While I don’t often talk about my PC gaming experiences on this blog, it is and always has been my intention for this to be an all exclusive gaming blog. Today we are going to talk about League of Legends, a 10 year old MOBA that is without question the king of kings when it comes to the genre. Currently according to statistics released by RIOT games, there are over 100 million active players each month and on average 7.5 million players online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week , 365 days a year. It is among the largest MOBA game communities in E-sports today and that means that if you are are game reading this article, statistically speaking, you either have, do or will at some point be a player.

Over the next couple of articles we are going to dive into League of Legends. I have been a player since League of Legends launched nearly 10 years ago and I have had a lot of personal success with the game and buckets of experience. I have really enjoyed my time despite the often harsh community that forms around the game and in this article series I have constructed countless tips, tricks and lots of tid-bits of information less commonly known by league players. Consider this your guide to League of Legends from an old dog, whether you’re new to the game or an old veteran trying to climb the ladder of success.

The Basics Don’t Change

First and perhaps the most important thing most League of Legends players overlook and ignore are the fundamentals (the basics) of the game. I think it serves every League of Legends player, new and old alike to familiarize (or re-familiarize) themselves and remember the core fundamentals of League of Legends road to successful play, so I will list them here first before we get any deeper into this guide.

You cannot win alone
No matter how good you are, no matter how well you play and no matter what you do in a match, its physically impossible for even the best player in the world, to beat, even the worst team in the world alone. Don’t let anyone ever fool you into thinking you can carry a game without your team or that somehow your fate is not intertwined with the rest of your team. This IS a team E-Sport from the core of its design and alone you will ALWAYS lose, period. You need your team, which means that they are on your side, they are your friends for the 30-45 minutes you are in a match together.

You can play well and still lose
No matter how good you think you are (or actually are), no matter how well you play, there will always be people who play and are better than you. Make peace with it. This is a game of skill and your skill is your skill and everyone else’s skill is everyone else’s. You can’t expect players who are below your skill level to perform as good as you, nor can you expect to beat players who have higher skill then you. During matches you must accept your “real situation” as opposed to your “frustration situation” (more on those terms later).

Statistics Don’t Matter, Focus Does
Your KD ratio, your win/loss record, your league rank or division, your farm.. forget about all of it, it’s totally and utterly irrelevant. The only thing that matters is your last game. Did you improve, did you discover something new about the champion that you just played, did you discover a new combo, did you make mistakes and were you able to identify them. If you are focused on your performance and strive to improve your actual play, your statistics will improve automatically. Don’t let the numbers get under your skin, focus on the matches, on your actions, on your real performance and strive to improve your play, your stats will improve as you do.

Play to your strengths, develop your weaknesses
There is a tradition among League of Legends players, which is to speak about what your good at. I’m a good ADC with Ashe, or I’m great top with Tremele. All great and good, every player should play to their strengths, but League of Legends is a game with well over 100 champions, not the 5 you play. Knowing what champions can do, is a key element to understanding how to deal with them in game or benefit from them if they are on your team. As such, one of the key fundamental approaches to the game is to always be developing the weakest part of your game. Do you suck at support? Well then that is where your focus should be. Why? Because it will make you even better when you play to your strengths and give you a far broader understanding of the game.

You will lose with your mouth before you lose with your hands
This is a big one. League of Legends is infamous for trash talk in game, in fact, to such a degree that RIOT themselves have done studies on player statistics and discovered what we all already know inherently. If you trash talk you will lose more games than if you don’t, in fact, 30% more. What that means is that when it comes to finding ways to improve your game, the most sure fire and direct way you can do that is to simply shut the fuck up. It’s that simple. Stop trash talking and you will win more games. It’s worth pointing out that if you statistically lose 30% more often, it is physically impossible for most players to win more games then they lose as the average win/loss record for a really great players is winning 70% of their games. So if you lose another 30% on top of that, you are flipped upside.

The Big Picture Strategy

Now that we have some of the basics outlined, it should be clear that most of the fundamentals have very little to do with strategy/tactics in game and more to do with mentality and approach to the game. Why is that? Simply put, when it comes to any sort of sport and League of Legends is a sport, E-Sport, but a sport non the less you must approach it like an athlete approaches his sport. Which is to say, you must focus on yourself. You cannot control what other people do, but you can control how you react to it and you can control your own approach to the game and this is the big picture and the point of the fundamentals listed above. More importantly however, is that the focus should be on practicing your craft, in this case, playing matches. Theory has its place but practice is everything which means that the Big Picture Strategy for League of Legends is Focus on yourself and practice.

That only leaves the question about how you should practice, after all, practice is a practical word, but to improve, you must have a strategy on how you practice. Simply playing a lot of games without direction will not improve your skills by much, in fact, what it will most likely do is result in you stalling your improvement as you develop habits. My advice to anyone, newbie and pro alike is to ensure, if you are going to apply strategy, it should be to the method and approach you use in how you practice, as opposed to what you practice, which brings me to the following list of 5 tips on how to practice.

Practice Tip 1: Focus on a personal goal
When it comes to practicing something, it’s about repetition and ensuring that what you are learning becomes less a thought and more a reflex, but it can be very easy to get bogged down by the complexity of the many things one must think about in a match to be successful. As such, its best to enter a match with a definitive goal in mind in what you want to accomplish/practice in a match and do that thing over and over until you have it down. For example, if you want to improve you warding skills, or you want to test some warding locations, then focus on that. Make the match about you putting down good wards for your team. Analyze the benefits and drawbacks of what worked, what didn’t and establish working routines, but don’t be afraid to challenge them.

This is just an example, but the idea here is that you want to zero in on one thing and get it to a point that its automatic. So that in all future matches from that point forward, you don’t have to think about it, you just know what to do. When you get to that point, move on to the next thing you want to practice. Eventually you will see a lot of improvement in your play as you expand your expertise and you will find that many skills, enhance, other skills you will focus on later. You will find that as your skills stack, you win more matches, that’s a promise!

Practice Tip 2: Play Ranked ASAP
Pressure and competitiveness are an athletes best friend and so it is true for E-Sports, get into Ranked games ASAP and stay there. Many players will tell you the exact opposite, I disagree.

If you want to be a rockstar, you need to get on stage, its as simple as that. In ranked matches, when it comes to League of Legends, the pool of players, the effort people put in and the demands they place on themselves are much higher/bigger which leads to considerably better games. This is true for any stage in the divisions.

I truly believe that simply by joining Ranked play, your game will improve much faster as a natural adjustment to a competitive environment and being surrounded by players that are a bit more serious about competing.

Practice Tip 3: Prepare your champions in advance
As a rule, any hero that you would potentially play you should have your core gear plan setup in the items section, runes setup for that specific champion and a core plan for your leveling progression. You don’t want to be inventing this stuff on the fly. This may be obvious, but you would be shocked how frequently people don’t do this and more importantly what a huge advantage it is to go into matches with a clear plan that clears your mind and allows you to focus on the game rather than on decisions and analysis of champion builds.

You should have alternatives as well, situational builds to counter certain types of situations. Its usually good to think about it in basic/general terms than in champion specific terms. In other words, instead of having an Anti-Malphite build, have a vs. melee or vs. magic build. As you get better you may improve upon this by getting more specific, but having a general plan is always preferable to no plan.

Practice Tip 4: Be a good sportsmen
It may seem strange to “practice” being a good sportsmen but given the statistical nature (30%) of losing games as a result of trash talking, it can be surmised that doing the opposite will shift the statistic the other way. In Other words, instead of trash talking, practice encouraging opponents and being a good sportsmen.

I truly believe that building up a teams confidence has many benefits and will more often result in teams playing better as it does the opposite when you tear your team down with trash talk. When a player does well, pat him on the back, if he makes a mistake, be quick with an encouraging comment. If you feel negative energy building up, focus on the positive. It may sound silly, but the mental state of a team constructed out of 5 strangers in an online game can shift wildly and I’m convinced it has massive impact on player performance, including your own. So be a good guy on the team, encourage your team and make it a habit by practicing it every match, every time.

Practice Tip 5: Know your place and own it
This is less a practice tip and more a general tip, but I’m putting it here because it really does require a paradigm shift for most people. This is one of the hardest hurdles that I find the overwhelming majority of League of Legend players can’t make peace with. Knowing their place in a match. I’m not talking about position, I’m talking about your skill level.

The most typical response you will get from players is that they belong in a higher rank then they currently are in nd the people they are playing with and against people who belong in a lower rank then they are. It’s an assumption that the matchmaking is terrible, the ranking system is broken and the entire infrastructure of determining which players your matched up with and against is giant mistake by Riot.

Embrace the fact that you are wrong on that. If you are in Iron II, Silver III, or Diamond I, it’s because that is where you belong. When you are Iron II and you are matched with a Bronze II, accept that this player has a higher skill set then you do. It might not reflect it in the current match, it might not reflect it on that matches K/D ratio, but it’s 100% true.

It’s vital to the success of your climb to accept where you are in the league and that you belong their. Your focus should be on improving and climbing, but you must do it with the clear mind and acceptance that based on your performance to this very moment, you are exactly where you belong.

Embrace that and your mental state will change, your approach and understanding of the game will shift and you will find yourself free of the frustrating burden of trying to prove yourself to everyone. The number one cause for tilting and players throwing games with bone head moves and the blame game that follows is the result of people resisting this premise. It’s physically not possible for you to improve as a player without taking this step. Wherever you are now, you will stay there until you deal with this mental block, that is a guarantee from a 10 year League of Legends veteran.

Ok that it’s for Part I, in Part II of the series we are going to get into more specifics.