three elimination tournament broadcast live offline. Only the top four teams will be able to participate in the next OGN Spring Season.
That's right. Although the NLB league has a very low entry threshold, you only need 2000 points to register. When converted to the ranking system that was only updated in Season 3, it's not even close to Diamond.
(PS: Diamonds are roughly between 2100 and 2400.)
However, the skill ceiling of the competition is extremely high, and in the offline stages, you can directly face the bottom teams in OGN.
In short, it's basically a combination of the City Heroes Championship and LSPL from the CN region.
Of course, this is exactly what Li Zhixing wanted. He only needed to participate in one league, and didn't even need to win the championship, to go directly from an amateur team to a top league team. It was simple and convenient.
Of course, the margin for error is indeed quite low. The format of the early online stages is simply inhuman: BO1 random matchups and single-elimination.
Even if you are a team with true OGN strength, if you encounter a stronger team early on, or if your players make a fatal mistake in a certain wave, you can only be eliminated with regret.
Therefore, Li Zhixing must train his four teammates even more rigorously to prevent any accidents from happening.
The three titles he won as a coach gave Li Zhixing a complete system of training methods in his mind.
In this era, no team's training system is as professional as his, and that is his greatest advantage.
Professional esports teams, to put it simply, prioritize maintaining a minimum standard while striving for an upper limit.
As long as his teammates strictly follow his methods, there should be no problem with advancing to OGN.
I consistently train in ranked matches for at least 4 hours every day without fail, mainly to maintain my skill level and keep up with the latest hero pool.
Li Zhixing deeply understands that League of Legends is a game of version updates. Teams that can't keep up with the meta and playstyle will be eliminated no matter how talented they are.
In addition, there are customized training programs for each position, such as jungle clearing speed training, last-hitting training, and vision simulation.
The simulation of vision with Mata was of paramount importance. Li Zhixing opened a custom game and personally guided Mata in setting up wards, which greatly improved Mata's ability to control vision.
There were even training sessions on how the bot lane duo could dominate and withstand pressure against the top laner.
Only after all the training is completed will the final training match take place.
NLB officials provided them with contact information for other participating teams.
Although other online teams generally only have a little over 2000 points and are not considered very strong, it's better than nothing.
Once this training process is arranged, a whole day is basically over.
Moreover, Li Zhixing also has requirements regarding the contestants' private lives.
No smoking or drinking, no staying up late, and you have to get up and sign in on time every day – pure military-style management.
The four teammates were suffering greatly from this. They were currently in a phase of severe internet addiction, and even this whole process was becoming unbearable for them.
It was only then that they realized that being a professional gamer wasn't so easy; it wasn't as simple as just playing games and making big money.
But none of them gave up.
Because they all saw that Li Zhixing, as the initiator of the training program and the strongest among them, was setting an example by training more diligently than anyone else.
It's worth noting that in addition to training, Li Zhixing also has to edit videos and run an online store, working hard for the club's future survival.
The teammates had nothing to say and could only grit their teeth and persevere.
They were well aware, of course, that this rigorous training would only benefit their future.
Time marches on day by day.
The NLB Second Division has finally begun. The RISE team has also finally obtained the matchups for the first round from the official channels.
There are so many teams in online tournaments that they're like stray dogs on the street. The dramatic scenario of encountering top teams early on didn't happen to them.
Their first-round opponents are five teams with an average score of just over 2000.
Defeating this kind of opponent is naturally a piece of cake; it's an easy sweep.
128进64、64进32、32进16、16进8......
As time went by, RISE drew closer and closer to OGN.
Along the way, the team encountered many formidable enemies.
I've even encountered a team of five top-tier players, all ranked 2300 points or higher, who frequently faced each other in ranked matches.
Even so, the team still easily crushed all four lanes, forcing the opponent to surrender within 20 minutes.
The reason they were able to perform at such a high level is not only because the five of them are all exceptionally talented, but also because Li Zhixing provided them with a sufficiently standardized and stable training method.
After undergoing rigorous training brought by Li Zhixing from his previous life, the five gifted individuals of RISE are realizing their talents at an even faster pace.
In the world of esports, no one believes that hard work can overcome talent, but no one can dominate everything just by relying on talent alone.
Only those with innate talent and hard work can truly win in the end.
The five members of RISE are an example of this.
Li Zhixing was deeply moved by his teammates' consistent performance and decided to contribute more to the club's development.
He used the proceeds from last month's online sales to hire a new chef for the club...