This year, Chinese New Year falls on January 23rd, earlier than in previous years. Pei Qian looked at the calendar and calculated the time – after finishing exams this week, he’d need to spend massive energy blitzing through spending money and dealing with settlement matters.
Arriving at Slackin’ Internet Café, Pei Qian sipped his drink while scrolling through his phone, checking for recent news.
“Hm? Foreign media reports FV club is unable to get training matches?”
Pei Qian hadn’t intended to specifically follow FV club news, but this story was right on the front page headlines of the gaming and esports section – impossible to ignore.
Seeing this news, Pei Qian perked up immediately, quickly clicking in to read more.
This was a tidbit from foreign media, and their source seemed to be clubs from Europe and North America.
The news itself was simple: before the quarterfinals began, this media outlet interviewed various North American clubs that made it to the top eight, asking about their status and training match situation. One club mentioned that the FV club had tried to arrange scrims with them, but they declined.
This kind of rumor certainly lacked hard evidence – not even chat logs – but since the reporting media had some reputation, it was quickly picked up and reposted by major outlets.
The quarterfinals wouldn’t start until the weekend, and GPL’s spring season would also kick off this Saturday, so there wasn’t much news in the esports scene during this period. That’s how this unsubstantiated rumor made it to the headlines, sparking heated discussions.
Pei Qian didn’t know whether Dragon Yu Group was involved, but seeing the buzz and discussion around this news, it was impossible to say there weren’t any internet trolls fanning the flames behind the scenes.
The comments section already had many posts, with quite a few people writing off the FV club.
“No training matches? That’s brutal!”
“Then what’s the point? Can they only play solo queue ladder games? Won’t they get crushed in the quarterfinals?”
“This has to be club management’s fault, right? You should book scrims early – now that everyone’s schedule is full, of course, you can’t get any!”
“You think it’s just about schedules being full? How naive can you be? If you were a strong team, they’d make time to scrim with you. They’d squeeze it in somehow! They think you’re weak, so they’re making excuses!”
“Just check foreign streaming platforms and forums – it’s all ‘cn lol noob’ – they think you’re too weak, that scrims with you would be wasted time.”
“What about the other two clubs? Did they just go home? Since you’re all domestic teams, couldn’t you stay to practice together?”
“Practice with them? When they lost matches, wasn’t FV adding insult to injury? You expect them to practice with you?”
“Ha, if you ask me, FV brought this on themselves. Weren’t they having fun stirring up drama on Weibo before? They mocked almost every team competing in the world championship. Even if other clubs don’t say it out loud, you think they’re not holding grudges? Well now, they’re isolated, can’t even arrange scrims!”
“No hope left. This year’s LOL world finals were so frustrating to watch. The qualifier was already a mess, and then in the group stage, both teams got eliminated. The number one seed doesn’t have training matches and just posts memes on Weibo all day. Probably gonna get 3-0’d too. That’s that, time to watch GPL.”
“The matches haven’t even started yet, isn’t it a bit early to write them off? I heard SUG is still practicing with them.”
“What’s the point? The skill gap between domestic and international is too big. SUG will get destroyed too. Without opportunities to scrimmage against European and American teams, how can they study their tactics and play style? When the game understanding is so far behind, that’s not something you can make up with just mechanics!”
Online was flooded with negative sentiment. Even the few players supporting the FV club didn’t have much hope.
Moreover, the FV club had been constantly posting memes on Weibo, plus Dragon Yu Group had hired some internet shills to stir things up, so FV’s public image wasn’t great.
Now, with this negative news about “no training matches available” coming out, it was just adding insult to injury for players who already lacked confidence in domestic teams.
In short, the internet was full of doom and gloom.
Pei Qian browsed through the comments, his face lighting up with joy.
Nice!
Could this be what they call “when fortune smiles, even heaven and earth conspire to help”?
Even foreign clubs are giving me a hand now?
Pei Qian didn’t ask Wu Yue about the truth of this news, because it was most likely real.
When teams from the same region practice together, they naturally tend to stick together – after all, no one wants to reveal their secret strategies to other regions.
Plus, with FV being the only remaining domestic team in the quarterfinals, those European and American teams forming cliques and isolating the FV club would objectively weaken FV’s strength and eliminate a competitor.
By emotion and logic, foreign teams had ample motivation to do such a thing.
Pei Qian was delighted, already making preparations.
