Li Yao's joining was very low-profile.
So low-profile that WE didn't even make an official announcement on Weibo, nor did they take promotional photos.
Li Yao had no complaints about this. Aside from a symbolically mandated daily training schedule and a prohibition against engaging in activities that would cause severe reputational damage to the club, the terms in the contract he signed with the club were exceptionally lenient.
What surprised Li Yao the most was his compensation.
Even as a substitute, Li Yao earned a monthly salary of ten thousand yuan.
For Li Yao, who had just turned eighteen, this was undoubtedly a huge sum of money.
Yet, after a brief moment of reflection, Li Yao vaguely understood.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
A club wouldn't support an idle person for no reason.
Since they offered such compensation, it meant that in the eyes of the club, he was worth it.
Regarding Li Yao's addition, the players on the club had some initial reservations.
According to normal procedures, for a professional player to join a club, a tryout was indispensable.
Tryouts consisted of two stages: performance in live solo queue rank matches, and subsequent participation in scrims that same day with the rest of the starting roster.
Many newcomers couldn't even pass the first hurdle.
Never underestimate rank matches. In fact, quite a few players can pull off all sorts of flashy plays when playing by themselves, but the moment someone stands behind them with a critical eye, their state inevitably falls apart.
Those with weaker mentalities would see their mechanics warp after a single mistake, leading to a cascade of errors.
Whether Li Yao had gone through rank tryouts, no one knew.
But the second stage of scrim tryouts definitely hadn't happened.
The ones with the biggest opinions about this were the two mid laners; the addition of a new mid laner naturally made them feel a sense of crisis.
Of course, these opinions were only buried in their hearts. Unless Li Yao suddenly needed to participate in scrims to take their place, they naturally wouldn't question the club.
Li Yao, who was good at observing his surroundings and had a sharp sense of perception, naturally noticed these glances.
However, these were all things Li Yao had anticipated in advance.
Li Yao didn't mind. His desk was in the corner, not right next to the water dispenser, and was quite a distance from the other players.
After settling Li Yao into his seat, WeiXiao prepared to leave.
Although he could stay at the base as long as he wanted, he still had to go back to stream.
WeiXiao didn't pay too much attention to the players' odd looks regarding Li Yao joining the team. Among professional players, the only thing that earned mutual respect was strength, and whether Li Yao could integrate into the team depended entirely on himself.
It was just that WeiXiao felt it would be somewhat difficult for Li Yao to integrate through sheer strength.
In his view, this atmosphere would likely persist for quite a long time.
...
On the evening after WeiXiao left.
WE's second block of scrims for the day.
The intensity of WE's scrims today was relatively high. In the afternoon, they first played against LNG, getting beaten in four out of five games, and in the evening scrims, they were crushed for three games straight. The dismal scrim results dealt a heavy blow to the confidence of WE, who had just secured two consecutive opening wins in the league.
And the coach, sask, was practically on the verge of a mental breakdown.
"Seriously, is it really that hard not to throw? Why have I said so many times not to fight when the composition is weak, not to fight when the composition is weak, yet you guys just refuse to listen?!"
"Huh? Li Haoyan, I'm talking to you. This game, it was you again getting caught at 12 minutes right before the dragon fight. We originally had control of the first dragon, and bot lane also had a lane advantage. Getting pressured every single game is one thing—the enemy is Knight, and it's normal not to be able to beat him, but can we please not throw at critical moments?"
"And can you all communicate? Are you tilted to the point of muteness or what? The longer the game goes, the less you talk, until by the end no one makes a sound at all. What difference does that make from playing solo queue? Did beating Suning make you guys full of yourselves?"
"At this rate, if we run into EDG, RNG, and the two teams that just crushed us today, TES and LNG, we have zero chance of winning. Out of four World Championship tickets, we're slated for fifth place? Oh right, there's also FPX."
After venting for a while, sask buried his head in his hands and sat blankly in his chair.
He truly hadn't expected today's scrims to go this terribly.
Li Yao sat quietly to the side like a spectator eating melon seeds.
The players either picked at their fingernails, lowered their heads, or aimlessly fiddled with their mice.
The focal point of today's scolding, Li Haoyan—also known as Mole—was obviously tilted.
He tried to defend himself a bit, but recalling his own performance, the words stalled on the tip of his tongue and he swallowed them back down.
Shanks, the substitute sitting on the other side, didn't make a sound either.
When playing against LNG in the afternoon, Mole was subbed out after playing the first game.
Although they won when he came in for the second game, he was also crushed miserably in the subsequent three games.
