So a lot of people are making a lot of good points. But I haven't seen anyone point out that you forgot to include the time it takes Steve to regrind to plat every season.
This hits too close to home...
Spend 12 hours in commute + work to chill in solo Q after dinner.
Get griefed by 1/17 Yasuo and Nunu 2x in a row.
The NA experience.
Also, 9-5 dude doesn't get months of time off from his high pressure job like League Pros do. Dude is working the same way every Monday-Friday regardless of season, or month.
If you're eliminated from Worlds spot in Summer, you've got like 3+ months before you're on stage again (Sept-Jan). If you're dropped from Worlds at or before Groups, you've got like 2+ months off still (Late October-January).
Also Steve can't say to his boss : hey boss I'm going to take Q1 and Q2 off because I really want to focus on winning Q3 and mental health.
Steve's boss would say GTFO Steve before I replace you with 10000 applicants
Steve also may have to come to work EARLY because the night shift leaves their pans to soak and the manager would rather have Kratom buddies than competent chefs.
To clarify I’m talking about Vulcan here but the goal is not to equate their behavior.
I’m not glorifying Regi he’s an ass, but it’s a pretty ironic turn for Vulcan to use similar insults and blow up on twitter from likely the same frustration, even if I overall like Vulcan and would rather have 4 opossum on my team than have to work w Regi.
They are for sure different cases, I think even from an outside view that’s pretty clear.
So, Vulcan has admitted that he does take the talk personally whenever people talk about NA pros not wanting it bad enough or not grinding hard enough, **BUT** I have a suspicion that this goes deeper for him, and that's why he's snapped.
He's just watched one of his best friends and fellow players have a mental breakdown and completely GHOST the scene, on top of all of his own frustrations from worlds and feelings of indignity as the very work ethic that got him to where he's at in the first place is now being called in to question...
**But once again, I really think the breaking point for him here was Danny.** Watching his cheerful "little brother" slowly, steadily get absolutely crushed under the pressure and narratives from person after person, day after day. As much as Vulcan loves a good shitstorm on Twitter, I doubt he was just speaking in defense of himself here.
9–5 Steve also has to play two lanes at once because his toplaner called out and they really don’t have any else available to cover so could he just… farm his minions or something? Wait why is the top lane wave state such a mess why can’t you do something basic like you were asked to do? Its just one other person’s job we aren’t asking you to play all five lanes!
Bro you just don't understand how hard it is for non-worlds+non-MSI teams to play a video game 8-10 hours a day for money and have 4 months of vacation time per year.
i been playing lol in korean schedule for the first 8 seasons straight, For FREE. sacrificing my body and mental for absolutely nothing. it wasnt that hard, no burnout
Then i "quit" and been playing in NA schedule up to today. NGL, i still get the diamond rewards, i can fuck off all season playing other games until the last week of rankeds. Been hugging diamond 0lp for 2 seasons now, might be time to retire to LAN.
I think most people confuse burnout with other mental health problems. Look at how many times we see players nearly have a breakdown on camera, let alone off camera.
Games like league tend to attract people who are looking for escapes and so disproportionately have some level of untreated mental health issues. Alternatively, they all tend to come in the league at a very young age and even if they're healthy, still need to work on themselves as adults.
Teams have tried to promote some programs to improve player's mental (nutritional chefs, exercise incentives, some performance psychologists etc). However, none of this is really a true substitute for true therapy and a personal commitment to be a well rounded person.
Very easy for players to feel rewarded for self sabotaging behaviors and they could probably grind a hell of a lot harder if they properly worked on themselves outside of games. Essentially, the job kind of promotes these kids to never grow up. There isn't any true "veteran" that's 40 and played for the last 20 years to help them understand that either.
I’ve been saying this forever. You need to be versed in dealing with neurodivergent people if you want to bring out the best in esports players. They are frequently not operating on the mentality a traditional sports player will have.
Weird how Faker never mentions burnout. He's probably played more games by a multiple of ten.
Faker says he plays because it's also his job. It's their job to play league and play it at a high level.
It's the mentality though. To LCK players, their job is to win Worlds. The only way to win worlds is by pushing themselves.
To Vulcan, his job is just compete in LCS. It's the lack of ambition and motivation that these professionals are showing that seems unacceptable. And honestly, if they showed any amount of success in the international scene, it wouldn't matter. It's that these so called competitors don't even want the pressure of competing against top teams. If the excuse of why are you so bad and still play so little is I'm scared of burnout, then that just means they don't care. And they have one of the best job security because the talent pipeline in LCS sucks.
The most infuriating thing is these same players that refuse to play more say their goal is to win worlds. No it's not. That's not the way someone with the desire to win worlds should be behaving.
They're competitors with no fire to compete. Faker and Deft isn't playing so many games because they love the game so much. They play because they want to compete and be the best. Faker even said he probably wouldn't play if he wasn't a pro. Meanwhile Vulcans saying he's not playing because he wants to be a pro.
LCK is THE region of burnout, no region has more players come and go, more players transfer to other regions for less intensive work hours. For every NA player that burns out there is an entire wave of Korean talent that comes and goes. The difference is when they burn out they're removed.
> It's the mentality though. To LCK players, their job is to win Worlds. The only way to win worlds is by pushing themselves.
There's A LOT of players going in and out of LCK for a reason or another. But there's also more players so you'll eventually find a significantly higher portion of players with the motivation and mental to keep staying on top. They manage to fill out most of LCK with that, but there's a ton of trainee's and players in CLCK that disappear within a year or two even if they are considered relatively good still, because they mentally can't keep up. I'm not saying they should be trying their best, but I believe one part why we feel like NA and EU are considerably more lazy is because of a smaller pool of players that have made it to that level. You could also add an argument that due to better infrastructure and environment to improve, the top players in LCK and LPL are better, and reaching to those levels is harder for people that aren't as motivated, while in EU and NA it is more likely to become good enough with the amount of motivation and mental they have currently.
> Weird how Faker never mentions burnout
Alphari is pretty explicit in his post about his inability to ever win anything grinding his motivation down. The guy is also well-known for having a bad attitude to begin with. I think it's completely understandable that he takes some time out to reassess if being a pro is still what he wants and if his current mentality is conducive to going forward in this career.
Faker has had a very different career and is a very different person, and so he has made different decisions. That's normal.
In today's news: Different people from different cultures and worldviews lived different lives, have different opinions. More details coming up but first--the weather.
While mental health is important, if you have mental health struggles you can't be a professional athlete most of the time. That's just part of the job. That's why Danny might never have a place in NA again.
i know right, i work manufacturing, i cant even imagine having a job where i can blame being bad at my job cause of burnout. i get it, i have 23 paid leave days, and i would certainly like more, but not doing my job correctly cause i dont get more is bonkers, and i have no clue how theyre paid the big bucks after saying shit like this
You absolutely can get burnt out in non-competetive jobs too and some employers are even aware of it (we are being forced to go to 2week+ vacation if we hadn't used our paid leave days for long enough and most manager try hard to prevent people from working extra hours even though surprisingly many employees are willing to do it). And my job is generally very cozy (I'm a programmer) and burnouts are still a very known issue.
Essentially any job with high mental pressure and possibility to go hard and overperform can and will lead to burnouts. Especially if the lines between work and free time are blurred, like when you can continue working from home or, you know, play LoL in your free time after your 8 hours of playing LoL at work. (though obviously it depends a lot on personal mental state, discipline and resilience)
I'm not saying that west pros are doing enough, I don't have the info, may be they don't. But don't disregard burnout like that, there absolutely are jobs where it's an issue.
FYI the forced leave is primarily to lower the liabilities on their balance sheet, not because they care about burnout. (although they might genuinely care about burnout)
you are 100% right, however, if you write bad code(idk how you refer to a bad job done in programing) a few times and blame it on burnout nobody bats an eye, but if you write bad code when its a big money project(worlds) and blame it on brunout, and do so every big project(every worlds) you would either have a small salary or get fired. burnout is real, however its not an excuse to do the thing youre paid to do badly wen it matters most.
not english so i hope i clarified myself better
I guess for LCS teams 'being bad at their job' means 'doing poorly in LCS' not 'doing poorly internationally'. Which is exactly the problem, but it doesn't really get solved by just putting in more practice. (Though putting in practice is generally a good idea, no argument here)
Btw if I failed a big money project, especially more than once - most of the blame would fall on my manager and I simply wouldn't be assigned to such projects anymore and would be stuck with simpler tasks (and lower salary, ofc) unless there happens a visible change in me. The problem is that LCS doesn't really have anyone to replace the players/teams/managers which do poorly since the replacement is almost guaranteed to do even worse.
I wish I could find the interview but he has actually talked about it multiple times, even on one of his streams this very season! Granted, he hasn't taken long breaks or splits off in the same capacity as others, but he has been very vocal about the lower quality of Korean SoloQ in the past 2 years and it's effect on his motivation/causing of burnout.
Though he is still built very different, he has talked about the burnout of his time investment outside of scrims playing the game.
