William 'Scarra' Li is the coach for Team Dignitas. Scarra is a veteran player of the North American League of Legends season, having played professionally since season 1. He has competed on the international stage multiple times, including on the Season 3 North American All-Star team. Most of his time as a professional player was spent on team Dignitas, and after retiring he remained on the team as their coach and sub.

Recently with everything that’s been going on with Montecristo and CLG, there’s been a lot of discussion about what a coach is supposed to be doing. What do you do as a coach and what do you think of the evolving role of coaches in eSports right now, specifically League?

Scarra: I think my role encompasses a lot of different stuff. I don’t really care about the terminology as much as I care about just making sure the team can win. I’ll do everything from dishes to making sure people are awake and active for certain times, making sure that they’re focused, pretty much I’m just here to make sure that they can play the game and improve at a rate that’s efficient and effective, rather than be inefficient and ineffective, which, of course, would make sense.

What do you think of the difference between having a former professional player as a coach versus having someone who wasn’t a professional player prior to becoming the coach?

Scarra: I think it just depends on the kind of person you are and the team you’re coaching. Especially in this scene it’s hard to get respect as a person because a lot of times, especially as a coach of analyst, you’ll be going onto a team where there are just a bunch of big egos. People who’ve been in the scene for a long time, who made a name for themselves, who worked their way up, and then you come in and you’re just like… there. It’s really hard to be able to contest people like that because it’s just hard to build that kind of respect or to open with some kind of respect going in.

In addition to you, what kind of staff does Dignitas have supporting the League of Legends team?

Scarra: We have 3 people right now. Me, who’s considered coach. I’ve got ComleyCast, or Adam as I call him, he’s the other coach. The title doesn’t really matter, I don’t care what he calls himself, I guess we just settled on another coach, and Mylixia, who is our life coach, he helps us a lot in terms of making sure people’s mental balances are correct and not messed up all the time. Aside from that I think that’s pretty much it.

As far as Dignitas’s performance at the end of the season, where do you think us as a team fell apart against TSM and what did we change to beat CLG to avoid relegation matches?

Scarra: Honestly, I don’t think we needed to change anything to beat CLG. I think they were just a weaker team than TSM, but, like real talk, I’m not going to go ahead and say CLG and TSM are the same skill level. I think there is one team that had a lot more internal problems and a lot more problems in general and there’s another team that consistently just didn’t have those kinds of problems. I think, uh, aside from that… I think we were much more comfortable in the best of 5 scenario going into the second set.

I think that’s a big deal, because in the first set against TSM… a lot of how best of 5s should work is that you go in with a strategy and then you make adjustments on the way. It’s pretty flexible in terms of what you want to be doing and I think that, uh, we kind of missed the point. I don’t know how we missed the point, but we ended up just, like, not getting it, because… a good example is when we played Nasus the first game, right, and after Nasus, we decided to not go for Nasus again, when they had not shown any reason, or anything to show draft or in the bans that they could deal with it. I thought it was a really poor decision because, especially in a best of 5 when you’re one game up, you should force the other team to have to react to your strategy.

It wasn’t like Nasus was some kind of one time deal, like, or some sort of cheese. He was an effective split push strategy that we know worked and I think that, like, being able to play out best of 5s in general was just a big problem that we ended up having in the TSM series that we were able to correct in the CLG series.

So do you think the move to best of 5s really shook up the playoffs? We saw some games like Curse being able to take the first two games and them LMQ being able to adapt better in the best of five scenario. So do you think some teams adapted better to best of five than others did?

Scarra: Yeah, definitely, I think best of fives are huge, like, I can’t stress enough how important best of fives are. Like, best of fives, you can get so much out of best of fives, it’s like ridiculous. Uh, hmm, A lot of best of fives comes from just being able to correctly realize, like, how you need to adapt, like, what problems game by game were the most important and like, what problems you should fix. I think a lot of that just has to do with how good and how smart your players are and how smart your support staff is. I think that’s, like, a big difference.

So, moving on to the upcoming world championship itself, how do you think North America’s going to be doing at worlds? I’ve seen a lot of people be putting Cloud 9 over TSM in ranking and such. Do you think North America has a better chance than we did last year at worlds this year?

Scarra: Uh, what happened last year?

We had TSM, Vulcun, and Cloud9.

Scarra: Wow I did not even remember. But yeah, we had those 3 teams, I remember TSM beat Lemondogs cause that was a big hype. I think, uh, yeah I think they have a lot better chance this year. I definitely do, I think everyone seems to have improved at quite a decent rate and even teams like us, even teams that ended up placing 5th and Curse ended up playing 4th really improved in a lot of different ways. Even though the standings don’t reflect that, I feel like where we started from and where we ended was such a huge chasm in terms of like the amount of improvement. The same can be said for almost every team here, like the amount of vision control had improved dramatically.

Like we’re able to uh, get the objectives early, on time, set up picks, control vision, understand like win conditions and how to bait Baron. It’s like ridiculous actually how much certain teams have improved and almost every team has improved in some regard. Even like the last place team, Complexity improved quite a bit and even though they’re not in LCS right now, I definitely expect them to come through the expansion tournament. I think, I expect at least one NA team to make it out of groups, although, yeah, at least one, maybe two. So, I’d say 100% one team and 50/50 on a second team joining them.

You just mentioned the expansion tournament coming up. What do you think the pros and cons are of having ten teams in the LCS compared to the eight we’ve had before?

Scarra: I think with the ten-team announcement, they’re going to change the format. Having they announced they’re changing the format?