LNG's mid laner Icon was in blazing form today, making the pressure quite suffocating for him.
In the evening, Shanks didn't have the nerve to volunteer himself either. He had experienced Knight's strength firsthand, and if he played, he wouldn't do any better than Mole.
Just then, the assistant coach at the base walked over and murmured a string of Korean.
The secondary spectator, the translator at the WE base, immediately said to sask: "The fourth scrim game is starting in five minutes. What do we say, are we still playing?"
"Play, why wouldn't we play? Getting crushed a few more times lets us gather more experience in getting crushed."
Having finished venting, sask calmed down, stood up, and said: "Let me tell you, getting crushed isn't scary. What's scary is that you always stumble in the same place twice. Without boasting right now, among all LPL teams, we are leading at the vanguard of the patch."
"The Zoe Ezreal system and the Sett system—we can play both of these setups. As long as we master them thoroughly, drafting becomes difficult for the enemy when they play against us, and you guys can play much more comfortably on stage."
"Cut down on laning mistakes, and we really aren't weaker than anyone else."
After sask finished these remarks, which seemed intended to praise the players and boost their morale, the players each sat back down in front of their computers.
Judging by their expressions, however, Li Yao didn't think sask's words had achieved much of an effect.
"How about we try a different train of thought?"
After thinking for a moment, Li Yao spoke up anyway.
In the slightly quiet training room, Li Yao's words felt abrupt.
"What do you mean? Does little Yao have any ideas?"
Breathe's eyes lit up, and he immediately spoke.
Of course, he wasn't expecting Li Yao to offer any constructive advice; rather, under this suffocating atmosphere, even his breathing felt restricted. The appearance of a third party breaking the silence—even if what he said was completely useless nonsense—could serve as a joke to relieve some of the oppression his teammates were feeling.
Sask also glanced at Li Yao with surprise, then thought about it and said: "Let's hear it."
"Alright."
Li Yao nodded, then stood up and walked behind the WE players. Amidst everyone's gaze, he slowly began: "I've watched the previous three games carefully, and the reason we lost—and lost so miserably—is that our mid lane got heavily blown up. TES's jungler Karsa radiates pressure into the jungle through mid lane dominance, making it extremely difficult for Beishang to play."
Mole lowered his head once more.
He felt as though he was anticipating the scene of being metaphorically whipped over his mistakes all over again.
However, Li Yao stopped at that point and shifted the topic: "But our top and bot lanes actually both have advantages. Although Jackeylove plays very seriously, their support Zhuo is a bit abstract. Jiumeng and Missing having an advantage during the laning phase is not a problem; it's just that the pressure given by the jungle is too heavy, making it hard to push out."
Li Yao's words struck a chord with Elk and Missing.
When sask analyzed and reviewed games, many of the suggestions and problems he raised were mostly on a macro level—such as how you should play this position or how you should coordinate in that role.
Yet he rarely broke it down into details on how to remedy things if a problem arose and that coordination failed.
Moreover, game reviews were mostly done by working backward from the result.
For example, TES's jungler Karsa didn't show up on the map, but previously Beishang discovered a cleared jungle camp. Following the logic of game review, through that blank jungle area, one could deduce approximately where the jungler was.
The bot lane didn't dare to push out without knowing the jungler's position, thereby missing their window of opportunity, but was this caution fundamentally wrong?
It wasn't wrong.
So since it wasn't wrong, where did the problem lie?
It lay in communication.
Players are human beings, not Blitzcrank.
Lapses in communication and other minute details are completely normal.
When a single shortcoming is infinitely magnified, these lapses are also infinitely magnified.
Much like the scrims against TES, when Li Yao said the mid lane collapsed, he was actually phrasing it rather mildly.
To put it bluntly, in these scrim games for WE, the mid lane was a massive sieve. Once the sieve started leaking, the tempo fell apart.
And WE had one huge flaw: once their fluent offensive rhythm was broken—just like in the second game against Suning—they would make more and more mistakes, and the leaks in the sieve would only multiply.
Yet in Li Yao's opinion, a player's individual ability could be compensated for through other aspects.
Even though... seeing Knight's laning prowess made Li Yao's hands itch, desperately wanting to say: "Put me in, let me go test my laning against him."
But Li Yao also knew that saying this right now wouldn't be very appropriate.
"I remember... Li Haoyan, you play a decent Twisted Fate, right?"
Li Yao thought for a moment and suddenly asked.
Mole was stunned, then blankly nodded.
"Then we have a solution."
Li Yao broke into a smile.