Three years ago, at the 2013 World Championship, Royal Club’s ADC Jian “Uzi” Zi-Hao pushed his position’s ability to solo carry to its max — and still lost.
The ADC role had long been the antithesis to what professional League of Legends showcased — the syncopated beauty of five champions working in unison to ring the death knell of an opposing team. For years, the role featured a host of players who felt like the star. They had a dedicated support. They did the most damage. And that damage was vital to taking every major objective on the map. A single ADC — with precise mechanical excellence — could turn a lost fight into an ace.
More than any other role, it was ADCs who actively sought and relished in the opportunity to place a team on their shoulders. And if the godfather for this mentality was Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng, then it was Uzi who mastered it.
“In Season 3, I watched Uzi basically carry his team to the Finals,” says Doublelift, “With four almost dead weight players. I was like — wow– he exemplifies everything that I have tried to work towards.”
Doublelift, with Counter Logic Gaming at the time, gained a reputation for making mind-boggling decisions in game. Sometimes he’d Flash forward to secure a kill. Sometimes he’d check random bushes or get caught plowing his minion fields in a side lane. But his ability to turn those seemingly bad decisions into good plays is what allowed him to thrive and stand above his competitors for years. His career highlight reel would be full of plays that started with him on the brink of death.
“A lot of players who are falling off now look back with rose tinted glasses on the role, though,” says Doublelift. “It used to be so ridiculous when you got fed on an ADC — you could just put your team on your back and 1v5.”
CLG plummeted into darkness at times — such is their history. And Doublelift with them. But each time, he would carry them out. Whenever their backs were against a corner, they would turn to their trump card. Everyone knew it was coming. Those old “Protect the Doublelift” comps enabled him to become a god. And so he carried them.
For Uzi, that was the default. He doesn’t agree with Doublelift’s assessment that his team was useless. “Back in Season 3 and 4,” he says, “The teams I was on — their strategy was to make sure I was alive. I got all the resources. I was always way stronger than the other ADC. So they relied on me to solely carry the team — that was just our strategy.”
Uzi led Royal Club to back-to-back appearances in the Season 3 and Season 4 World Championship Finals. They were defeated both times by teams with more robust and coordinated team strategies. The singular, focused spear couldn’t pierce the combined walls of Korea. And so those walls mounted. And so Uzi stood at its base, trying his best to remember the view from the top.
The word “toxic” is thrown around a lot — it’s at the point where it has mutated to mean any number of things. The “?” ping is toxic. Certain champions or game mechanics are toxic. Certain players carry the perception of being toxic influences upon their teams — Doublelift and Uzi are two of the more prominent ones. They carried a stigma of being prima donnas. And at best they are described as temperamental.
But Doublelift says, “Temperamental usually just means you’re raging at your teammates or at the situation. That’s the nicest way to put it. It really just means you’re pissed off. I never used to rage at my teammates, but I’d be really bitter that they were never as good as me.” That attitude has shifted away since he has joined TSM, though, in part thanks to his team’s success and in part thanks to him growing up.
“I distinctly remember three or four times where the camera’s on him at Worlds and he looks visibly tilted. He doesn’t get up from his desk to go backstage to talk to his teammates.” For Doublelift, it was almost grating to watch — he saw a lot of himself in Uzi especially when it came to gameplay. And in Season 3 and Season 4, he had to watch the World Championship from the sidelines.
For Uzi, it’s born from a desire to win. He says, “There are times when I’m super focused on winning, and when my teammate makes a mistake, I get a little overexcited.” Here he stops and grins and shakes his head before continuing, “So I comment more aggressively. It’s because I want to win, though. I care a lot about the game.”
That desire has never been questioned. And his success on the international stage is to the envy of many players — back-to-back shots at the Summoner’s Cup is unmatched by anyone else in history. And he did it as the primary carry on two completely different rosters. But he failed to find footing — until now.
“You have to consider the other side of it, too” says Doublelift, “He’s obviously a very emotional guy and maybe that’s part of his strength. There’s definitely a line you have to tread, though — which is don’t rub your teammates the wrong way to make the environment super unpleasant. Try to be constructive.
“Be critical and temperamental with yourself,” Doublelift continues. “I keep that bottled up now and I don’t let my teammates see that I’m really upset at something or at a situation, but I am. People who are like that — that’s in my nature. That’s in [Uzi’s] nature, too. Balancing it just comes with maturity, and he’s considerably younger than me.”
League of Legends’ game balance has shifted considerably since we last saw Uzi on the Worlds stage. ADCs aren’t nearly as dominant as they used to be. The current meta is more reliant on working as a unit than ever. Singular displays of excellence are few and far between. Watching Doublelift adapt was like watching a lion learn how to identify the right moment to strike at unsuspecting prey instead of leaping wildly at first sight.
Uzi adds, “Compared to before, where I just won my lane and played super aggressively — always pushing and fighting — if we do that now we get ganked. You also have to know the general sense of what other lanes can do because it’s really easy for an enemy to Teleport to a ward behind us. Or they tower dive us. If you don’t know what other lanes are thinking, it’s hard to play well.”
Teleport, despite its nerf, remains standard in professional play. It creates crossmap pressure for the duration of the game. This makes bot lanes in particular more hesitant to fight. And if they are pushed up too far, they might push past a ward that could be used to create a pincer on them. This means lane dominance is now primarily reliant on the ability to win small auto-attack trades.
These changes are expected for Doublelift, though, who says part of being a good player is flexibility and being able to play from an even position at the very least. “If you can only play with a farming advantage or a gold advantage,” he says, “Then there is just something wrong with your brain. If you can’t play from behind, if you can’t play from an even state, and if you can’t work with your team to make something happen, then you don’t deserve to be on the Worlds stage and you don’t deserve to win.”
“That was actually really hard for me to wrap my head around for awhile because I had played from an ahead position for three years. So when I finally got to the point where people were farming evenly with me, and I wasn’t completely demolishing lane, it took a lot of time and effort to overcome that and learn how to play again.”
They are two of the most dominant carry-mentality players ever, and they were forced to adjust their game. In today’s professional landscape, mechanics are the bare minimum. While Doublelift and Uzi still retain impressive individual talent for the game, it doesn’t dwarf that of their competitors.
And if mechanics are the modern entry point, then players these days are being pushed out due to an inability to adjust to the meta. For ADCs, that’s a combination of champion pools, not respecting teleports, or — as Doublelift says — not knowing how to play when even or behind. It’s one thing to secure lane leads on the ranked ladder and another to do it in the context of a professional match. Doublelift and Uzi are two of the best at both.
This World Championship is stacked with talent at the ADC position. Doublelift and Uzi are just two of six players to crack our Worlds Top 20 list. Additionally, they are smashing heads already — Group D resumes action today with a gridlock atop the standings. In their first meeting last week, Uzi got the best of Doublelift. But now that they’ve locked horns once, it’ll shift into a battle of adaptability.
Doublelift believes that’s his greatest advantage over Uzi, saying, “He hasn’t changed much since [Season 4]. And even though it’s his greatest strength, it’s also his greatest weakness that he really, really only knows how to play from ahead. He’s not a flexible player. He doesn’t play with his team very well. And I don’t think he has a good head for macro. Part of my strength is that I can play that style, and I can completely take over games. But I also have a more strategic head for the game and I lead the team’s macro. So I think being a flexible player at Worlds is way more beneficial than being a one-trick.”
This realization is, perhaps, one of the reasons Doublelift returned to Worlds last year after watching Uzi from the sidelines. The game changed. Slowly, but surely, Doublelift has emerged as a leader in his own right. He made major waves earlier this year by joining TSM. For many international fans, it’s their first time seeing him separated from the Counter Logic Gaming name.
For him, it was a unique opportunity to look back and reflect upon his time on CLG. Atop that, he’s had to take a rookie in Vincent “Biofrost” Wang under his wings. “I don’t want to be the guy that scares [Biofrost] off or gives him a shitty time in his very first split,” he says, “I want him to look back and appreciate me as a teammate and — maybe like a more experienced figure in his life.”
