Audience: Why is it more difficult to discover and cultivate good support talent compared to other positions? Is it too dependent on talent and intuition?
Wolf : Actually, discovering and cultivating talent for all positions is difficult. I feel that support is deeper than everyone imagines. Why do I say that? The performance of a support is not intuitive; whether a support is playing well or not is not intuitive.
For example, players in mid, top, and AD positions, as long as they perform super well in team fights, everyone will think they are playing well. It's very intuitive to see because they just need to farm and then perform in team fights, which is very straightforward to see.
Jungle is also very intuitive; junglers can plan jungle paths or help lanes. Junglers can do a lot of things themselves.
But whether a support plays well or not is actually not obvious.
Recently, you can see that supports perform well in team fights, but if a support wants to hear praise for playing well, they still need to perform well in team fights.
Even if a support performs well in team fights, it doesn't guarantee that the game will be won. They must do even better, create good vision, remember summoner spell timings, coordinate well with the jungler, lane with the AD, and coordinate with the mid; there are so many things to do, but it's not obvious.
This is also connected to something else; I don't know if I am playing well or just doing well in lane or team fights. Clearly, I am playing well, but upon closer analysis, there are many areas that need improvement.
However, players who truly play exceptionally well are still very obvious and stand out, like Delight, Keria , BeryL , Lehends .
If there isn't a good support coach, those ambiguous players have very little potential for growth because it's hard to show it clearly to everyone. Recently, Mata has become very famous, and his chemistry with Lehends is very good.
In summary, it's hard to showcase support to everyone.
But there's an even bigger problem: no money, the value isn't high enough. When I was playing professionally, the salary gap between supports and players in other positions wasn't big, of course, partly because T1 treated me very well.
But overall, the absolute value of support (salaries) itself wasn't high. When I was playing professionally, everyone's salaries weren't very high, so the gap wasn't big. But from the time I went to overseas regions and retired, the gap started to widen, with mid salaries being very high, top also relatively high, then jungle and AD.
At that time, the salary ranking was Mid>Top>Jungle=AD ≥ Support. Mid was the highest, then top, and the salary gap between jungle & AD and support wasn't big.
But now the salary ranking is Mid=Top=AD>>>Jungle>>>Support.
So now the gap is very big. Keria ? Keria's salary is, of course, very high; he is currently the world's number one support, has won the World Championship, and is still competing for the best support in history, so his salary is naturally high.
But there should be about 20 players in other positions with higher salaries than Keria, right? If you only look at the LCK, there aren't, I'm not sure, probably about 10.
So the salary for the support position is somewhat mismatched.
But I don't think it's because the salary is low that the talent pool for support is small, because players starting their professional careers don't think "Ah, I want to earn more money, so I want to go mid."
Didn't I say before? The gap in fundamentals is very big; the gap in fundamentals between current players and previous players is very big, especially for support. Because the bot lane laning phase has already become easier, I feel this way; this is my personal opinion, the bot lane laning phase is not as harsh as it used to be.
It's not because of lane swaps that it's like this; lane swaps only started this year.
The laning phase is now very short, and there's rarely a matchup between enchanter supports. Especially now that ranked has become about diving in and initiating, there are even fewer support players.
If it becomes about who plays the details well, then there should be many changes, right? How should I put it, there are many reasons why good supports are hard to come by. So I think Mata is currently taking on a very important role, not only helping those already outstanding players improve, but if he goes to any team to teach support, the whole team might improve. Because I also learned a lot from Mata, he really knows how to play the game, even making opponents want to praise him. I might lean more towards laning or initiating fights, but Mata has an excellent overall game sense. Most supports just need to find good champions and analyze the meta well to be more than halfway there, which is why someone like Mata is so important. I feel like GorillA could also teach newcomers well. Is Bang making a comeback? I think if he works really hard, it's really possible. Whether he can reach the top ranks can only be known after trying. But if he prepares well this year, he could play in the summer split, right? For example, teams ranked lower. Ah, there's no summer split now, just the 3rd to 5th rounds of the regular season.