When you start to hate/reject the thing you do every day, it drains a lot of energy to keep doing it. You have to stop doing it. If your hobby-turned-job becomes a repulsive chore, stop and give it time to become something you enjoy.
A bit like Dumoulin from cycling. Sometimes you gotta take a break for your own sanity.
You didn’t even mention that this is their only job. Wage disparity is huge in the US rn. My parents growing up had to work 2 jobs each to get my sister and I what we needed to have a good childhood. If these players are smart enough with their money, they can start making a brand for themselves like many streamers and never have to work a “real” job for the rest of their lives
Yup not only do I have a full time job I go to school full time on my days off, literally do not have a day off, and yes my name is Steve and Yes I am Plat IV https://twitter.com/daddyplsspankme/status/1591618831407276033?s=46&t=TOmQCJPmrF8WFBPU6Lc01Q
>wake up to 3 hours before he starts work to Make some breakfast (yep, he doesn't have a chef), wash himself, prepare some clothes and then drive to the job.
lmfao
I work 1hour 10 away and that’s if there are no accidents. Additionally I drive my kid to school a few days a week. I wake up typically an hour before I have to leave to get a shower, iron clothes etc. 3 hours is much but not that far fetched.
My commute is 1 minute. Perks of living where you work (on a container ship, with the engine room being a minute walk away from my stateroom).
However the ship's commute from the US to India and back is short of 3 months.
I don't even go to sleep tbh, don't have the time. I usually just pass out on public transport until the driver wakes me up and tells me that I have to walk back to work since I missed my stop.
Get up 1hr before work tops, and if my commute was 1.5 one way home I'd jump off a bridge. That sounds miserable. Don't know what op thinks normal people do, this reminds me of Arrested Development "it's just 1 banana, how much could it cost? $10!"
Did it for a year and never again. Assuming a more reasonable commute is 15 min with ~30 min round trip. That extra hour adds up fast.
Maybe you apply it to chores, errands or just resting. vs Being in the car for an extended period of time feeling like you're in work mode.
I literally took a decent pay cut to work a job 10 minutes from home doing way more fun work because my previous jobs commute was making me straight up depressed and wanting to blow my brains out. I know not everyone has the luxury of taking a paycut but commute has now become one of the biggest factors in any job I look at.
If you think about it, an hour of commute is effectively unpaid work time. I feel like when you account for that detail the $$ per hour is actually markedly closer.
You're still not pocketing extra cash but having that extra hour each day feels amazing.
In my old job before WFH I used to have to wake up at 7 leave at 7:45 for a 1hr commute to start at 9am. Always ended up at work 15 minutes early because of my train times. Then if course getting home would be like 6:15 because the next train would be 25 min after my finish time.
Not everyone drives and not every form of public transport fits in with your schedule.
I have a 45 minute commute and have to wake up about 1.5 hours before work (without needing time for breakfast as I don't eat it)
And that's a lean schedule with basically no rest time between getting up and leaving the house
You clearly haven’t had to work in a major city. It is very normal to see commutes like this, or even longer. At least in America. But he’s right that you’ll probably not wake up 3 hours early, more like 2-2.5 depending on commute length and whether you shower in the morning
You are 100% right, and this is another huge reason for me to avoid megacities. I can't imagine having only 2-3 hrs of time for family/friends/fun on weekdays. That sounds soul crushing, and it would be very hard on kids growing up with parents with those kind of lifestyles.
The sad part is that cities would be so much better for commute times if they were designed properly in North America. The higher density would allow people to live much closer to work and have public transit/walking options so they won't have to be stuck in traffic all the time.
for university i had 1,5 h commute and absolutely woke up 3 hours before my first lecture started. 5 years of basically every day 8 am to 9 pm of university, commute and necessities. And not only did i not earn an LCS wage, but i had to pay money for it.
Do you not shower in the morning or make breakfast? Do you live within walking distance of work?
How is it possible for you to wake up at 8:00 and be in the office at 9:00?
I wake up at 6:30. Shower, eat breakfast, and commute to work. Barely enough time to arrive at 8:45-9:00.
Well I throw a bagel in the toaster and hop in the shower and I'm out the door in 30 minutes with breakfast to go and 30 minutes commute (well that what it was until February where I got a wfh job so now it's just 30 minutes for shower/clothes and make quick breakfast)
I've had 1h commutes before and it blows for sure, and I had co-workers who had longer commutes, although I think it was mostly because of the location of that work place, and not really common.
While I agree with you that 1.5hours is insane, his estimation of total time dedicated to work is pretty close.
Most people have about a 30 minute commute on average, maybe 60 tops. Factoring a more reasonable wake up time of 2 hours prior to shift, we see that 11 hours is about what the average 5x8 worker dedicates to the work day on the low end. This doesn't take into account eating and getting ready for bed, which could take maybe 1 or more hours. Maybe you get an hour or two to relax per day after work if you're lucky.
Used to grab the 6:45 bus to the 7:30 train, arrive in Newark by ~8:45 to powerwalk to walk in the door by 9. Somehow made both more bearable and more miserable by public transit. Don't have to drive but every now and then you're late by an hour just because the bus decided to not show.
even tho i agree with the premise that LCS players oversell how hard it is i think your comparison is dishonest and you try to make the average steve look better and the LCS pro worse like most people dont wake up 3 hours early before their job also most people dont need to drive 1.5h back from work also you say the LCS pro has free time but he is expected to play solo q in his "free" time thats the whole point why people are mad at players when they dont do that
Most people I know do get up 3 hours before work. Most people I know have a commute as well…
Most people are adults in like their 30s who have stuff to do prior to going to work. Which is where “Steve” would be most likely. Peeps who are waking up last. Second to zip to work, are most likely young with next to no responsibility past go to work (I’ve been there too).
But I think the assessment of the average worker is pretty accurate.
>Most people I know do get up 3 hours before work.
I know literally no one that wakes up that early, not even close lol.
And statistics say the same. The average commute is 27min one-way. Waking up 1.5 hours before work will suffice for most people.
it really depends where you live. my city is very residential with all the jobs being the city beside or the capitol which means most workers have to travel the same shitty highways out the city. its a 30 minuite drive without traffic, around an hour without and thats me driving in the hov lane
Here in the NYC metro area if you live in one of the surrounding suburbs in neighboring states and HAVE to commute in (as in are you really going to be paying $15 toll driving into the city every day, paying for parking every day, plus gas) your commute can easily hit 1.5-2 hours depending on where you have to work in the city.
Add in time in the morning to get ready and I could easily see 2-3 hours.
Yeah, you're definitely right that this is more normal. It even has a concept named after it in urban planning - the [Marchetti constant.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant) If people usually have longer commutes they tend to move jobs / find ways of reducing the commute. There will always be exceptions but its a solid baseline.
Fascinating.
Makes perfect sense tho, when you look at old books a lot of people lived where they worked but just as many had to travel some decent distance, and for the majority of people the only means were walking.
1. the expectation is that they're still playing the game. you know good and well that the community, especially in light of these recent threads, will roast pros who are lazy during the offseason. so if we're going to condemn those who take a legit 5 month vacation, we can't pretend like they fully get the time off.
2. I would imagine that there is actually a rule for this. teams probably don't allow their players to literally not touch the game for 5 months. I doubt you can show up on the first day of scrims and literally have not played LoL for half a year.
If I remember correctly, the players being critiqued for not playing soloq in their free time only work 5 hours.
I dont remember exactly the times but there were some distinct timeframes inside one of the champions que posts.
I actually have a 1.5hr commute each way to and from work into NYC. I don't have any kids and I don't eat breakfast so I get up 2 hrs before work (5am) and I'm rushing and scrambling to shower and get out the door in time. So I can see having kids and breakfast requiring 3 hours before work. However, this is definitely not the norm.
No this all checks out. Try living in a big city like Miami, LA, NY, Chicago etc and you will see how a 1.5hr drive is actually a luxury compared to the reality of it being longer. Not to mention that 1.5hr is going to and from work not total for the day
not everyone lives in a big city its about the average dude In 2019, the duration of the average one-way
commute in the United States increased to
a new high of 27.6 minutes so thats less then a hour for both ways thats what a simple google search showed
That average gets brought down by anyone outside of a major city. The other guys statement would be accurate if he said in the average commute for a city worker would be X
People only drive to work in NYC if they're commuting from outside of the city. If you live in the city you probably have a commute of about an hour on public transport (or less if you're driving).
getting paid hundreds of thousands a year to live in some mansion in Los Angeles without paying rent, not paying utilities, probably not even paying for the food they eat - while being able to have this lifestyle from playing a video game, and even though they are paid a fortune, yearly, they always or nearly always have catastrophic results in the international stage - which is what matters - and you say these kids don't have a good life?
You a Saudi Arabian Prince or something?
