yellowpete: „I can see us doing well“

Peter ‚yellowpete‘ Wüppen is an exceptional AD-Carry, who was well known even before the earliest days in CLG.eu. At the moment he is the AD-Carry for ex-CLG.eu Evil Geniuses. Yellowpete has a long history of winning tournaments with CLG.eu and finished third at the Season 2 World Championships after knocking out team World Elite (WE). We asked him several questions regarding the current state of the game and LCS Europe. Please note, that the interview took place after the fourth week of LCS, so that we were not able to involve questions about changes in playstyle or the latest roster changes of the team.

escene.de: Hi Yellowpete, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. In your team you mostly play utility-oriented AD’s like Varus, Ezreal or Caitlyn, which bring certain strengths like initiation, siege-potential or global waveclear/ AoE –  Is that also your personal playstyle or something you are probably more or less forced into?
Peter ‚yellowpete‘ Wüppen: I am not forced to play certain champions by my team. I often end up having to pick my champion relatively early in competetive matches, which makes it so I tend to choose a versatile one that is potentially harder to counter by following picks than others.

Beside the fact that every ADC has some better or worse team-compositions to fit in, do you think there are several AD’s that just outclass others and are simply superior in the current meta? If that is the case, would you please evaluate which ones and especially why? And what is/are your favorite AD(’s)?
Draven has pretty
incredible lane presence right now, although he is not as dominant in
teamfights. Overall, I think the AD carry champions are pretty well
balanced amongst each other. If possible, I like to play Kog’Maw a
lot. Ezreal is also incredibly fun to play.

Do you think your mechanics are on par with World-Class-AD’s like Weixiao, Pray or Doublelift,or is there any specific area you think you need to work on?
I don’t think my mechanics are exceptional if compared to those widely regarded as the best AD carry players worldwide. That being said, the game revolves around more than just mechanics and I think I have the potential to easily hold my own on the highest level of play. What I need to work on  most is to transition practice performance better into tournament performance.

Do you personally think 1v2’ing is a problem and in case you agree, what would be your idea on how to fix it’s natural strengths? I myself have the impression it significantly lowers the amount of possible Champions in a Sololane,  because if a Champion lacks ranged skills he automatically has a huge disadvantage, which you can exploit quite easily. Would you agree with that statement or what are your thoughts on it in general?
It is true that in an environment where it is hard to predict where the enemy duolane is going to go, often it has the higher expected benefit to pick a champion that can at least potentially deal with a 1v2 situation – not even the midlane is excluded from that nowadays. Unless Riot reintroduces certain incentives for duolanes on one side of the map (such as formerly the double golems) or makes early dragons easier to take, 1v2 lanes will always be frequent as there is often no significant advantage to send your lanes either way (unless you have information on what the enemy is going to do). „Fixing its natural strength” won’t do anything regarding that – if playing 1v2 is made easier or harder, that will naturally always affect both teams equally, as both have a champion struggling in a 1v2, thus making it not more or less favorable to aim for a 1v2. In fact, even if it is made easier only for certain champions to survive such a lane, that is still not going to influence the total amount of 1v2s we will see – it might however widen the pool of champions we generally see picked for sololanes.

It seems like your team is struggling in S3 overall. At the moment you have the same W/Las Fnatic, NiP, Lemondogs and SK Gaming, do you think you have the capabilites to qualify for S3 World Finals and if so, what are your current main-problems that hold you back from constantly winning games again? And on the other hand is there anything you would call a huge advantageyour team has that separates you from others?
The regular season of LCS is relatively meaningless, the moment that really counts is just the playoffs. To reach them, we will have to finish 6th place or higher, which I think we are capable or doing. Then it’ll just depend on whether we have a good run at the playoffs like last time or not. I think we should just use the rest of the season to get a bit more organized ingame again and to implement certain plays as routine; if we manage to do so, I can see us doing well. I can’t see any obvious huge advantage that we have over other LCS teams currently.

Since last week, tournament games in LCS Europe are played on patch 3.8 as well. Mostly the Jungle was affected, but still do you think your team gained something from it, that could give you an edge in the future? What are your personal, but also your thoughts as a teammember, on this patch in particular?
I personally like the fact that there is less random XP distribution over the lanes at the start of the game, but obviously this affects everyone equally and doesn’t give anyone an advantage. The changes also make level 1 fighting a bit more frequent, which I guess is interesting to watch but can also influence games massively right at the start.

The probably biggest
surprise of the summer split was the rise of Team Alternate from a
well known team that always struggled
to succeed, to the convincing number one in LCS Europe. What are your
thoughts on them and why do you think they improved so much?
They are new, talented,
motivated and not too proud to copy and adopt working strategies.
They have the right mix of smartness/theorycrafting and bold,
decisive play.

If we zoom out of Europe
to a more global view on League of Legends, are there any teams or
players you personally look up to or which you exceptionally respect
for their achievements, work ethic, playstyle etc. 
There is many teams around
the globe that achieved cool things or are just generally impressive,
none of them really stands out for me though.

Do you have any ideas on how to improve the game overall, anything that (in your opinion) needs to be implemented or changed to make it even better? Regardless whether it is mainly for tournament play or the „normal“ playerbase.
There is a few QoL changes and additions that come to my mind that would make the game better, like an official replay feature or more freedom in customization of games. As far as actual gameplay is concerned though, I’m content just letting Riot do their job of creating interesting and eliminating anti-fun elements.

And to come to an end, relatively similar to the last question, if you had one wish, what would be your favorite change to make the game for you more enjoyable? Would it be just a small buff for a certain champion, a small nerf to objective-based metagame or would you remove teemo from the game?
One good thing would be to finally fix all the small bugs and inconsistencies like invisible skillshots, inconsisent CC- and flash behaviour, etc. to make the gameplay experience more „reliable“.

Thank you for your time once again and I wish you and your team EG Raidcall good luck for the next weeks of LCS Europe. If there is anything left you want to say, the stage is yours!
Thanks to all our supportive fans, you guys are great! Also, thanks to our sponsors.

Photo 2: facebook.com/lolesports