The MOBA League of Legends is a tough e-sport: The international tournament MSI 2024 took place in China. Two teams competed for Europe: 22-year-old Oh “Noah” Hyeon-taek played as ADC for Fnatic. The young South Korean had big plans for the tournament in LoL and wanted to do his idol, Ruler, proud. But the pressure became too high.
Who is Noah in LoL? Noah started playing LoL competitively in 2017 when he was 15 years old. That year, the ADC Ruler won the world championship against Faker with Samsung Galaxy. It was then that Noah decided to become an ADC in Ruler’s honor.
Noah played for the KT Rolster youth team in South Korea, moved to Europe in December 2022 and has been playing for Fnatic, one of the best European teams, since June 2023. With his compatriot Jun he forms a South Korean botlane duo in the LEC.
The MSI 2024 tournament should now be his big breakthrough. Because he wanted to do Ruler all the credit.
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22-year-old decides to honor his childhood idol
How was he before the tournament? Realistically, Fnatic didn’t even have an outside chance of playing a good role in the tournament, but Noah had big plans. Before the tournament, he said in an interview that he wanted to beat the Chinese team Top Esports and thus take revenge for his idol Ruler, who was unable to qualify for the MSI in 2024.
Ruler, who plays for Chinese team JD Gaming, missed qualifying.
ADC is self-critical after the first defeats: I am the problem
So how did things go for the young ADC? Not good at all. Fnatic lost 1-2 against Top Esports. Noah had to go up against Jackeylove, one of the best ADCs in the world. Noah got 6 kills and died 6 times in the 3 games.
But he was not at all satisfied with his performance: He apologized for his performance on Twitter. He was the problem. Now we will prepare for Gen G.
But ultimately they lost 0-3 against the South Koreans and a 1-3 defeat against “Team Liquid” (USA) sealed Fnatic’s elimination. Gen G. later even won the tournament.
Player says: He read too many comments and had a panic attack
This is what the player said after the tournament: Noah is apparently depressed by the tournament and says: He played very badly and disappointed a lot of people, especially himself (via Twitter).
He says he read too many comments and opinions about himself, lost faith in himself and got so caught up in the crisis that he suffered a panic attack.
The 22-year-old says all he thinks about is what others say about him.
This is how he wants to continue: Noah says from now until the last game of the year he will delete all social media apps and just focus on himself and the people around him.
He apologized to the fans and said he would do his best to make them proud again.
Some players are their own worst critics
This is what’s behind it: This is something that you have to make clear to yourself from the outside. No matter how harsh and critical fans are, some players are the most critical of themselves. If, in addition to self-criticism and the professional criticism of the coaches, there is also insulting criticism from outside – whether justified or not – this can lead to a crisis, especially for young players, in which the criticism reaches the exact opposite and blocks players.
Even if Fnatic fans don’t want to hear it, the only game Fnatic could have won would have been against Team Liquid – and even then they would have been eliminated in the next round against T1.
Both Top Esports and Gen G. are actually playing in a different league than Fnatic, who were in the deepest mourning valley of European LoL just a few months ago.
There is no point in confronting the players with excessive expectations. How well Fnatic is doing today can be seen in stories like this: LoL: Fnatic releases heartbreaking video of how their Worlds dream is shattered