I don’t believe so. All they’ve announced is the addition of two teams.

Scarra: Right. I think they’re gonna change the format. There’s no way they’d be able to add two teams and keep a similar format and just increase the number of games. If the format is changing to something like a best of two system that I’ve heard rumors is gonna come in, I think it’s gonna be a lot better for next season. The actual addition of two teams though, I’m not sure. I think it’s great to be able to be able to build talent, it just sucks we have to build talent in the LCS rather than on an amateur team because we don’t have a good amateur scene. We don’t have an NLB or an LPSL or whatever China has.

So you think one of the biggest failings of the LCS right now is that the amateur scene is so weak?

Scarra: Failings is a pretty big word. I don’t know about failings but…

One of the problems?

Scarra: Yea. That’s the problem with every region. The amateur scene isn’t as good as it could be.

What do you think of Riot’s recent discussion of the cross-regional rules where teams can only have two members that are not residents of whatever region they’re playing in?

Scarra: I think it’s really smart. I think it was necessary before full teams from other regions came over. It was definitely necessary. I don’t want to sound xenophobic but it gets to the point where at some point you have to put the stop on it. I think that other scenes, namely Starcraft weren’t able to correctly implement that fast enough or as effective enough to be relevant and Riot wanted to stop it immediately before it became a problem. Some could argue that LMQ being in the LCS is already a problem but I don’t really care about them. It’s cool that they’re here, I love all their players but any more might be a little crazy.

So the moving of players is good, but too much moving is just going to destroy scenes because they aren’t actual players from that region?

Scarra: Yea, I don’t even know if the moving of players is so great. It’s hard to build talent especially without a good support staff. I think that’s the best way to put it. It’s extremely hard to build talent without a support staff and if you don’t have that you don’t have much.

A good example is, especially in regions like NA and Europe I think there are less of the crazy talented players. For instance if you look at the NA region and you look at players who aren’t in the NA LCS, I can’t name a single player that is incredibly talented, I look at this guy and he’s a beast. If I could see him in NA LCS because he’s mechanically talented and can play multiple roles, multiple champions.

Maybe you can make a case for some of the multi-time challenger players like Adrian and maybe Zignature, people like those. A better example is you look to Europe and you see someone like Incarnati0n. When I saw Incarnati0n play I thought, “this guy could potentially be the greatest player ever”. This is a guy that can get on any team and perform well. You won’t have that kind of consistency, that kind of skill level. I can list other examples in Europe, Europe doesn’t even have that many. Europe has maybe Incarnati0n he’s banned for life I don’t know when he’s gonna get back. Europe has WhiteKnight. I think WhiteKnight is extremely talented. I’ve heard things about his work ethic but I think WhiteKnight is a player that could be extremely good but it’s hard to say.

Aside from him there’s one or two more, I don’t follow European solo queue and challenger as much but I’ve heard rumors from European players as well as other NA players who could potentially be gods at their role. We just don’t have those kinds of people.

But I think you don’t necessarily need a god. You can’t look into solo queue and find a Faker. I think that’s not very likely. But you can definitely look at train someone to be as consistent as, I don’t know, Sneaky is really good. I feel like you could maybe train someone to be up to his level. That might be taking away from Sneaky because he’s the best NA AD Carry right now. That might be taking away a little bit from him. I think that the infrastructure on the teams hasn’t been good enough to be able to train players to become better. That’s something I didn’t realize was relevant until I became a coach because you really need to have a grasp of how players will be able to work in a work environment to be able to create better players.

A great example of a failure in doing that is when GoldenGlue first joined Dig. I wasn’t able to correctly assess. He got caught up in a really poor work environment and it negatively influenced his play. He didn’t get a lot of other things from me that should have happened to make him a better player. I know for sure his confidence was shaky coming here and if I was able to at least work on his mental state he would have performed better at the LCS. But I wasn’t able to do that and that’s a good example of me not being good enough to support an amateur.

Maybe now, and in a different work environment, I could definitely train amateur players to be better but I think before it was not as easy because I just didn’t have the grasp of how people clicked together and what was necessary and what was needed in an environment to make people win.

You said before that you think North America as a region got stronger this season. Do you think that is because so many teams have been picking up coaches, analysts, whatever you want to call them, and those coaches and analysts that were already there have been improving?

Scarra: Definitely, I think that’s the main reason that they’ve gotten better. I think a lot of it is also that team’s realized the importance of having a support staff. People before might have been really stubborn about it, but as other teams slowly picked them up, more and more players thought they were better or more necessary or at least productive. Having that in mind makes people less likely to have egos clash when other people come in. It’s very for an outsider to come into this kind of field and say “look, listen to what I say” because that creates problems.

Will you be joining as a guest analyst or anything at worlds this year?

Scarra: Nope. I will not be joining the desk as an analyst this year.

Any final remarks or shout-outs?

Scarra: Typically this is the easiest part because I say “our sponsors, our fans” but I wanted to say something more here. I’m not quite sure how to phrase it. It sucks that we aren’t going to worlds. I think everyone is really bummed about not going to worlds. I think this was a test for me in terms of coaching. This is definitely a split for me where I was a full-time coach, I worked eight hours a day, maybe a little bit more and I wasn’t sure how I was gonna perform.

Now that I have a good idea about what’s gonna happen, where people are gonna go, I feel like next season is going to be dramatically better for the team that I’m on. Aside from that I want to thank the fans and the sponsors for letting me be able to play or coach at a competitively level. That’s great, that’s my whole lifestyle. Nothing but a huge thanks to those people.