A Brief Background
League of Legends is a multiplayer online battle arena game (more commonly referred to as “MOBA”), published and developed by Riot Games. It’s a game built on the freemium model and is heavily inspired by the Dota mode for Warcraft III. The game has microtransactions for cosmetics and such, but it’s free to download and play.
Currently one of the largest games within the esport scene, League of Legends has gathered a huge worldwide following since its release, which has kept growing ever since. As of August 2018, the game has amassed a user base of over 111 million players, and its presence on the professional scene is as impressive with huge tournaments and crazy prize-pools. The game is also a very popular game on the streaming platform Twitch, and a lot of tournaments and events are broadcast there.
The game is played in much the same way as Dota 2, with 5 players in each team controlling their individual hero out of an impressive roster of 143 different characters. Each team has a base with a main building called a “Nexus”, which needs to be destroyed or defended. During the game each team has to push 3 different lanes on the map to progress closer towards the enemies’ Nexus to finally destroy it.
As the game progresses, each player will acquire experience points and gold by performing certain features such as killing enemy players or destroying defending turrets in the lanes. The first team to push all the way to the enemey’s Nexus and successfully destroying it will be victorious.
How to Play
To win in League of Legends, you have to work with your teammates to destroy the enemy’s Nexus. Each map has two bases in each corner, one for your team and one for your enemies. Between these bases, there are 3 different lanes that you need to push and progress to, to finally reach the enemy base.
Each team starts off with picking one individual hero who will be their playable character throughout the game. You’ll have to communicate with your team and decide which players will focus on which lanes. The goal within these lanes are to push towards the enemy base, and in the process, kill the defending turrets and enemy non player characters (minions) to gather experience points and gold. Experience points are used to level up your characters and acquire new talents and abilities, and the gold you gather is used to purchase different items that improves your hero in different ways.
In these lanes you will not only go up against minions and enemy defense turrets, but also the enemy heroes controlled by the other team with the same goal as you, to push towards your Nexus. It’s very important that you make sure not to be killed by the Enemy heroes. This is because it will push their progress forward, by not only granting them gold and experience from killing you, but also force you to wait some time before respawning and having to run back to the lane.
This will allow the enemy team to push further and kill your defense turrets without you disturbing them. By doing this, not only will they come closer to your Nexus, but their heroes will also gain more power and reach higher levels than you, which can make it easier for them to continue to control the lane and hindering your progress.
All heroes start the game at level 1 and are very weak, so it’s up to you to make sure that you level your hero at a good pace to make sure to always be relevant to the pace of the current game. A good way to ensure that you are leveling in a good pace, is to stick to your lane and make sure to get as many kills on the minions as you can. And, if possible, destroy the enemy teams defense turrets.
To gather gold from killing minions you have to make sure that you get the killing blow, also referred to as the last hit. The more gold you gather, the stronger items you can purchase for your hero. If any hero is on a good gold grind, that hero will become stronger and more dangerous than the rest, and this can really decide the outcome of the game. One way to counter an enemy’s gold grind is to deny his last hits on the minions by killing them yourself just before the enemy.
Further into the game as heroes grow stronger and the lanes are pushed further, it’s very important that all of your team’s players have managed to build up their heroes properly as the player versus player action will get more intense. If one of the teams have managed to level up their characters quicker than the other team, they can easily start to feed on the enemy team and use their level advantage to gain even more advantage.
This is why it’s so important to maintain good communication throughout the game, and if you’re noticing that the enemy heroes in your lane have started to harass you and maintaining control of the lane, you should call this out and ask your teammates to help you out and “gank” your opponents.
Ganking is done by having your teammates sneak up on your lane, and flank the enemy heroes and coordinating an attack on them whilst you help them out. Performing a successful gank can turn the tables for a brief moment, allowing you to grind some gold by killing minions without being disturbed, perhaps even manage to eliminate an enemy defense turret!
Later in the game, it’s all about big team fights and heavy coordination. You have to perform synced attacks with your whole team towards the enemy base to finally try and reach their Nexus. Before the Nexus you have other buildings called Inhibitors, and destroying these will spawn more powerful minions form your base to help out in the lanes. This puts more pressure on the enemy team as these minions can quickly wreak havoc on their lanes and defense turrets. After the inhibitors are killed, the Nexus is next. By killing the Nexus you will as mentioned earlier, be victorious.
How to Watch
League of Legends has a really big presence within the esport scene and Riot Games are very actively running tournaments and providing ways to watch it. One good way to watch the big tournaments is to follow their official twitch channel. On this channel they broadcast a lot of the tournaments, but they also host different special events, so it’s a great way to stay updated and involved within the community. For even more content you can also follow their official Youtube channel, where they upload VOID’s of all the events and even live-streams. You can find the channels here: