Improving Your Level of Play

League of Legends is a game in which ten players called summoners summon a champion to fight for them on a battlefield known as Summoner's Rift. The summoned champions start off on opposite sides of the map, five on each side which form a team. The map is divided by a river and each side belongs to the team that starts out on that side of the map. Each team has a base where their nexus, a giant crystal the enemy team wants to destroy, resides. The objective of the game is to destroy the enemy nexus which means victory. There are several towers that must be destroyed before the nexus is targetable so you have to take them out as well. Everything else is optional. Optional does not mean you don't have to complete said tasks to win the game, it simply means you don't have to do it to win every game. However, to complete every game you must destroy towers and the nexus.


Tasks required to win:

• Destroy Towers
• Destroy a Inhibitor
• Destroy Nexus

Optional Tasks:

• Kill Enemy
• Use Wards
• Acquire Buffs
• Farm minions
• Destroy Inhibitors
• Everything that isn't required

Now that we have the basics outlined we can focus on how to improve your level of play.

Better Equipment Helps

I'd like to say that getting better equipment doesn't matter, but it does in some cases. If you ever reach the point where you wanted to do something in game but found yourself unable to do so because of mechanical limits it may be time to upgrade your equipment. Your regular mouse just isn't going to do it anymore and turning up the sensitivity in the options isn't a permanent solution. You'll want to get a 3500 dpi mouse (more if possible) and turn it all the way up. You could most likely get a lower mouse moving as fast as a 3500 dpi mouse by turning the sensitivity up in the game options but it'll be inconsistent. Once the game is over you'll return to your regular mouse speed and switching between the two (and more if you play other games at different mouse speeds) just isn't good.

Play a mouse movement game

If you get a new mouse games like osu! will really help you adapt to your new mouse speed movement and master it. If you're looking to move in game with better speed and precision then games like osu! really do help you in this department. Something that isn't done often in league of legends is warming up. Playing a few games of a movement game before you jump into queue will rid you of sloppy mechanical play in the first game of the day.

Thats as far as it goes for trying to improve your play outside of what goes on in the game. Lets be frank though, that shit don't help much. Having better mechanics means nothing if you don't know what to do with it so what you really want to improve on is what goes on mentally during the game.

Who gon' stop me?

The way you play a game is decided by the game's objective. If you've forgotten already, the objective of league is to destroy the enemy nexus. To destroy the nexus you have to destroy the towers around them, to destroy those you have to destroy an inhibitor and to destroy the inhibitor you have to destroy three towers infront of it. I doubt anyone will argue against this even if they run into lane thinking about how they're going to kill their lane opponent. I understand that if you kill your lane opponent you can destroy the tower, however you're limiting the way you think. This kind of thinking is what bred the saying "win lane lose game". Well shit, of course you lost the game. Winning lane =/= winning the game, so stop trying to win the lane. Start trying to win the game so you can start your path to being a better player.

If you can't drive this mentality into your head, then I'll tell how you can. You need to go straight up your lane blasting Who Gon Stop Me on repeat with your sight set on their nexus. As soon as you see your lane opponent chosen in champ select (or confirmed at the loading screen) you ask yourself, "Who Gon Stop Me?" Mind you that who gon stop me does not mean "who is going to try and stop me", it means what it says. Who WILL stop you, if that answer is ever no one then you'd better be all over their towers. This question is THE question you need to ask yourself if you want to win the game. It works in every single situation, do not question it. Enemy Yi backdooring nexus towers? "Who gon stop me?" Well obviously if Yi destroys your nexus, you can't destroy his. He is stopping you, so you have to eliminate him. They stop you in every game you lose and fail to in every game you win. If you fail then you fix what was wrong and try again. If you had the choice to lose lane every game yet still win, would you take it? I'm not saying that learning how to win lane is a bad thing. It simply means that if you're trying to learn how to win games, winning lane isn't what you need to learn how to do first.

Conscious Play

Before you start trying to win anything, you should know that your play isn't going to go up a division just by reading this guide. You get better with practice and twenty games doesn't count as practice so it will take a while. Its important to know what you're practicing though, which was the whole point of the previous paragraph. Learning League is like learning anything, except its on your own. You don't have a teacher (most likely) so you have to do some self learning here. Pretty sure self learning isn't taught but its pretty easy to get the hang of. You simply do, and when you fail you make an assertion as to why you failed and how to correct it. As long as you can say you didn't play the match perfectly, there was something you can learn. When you play a game just pick one mistake you noticed in your gameplay and then guess why that mistake was made and how to fix it. I say guess because it doesn't have to be right- its important that you just make a guess. It'll be an educated guess which means that it was based on the knowledge you already have for the game. If you guess and its wrong, you've lost nothing because you were wrong the first time (which is why you made the mistake). If your knowledge is poor at first you'll get a lot wrong but no one else is going to tell you what mistakes you made so this is something you have to do. You don't have a teacher to do this, so you have to do it yourself. Its like fighting a hard boss on a video game, you try one thing and fail. So you try another and fail, and another and another until you beat the boss. League didn't come with a manual on how to play the game perfectly, meta knowledge and all that stuff came from experimenting until something worked. Once you start getting a few things right your next guesses will build off of the previous guesses that worked. It'll snowball until its much easier to guess what you did right and what you did wrong.

Failing

You should never settle because you're afraid of failing. If you don't fail you won't get better, its just that simple. Contrary to popular belief, reaching diamond doesn't unlock the ability to create plays with characters. You don't become diamond with Zed and unlock the ability to do that awesome Ahri play you saw on youtube. I know people will say things like "Stop doing what X does on stream, you're not diamond" but fuck them. They aren't interested in getting better, so you keep doing it until you can. Faker didn't play Zed the first game and was amazing with him because he was diamond. Albeit he was better than a bronze player with Zed but he wasn't youtube highlight reel good. He played him, failed with him, corrected his play until he could. If you're mid sin and you're thinking "I can probably kill him if I do X but I'll probably fail." then you should do it 100% if you're trying to get better. No if ands or buts about it, just do it. You WILL fail, but it won't be in vain if you learn from the experience. By the time its your 50th time doing it, you'll have no problem executing it. You never see the fails on highlight videos, just the end result. That lee sin thats failing ward jumps horribly isn't going to be forever if they keep at it, eventually they'll perform them reasonably well. It may sound contradictory saying this after putting so much emphasis into going after towers but playing to win and playing to learn are two different things. Once you have the proper playstyle drilled into your head then learning other things is only natural.

Conclusion

Learning should be done in normal games, ranked is where you should always tryhard. You may want to dive your enemy laner instead of getting the easy tower in ranked but unless you know you can do so 100% and get the tower you shouldn't. As long as you're not trying to lose in normals, failing is fine. However playing dominion with characters you aren't familiar with goes a long way. All in all, if you're having fun as is and your level of play isn't an issue to you then don't worry about getting better and just play for fun.