[2021] Why Owners Want to Remove the Import Rule, and Why That's a Terrible Idea

Hey, gbay. I appreciate the video and I agree with most of your points. However, some issues or outright mistakes:

1. At 3:30 you talk about no local talent post-franchising. This is actually very easy to research and I'm sad you didn't. I know you went for a quick vlog-style post, but just saying "Well I'm pretty sure the number of imports only went up" is not exactly great argumentation. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you didn't substantiate your claim in any way.

2. 10:10 has a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. The demand for top talent is strictly lower right now because it is impossible for an LCS team to have Rookie, TheShy, and JackeyLove on the same roster. There are only so many truly S-tier pro players out there. Only so many Fakers, CoreJJs, etc. but only 20 of them can ever be in the LCS. The demand is lower. This lowers their price. Removing the import restriction would RAISE the price of S-tier pro players because then Team Liquid could actually sign Rekkles. They literally can't right now. The opposite is what would happen: The price of residents would plummet. There are very few people competing for Tactical's job. He has a lot of leverage in contract negotiations because there aren't a lot of Bot Laners that can legally play for TL as well as Tactical does. This disappears once they can bring in any English-speaking player.

3. 15:00 you talk about solo queue not improving. The conjecture just feels weird to me. It's another wholly unsubstantiated claim that feels off. Again, it isn't necessarily wrong, but for a video that purported to try to show both sides and arrive at a reasonable conclusion (which I overall agree with), I think you could have done without trying to disprove points in such a weak manner.

4. I'm sad you only gave two StarCraft tournament examples out of the multiple leagues you mentioned. I was honestly getting excited for your mention of OWL because I never really followed the league and was looking forward to any level of analysis on it. Instead you simply mentioned OWL and imports and never brought it up again. Once again it feels pretty unfair to say, "Here's my example of how teams abuse no region locking" and then not provide literally any examples. For reference, your coverage of LMQ was good and about the level of detail I'd have liked to see.

Again, overall I thought the video was good and I agree with you. But I'm just not a fan of making claims that you don't back up, or in some cases, outright falsehoods.

Respect for you, too <3

On the salaries point, I don't try to find any extra information. Certainly nothing is handed to me in that regard as a caster and I don't go looking for it. I probably get salary info from the same places you do (RIP ESPN).

There is more breakdown that could be done on style-of-imports, to be fair. For example, right now no self-respecting LCS or LEC team imports players who don't speak English anymore. This used to happen. It was bad. They never worked out. The coaches/GMs did a bad job vetting and understanding language barriers. So through that lens, by default LCS teams need to be English-speaking, unless you could get together a roster like huhi+Pobelter, any other Korean-American or Korean-Canadian players and some more Korean imports who may not speak English. That would absolutely move the landscape around.

Being an import is not a specific need. Teams are not shopping for "import-tagged" players. They are shopping for very good players. However, they are only allowed to attain two import-tagged players. Thus Team Liquid right now has zero demand for any import-tagged player. Even if they'd like to pay for Faker they literally can't without firing Alphari or CoreJJ... which means they aren't in demand enough...

Indeed, there is a lower supply of "resident" players since everyone who's not an NA resident isn't a resident. You have a lower supply of resident players, raising the prices of the elusive good-and-resident player, and a lower demand of import players, lowering their prices.

Lo and behold, here we are, at exactly the place I mentioned.

Read my point more carefully. I'm implying teams won't default to English-speaking, just like with LMQ in 2014

Edit: I had a different version of the above post before I actually submitted it. So it wasn't explicit at all there.

In short, yes, you could just have a full Korean-speaking team without import restriction. Your pool of acceptable players skyrockets.