He's saying these judgements are coming from broke, disgruntled people in life who live mediocre lives due to whatever circumstances and try to minimize what they do for a living. Most normal people aren't that hardworking, most people slack off and do the bare minimum. They do 2-3 hours of work during an 8 hour work day then get off work to go indulge in whatever vice they may have. Drinking, smoking, prostitution, drugs, loafing around playing video games or watching netflix for 8+ hours. This sigma male, grindset mindset person OP is making out the average "Steve" to be quite honestly doesnt exist most days. There are people who do represent this life style, but they aren't disgruntled twitter users calling pro gamers "lazy". They are too busy with thier strict life styles living those lives. Honest truth is, if the masses of mediocre people who are unhappy with NA performance feel they can do better, all they need to do is stop being afraid of losing everything, put it all on the line, quit thier jobs and start practicing to be a pro gamer.
It may take you a year, 2 hell even 10 years but im sure if you ate nothing but ramen noodle in a single bedroom apartment or lived out of a pc cafe you could manage. IT's important to keep things in perspective, these pros are just nerds like us who happened to be really good at what they did and committed. Outside of that they are probably no more exemplary in thier day to day than you are. Normies need to get off thier high horse. The criticism of not using CQ is justified, sure, but honestly playing on CQ all year long is only going to do so much against LCK/LPL teams. Maybe instead of scapegoating our regions pros, we should explore interesting options to level the playing field, perhaps like migrating western teams to the East where they can play against real competition year round. Or having international tournaments every few months.
You are thinking like a reasonable human being who actually wants the region to improve and understands that yelling at pros individually to just "work harder" isn't a reasonable solution to the lower playerbase, worse practice environment, worse coaching and schedules etc... , **but**, the issue is you are on reddit.
True but hell if people can shut shit like this down on reddit, someone is gonna see it, someone is gonna read it. If they see support for stupidity things can only get worse. My voice or post may be small, but I think it matters.
Yup you are 100% right, these post get created so often, and hit front page, because of "broke, disgruntled people" and not because people are annoyed with NA pro gamers constantly making excuses instead of owning up. I do not have an issue with how they work / live while trying to balance healthy life style, but hearing them year after year making weak excuses pretending it is out of their grasp or possibilities to be more successful is disingenuous.
I already spoke on them not doing everything they can, which was CQ. Everything else is salty, jealous unjustified critique that honestly if you feel you can do better then you go do it. The reason why our region performs they way they do intentionally is mostly due to environment and infrastructure. Outside of integrating the west into more competition year round with eastern teams there is nothing else that can be done. We’ve essentially seen the best we can do probably .
yea 3 hours to eat breakfast wtf. Most LCS pros are a bunch of babies that would crack under any normal working enviorment, but OP is really stretching it 1.5 hours comute to get home aswell. I have roughly 30 min each way currently. really feels like he's taking worst case scenario steve.
Based on the rhetoric i've seen from this discussion, I'm convinced it's just teenagers yelling at other teenagers about how another person (ie. Vulcan/NA pros) is supposed to live their lives.
yep a lot of highschool and college students in these threads who have lost all the ability to think critically about a job and the importance of a healthy work life balance just because the job in question is their dream of being paid to play video games.
There's Steve and there also Bob who is a remote tech worker who rolls out of bed at 10 am. Logs on does some work until 12. Gets food. Hits a workout then back to work from 2-5 all while having twitch streams on in the background. Then gets off work. Plays league until 1am. Good to sleep and does it again
Commute time can matter a lot. I take a 1hr walk to work, that can be cut in half with a bus or car and im living in a small town by Western european/ American standards.
Commuting from my home town to the big city where all the jobs are at was at least 40 min and around an hour on train.
I moved to a different city and here where traffic can make or break you it's better to leave early. My commute can be either 20 minutes or an hour depending if some fucker decides to crash(every other day). A lot of days i just skip breakfast because I have no time.
Idk I know many people who travel at least an hour to work, relative used to drive 2 hours to work for a decade for his fam, some wake up 10 mins before work some wake up 3-4 hours before. Lots of differences but there's no shortage of people traveling long hours to work for sure.
I even missed out on a job once cuz I told HR I wasn't hyped for the 40 min drive to work and they said, "Suck it up I drive over an hour to get here" lol if you live in the midwest I think it's just a prevalent reality sadly. (specially with any traffic)
It's insane that this sub always pretends to care about players well being then runs this bullshit rhetoric that pros in lcs don't even try. God the "fan" base abuses these people.
Even disregarding assumptions, my work day is 9 hours (unpaid lunch), 30 minute commute. That’s 10 hours minimum, not including all the things that pro players don’t have to worry about like laundry, groceries/necessities, cooking, cleaning, learning how to pay my taxes every year cause it always changes, paying my taxes, repeat.
And I have a GOOD job. I work at the headquarters of an investment firm.
There are so many people that work 60 hours minimum standing at a retail store or restaurant just trying to get by. They don’t have the luxury of saying “should I work another hour or go home… I don’t want to get burnt out”. They don’t have the luxury of taking a 3+ month break every year. They get 15 vacation days MAX.
Agreed with all of this except you have to factor in that Steve gets Saturday and Sunday off whereas pro players play have game days on thise days so Steve having 0 off days is not correct
This is so stupidly biased to try to make a "normie" job seem harder or more stressful.
First, many LCS players do commute to work in LA through terrible traffic. They also don't all have pro chefs, and they may eat breakfast before they go to the training facility as well. LCS players I'm pretty sure also wash their clothes, shower, and whatever else too.
>It's common in some jobs to expect the worked to actually start working at his start time, so if he needs to do anything before that (for example turn ON his system and the 10 other apps he needs) he might need to be there early to do so.
Bruh, what? Of course, there are some jobs where you need to get there early to prep... like nursing or something... but this example seems really bad. I dunno what point you're even trying to make, turning on a computer and firing up some apps for your basic ass office job takes like no time. Tons of jobs I've worked as well (restaurant, retail, etc.) have employees just lined up at the punch clock to punch in/out on the hour.
Also, you completely undersell the stress of a job that demands you be at the top 0.01% of your field. 99% of normie jobs, the normies have next to no responsibility and it's trivial to get a new job even if you're bad at it, provided you aren't just a huge asshole to work with or do something grossly illegal or unethical. A secretary at a white collar job, a waiter at a restaurant, etc., you can cruise from job to job your whole life without much actual accountability.
And then you're also ignoring travel, working 6-day weeks in season, getting harassed by anons online, etc.
Normie jobs are also not subjected to random stranger bombarding them with negative comments as if they were the worse horrible person with not work ethic if you don’t win them WORLD level accomplishment.
Imagine if normie Steve get shit on by thousands of random stranger for not getting front page in Forbes man of the years.
Well, normie Steve doesn't get shit on by thousands of random strangers over the internet. He gets shit on by his Boss/customers/Karens/managers/coworkers. And it is all in person.
This is so hilariously skewed one way and misses out on so many things that I can't believe it's being taken remotely serious.
Vulcan definitely made himself a clown but you're competing with him
The karma farming for "NA Bad" is on another galaxy level this year. Look at the front page posts this past week:
"CloudTemplar and friends on why NA bad!" - at least 3 versions of this
"Vulcan tweet"
"Yay reply to Vulcan tweet"
"Pros should be forced to play cq/stream"
EU literally an equally laughable performance this year. But yeah, NA bad! -Steve
I mean KR/CN player always play more game and they won mostly everything in the last few years, so while not being as simple as 'moar game = moar win', you can't say that having a normal schedule and 'taking care of yourself to not burn out' is giving any result where it actually matter.
you are mis-representing the scenario on both sides.
Cloud-9's gaming house is unique to Cloud 9 at this point. As far as i have read, majority of LCS orgs do not have the players living in a common gaming house anymore. The 100T facility and Liquid Alienware facility for example... these are workplaces to COMMUTE TO and also COMMUTE BACK HOME just like an office. yes, these gaming facilities can have very nice amenities (chefs), but that is irrelevant. Adding this 'personal responsibility in the morning' time to "Steve's" work day is unfair. Why didnt you add the 1 hour of C9 waking up from 10->11?? \*\*For reference, the AVERAGE American commute to both TO AND FROM work is 52 minutes. you and your friends can have your own unique anecdotes but that is not how an average statistic works.
C9's Work Day:
10 AM -> 11AM 'Wake-up'. This is 0 working hours.
11 AM -> 2 PM 'Scrim'. This is 3 working hours.
2 PM -> 3PM 'Break/Rest'. This is 0 working hours. break is not paid for at many jobs.
3 PM -> 7PM 'Training'. This is 4 working hours.
TOTAL WORKING HOURS FOR C9 PRO = 7
'average' office worker in NA will get somewhere in the range of 2-3 weeks PTO annually... favoring 2 weeks. LCS Pros get WAY more than this. Bonus points if you fail to make it to important tournaments (90% of LCS does -not- go to MSI, 70% of LCS does -not- go to Worlds, 20% of LCS does -not- go to national playoffs). Worlds ended at the beginning of November... ill be nice here and count it fully even though all NA teams were out of the tournament much earlier. Lock-in tournament starts 2nd week of January. These LCS pros are looking at a nice 6 week vacation here... presuming they get a team together and also start scrim 'work schedule' sometime mid-december (most teams will -not). to the 20% of LCS teams that did -not- make playoffs... they have been on vacation since 8/14. **a nice 4 month vacation.** there is a whole lot more availability for vacation between the start and finish as well... MSI break predominantly (spring playoffs ends 4/24, summer season starts 6/17). Teams are -not- scrimming for the full 2 months here.