Once FV club gets eliminated in the quarterfinals, he’d immediately call Wu Yue to offer condolences, telling everyone they’d done their best and not to be sad, to keep enjoying themselves in Los Angeles until the world finals end before returning!
…
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles.
On the second floor of the internet café, both the FV and SUG teams were still earnestly conducting their daily training.
Wu Yue, meanwhile, was looking at the online news, fuming with anger.
“Are these European and American teams sick or something?”
“If they don’t want to scrim with us, fine, but why are they shooting their mouths off everywhere?”
“Are they nuts? Do they think we’re dying to scrim with them?”
FV club had a dedicated data analysis team and two practice teams – they didn’t need to scrim with European teams. Not only might they not learn anything, but they could even expose their strategies.
But with the competition approaching, Wu Yue felt it might not be appropriate to completely skip scrims, thinking about inviting any European team for some practice, just to warm up before the match and stabilize the players’ mentality.
Unexpectedly, when he approached several European clubs for scrims, he was rejected by all of them!
As for the reasons for rejection, these clubs wouldn’t say it directly, only using excuses like “our scrim schedule is already full.”
But everyone knew what was going on.
With over ten hours of training time per day, how could scrims alone fill it up?
If it were a very important scrim partner, they’d find time somehow.
So their responses boiled down to two reasons: first, they thought FV was too weak, that scrims would be ineffective and a waste of time; second, deliberately teaming up to isolate FV, affecting their training state, conveniently eliminating a competitor.
Wu Yue hadn’t taken it to heart initially – if they didn’t want to scrim, fine, FV didn’t need those few practice matches anyway. If they mutually looked down on each other, they’d just part ways.
But then someone, who knows which club had such a big mouth, told the media, and this news got out!
This pissed Wu Yue off.
“Tell the team members, in the quarterfinals, go all out – tower diving, fountain diving, dancing, spamming emotes, everything!”
“These European teams look down on us? Let them feel what cruelty means!”
…
…
January 7th, Saturday.
Pei Qian slept until noon before waking up, refreshed and energized.
Last Friday, he’d just finished a particularly important closed-book exam, and Pei Qian felt pretty good about it. So that night, in his joy, he played games until late into the evening, and today slept until he naturally woke up.
This weekend, Pei Qian still had two final courses to review – one open-book, one closed-book – but the pressure shouldn’t be as intense as before.
Pei Qian planned to relax a bit, going to GPL in person to watch some matches on Saturday, resting at home on Sunday, then finding some time to study lightly.
For esports fans, this weekend was like a holiday.
This afternoon, GPL’s spring season will officially begin.
GPL’s spring schedule was packed, with 16 teams in the league playing BO3 matches, so except for Mondays, there were matches every other day.
Though Mondays had no matches, they featured a review show, briefly recapping the previous week’s games, analyzing key battles, playing around with memes from the matches, and interacting with fans online.
Time-wise, GPL offered high-intensity entertainment seven days a week – fans had something to watch every day.
Simultaneously, IOI’s world finals entered the quarterfinals stage, with two BO5 matches each on Saturday and Sunday, directly determining the final four spots.
Due to time differences and scheduling, the IOI world finals quarterfinals would be at 5 AM Beijing time the next day, actually more viewer-friendly for domestic audiences.
Watch GPL’s opening match Saturday afternoon, IOI quarterfinals Sunday morning, continue with GPL in the afternoon, then more IOI quarterfinals Monday morning…
A fully packed schedule, watching to one’s heart’s content.
Though IOI players weren’t numerous domestically, it was still the world finals, and Dragon Yu Group had been promoting it relentlessly lately. Combined with recent controversies, attention remained high.
…
That afternoon, wearing a mask, Pei Qian arrived at the GPL spring season venue.
They’d already held preseason matches last month, where newly formed teams had debuted. Issues that appeared during competition had been fixed and improved, with contingency plans ready for potential emergencies.
Today’s opening match featured H4 versus SHG – the former being world champions, the latter being God-Hua’s assembled team.
Since SHG’s formation, they’d attracted considerable attention. After all, God-Hua’s success in soccer meant applying that methodology to esports could be seen as dimensional superiority – many were eager to see their performance.
In previous preseason matches, SHG had appeared several times with decent showings. After this period of preparation and team synergy, their starting lineup was finalized and was improving rapidly. Based on practice match results, Zhang Yuan ultimately decided to have them play the opening match, providing better exposure for the team.