It seems in the wake of LMQ qualifying for NA LCS and players like Amazing and Seraph being imported by NA teams all the talk is about allowing foreign players into the NA LCS. Complaints about holding down NA talent range from pointing out more than 1/4th of NA LCS will be foreign players to the fact that only 3 of 8 junglers will be from NA in the next split.While NA players predict doom for NA, in truth the importing of foreign talent is completely the opposite.
The only solid argument against foreign players boils down to it having a negative effect because it removes NA competition. Often people cite the StarCraft 2 WCS where a lack of region locking has had a clear deleterious effect. It is certainly true that the WCS lack of region locking has exacerbated a problem in the StarCraft scene. You must live in Korea and play on the Korean SC2 server in order to be competitive and Korean players flock to other regions looking for a sure spot that they otherwise would likely fail to grab in Korea. The lack of region locking and the allowance for players to telecommute means local players never get to play those at the top level, and as a result never get the practice needed to be true competition without moving to Korea.
Unlike the WCS, the LCS requires players to show up and play live, in studio, every week; as well as qualify playing via the local server over an extended period. There is no WCS style show up for a week and otherwise play online via Korean servers from Korea. The LCS requirements are stiff enough that if you so much as don't live in the same state as the studio you're going to have a bad time which Curse, TSM, and Gambit have all attested to. This means even foreign players coming into the NA LCS are forced to play on the NA servers with and against the NA players.
Not only is bringing in foreign players not creating a WCS style scenario, it's also actively improving the global LoL scene as a whole. Players are becoming more valuable, lured over with promises of more money and better amenities. In order to keep all their own talent being bled away foreign organizations have to pay more and treat their players better. The knowledge that teams with big American bank rolls are willing to pick up talent from anywhere gives every player a stronger bargaining position, as a direct result every player is able to earn more and live better as a pro player.
On top of raising potential earnings Foreign players also help native players improve skill wise. It's no doubt that the NA players of season 3 were simply not on par with EU, China, or Korea, no matter how you look at it they were going to have to get better. Foreign competition doesn't just immediately improve the scene with an influx of new talent, they also serve as free personal trainers for every local player who runs across them in solo-queue. The way to beat the best is to compete against the best, and now NA players have access to more pros on an even higher level. The short term is players like Oddone, Elementz, Scarra, and other players who were not world class find themselves out of a job, the long term is they've been challenged to use a free sparring partner and get to the level they always needed to reach to be a world champion.
The truth of the matter is that any player replaced by foreign talent likely had low chances on the world stage anyways. It's hard to have that thrown in your face, but it's not the beginnings of the scene's apocalypse. It is an invitation, a challenge, to finally dig down deep and become the player required by a World Champion team. The NA LCS is going to be much stronger this summer thanks to the influx of new players, and the challenger scene will be better when relegations come about thanks to months of practice against a new set of best in NA players who've raised the bar.
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