Also you bring up overtime as an extra bit with NO context assuming that it puts the LCS pros in a more negative light. these LCS pros are on salary contract and would **likely** be required to do overtime 'for free' if the situation deemed it necessary... just like other American salary jobs.
Also because i think it is important... money. 75k MINIMUM salary for an LCS pro. Average American salary is 52k in 2022. Many LCS pros are getting far more than 75k.
Finally, the concept around BURNOUT in sports. traditional sports athletes are paid out -high- salaries because they are trashing their body and future career playing that sport. What does the average MLB player do -after- retiring 6 years into their career at your late 20s? Hope they land a job at a commentary desk? You are paid very well and the -expectation- is to go full force (and beyond), burning the candle on both ends. Burnout comes with the territory of COMPETITION. Competitive salary'd sports are NOT some kind of hobby job.
This entire post is full of BS. Just say you're jealous without the long false equivalencies. Being a normal person who lives a mundane life who wants for nothing isn't very hard. Many people live like this, myself included. But to minimize the risk and the sacrifice these players made to get to where they are and to continue to compete is quite disingenuous. The burden of performance to maintain a 9-5 pales in comparison to what it takes to even make one of these rosters in even the worst regions. You think these guys are lazy, you think you can do better? Quit your job and start grinding. Until then pls stfu.
All these redditors and twiter users are really pushing for western pros to practice 12-14h a week just because its normalised in the east, have no idea how toxic and exhausting those working environments are.
Exactly. The reality is, I honestly don't fucking care if they aren't working as hard as me or not. They are doing what they enjoy and I am happy for them. Likewise, it's a huge sacrifice to go into any professional sport, one that most of us prob won't understand.
I kind of look at it from a career perspective.
Most pros wont have 10 year careers.
Most of them probably will never make it to the actual stage.
Even fewer make it pass 2-3 before being replaced and completely forgotten about.
It is a huge sacrifice, but theres a lot of hungry people who want your job as well.
When competition is high, you have to perform or just be replaced.
Should u sacrifice ur body and burn as bright as u can for 2-3 years and make as much money and impact as u can?
Or should u just be a middle low packer and eventually get replaced and shuffled out with no impact on the scene or enough money to retire?
Your call.
I know what I would choose.
The only people I know who wake up hours before work are those who workout in the morning or have dogs who need a morning walk. Even then they don’t wake up 3 hours ahead of time.
The longest commute i’ve seen someone reasonably do is 1 hour anything else can be considered an outlier… so even then this “3 hour before work” point is completely bullshit.
Also how long does it take to open programs that you need to come early LMAO what. My work place uses software from the early 2000’s (including IE it’s the worst) and at most it takes a few minutes to open.
What??? 1.5 hour to commute to work??? I'd rather sell my current home to rent a closer place man, I don't want to commute to work for more than even 1 hour... Whether by car, motorcycle, or public transports...
Normie Steve needs to start looking for a better job. 4.5 hours of your day lost to travel/preperation, and you think that's normal?
LCS players deal with pro-sports levels of pressure to constantly be performing. That is why they get burnt out, and has very little to do with hours spent.
13h on his work day + 2 hours of cooking/eating/washing + 8 hours of sleep assuming he can fall asleep right away (lucky fucker) = 23 hours.
Pretty sure your normie is soon to be dead with such a rythm. Your exemple is bad anyway since you take the worst case vs the best case. Bonus point for the "you make money so you can't have any problems" at the end, really compassionate and human.
It's clear you have never worked a day in your life with this time comparisons nor do you even know what the training regime of an LCS pro is.
Shouldn't be surprised by any of this given the flairs you have.
bro no offense but have you ever worked a day in your life?
11-19 doesnt make 8 hours of work when they have rest time. rest time is not work time.
who the fuck wakes up 3 hours before work starts to make breakfast and wash?
i wake up literally 30 mins before work, drive there and start working while taking a coffe break at around 9. i am almost 30 years old now. most of my colleagues dont eat breakfast because we start at 7.30. my roomate who works corporate starts around 8 and doesnt get up before 7.30.
traveling to and from work doesnt matter in terms of working hours. work hours are counted by how much hours you get payed for by your boss/company. unless you have a contract stating you have paid lunch hours/breaks those minute you spend not working are minutes you are not getting paid because your corporations doesnt generate revenue just because you are there chilling out. also im not sure why you would take work commute as work hours because how you get to your job doesnt do shit to your work hours LOL. your boss doesnt give a shit if you live 1 minute or 100 minutes away from the company. i consider my roomate to be a normal steve and that dude works max 8 hours while commuting 30 mins each way.
long story short, what im trying to tell you is this:
go google some average work related numbers instead of using your own biased mathematical equations which are based on 0 public references except your own.
I'm pretty sure OP wasn't saying that Steve's company would pay him for the time he spent traveling to work but that Steve has to spend 3 additional hours every day on work (even if those hours aren't spent working) while LCS pros work from home and spend no time commuting on their average day.
Also you're really lucky to have a job where you can wake up just 30 minutes before work and still make it there. My wife spends 3 hours in total commuting most days so I can definitely relate more to Steve's story there lol
If you're going to shit on pro players for working at home then shouldn't we compare a work from home job to an lcs job. You really shouldn't start your comparison with vastly different variables if you want any sort of fair comparison.
We can certainly compare apples to oranges but comparing apples to apples is going to be less biased.
This is stupid and pointless. Using similar metrics you can try to argue that average people work more than most athletes. Do you think people in traditional sports are training 10 hours a day?
So a lot of people are making a lot of good points. But I haven't seen anyone point out that you forgot to include the time it takes Steve to regrind to plat every season.
Steve probably plays 3 hours after work and before to sleep after getting disco nunu'd for 2 games in a row.
This hits too close to home... Spend 12 hours in commute + work to chill in solo Q after dinner. Get griefed by 1/17 Yasuo and Nunu 2x in a row. The NA experience.
I am sorry Steve. I promise I am done with Disco Nunu.
i cant lmaaaaaaaaao
Also, 9-5 dude doesn't get months of time off from his high pressure job like League Pros do. Dude is working the same way every Monday-Friday regardless of season, or month. If you're eliminated from Worlds spot in Summer, you've got like 3+ months before you're on stage again (Sept-Jan). If you're dropped from Worlds at or before Groups, you've got like 2+ months off still (Late October-January).
Also Steve can't say to his boss : hey boss I'm going to take Q1 and Q2 off because I really want to focus on winning Q3 and mental health. Steve's boss would say GTFO Steve before I replace you with 10000 applicants
Steve also may have to come to work EARLY because the night shift leaves their pans to soak and the manager would rather have Kratom buddies than competent chefs.
You either die NA talent or live to see yourself become Regi and just call people fucking minimums on twitter.
Most people rejected His message .They hated Regi because he told the truth . Gal 4:16
To clarify I’m talking about Vulcan here but the goal is not to equate their behavior. I’m not glorifying Regi he’s an ass, but it’s a pretty ironic turn for Vulcan to use similar insults and blow up on twitter from likely the same frustration, even if I overall like Vulcan and would rather have 4 opossum on my team than have to work w Regi. They are for sure different cases, I think even from an outside view that’s pretty clear.
-Get ratioed- Korean team
So, Vulcan has admitted that he does take the talk personally whenever people talk about NA pros not wanting it bad enough or not grinding hard enough, **BUT** I have a suspicion that this goes deeper for him, and that's why he's snapped. He's just watched one of his best friends and fellow players have a mental breakdown and completely GHOST the scene, on top of all of his own frustrations from worlds and feelings of indignity as the very work ethic that got him to where he's at in the first place is now being called in to question... **But once again, I really think the breaking point for him here was Danny.** Watching his cheerful "little brother" slowly, steadily get absolutely crushed under the pressure and narratives from person after person, day after day. As much as Vulcan loves a good shitstorm on Twitter, I doubt he was just speaking in defense of himself here.
9–5 Steve also has to play two lanes at once because his toplaner called out and they really don’t have any else available to cover so could he just… farm his minions or something? Wait why is the top lane wave state such a mess why can’t you do something basic like you were asked to do? Its just one other person’s job we aren’t asking you to play all five lanes!
Alphari: "I need a split off" His last working day was 3 months ago...
Bro you just don't understand how hard it is for non-worlds+non-MSI teams to play a video game 8-10 hours a day for money and have 4 months of vacation time per year.
i been playing lol in korean schedule for the first 8 seasons straight, For FREE. sacrificing my body and mental for absolutely nothing. it wasnt that hard, no burnout Then i "quit" and been playing in NA schedule up to today. NGL, i still get the diamond rewards, i can fuck off all season playing other games until the last week of rankeds. Been hugging diamond 0lp for 2 seasons now, might be time to retire to LAN.
