Made Silver 3!

I've been very quiet on this blog. I've been playing regularly and trying to improve, but it's taken a long time.

Since my last post, the season (number 4) ended, and I finished Silver 4. Provisionals in Season 5 dumped me back into Bronze 3. After many months of fighting, and a few lessons, I finally made it back into Silver.

You can see something changed in September. I went 13/15 with Caitlyn on a stretch in there. My Challenger coach said "One of you main jobs is not to die. If you're dead, you're not getting gold, you're not getting XP, and you're not dealing damage. I'd rather you're 0/0/10 than 6/5/6." It sounds stupid, but this was a really important piece of advice. It took a while for it to sink in, but I started playing not to die.

Suddenly, my week stats looked like this:

Many more kills than deaths, which is really what you want on an ADC.

Another thing he (or maybe it was my other platinum coach) told me was this: "Every time you back (until the first bot turret is down) buy two health pots and a ward." This has also made a big difference. I had not been buying wards or pots (after the first one) because I thought of them as gold lost due to being consumable. But it's much harder for their jungler to gank you if you've always got a ward up in the river and tribush, so in the long run, you don't die as much.

To see what "playing not to die" looks like in practice, you can watch this game where I was against a really aggressive Jinx.

Rambling thoughts about LoL vs DotA 2.

(Reposted from my other blog)

Here's a list in no particular order of reasons why I don't like DotA 2. In some places, I'll say "DSCGP", for "Doesn't Support Core Game Play". To me, the core gameplay is "I work with my team to destroy towers to access their base so we can destroy their nexus." Pieces of the design that don't support this are extraneous. LoL has some, but not as many.

The camera is too close to the ground. Hard to see what's happening.

Map is illegible. There are gaps in the scenery that don't look like gaps. This requires a lot of memorization to know where you can go and where you can't. LoL has some of this, since some heroes have gap-skipping abilities, and you need to know where they apply. At the very least, you can tell how wide the obstacles are by looking at the map.

"Secret Shop" Why is the shop split into different parts of the map? So you have to risk your life to buy an item? (DSCGP) Requires excessive memorization to know what you can buy where.

Balance point in games is narrower. This is because death is more punishing. In DotA, you lose gold when you die. On top of this, they make going back to base more expensive. You have to buy a scroll to warp back to base. In LoL, this is free (though it takes 8 seconds). This results in higher risk/higher loss for staying at the front and getting killed.

Once a game is off-balance, it's harder for the losing team to restore that balance. It takes longer to reach max level in DotA, and longer to reach a point where there's nothing more to build for your character. In LoL it's easier to make a comeback from a losing position. To clarify this, let's suppose you're in a game of LoL where your opponents are ahead. Why are they ahead? They've gotten more gold and levelled higher than you, so you're having a hard time defeating them in battle. This leads to them taking more objectives.

In either game, if you can defend long enough, eventually everyone on both teams will be max level, and have no more room to buy better items. At this point, neither team has an advantage due to gold or xp. One team will have a tactical advantage due to remaining turrets, but the teams themselves will only be unbalanced by A) team composition B) player skill C) teamwork. Ultimately, if a game is decided by these three things, not by who got ahead first, then the game is functioning according to its core game play: "I work with my team to destroy towers to access their base so we can destroy their nexus." The core gameplay is not "I get ahead of my opponents in gold and xp so I can win fights." That is a sub-objective in the game. Selfish players who value individual accomplishment over teamwork focus on this part of the game, and can lose you the match if your opponents are sharper on the teamwork.

DotA has courier animals so you can buy stuff and have it delivered to you at the front. (DSCGP) This was added to give more options to get items without going through the punishing walk-back or pay-to-teleport mechanic. Get rid of that mechanic... problem solved. Don't add a new mechanic to fix it.

Default map shows COLORS on the map, not faces. I have to memorize which player is which color to see at a glance which hero abilities are where on the map. I've been told there's a setting to change this, but I don't know for sure. The colors are shitty, too. These are holdovers from Warcraft III's color system.

Creep denial. (DSCGP) In DotA, you can last hit your own minions to deny your opponents getting XP/gold for them. This is also a leftover from the mod, as in W3 you could attack anything, allied or not. Last-hitting minions to get gold is an annoying mechanic in both games, having to worry about last hitting to deny makes it even worse. In LoL, you deny XP/gold by zoning your opponents and keeping them too far from the minions to get the xp or gold. This is enough of a denial mechanic, in my opinion.

This is open to debate, but I think DotA's "All heroes unlocked" is not a good thing. Your first choice in the game is "which hero do I play" and you have to pick from over 100. LoL's free champ rotation (10 a week) makes this more managable. This could be argued to be a greed play by Riot, but I've never found LoL's monetization to be evil. I find that with regular play I earn new champs about as fast as I can digest how to play them reasonably well.

The summoner levelling in LoL is something I didn't like at first, but it's used mainly as a mechanism to limit the complexity new players see. To play ranked games, you have to reach level 30, so everyone you play with at that point has access to the same stuff you do.

The announcer in DotA makes me feel like they think I'm 3 years old. This is a holdover from the old mod, which ripped the announcer from Unreal Tournament. The calm, slightly British accent announcer in LoL is far superior.

The heroes throwing verbal taunts at you in DotA when they kill you is annoying at best, and just adds to the general noise in the game.

Shop interface in LoL is far better. (Maybe the DotA one has improved since I last played)

Well, that's it. There might be some other small things hanging around, I think I got the big ones.

Made Silver 5!

In this post, I talked about finally getting to Bronze 2 (up from Bronze 4 in a month). Three months later, I have finally made it to Silver 5.

Here's the game where it happened:

http://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/NA1/1553229197/423744

I was playing Ashe, and the support was Thresh. Thresh was really aggressive considering we were against Leona and Lucian. I messed up a few engagements and Thresh got kind of pissed off, but he kept playing well, and I improved.

My duo partner was Viktor, and he played pretty well as usual. I'm pretty sure his help over the last couple weeks has helped me go up in rank. Sure, the matchmaker tries to make sure we're on even teams, but having a good duo partner reduces the chances of getting a troll or AFK.

I'm finding this season that my Ashe record is much better than with Caitlyn, who is my "main". If the stats told me in Season 3 that my main was Cait, my Season 4 stats appear to be telling me that my main is really Ashe.

I'm 58% win on 35 games with Ashe, and 45% on 171 games with Cait. Season 3 I went 60% with Cait on 102 games. I'm really not sure what happened to cause this. Not that I never play Cait well, like in this game where I went 20/2:

http://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/NA1/1543816521/423744

One of those deaths was when someone asked me something, and I responded with "okEfffffffffffff". "E" is shift-E, auto-casting her net-escape, and "f" is flash to warp out.

Well, as I move up I must say the quality of the games is increasing. Fewer trolls, fewer AFKs, stronger tactics all around. It's a good sign when your enjoyment of a game increases as you get better. Well, that's all for now. Signing off!

Promoted to Bronze 2

I haven't written anything for quite some time about LoL, because I felt stuck in a rut. Every time I would get to the top of Bronze 4, I would go on a losing streak and be back at the bottom. