…and if Selfmade was in NA, he probably would have had similar struggles to Dardoch.
The thing is, very few of the Europeans who read this will disagree – unless they think Dardoch wasn’t actually that good, which isn’t an entirely unfair critique. I had my doubts too, until I watched him drag a mediocre Dignitas team to some sort of relevance playing whatever the f**k he wanted.
If you can win games on that team…
Dardoch is, and always has been, a very good Jungler, plagued by the curse of being a bit of a maniac. In that, he cannot resist flaming his own teammates, opponents, casters, backroom staff and probably himself.
Basically, he’s toxic. And in NA, that’s a no-no. Sort of.
They don’t mind a bit of toxicity, but it has to be all a bit sterile. It has to be redditor approved toxicity, and even then they get a bit uneasy when Alphari isn’t particularly happy that he got benched for an academy player.
Dardoch crosses that line, and I’m pretty sure Selfmade has as well at some point. I mean, the kid is L9 for a reason – but EU teams just sort of… deal with it? I don’t know, Europeans are just built different I guess.
Dardoch announces his new team in EU.
I don’t totally buy in to the idea that Americans are just soft and don’t get better because they don’t talk about their problems – plenty of EU coaches and players have moved to NA to bring the culture over, and it just doesn’t work.
But Dardoch just can’t seem to find a team who will actually keep him around, while in EU his talent would probably be more important than his explosive personality. They might just put him on a team with some other crazy cats and see what happens.
They could call it ‘Team Vitality’.
Dardoch in EU when he was younger would certainly have had a better chance at being a superstar – not least as he might play at a better level, but also because culture-wise, it would suit him a lot more. The flame he gives to his mid laner for not moving to the crab is probably not as bad as what a 13 year old tells you in EUW solo-queue because you took second blue.
As a jungler.
If I could go back in time, I’d move Dardoch to EU as a young adult and see what happened. He’s not quite as good as Selfmade, obviously, but he might have been had he been forged in the fire of EUM, instead of playing against MikeYeung and Grigne in LCS. Nurture outweighs nature quite often.
He’s essentially just L9 taken to the nth degree, where Selfmade was forced to reinvent himself much like RatIRL. Dardoch never was, and as such, his career will go down as a wasted one.
Move to EU now, Josh. It’s never too late.
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