That says a lot to longtime Doublelift fans who know his origin story — how his parents kicked from his home and essentially disowned him. He long felt like he owed CLG for providing him with his first home away from home. He returned the faith with years of loyalty. He was the face of their franchise. What’s happening now is him paying the favor forward. He has embraced his duty as an elder — and the responsibility of thinking about how someone else feels has helped him grow tremendously.
Uzi understood the need to make adjustments to his approach, too. He bounced around three different teams — OMG, Qiao Gu, and Newbee — before settling with RNG ahead of this Worlds. He paused when asked about what was different now, before saying, “Back in the days, I was more focused on my personal skills and how I can best play my champion, but now that I’ve played even more, I’ve learned it’s not just a personal game. I’ve learned you have to be able to coordinate and play with your team. The meta is more balanced.
“I swapped to a lot of different teams. I was used to everyone — all four teammates — protecting me as the damage source, but now I can’t just rely on myself to win the game. I can’t just do all the damage by myself and not care about the rest of my teammates. With this realization, I’m less aggressive, too.”
It may yet be that Doublelift is correct about Uzi’s stubbornness, but Uzi thinks RNGs inconsistencies stem more from communication problems. China famously attracted hordes of talent from Korea to start 2015 and just as infamously saw it amount to little at last year’s World Championship. With time, however, Uzi believes the communication factors can be mitigated if the players can get comfortable to the point where they know what the other is thinking.
The struggles do exist, though. He says, “ADCs in this meta are very reliant on supports in the lane phase. And in terms of communication, details are sometimes hard to communicate because [Mata and I] speak different languages. Communication errors mean we can’t cooperate to the best of our ability.” This is a scary proposition for opponents — Uzi and Mata already look like one of the most dominant bot lanes at Worlds.
For Doublelift, this is still secondary to his preparation and more holistic approaches to the game. If it’s harder to win the game by brute force, then strategical mastery is more important than ever. “I used to not have a good head for the game,” he says, “But now I spend a lot of time studying it. I try to figure out how to get the team to work together to do Dragon or whatever. I’m more calculated.”
His approach to shotcalling is, well, classic Doublelift. He says, “It really tilted me when I played with indecisive shot callers — I’ve played with a lot. I always thought, ‘Why wait? Just do it now.’ And if it doesn’t work, then fuck it. You learn from it and maybe the next game you can make a better decision.”
Both Doublelift and Uzi have taken different strides from where they used to stand, which was the perch branded with a “me against the world” mentality. That they clash at this Worlds is a sort of throwback to the old days, where carries flexed their muscles and their guns.
Even at his peak as an individual star, Uzi recognized the shortcomings even if he couldn’t articulate the why behind it, saying, “In Season 3, when we played against SKT, we knew we had no chance because we never once beat them in scrims. We didn’t even know what we needed to do against them to win.”
It’s been three years since, and it seems Uzi has finally started to find his answer. Whether he has fully embraced it or not is yet to be seen. Another run to the Finals might solidify his standing as the greatest ADC ever. But for him, it’s enough to be remembered in China — he says, “I want people to remember that the LPL region had amazing bot lanes.”
And they’ve had many. A lot of those iterations include Uzi. He’s not sure what expectations are reasonable to place on RNG, though. He wants to be recognized ahead of all the other ADCs in the world again, yes, but he also understands his team’s ups and downs. At their best, he thinks they can beat anybody in the world, but at their worst, they can also lose to anybody.
The two carries can’t pull off the same type of magic that made them famous. The game is simply different now, and the competitors are better. The two of them still show off when they can. And when they clash again today, it’ll be a special treat for fans.
This time the pressure to succeed lands squarely on Doublelift and TSM. He says, “I feel way more pressured this year compared to any other year I’ve played. I don’t think I’ve ever worked as hard this year — and that expectation is definitely on and from myself.
“I want to be remembered as one of the greatest of all time. That’s always been my goal. To be the greatest of all time at something. Six years ago, I found League and I knew this was going to be it.”
