Chapter 37: Renowned Throughout the Realm Overnight

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Oh, of course, we must admit that the League is not yet perfect in this regard. So much so that, at times, the interaction between abilities and Summoner Spells fails, making it look like a bug.

The team even considered abandoning it at one point, but please rest assured.

For cool maneuvers like Gragas’s E-Flash, we certainly aren’t willing to let go, and it will be optimized in the next patch.

The goal of League of Legends has always been to bring everyone a richer, more interesting, and more strategic gaming experience, ensuring every match is filled with new possibilities and challenges.

Just like the discovery of this new mechanic, its emergence is intended to bring fresh changes to the game's overall ecosystem.

We hope that through it, the synergy between different heroes will spark more chemical reactions, and that players will need to rethink and formulate strategies for laning, team fights, and objective control.

For instance, during the laning phase, this new mechanic might alter the inherent strengths or weaknesses of certain heroes, requiring everyone to experiment and explore to find new countermeasures.

In team fights, this new mechanic might become the key factor in turning the tide, making team coordination even more vital. Of course, we understand that the introduction of new mechanics might feel uncomfortable at first, and you may even find some issues or imbalances.

This is completely normal; after all, the development and refinement of a game is an ongoing process.

We take every piece of feedback and suggestion from you very seriously, and your discoveries and opinions are the vital basis for us to constantly improve the game. ...

Finally, thank you all again for your support and love for League of Legends. We hope you continue to enjoy the game, discover more fun as you explore these new mechanics, and we welcome you to keep sharing your thoughts and suggestions so that we can make League of Legends even better together.

Have a great game!

[LOL Hero Design Team]

[!!!]

[Holy crap, it’s actually a real announcement from Riot, posted on both Twitter and Weibo.]

[Amazing, bro. So Gragas E-Flash really wasn't a bug; the designers admitted it themselves.]

[The interaction mechanism between abilities and Flash—wow, I feel like there’s so much to dig into here!]

[JM, you old fox, hurry up and hand over all those game tricks you’ve been hiding up your sleeve.]

[Waaah, I’ll buy the beef jerky, I’ll buy it, okay? Just please, release the Gragas E-Flash tutorial video. I need it right now, immediately.]

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Riot’s announcement was undoubtedly a super bomb dropped into the water, instantly stirring up massive waves within the LOL community.

Unlike in later years when designers became a complete laughingstock, in the S3 era, League of Legends was clearly still viewed by players as a masterpiece with top-tier gameplay.

Now, with the game knowledge acknowledged by the designers and the instructional videos—which served to promote the game—validated by officials, Jiang Ming had undoubtedly gilded his reputation.

...

However, unlike the average player, professional gamers turned their focus toward Jiang Ming like a spotlight. This was not only due to the Riot announcement but also because he had crushed a star-studded lineup featuring four WE members in a ranked match.

A point Jiang Ming might have overlooked himself—the WE team of 2012 had just been crowned world champions, and like a red hurricane sweeping across the global esports scene, the sheer terror of their traffic was immense.

Before this, simply bumping into Clearlove in ranked had pushed his stream’s follower count up a notch. Now that he had effectively defeated the entire WE team, the upheaval caused in the professional circle can only be imagined.

"What?"

"That’s impossible!"

"Say that again?"

"WE, the team that treats other major squads like bots, got washed by a random and a semi-pro rookie jungler?"

The first reaction from most pro players was disbelief. How could that Red Legion, with its precise tactics and terrifying execution, be defeated head-on by a nobody?

What a joke.

Updates are updates, but how could the impact be so exaggerated? If one were to calculate it that way, every patch Riot released would decide the life or death of a top team, and there would be no point in holding professional tournaments at all.

If a patch could truly topple a dynasty, wouldn't the professional league just be a puppet of the balance team?

However, this all changed once the frame-by-frame analysis of Jiang Ming’s Challenger promotion match surfaced.

The professional circle fell silent, and the skepticism quietly vanished.

To describe the state of the LOL pro scene at that moment in one sentence: first shock, then joy, and finally madness!

Yes, from the initial shock of disbelief to the joy of realization, and finally to the madness of realizing they could extract tactics from a random player’s video to topple WE.

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Inside the IG training base.

The smell of greasy instant noodles mingled with the scent of young men. PDD, with his messy "bird's nest" hair, slammed the table and urged, "Damn it, Square Dragon, have you figured it out yet? I'm waiting to rub WE's faces in the dirt during the LPL opening match!"

"Screw you, if you're so good, you do it. Stop sitting there and armchair quarterbacking. If the techniques this guy is talking about were that easy for me to understand, I would’ve been rank one on the Chinese server ages ago."

XiaoXiao, whom PDD called "Square Dragon," smoothed his thinning bangs and retorted indignantly, "But one thing is certain: in the S3 patch, mid-lane assassins are indeed much stronger than the previous version. That really suits Zzitai..."

Everyone’s gaze instantly locked onto the shy youth in the corner.

Kid nudged the blushing Zzitai with his elbow: "Left hand on the DJ deck, right hand playing Zed—shatter Misaya’s mid-lane defense!"

"Ah... me, really?"

PDD broke into his signature shark-toothed grin: "JM’s game knowledge is indeed wicked, but as for mechanics..." He deliberately drew out the tail of his sentence, "Our genius mid-laner would lose to a random?"

"WE will probably have a rough time this new season. Once this rank game video spreads, other teams will definitely follow suit and target them the same way."

"Heheheh!" PDD snorted, "That’s exactly why we need to get ahead of the other teams."

As old rivals, IG had been beaten up by WE so many times that they desperately wanted to stomp them into the ground in the new season.

There were many others like IG, with entire teams cutting up clips from JM’s streams.

By the end of their research, a group of professional players discovered with horror that in JM's videos—even in those intended as tutorials for beginners—he had inserted a vast amount of professional-level insight. Some of his nuanced understanding was even deeper than that of the people who had been grinding in the pro scene for years.

A simple "climb to Challenger" event, from promotion to finally locking in the top spot, lasted only three short days. Yet, driven by different groups of people, it pushed the topic to an incredibly exaggerated level of popularity.

As the buzz grew, many news media outlets actively joined in.

By the time some of the protagonist's deeper information was made public, Jiang Ming, already at the center of the storm, became an overnight sensation known to everyone in the gaming world.