Announced earlier today on Weibo, Bilibili Gaming has signed a new top laner for their League of Legends team. In a surprising move, the team has signed former KT Rolster top laner Hwang “Kingen” Sunghoon.
A surprising move by Bilibili
One reason for the surprise is that Bilibili Gaming already has a different top laner signed until after the 2020 season: Kang “Add” Geon-mo. Add performed very well in the past season, so it’s honestly quite strange to see Bilibili grabbing another top laner, especially one who is considered inferior in skill.
To put things in perspective, Kingen and KT Rolster placed 8th in the LCK in the past split and 9th in the split before that. In addition to this, Kingen only played 13 games in the last split and only won 5 of those games in total. Sure, this record is slightly better than KT’s starting top laner, Song “Smeb” Kyung-ho, who started in a total of 29 games and only won 8 of those. Still, compared to Add, who won 20 out of 37 games played in the last split, these stats are miles apart.
The roster so far
The roster of Bilibili Gaming took a massive hit last month, when their star mid-laner, Lee “Kuro” Seo-haeng, left the team. However, recent weeks have been much better for the team. On Nov 17, they announced the extension of Zeng “Meteor” Guo-Hao’s contract through 2022. Meteor has been a key player in the roster since he joined last year.
Another major win for the team was the signing of Chu “FoFo” Chun-Lan, a player from Taiwan. FoFo has been the undisputed best mid laner of the LMS throughout 2019, leading the team to a perfect summer score of 12-0 and winning the LMS 2019 Summer Playoffs. In addition, FoFo led his team to a 3-3 score in the group stages of the 2019 World Championship. This was a better score than almost anyone expected the team to achieve on the international stage.
For more League of Legends roster moves, be sure to check out the news surrounding Damwon Gaming and the potential of them retaining the entire 2019 roster.
