Team WE Ben: 'The key to that is we have to trust each other more'
Following their hard-fought victory over Team SoloMid, Team WE now have the slight advantage of a 3-3 record, tied for second place with G2 Esports, but behind the undefeated SK Telecom T1 at the 2017 League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational. After the win, Yahoo Esports sat down with Team WE support Nam “Ben” Dong-hyun to talk about Team WE’s coordination and his synergy with bot lane partner Jin “Mystic” Seong-jun.
Congratulations on your win against TSM. How is the team feeling and how are you feeling?
That TSM victory really relieved our entire team, including myself. We were actually expecting a 2-0 today coming today. There are still a lot of regrets looking back at our match against Gigabytes, but I guess a 1-1 record isn’t too bad”
Condi said yesterday that you guys were almost back to the level of what you were at during the LPL finals and that your cohesion was coming back. Do you think that it came back today or are you still working on it?
Actually, looking back at today’s performance I think we still have a lot to work on to recover back to our LPL final performance. I think the key to that is we have to trust each other more, but right now I think we are having some team trust issues.
Do you know where those trust issues are coming from? Is it just playing on the international stage versus playing in the LPL?
Back in LPL we knew what we were playing against and we were more comfortable playing against those teams and preparing against those teams. But here at MSI I think that we aren’t fully prepared and that we didn’t prepare enough against these international teams. In addition to that in practice we are making these mistakes that we didn’t make back in LPL. I think that’s what’s making these trust issues.
Earlier today as we went over you guys lost to the Marines and they have this very aggressive early game style. I noticed you and Mystic played very aggressively in the beginning. Was that to counteract the Marines style?
Actually myself and Mystic prefer to play aggressively, and we prefer to put a lot of emphasis on bot lane. We were just playing our own game style. But playing against them we thought that Marines team was really really good up to the 10 minutes in the game. To wrap it up, we weren’t playing anything different against Marines.
Initially when you were brought onto the team over Zero. A lot of people said it was to help motivate Mystic in the botlane. Was that true and what is your relationship with Mystic? How would you categorize your botlane?
When I first joined, the team liked Mystic. He provided a very friendly environment and he made friendly jokes and he made it very easy for me to move into the team. That was really helpful. Mystic, even before I joined the team, was known for his strong lane phase. I also have a confident lane phase. I think together we make a very strong bottom [lane] team.
Emily Rand’s love of the 2013 KT Rolster Bullets will never die. You can follow her on Twitter.