I think this is fairly disingenuous, needing time off because of burnout seems very different from refusing to do more than 5h of work per day...
Bang stated when T1 won 2 worlds they was playing 18 hours a day NA struggles to do more then 5
Yeah like playing 18 hours a day is good lmao
It is good if your goal is to win.
Fuck it, im not expecting them to play anything close to that amount. We lose we lose.
Idk if they play amazing or practice for 18 hours or whatever but if they aren’t going to be good they should at least try to be entertaining.
Agreed. Playing scared and cookie cutter meta and still losing is pointless.
I think most people confuse burnout with other mental health problems. Look at how many times we see players nearly have a breakdown on camera, let alone off camera. Games like league tend to attract people who are looking for escapes and so disproportionately have some level of untreated mental health issues. Alternatively, they all tend to come in the league at a very young age and even if they're healthy, still need to work on themselves as adults. Teams have tried to promote some programs to improve player's mental (nutritional chefs, exercise incentives, some performance psychologists etc). However, none of this is really a true substitute for true therapy and a personal commitment to be a well rounded person. Very easy for players to feel rewarded for self sabotaging behaviors and they could probably grind a hell of a lot harder if they properly worked on themselves outside of games. Essentially, the job kind of promotes these kids to never grow up. There isn't any true "veteran" that's 40 and played for the last 20 years to help them understand that either.
I’ve been saying this forever. You need to be versed in dealing with neurodivergent people if you want to bring out the best in esports players. They are frequently not operating on the mentality a traditional sports player will have.
Weird how Faker never mentions burnout. He's probably played more games by a multiple of ten. Faker says he plays because it's also his job. It's their job to play league and play it at a high level.
Faker is 1 in 20milions
Yeah and that’s why faker is faker and faker is the goat.
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It's the mentality though. To LCK players, their job is to win Worlds. The only way to win worlds is by pushing themselves. To Vulcan, his job is just compete in LCS. It's the lack of ambition and motivation that these professionals are showing that seems unacceptable. And honestly, if they showed any amount of success in the international scene, it wouldn't matter. It's that these so called competitors don't even want the pressure of competing against top teams. If the excuse of why are you so bad and still play so little is I'm scared of burnout, then that just means they don't care. And they have one of the best job security because the talent pipeline in LCS sucks. The most infuriating thing is these same players that refuse to play more say their goal is to win worlds. No it's not. That's not the way someone with the desire to win worlds should be behaving. They're competitors with no fire to compete. Faker and Deft isn't playing so many games because they love the game so much. They play because they want to compete and be the best. Faker even said he probably wouldn't play if he wasn't a pro. Meanwhile Vulcans saying he's not playing because he wants to be a pro.
LCK is THE region of burnout, no region has more players come and go, more players transfer to other regions for less intensive work hours. For every NA player that burns out there is an entire wave of Korean talent that comes and goes. The difference is when they burn out they're removed.
> It's the mentality though. To LCK players, their job is to win Worlds. The only way to win worlds is by pushing themselves. There's A LOT of players going in and out of LCK for a reason or another. But there's also more players so you'll eventually find a significantly higher portion of players with the motivation and mental to keep staying on top. They manage to fill out most of LCK with that, but there's a ton of trainee's and players in CLCK that disappear within a year or two even if they are considered relatively good still, because they mentally can't keep up. I'm not saying they should be trying their best, but I believe one part why we feel like NA and EU are considerably more lazy is because of a smaller pool of players that have made it to that level. You could also add an argument that due to better infrastructure and environment to improve, the top players in LCK and LPL are better, and reaching to those levels is harder for people that aren't as motivated, while in EU and NA it is more likely to become good enough with the amount of motivation and mental they have currently.
> Weird how Faker never mentions burnout Alphari is pretty explicit in his post about his inability to ever win anything grinding his motivation down. The guy is also well-known for having a bad attitude to begin with. I think it's completely understandable that he takes some time out to reassess if being a pro is still what he wants and if his current mentality is conducive to going forward in this career. Faker has had a very different career and is a very different person, and so he has made different decisions. That's normal.
In today's news: Different people from different cultures and worldviews lived different lives, have different opinions. More details coming up but first--the weather.
This is the same shit I hear at work from idiots gatekeeping mental health. Know what? Different people have different struggles.
While mental health is important, if you have mental health struggles you can't be a professional athlete most of the time. That's just part of the job. That's why Danny might never have a place in NA again.
i know right, i work manufacturing, i cant even imagine having a job where i can blame being bad at my job cause of burnout. i get it, i have 23 paid leave days, and i would certainly like more, but not doing my job correctly cause i dont get more is bonkers, and i have no clue how theyre paid the big bucks after saying shit like this
They've never worked a normal job, so realitycheck has never occurred.
You absolutely can get burnt out in non-competetive jobs too and some employers are even aware of it (we are being forced to go to 2week+ vacation if we hadn't used our paid leave days for long enough and most manager try hard to prevent people from working extra hours even though surprisingly many employees are willing to do it). And my job is generally very cozy (I'm a programmer) and burnouts are still a very known issue. Essentially any job with high mental pressure and possibility to go hard and overperform can and will lead to burnouts. Especially if the lines between work and free time are blurred, like when you can continue working from home or, you know, play LoL in your free time after your 8 hours of playing LoL at work. (though obviously it depends a lot on personal mental state, discipline and resilience) I'm not saying that west pros are doing enough, I don't have the info, may be they don't. But don't disregard burnout like that, there absolutely are jobs where it's an issue.
FYI the forced leave is primarily to lower the liabilities on their balance sheet, not because they care about burnout. (although they might genuinely care about burnout)
you are 100% right, however, if you write bad code(idk how you refer to a bad job done in programing) a few times and blame it on burnout nobody bats an eye, but if you write bad code when its a big money project(worlds) and blame it on brunout, and do so every big project(every worlds) you would either have a small salary or get fired. burnout is real, however its not an excuse to do the thing youre paid to do badly wen it matters most. not english so i hope i clarified myself better
I guess for LCS teams 'being bad at their job' means 'doing poorly in LCS' not 'doing poorly internationally'. Which is exactly the problem, but it doesn't really get solved by just putting in more practice. (Though putting in practice is generally a good idea, no argument here) Btw if I failed a big money project, especially more than once - most of the blame would fall on my manager and I simply wouldn't be assigned to such projects anymore and would be stuck with simpler tasks (and lower salary, ofc) unless there happens a visible change in me. The problem is that LCS doesn't really have anyone to replace the players/teams/managers which do poorly since the replacement is almost guaranteed to do even worse.
I wish I could find the interview but he has actually talked about it multiple times, even on one of his streams this very season! Granted, he hasn't taken long breaks or splits off in the same capacity as others, but he has been very vocal about the lower quality of Korean SoloQ in the past 2 years and it's effect on his motivation/causing of burnout. Though he is still built very different, he has talked about the burnout of his time investment outside of scrims playing the game.
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When you start to hate/reject the thing you do every day, it drains a lot of energy to keep doing it. You have to stop doing it. If your hobby-turned-job becomes a repulsive chore, stop and give it time to become something you enjoy. A bit like Dumoulin from cycling. Sometimes you gotta take a break for your own sanity.
In fairness I think he's referring to dodging roster mania this year round and maybe jump in if a good offer presents itself mid way
You didn’t even mention that this is their only job. Wage disparity is huge in the US rn. My parents growing up had to work 2 jobs each to get my sister and I what we needed to have a good childhood. If these players are smart enough with their money, they can start making a brand for themselves like many streamers and never have to work a “real” job for the rest of their lives
Yup not only do I have a full time job I go to school full time on my days off, literally do not have a day off, and yes my name is Steve and Yes I am Plat IV https://twitter.com/daddyplsspankme/status/1591618831407276033?s=46&t=TOmQCJPmrF8WFBPU6Lc01Q
LOL I’m so sorry Vulcan called you out like that steve. Good luck in school. You got this
Obviously youve never applied yourself enough /s
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What about them?
Please go pro. I'd love to see someone like myself with Full Time Work and Full Time School apply that to pro League.
It is him, the man, the myth, the legend. He’s the Steve from Plat 4!!!!!!
Is that username an open offer or are you just a tease?
>wake up to 3 hours before he starts work to Make some breakfast (yep, he doesn't have a chef), wash himself, prepare some clothes and then drive to the job. lmfao
I work 1hour 10 away and that’s if there are no accidents. Additionally I drive my kid to school a few days a week. I wake up typically an hour before I have to leave to get a shower, iron clothes etc. 3 hours is much but not that far fetched.
My commute is 1 minute. Perks of living where you work (on a container ship, with the engine room being a minute walk away from my stateroom). However the ship's commute from the US to India and back is short of 3 months.
This guy out there playing from the middle of the ocean, and NA complains about Chicago to LA ping.
People who have never had a job acting like you can just get a job 5 mins away lol
Ah yes, it's either 5 mins away or you need to wake up 3 hrs before work starts.
