Diary of a League of Legends N00B

With the escalating hype surrounding e-sports and the serious dollars now involved I thought it high time to try my skill at the hugely popular title League of Legends. Who knows maybe I’m a natural. I chose LoL for two reasons;

1. I’m still scared by my first DOTA experience 5 years ago when I joined my first game and was abused and heckled. I quit after 5 minutes and never returned.
2. The record-breaking numbers surrounding how many people watch and play this game is out of this world! The League of Legends championship last year in October attracted 32 million views, 8.5 million of those simultaneously. As of January this year Riot have claimed 27 million active daily players and 67 million active monthly players. These numbers are truly astounding.

So I’ve left the comforts of my natural habitat of an all immersive single player RPG to the world of multiplayer MOBA’s. Let the games begin!

My initial feelings as I downloaded LoL was that this was going to be an overwhelming and complex experience where 4 other people are going to get seriously pissed off at my n00b like experience.

I was pleasantly surprised that the game walked me through a tutorial that was simple enough for me to grasp the very basics. I also did not realise how cartoony the game was. It doesn’t worry me in the slightest, it may also explain why literally anyone and everyone is playing this game.

Once I completed the tutorial I played against some Bots and appreciated the fact that I could play with other players rather than having a team consisting of AI. My chosen character that I thought I would get the hang of was Ryze.

I typically enjoy playing mage characters so was drawn to his range type spells. After this match I jumped in and played a non ranked match against other players. I stuck with Ryze as I wanted to get used to his skills. Some of the key things I learnt from my very early experience was:

• Don’t die early, this gives the other team a huge advantage. Defensive, defensive, defensive.
• You don’t need to push as much as I originally anticipated. My first match involved a team member constantly pinging exclamation marks telling me to back off.
• Players that have a lot to say aren’t necessarily good – a rather vocal player ended up with worse stats than myself. While irrelevant for some this calms me in multi-player games knowing this.
• There are a lot of items to combine and so many different characters! After looking it up there are over one hundred! How do people get time to try to get any good at them all?

The key to my level of enjoyment overall I would have to say so far is playing in a team filled with friends. Yes, it does get heated and intense. But those team fights and coming out on top are seriously fun and satisfying. Even my first kill against a real life human player I got stupidly excited over.

These are purely my initial impressions and thoughts of League of Legends as a first time player. I’m now level 11, can’t wait to hit level 30 and get stuck into some ranked matches. In the meantime I’m off to get my head around the LoL lingo, what does ADC, AP etc even mean?

 Do you have any League of Legends tips or tricks that are good for newbies? Check out our League of Legends Early Game Item Guide.

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