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The 2017 EU League of Legends Championship Series spring season has proven challenging for 2016 World Championship participants Splyce. Initially pegged as favorites to crush Group B, they currently find themselves in the middle of the table, neither in danger of relegations, nor in the elite echelon where Unicorns of Love and H2K are tied for first place. However, Splyce are not out of contention for a shot at the top - they're merely gathering strength.
Martin "Wunder" Hansen has had a front seat to Splyce's journey, where they joined the LCS, were nearly relegated, then qualified to the 2016 World Championship. In his opinion, the team's setbacks in the 2017 spring season find roots in two distinctive issues that, added up, can be nightmarish to deal with.
The first issue was lack of practice.
"We were really rusty [coming into the season]," he says on one of the issues. "Our 1-3-1 that we're known for, and our picks that we usually pick didn't quite work for us. To this day, it still doesn't quite work, but we can still manage to win games off it."
Continuing the theme, Wunder readily admitted that he is not at 100 percent in terms of performance yet, despite weeks of play.
"I was better at Worlds mechanically, and I'm still trying to claw back [to that level] and be a guy that top laners will fear coming into a match [and] playing against in lane," he says. "Even though I feel like I'm better than a lot of top laners, I'm not there yet."
"I'm still trying to claw back [to my 2016 Worlds level] and be a guy that top laners will fear coming into a match [and] playing against in lane." Martin "Wunder" Hansen
The second issue impacted the team as a whole. Their lack of decisiveness has caused them to refrain from capitalizing on early-to-mid game snowballing opportunities when striving for a late-game approach, leading to closer games than was ideal.
"Oftentimes, we're content with farming for late game because we think that it would be a gain for us instead of abusing the openings that we have when we have them, even though we may scale better," he says. "I feel like it's just a question of [pressing the "go" button]. It's easily solvable. We can get out of the issue we have pretty easily, and I don't think it's going to be the biggest problem in the future."
Compared to what was the case a year ago, and to some extent before the World Championship, Splyce's lack of a "go" button right now seems benign. The top laner recalls a time when opponents would kill them under their turrets and pressure them into submission, rather than the other way around.
"Back in the day, we didn't have the greatest early game for reasons that we didn't know how to pressure around certain lanes," he says. "We got a lot of practice against good teams [during Worlds], and of course we can't just get stomped every early game without learning something. We learned a few things there."
But the transition from being the team that qualified for the World Championship in 2016 to the start of the 2017 spring split did not go as seamlessly as expected, despite the roster staying intact. At Worlds, Splyce's victory against Royal Never Give Up was followed by a 2-0 defeat at the hands of H2k-Gaming. Since then, the team has seen the Defeat screen more often than they'd have liked (11-7 map score, 5-3 overall currently).
In such conditions, frustration can build up, especially when playing with the same players for so long doesn't seem to yield consistent improvement.
"The main problem was that there was a lot of frustration that we didn't perform up to our expectations and that we've been playing for so long. For many, that would trigger some kind of feeling where you need something to change or we're not going to get better; it's been the same thing for so long, but now you come back we're not better than everyone else," said Wunder, before adding: "I feel like we're kind of figuring out how to play the game at the highest level and, hopefully, will be a bright future for Splyce."
The difficulties the squad have met upon returning to competition attest to a general increase in the level of play in the region, with G2 Esports, Misfits, H2k-Gaming and the Unicorns of Love leading the fray.
"I think EU is in a really good state. At the moment, there are a lot of really good teams. It's definitely harder than last year to be a top two, top three team like we were," Wunder says. "At the same time, we have a lot of potential, and we're not weak players like a lot of people thought of us - that we were weak laners and weak individually."
It's all about the team play. We all fit together, and we all have a good time still, so that's not a problem. It's a matter of time for us to get that high level of consistency."
Even then, dealing with setbacks remains a tricky task, especially when expectations from fans and observers were high.
"A lot of people had high expectations, even though we didn't match them. That's the most disappointing thing for us than for probably a lot of our fans," he says on the matter, reflectively. "I hope that people will still stick around, and will still cheer for us. I think we will bounce back in the near future, and I think it will be good."