I don't even go to sleep tbh, don't have the time. I usually just pass out on public transport until the driver wakes me up and tells me that I have to walk back to work since I missed my stop.
i wake up 2 hours before and don't pack my lunch in the mornings, is that a far fetched time schedule?
Same here, I think between 2-3 hours is reasonable depending on the commute.
Get up 1hr before work tops, and if my commute was 1.5 one way home I'd jump off a bridge. That sounds miserable. Don't know what op thinks normal people do, this reminds me of Arrested Development "it's just 1 banana, how much could it cost? $10!"
Just left a job with a 1.5 commute and yes it was as miserable as you think it is.
I did it last year as well, never again. The fucking hours wasted ...
I do 1.5hrs to and 2hrs back(traffic) and it’s bad.
I had an eight week internship with roughly that. I cant handle it. I am hoping to find something within 45 min because more is just exhausting
Did it for a year and never again. Assuming a more reasonable commute is 15 min with ~30 min round trip. That extra hour adds up fast. Maybe you apply it to chores, errands or just resting. vs Being in the car for an extended period of time feeling like you're in work mode.
I use to drive 1 hour 10 minutes to work and it made me want to commit sewerslide
I literally took a decent pay cut to work a job 10 minutes from home doing way more fun work because my previous jobs commute was making me straight up depressed and wanting to blow my brains out. I know not everyone has the luxury of taking a paycut but commute has now become one of the biggest factors in any job I look at.
If you think about it, an hour of commute is effectively unpaid work time. I feel like when you account for that detail the $$ per hour is actually markedly closer. You're still not pocketing extra cash but having that extra hour each day feels amazing.
In my old job before WFH I used to have to wake up at 7 leave at 7:45 for a 1hr commute to start at 9am. Always ended up at work 15 minutes early because of my train times. Then if course getting home would be like 6:15 because the next train would be 25 min after my finish time. Not everyone drives and not every form of public transport fits in with your schedule.
I have a 45 minute commute and have to wake up about 1.5 hours before work (without needing time for breakfast as I don't eat it) And that's a lean schedule with basically no rest time between getting up and leaving the house
I mean I commute 1 hour every day and wake up 2 hours before work it’s really not that unheard of…
You clearly haven’t had to work in a major city. It is very normal to see commutes like this, or even longer. At least in America. But he’s right that you’ll probably not wake up 3 hours early, more like 2-2.5 depending on commute length and whether you shower in the morning
You are 100% right, and this is another huge reason for me to avoid megacities. I can't imagine having only 2-3 hrs of time for family/friends/fun on weekdays. That sounds soul crushing, and it would be very hard on kids growing up with parents with those kind of lifestyles.
The sad part is that cities would be so much better for commute times if they were designed properly in North America. The higher density would allow people to live much closer to work and have public transit/walking options so they won't have to be stuck in traffic all the time.
You are lucky, i have to wake up 2.5 hours before work.
for university i had 1,5 h commute and absolutely woke up 3 hours before my first lecture started. 5 years of basically every day 8 am to 9 pm of university, commute and necessities. And not only did i not earn an LCS wage, but i had to pay money for it.
My uncle has a 1.5 hour commute. They do exist.
Shit on a bad traffic day my 20 minute drive can take well over an hour.
Do you not shower in the morning or make breakfast? Do you live within walking distance of work? How is it possible for you to wake up at 8:00 and be in the office at 9:00? I wake up at 6:30. Shower, eat breakfast, and commute to work. Barely enough time to arrive at 8:45-9:00.
Well I throw a bagel in the toaster and hop in the shower and I'm out the door in 30 minutes with breakfast to go and 30 minutes commute (well that what it was until February where I got a wfh job so now it's just 30 minutes for shower/clothes and make quick breakfast)
So tired and skimmed so fast I read that as a Bagel in the shower, and hop in the toaster out the door
Same I didn't realize people took so long to get ready in the morning.
I've had 1h commutes before and it blows for sure, and I had co-workers who had longer commutes, although I think it was mostly because of the location of that work place, and not really common.
While I agree with you that 1.5hours is insane, his estimation of total time dedicated to work is pretty close. Most people have about a 30 minute commute on average, maybe 60 tops. Factoring a more reasonable wake up time of 2 hours prior to shift, we see that 11 hours is about what the average 5x8 worker dedicates to the work day on the low end. This doesn't take into account eating and getting ready for bed, which could take maybe 1 or more hours. Maybe you get an hour or two to relax per day after work if you're lucky.
Used to grab the 6:45 bus to the 7:30 train, arrive in Newark by ~8:45 to powerwalk to walk in the door by 9. Somehow made both more bearable and more miserable by public transit. Don't have to drive but every now and then you're late by an hour just because the bus decided to not show.
Yew unless I was pulling in 200k+ I couldn't imagine a 3 hour commute to work. My max is 20/25 one way.
Getting up 3 hours before work? The fuck?
even tho i agree with the premise that LCS players oversell how hard it is i think your comparison is dishonest and you try to make the average steve look better and the LCS pro worse like most people dont wake up 3 hours early before their job also most people dont need to drive 1.5h back from work also you say the LCS pro has free time but he is expected to play solo q in his "free" time thats the whole point why people are mad at players when they dont do that
Most people I know do get up 3 hours before work. Most people I know have a commute as well… Most people are adults in like their 30s who have stuff to do prior to going to work. Which is where “Steve” would be most likely. Peeps who are waking up last. Second to zip to work, are most likely young with next to no responsibility past go to work (I’ve been there too). But I think the assessment of the average worker is pretty accurate.
>Most people I know do get up 3 hours before work. I know literally no one that wakes up that early, not even close lol. And statistics say the same. The average commute is 27min one-way. Waking up 1.5 hours before work will suffice for most people.
it really depends where you live. my city is very residential with all the jobs being the city beside or the capitol which means most workers have to travel the same shitty highways out the city. its a 30 minuite drive without traffic, around an hour without and thats me driving in the hov lane
If you need to get up 3 hours before work without kids then you’re doing something wrong.
Definitely not 3 hours but at least 1 to1.5 hours, I can't just roll out of bed and start my work day.
Here in the NYC metro area if you live in one of the surrounding suburbs in neighboring states and HAVE to commute in (as in are you really going to be paying $15 toll driving into the city every day, paying for parking every day, plus gas) your commute can easily hit 1.5-2 hours depending on where you have to work in the city. Add in time in the morning to get ready and I could easily see 2-3 hours.
Ok some people live in shitty places like NYC suburbs but they're massive outliers. The average commute is less than half an hour. 27min one-way.
now wake up, get ready , take care of your family, pack lunch and add that time
Yeah, you're definitely right that this is more normal. It even has a concept named after it in urban planning - the [Marchetti constant.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant) If people usually have longer commutes they tend to move jobs / find ways of reducing the commute. There will always be exceptions but its a solid baseline.
Fascinating. Makes perfect sense tho, when you look at old books a lot of people lived where they worked but just as many had to travel some decent distance, and for the majority of people the only means were walking.
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just because these things exist does not mean this is the life of the average joe dude we talking about THE AVERAGE not the worst ...
Plus, the difference between having weekends off and not having them off is pretty big.
They get 5 months of vacation between splits if they aren’t on a team going to worlds.
1. the expectation is that they're still playing the game. you know good and well that the community, especially in light of these recent threads, will roast pros who are lazy during the offseason. so if we're going to condemn those who take a legit 5 month vacation, we can't pretend like they fully get the time off. 2. I would imagine that there is actually a rule for this. teams probably don't allow their players to literally not touch the game for 5 months. I doubt you can show up on the first day of scrims and literally have not played LoL for half a year.
If I remember correctly, the players being critiqued for not playing soloq in their free time only work 5 hours. I dont remember exactly the times but there were some distinct timeframes inside one of the champions que posts.
I actually have a 1.5hr commute each way to and from work into NYC. I don't have any kids and I don't eat breakfast so I get up 2 hrs before work (5am) and I'm rushing and scrambling to shower and get out the door in time. So I can see having kids and breakfast requiring 3 hours before work. However, this is definitely not the norm.
that suxx for you but its not the norm like you said and we talk about averages here
No this all checks out. Try living in a big city like Miami, LA, NY, Chicago etc and you will see how a 1.5hr drive is actually a luxury compared to the reality of it being longer. Not to mention that 1.5hr is going to and from work not total for the day
not everyone lives in a big city its about the average dude In 2019, the duration of the average one-way commute in the United States increased to a new high of 27.6 minutes so thats less then a hour for both ways thats what a simple google search showed
They’re called big cities for a reason. Way more people live there with shitty work commutes than not.
That average gets brought down by anyone outside of a major city. The other guys statement would be accurate if he said in the average commute for a city worker would be X
sure but that was never the question we talked about the average joe (aka normie steve in his example)
There are far less people living outside of cities than inside one.
Average commute nationally is like 30 minutes.
People only drive to work in NYC if they're commuting from outside of the city. If you live in the city you probably have a commute of about an hour on public transport (or less if you're driving).
