If your League of Legends region had a special server set aside for the best players out there, would you strive to gain access to it?

This is the case with the Chinese League of Legends community, which is home to the League of Legends Pro League (LPL) and the home of some notable champions as of recent.

If you’re curious as to what a “super server” would feel like, read on below.

The Basics

The Chinese League community is the only community to have more than one server due to its playerbase population. It’s like what you would usually see in an old school MMORPG, but there are over 29 servers instead of around 3 or 4.

Out of these 29 servers, two of these servers are specifically dedicated to the upper echelons of ranked: The Pro-Player Restricted, and the Super Zone.

An excerpt from the League of Legends Fandom/Wikia site:

“This server is meant to scout potential players for LDL and LPL. Entry requires Solo/Duo Diamond II and above in another server, accounts are raised to level 30, awarded Blue Essence for the required champion pool for ranked, and gain 1000LP per win. Settlement date is the last day of the calendar month, new players will start counting the next month. On the settlement date, a player is removed if their recorded monthly games do not total at least 24 (18 games in July), if they are the lowest ranked player, or no player is at least Diamond II.”

From the requirements itself, it sounds like you have to make it to high elo in the initial server to even at least be permitted to apply, and it doesn’t stop there: you must maintain the standard rank or better if you want to keep your account in the super server.

For us players from the Riot-based servers, 1000LP is something you’d only ever hear to be possessed by the best of the best Challenger players who essentially have their top slots secured with that many points to their name. However, this is the norm for China’s aspiring pro players and Challenger streamers.

The Pros                                                                                                                    

Having the best of the best players curated onto a server solely dedicated for them entails high quality gameplay, and such is the things we see from the likes of Top Esports’ Knight and JackeyLove in their recent tournament runs.

Speaking of tournament players, it is explicitly stated in the former excerpt that this is the Chinese eSports community’s scouting grounds for the next best prodigy and young legends of the LPL. JackeyLove is an example of this, being a young ADC prodigy during his 2018 run with Invictus Gaming.

In addition to that, this is a good system to filter out the consistently strong players and the one-hit wonders that managed to get Masters only to fall back down to below Diamond II, thereby further ensuring the quality of games played on a daily basis. If other severs tend to complain about boosted monkeys in their games, China’s super servers are tweaked to take care of that.

The Cons

Despite the ideal scenarios of this fine-tuned community, there are some drawbacks to this.

Firstly, when you’re at the highest rank in your region, you will certainly see the same people doing the same stuff. That can be stagnating due to the implied monotonous gameplay, which is why you can see some players climb to Challenger at a different server other than theirs. For instance, some top players of the world (including Chinese pros) tend to bootcamp at the Korean server to experience high-level gameplay with a different playstyle.

However, in the recently concluded LPL Spring Season, there were changes implemented in the rulebook to restrict the Chinese players by making them maintain a Diamond 1 account or higher. While it is a good move to improve the quality of their own players, the lack of exposure to others’ playstyles creates an information gap in their own gameplay that could be turned against them.

Given that the 2020 Mid-Season Cup has concluded in favor of the LPL, this rule seems to be working well for them. Things could change later down in Worlds, as the LCK teams were able to taste Chinese gameplay despite being utterly defeated.

Another disadvantage of this super-server style is that there is no actual way to filter out the true competitive players and the casual high ranking players. By simply having a Diamond II account, there can still be trolls and casuals who would not take the game just as seriously. Even with these restrictions, there’s still a Bronze-to-Challenger like spectrum of players in the super server.

Should every server have a super server?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: The requirements for a region to maintain a single server is already costly. Depending on the location, there might even not be enough of a playerbase to maintain a consistent queue timer for members of this supposed super server.

This is why top players in other regions like EUW and NA are setting up bootcamps and physically travel to Korea just to play on another server and climb against an unfamiliar playstyle.

This way, it may look like that the Korean server is the world’s own super server, due to the skill the players there possess. They still have the aforementioned disadvantages, especially on the casuals and trolls part.

China, however, is able to accomplish the need for maintain not just one server, but over 29 servers due to their population and capacity to maintain such servers. This, in turn, may be a privilege for the team who has been taking global championships left and right.

Do you think the PH or other servers need a super server? Will there be a difference if a different region other than China had a super server? Let us know!