Winning isn’t everything, but it’s close. FORG1VEN returned to H2K at the end of the summer, and it seems, all their woes were quickly forgiven.
H2K’s ADC Konstantinos-Napolen “FORG1VEN” Tzortziou has been one of the most polarizing figures in professional League of Legends. At his best, he has been simply game-changing. Teams have revolved their entire pick and ban phase around stopping him. But for one reason or another, his teams had consistently failed when it came to the Playoffs.
Even this year, H2K couldn’t reach either the spring or summer Finals in Europe. They managed to qualify for the World Championship because the teams around them imploded even harder. FORG1VEN unceremoniously parted ways with H2K after their poor showing in the Spring Playoffs. A brief stint with Origen followed, but he left the scene shortly thereafter and watched from afar for most of the summer.
But an injury to H2K’s replacement for him — Aleš “Freeze” Kněžínek — created room for FORG1VEN to return to the lineup. Though they only had a few weeks to develop their synergy, H2K managed to challenge the top ranks of Europe. They would fail to reach the final again, but their showing in the EU Summer Playoffs earned them enough points to qualify for Worlds 2016 as the No. 2 seed from the region. FORG1VEN would finally have the opportunity he’d long coveted — a chance to prove his worth on the grandest League of Legends stage.
For FORG1VEN, this has been a strange series of events.
“People don’t realize what we went through to get here,” he says. “My army duty, me being kicked. I got publicly flamed [for so many different things] the whole time. The strings were pretty strange — how all of it connects — it’s really weird. If one of these things didn’t happen, then none of this would have happened — qualifying for Worlds and so forth.”
For him in particular, it has been a unique journey. A public appeal helped him delay his military service for country, Greece. That time, public perception sympathized with him. But he has also received a lot of vitriol from the public for his comments — generally on social media — about other players and teams and even teammates. People often vilified him as a toxic presence. They said all he did was shift the blame. It is not fair to make these claims without a full understanding of the picture. And he is, of course, aware of these things.
“I can’t say I’ve changed much — I’m very similar to how I was at the beginning,” he says. “But the differences are — after the spring, I literally stopped caring. What I mean by that — there was disparity between how much teammates played and how they performed. [Now], I am more laid back because after the spring, I stopped thinking of League of Legends too seriously.”
This is different from not caring for him though. It seemed as if the time off helped him gain some perspective on the competition. He realized “If I won, I won. If I lost, I lost. I accepted the result.”
It was difficult for him to see some of his teammates either not caring or not putting in the same amount of effort as him. As for the public perception of that — how he bares his emotions on his sleeves — he says, “Like it or not, I am a very polarizing figure. Even if people like me for some reason, they will always find another reason to dislike me.”
There are few players in the scene as a vocal as FORG1VEN — he is very open on public forums. This is a lot easier to love until he says something you disagree with. But it comes with the package. This is something he understands very well.
Prior to the start of this Worlds, if you’d told people that the Semifinals would feature three Korean teams, they would have groaned. But they’d have believed you. They’d just all have expected the final slot to be their team. Few people expected that fourth team to be H2K, but here they are, riding a seven game winning streak as they clash with the tournament’s other hottest team — Samsung Galaxy, who are also sporting a seven game winning streak.
H2K has done it thanks in large part to their dominant laners — this has always been a trademark of FORG1VEN. Their ability to win lane and snowball those small advantages into a victory has been almost unmatched. Solo laners Andrei “Odoamne” Pascu and Sang “Ryu” Wook Yoo have particularly shined — there was even a recent victory in which FORG1VEN put up a support-like 0-1-18 score line.
He is grateful to have reliable teammates. Their success as a team revolves around both their individual talent and their ability to gel. “The meta now — there are no lane swaps,” he says. “People can’t get away from me. Or my top laner. And these things let my mid laner do more, too.
“Most of the bot lanes we played against picked lane bullies to match me, but they didn’t,” he continues. “Now, I think I pick more for my team than my opponent. The game isn’t won 1v5 anymore.”
Though he does admit he sometimes wishes it were still that way. There were games where he felt he could single handedly will his team to victory back in Season 4. He says, “I have the ability to create the meta. When I showed up in 2014 for the first time, bot lanes were terrible. When EU bot lanes went against international competition in the past, they were mocked badly. When I came, people were forced to match my skill level or at least my determination and will to win the game.”
In older seasons, the ADC role was the dominant force on most teams — especially as a game progressed. Repeated changes to the meta have diminished the role compared to its height, at least in terms of ability to single handedly win fights and games. These days, it’s more of a balancing act that forces all five players to maneuver in unison. TSM’s ADC, Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng shared this story about those days with me:
“In that transitional period for league, there were a lot of up-and-coming players, like FORG1VEN — it’s really funny, one of my favorite stories to tell my teammates. FORG1VEN messaged me a long time ago when he was first came into the scene in Season 3. He was like, I look up to you, I’m a big fan — what do you think? I’m about to make it into EU LCS — what ADC should I play? What do you think is good?
I was like, who is this guy? I’ve never heard his name. Konstantino sounded like a funny European name. I didn’t really know what to say. I gave him the best advice that I could and I said good luck, but I didn’t even know what team he was playing on. And it turns out he would become one of the most prolific ADCs in the European scene.”
When I tell this to FORG1VEN, he laughs and kind of shakes his head. He says, “I was qualifying for the LCS with the Copenhagen Wolves. We were going to play in the upcoming Promotion Tournament, there was rapid change in the meta for ADCs. I can’t say exactly that I look up to any player, but I respected him very much as a pro. He was very charismatic and I enjoyed watching him play. I sent him a message on my personal page — he actually replied to me one day after.”
It was a lot easier to communicate with pros even a few years ago — before teams developed the infrastructure to train players on how to effectively navigate through social media. It was a period in which fame and the like had yet to be defined. Esports felt like this new thing that was growing faster than anyone could properly wrap their minds around.
For FORG1VEN, who has had such a long and often maligned career, this road has been nothing short of extraordinary. He is an incredibly imposing player on the Rift. But off it, he has had to make many adjustments to his personal situation. That it all strung together to culminate on this particular moment is something that doesn’t slip past him.
“[Reaching the Semifinals is a really huge success in itself]. We are coming to this realization more and more, but we are actually in the Semifinals of the World Championship,” he says, while acknowledging the team’s struggles throughout the year. “[But] everything just clicked when I rejoined them. The team and I both appreciated the wins even more. Me and Jankos have never played on the World Stage, so it’s remarkable. One could argue about the group draw or how we faced two wildcard teams or other teams under-performed and this or that, but the teams we did beat — we beat them very convincingly.”
As for his opponents in the Semifinal? He thinks H2K are heavy underdogs. But FORG1VEN has been a bit of an underdog his whole career — some of that status self-inflicted, some completely out of his control. No matter what happens, it is now impossible to say he doesn’t show up on the big stage. But he’d probably love to shut the rest of his dissenters up with a big win.