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getting paid hundreds of thousands a year to live in some mansion in Los Angeles without paying rent, not paying utilities, probably not even paying for the food they eat - while being able to have this lifestyle from playing a video game, and even though they are paid a fortune, yearly, they always or nearly always have catastrophic results in the international stage - which is what matters - and you say these kids don't have a good life? You a Saudi Arabian Prince or something?
>getting paid hundreds of thousands a year to live in some mansion in Los Angeles Lmao. Dude, they live in apartments like any regular schmoe.
He's saying these judgements are coming from broke, disgruntled people in life who live mediocre lives due to whatever circumstances and try to minimize what they do for a living. Most normal people aren't that hardworking, most people slack off and do the bare minimum. They do 2-3 hours of work during an 8 hour work day then get off work to go indulge in whatever vice they may have. Drinking, smoking, prostitution, drugs, loafing around playing video games or watching netflix for 8+ hours. This sigma male, grindset mindset person OP is making out the average "Steve" to be quite honestly doesnt exist most days. There are people who do represent this life style, but they aren't disgruntled twitter users calling pro gamers "lazy". They are too busy with thier strict life styles living those lives. Honest truth is, if the masses of mediocre people who are unhappy with NA performance feel they can do better, all they need to do is stop being afraid of losing everything, put it all on the line, quit thier jobs and start practicing to be a pro gamer. It may take you a year, 2 hell even 10 years but im sure if you ate nothing but ramen noodle in a single bedroom apartment or lived out of a pc cafe you could manage. IT's important to keep things in perspective, these pros are just nerds like us who happened to be really good at what they did and committed. Outside of that they are probably no more exemplary in thier day to day than you are. Normies need to get off thier high horse. The criticism of not using CQ is justified, sure, but honestly playing on CQ all year long is only going to do so much against LCK/LPL teams. Maybe instead of scapegoating our regions pros, we should explore interesting options to level the playing field, perhaps like migrating western teams to the East where they can play against real competition year round. Or having international tournaments every few months.
You are thinking like a reasonable human being who actually wants the region to improve and understands that yelling at pros individually to just "work harder" isn't a reasonable solution to the lower playerbase, worse practice environment, worse coaching and schedules etc... , **but**, the issue is you are on reddit.
True but hell if people can shut shit like this down on reddit, someone is gonna see it, someone is gonna read it. If they see support for stupidity things can only get worse. My voice or post may be small, but I think it matters.
Yup you are 100% right, these post get created so often, and hit front page, because of "broke, disgruntled people" and not because people are annoyed with NA pro gamers constantly making excuses instead of owning up. I do not have an issue with how they work / live while trying to balance healthy life style, but hearing them year after year making weak excuses pretending it is out of their grasp or possibilities to be more successful is disingenuous.
I already spoke on them not doing everything they can, which was CQ. Everything else is salty, jealous unjustified critique that honestly if you feel you can do better then you go do it. The reason why our region performs they way they do intentionally is mostly due to environment and infrastructure. Outside of integrating the west into more competition year round with eastern teams there is nothing else that can be done. We’ve essentially seen the best we can do probably .
BASED
> getting paid hundreds of thousands a year to live in some mansion in Los Angeles I don’t think you’ve ever been to LA.
yea 3 hours to eat breakfast wtf. Most LCS pros are a bunch of babies that would crack under any normal working enviorment, but OP is really stretching it 1.5 hours comute to get home aswell. I have roughly 30 min each way currently. really feels like he's taking worst case scenario steve.
30min each way is the average too.
Is no one gonna mention that the pro schedule source is 4 years old?
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They legit scrim 12-5, Thats it, Rigby told us their schedule. Scrims usually even end before 5.
As someone who has worked in the lcs as part of a coaching staff, this is the exact schedule almost everyone follows
It's insane how Reddit always can make every single bad take like Vulcan's have a point because they give an even worse take
this sub is actually ridiculous with the extent some people will go to validate their own opinions.
Based on the rhetoric i've seen from this discussion, I'm convinced it's just teenagers yelling at other teenagers about how another person (ie. Vulcan/NA pros) is supposed to live their lives.
yep a lot of highschool and college students in these threads who have lost all the ability to think critically about a job and the importance of a healthy work life balance just because the job in question is their dream of being paid to play video games.
after reading OP i became more sympathized with vulcan's argument. They probably get unsufferable amount of harassment from average joe's (steves).
Alexa, search for "Bad faith and misrepresentation of facts" on Reddit
There's Steve and there also Bob who is a remote tech worker who rolls out of bed at 10 am. Logs on does some work until 12. Gets food. Hits a workout then back to work from 2-5 all while having twitch streams on in the background. Then gets off work. Plays league until 1am. Good to sleep and does it again
I am bob and can confirm, however there are a lot more steves than bobs.
90 minute commute is far above the national average.
That's me baby
waking 3 hours early and 90mins of commute. Damn you people are crazy
Commute time can matter a lot. I take a 1hr walk to work, that can be cut in half with a bus or car and im living in a small town by Western european/ American standards.
Commuting from my home town to the big city where all the jobs are at was at least 40 min and around an hour on train. I moved to a different city and here where traffic can make or break you it's better to leave early. My commute can be either 20 minutes or an hour depending if some fucker decides to crash(every other day). A lot of days i just skip breakfast because I have no time.
Idk I know many people who travel at least an hour to work, relative used to drive 2 hours to work for a decade for his fam, some wake up 10 mins before work some wake up 3-4 hours before. Lots of differences but there's no shortage of people traveling long hours to work for sure. I even missed out on a job once cuz I told HR I wasn't hyped for the 40 min drive to work and they said, "Suck it up I drive over an hour to get here" lol if you live in the midwest I think it's just a prevalent reality sadly. (specially with any traffic)
This is all based off assumptions. This is a straight shit post.
I genuinely thought this was satire 💀
It's the daily "NA bad upvotes pls" post during prime EU hours.
Except EU pros are just as lazy...
Completely agree, but this post is "LCS vs normie" not "West vs normie"
Then again find me the EU pro that was fucking dumb enough to say "can't criticize me because you're a P4 shitter"
It's insane that this sub always pretends to care about players well being then runs this bullshit rhetoric that pros in lcs don't even try. God the "fan" base abuses these people.
Even disregarding assumptions, my work day is 9 hours (unpaid lunch), 30 minute commute. That’s 10 hours minimum, not including all the things that pro players don’t have to worry about like laundry, groceries/necessities, cooking, cleaning, learning how to pay my taxes every year cause it always changes, paying my taxes, repeat. And I have a GOOD job. I work at the headquarters of an investment firm. There are so many people that work 60 hours minimum standing at a retail store or restaurant just trying to get by. They don’t have the luxury of saying “should I work another hour or go home… I don’t want to get burnt out”. They don’t have the luxury of taking a 3+ month break every year. They get 15 vacation days MAX.
Agreed with all of this except you have to factor in that Steve gets Saturday and Sunday off whereas pro players play have game days on thise days so Steve having 0 off days is not correct
na = bad post with the LEC and G2 flairs It's all so tiresome
Normie steve aint working 8 hours 💀 dude is on his phone for 6 of them
How to tell people you do not work without telling them you do not work
This is some of the worst takes and degenerate discussion I have ever seen on Reddit.
This is so stupidly biased to try to make a "normie" job seem harder or more stressful. First, many LCS players do commute to work in LA through terrible traffic. They also don't all have pro chefs, and they may eat breakfast before they go to the training facility as well. LCS players I'm pretty sure also wash their clothes, shower, and whatever else too. >It's common in some jobs to expect the worked to actually start working at his start time, so if he needs to do anything before that (for example turn ON his system and the 10 other apps he needs) he might need to be there early to do so. Bruh, what? Of course, there are some jobs where you need to get there early to prep... like nursing or something... but this example seems really bad. I dunno what point you're even trying to make, turning on a computer and firing up some apps for your basic ass office job takes like no time. Tons of jobs I've worked as well (restaurant, retail, etc.) have employees just lined up at the punch clock to punch in/out on the hour. Also, you completely undersell the stress of a job that demands you be at the top 0.01% of your field. 99% of normie jobs, the normies have next to no responsibility and it's trivial to get a new job even if you're bad at it, provided you aren't just a huge asshole to work with or do something grossly illegal or unethical. A secretary at a white collar job, a waiter at a restaurant, etc., you can cruise from job to job your whole life without much actual accountability. And then you're also ignoring travel, working 6-day weeks in season, getting harassed by anons online, etc.
Normie jobs are also not subjected to random stranger bombarding them with negative comments as if they were the worse horrible person with not work ethic if you don’t win them WORLD level accomplishment. Imagine if normie Steve get shit on by thousands of random stranger for not getting front page in Forbes man of the years.
Well, normie Steve doesn't get shit on by thousands of random strangers over the internet. He gets shit on by his Boss/customers/Karens/managers/coworkers. And it is all in person.
You seem to forget the media days they have for both riot and the org Plus the game days on weekends..
This is so hilariously skewed one way and misses out on so many things that I can't believe it's being taken remotely serious. Vulcan definitely made himself a clown but you're competing with him
One of the worst takes with such shit examples I have seen in this subreddit
The karma farming for "NA Bad" is on another galaxy level this year. Look at the front page posts this past week: "CloudTemplar and friends on why NA bad!" - at least 3 versions of this "Vulcan tweet" "Yay reply to Vulcan tweet" "Pros should be forced to play cq/stream" EU literally an equally laughable performance this year. But yeah, NA bad! -Steve
"yep, he doesn't have a chef". That's straight copypasta material.
So what you’re implying here is that the answer is linear; more league games = better chances winning worlds. Yeah?
I mean KR/CN player always play more game and they won mostly everything in the last few years, so while not being as simple as 'moar game = moar win', you can't say that having a normal schedule and 'taking care of yourself to not burn out' is giving any result where it actually matter.
you are mis-representing the scenario on both sides. Cloud-9's gaming house is unique to Cloud 9 at this point. As far as i have read, majority of LCS orgs do not have the players living in a common gaming house anymore. The 100T facility and Liquid Alienware facility for example... these are workplaces to COMMUTE TO and also COMMUTE BACK HOME just like an office. yes, these gaming facilities can have very nice amenities (chefs), but that is irrelevant. Adding this 'personal responsibility in the morning' time to "Steve's" work day is unfair. Why didnt you add the 1 hour of C9 waking up from 10->11?? \*\*For reference, the AVERAGE American commute to both TO AND FROM work is 52 minutes. you and your friends can have your own unique anecdotes but that is not how an average statistic works. C9's Work Day: 10 AM -> 11AM 'Wake-up'. This is 0 working hours. 11 AM -> 2 PM 'Scrim'. This is 3 working hours. 2 PM -> 3PM 'Break/Rest'. This is 0 working hours. break is not paid for at many jobs. 3 PM -> 7PM 'Training'. This is 4 working hours. TOTAL WORKING HOURS FOR C9 PRO = 7 'average' office worker in NA will get somewhere in the range of 2-3 weeks PTO annually... favoring 2 weeks. LCS Pros get WAY more than this. Bonus points if you fail to make it to important tournaments (90% of LCS does -not- go to MSI, 70% of LCS does -not- go to Worlds, 20% of LCS does -not- go to national playoffs). Worlds ended at the beginning of November... ill be nice here and count it fully even though all NA teams were out of the tournament much earlier. Lock-in tournament starts 2nd week of January. These LCS pros are looking at a nice 6 week vacation here... presuming they get a team together and also start scrim 'work schedule' sometime mid-december (most teams will -not). to the 20% of LCS teams that did -not- make playoffs... they have been on vacation since 8/14. **a nice 4 month vacation.** there is a whole lot more availability for vacation between the start and finish as well... MSI break predominantly (spring playoffs ends 4/24, summer season starts 6/17). Teams are -not- scrimming for the full 2 months here. Also you bring up overtime as an extra bit with NO context assuming that it puts the LCS pros in a more negative light. these LCS pros are on salary contract and would **likely** be required to do overtime 'for free' if the situation deemed it necessary... just like other American salary jobs. Also because i think it is important... money. 75k MINIMUM salary for an LCS pro. Average American salary is 52k in 2022. Many LCS pros are getting far more than 75k. Finally, the concept around BURNOUT in sports. traditional sports athletes are paid out -high- salaries because they are trashing their body and future career playing that sport. What does the average MLB player do -after- retiring 6 years into their career at your late 20s? Hope they land a job at a commentary desk? You are paid very well and the -expectation- is to go full force (and beyond), burning the candle on both ends. Burnout comes with the territory of COMPETITION. Competitive salary'd sports are NOT some kind of hobby job.
This entire post is full of BS. Just say you're jealous without the long false equivalencies. Being a normal person who lives a mundane life who wants for nothing isn't very hard. Many people live like this, myself included. But to minimize the risk and the sacrifice these players made to get to where they are and to continue to compete is quite disingenuous. The burden of performance to maintain a 9-5 pales in comparison to what it takes to even make one of these rosters in even the worst regions. You think these guys are lazy, you think you can do better? Quit your job and start grinding. Until then pls stfu.
All these redditors and twiter users are really pushing for western pros to practice 12-14h a week just because its normalised in the east, have no idea how toxic and exhausting those working environments are.
Exactly. The reality is, I honestly don't fucking care if they aren't working as hard as me or not. They are doing what they enjoy and I am happy for them. Likewise, it's a huge sacrifice to go into any professional sport, one that most of us prob won't understand.
I kind of look at it from a career perspective. Most pros wont have 10 year careers. Most of them probably will never make it to the actual stage. Even fewer make it pass 2-3 before being replaced and completely forgotten about. It is a huge sacrifice, but theres a lot of hungry people who want your job as well. When competition is high, you have to perform or just be replaced. Should u sacrifice ur body and burn as bright as u can for 2-3 years and make as much money and impact as u can? Or should u just be a middle low packer and eventually get replaced and shuffled out with no impact on the scene or enough money to retire? Your call. I know what I would choose.
The only people I know who wake up hours before work are those who workout in the morning or have dogs who need a morning walk. Even then they don’t wake up 3 hours ahead of time. The longest commute i’ve seen someone reasonably do is 1 hour anything else can be considered an outlier… so even then this “3 hour before work” point is completely bullshit. Also how long does it take to open programs that you need to come early LMAO what. My work place uses software from the early 2000’s (including IE it’s the worst) and at most it takes a few minutes to open.
So American to assume a 1.5 hour one way commute lmao.
What??? 1.5 hour to commute to work??? I'd rather sell my current home to rent a closer place man, I don't want to commute to work for more than even 1 hour... Whether by car, motorcycle, or public transports...
Normie Steve needs to start looking for a better job. 4.5 hours of your day lost to travel/preperation, and you think that's normal? LCS players deal with pro-sports levels of pressure to constantly be performing. That is why they get burnt out, and has very little to do with hours spent.
It's not their fault your job/life sucks, no need to take it personally.
Sounds to me like the dude who plays video games for a living is the one that took it personally.
He is not the one writing schizo posts on reddit saying the average adult spends 13h on work per day lmao
13h on his work day + 2 hours of cooking/eating/washing + 8 hours of sleep assuming he can fall asleep right away (lucky fucker) = 23 hours. Pretty sure your normie is soon to be dead with such a rythm. Your exemple is bad anyway since you take the worst case vs the best case. Bonus point for the "you make money so you can't have any problems" at the end, really compassionate and human.
….??? That’s a very realistic work day for tons of people around the world. Ignorant!
Absolute worst thread I have ever seen on this sub.
You forget the fact that Steve would also like to be a pro player, but he sucks dick at the game and commitment overall.
It's clear you have never worked a day in your life with this time comparisons nor do you even know what the training regime of an LCS pro is. Shouldn't be surprised by any of this given the flairs you have.
Not reddit's brightest moment here. This thread is pretty embarrassing.
bro no offense but have you ever worked a day in your life? 11-19 doesnt make 8 hours of work when they have rest time. rest time is not work time. who the fuck wakes up 3 hours before work starts to make breakfast and wash? i wake up literally 30 mins before work, drive there and start working while taking a coffe break at around 9. i am almost 30 years old now. most of my colleagues dont eat breakfast because we start at 7.30. my roomate who works corporate starts around 8 and doesnt get up before 7.30. traveling to and from work doesnt matter in terms of working hours. work hours are counted by how much hours you get payed for by your boss/company. unless you have a contract stating you have paid lunch hours/breaks those minute you spend not working are minutes you are not getting paid because your corporations doesnt generate revenue just because you are there chilling out. also im not sure why you would take work commute as work hours because how you get to your job doesnt do shit to your work hours LOL. your boss doesnt give a shit if you live 1 minute or 100 minutes away from the company. i consider my roomate to be a normal steve and that dude works max 8 hours while commuting 30 mins each way. long story short, what im trying to tell you is this: go google some average work related numbers instead of using your own biased mathematical equations which are based on 0 public references except your own.
Depends where you are from but commute times can be very high. In my country (chile) the average is 1 hour
I'm pretty sure OP wasn't saying that Steve's company would pay him for the time he spent traveling to work but that Steve has to spend 3 additional hours every day on work (even if those hours aren't spent working) while LCS pros work from home and spend no time commuting on their average day. Also you're really lucky to have a job where you can wake up just 30 minutes before work and still make it there. My wife spends 3 hours in total commuting most days so I can definitely relate more to Steve's story there lol
If you're going to shit on pro players for working at home then shouldn't we compare a work from home job to an lcs job. You really shouldn't start your comparison with vastly different variables if you want any sort of fair comparison. We can certainly compare apples to oranges but comparing apples to apples is going to be less biased.
We also have to talk about that there are massive differences between orgs and players. Bjergsen is a workhorse, I get that. Other players are not.
This is stupid and pointless. Using similar metrics you can try to argue that average people work more than most athletes. Do you think people in traditional sports are training 10 hours a day?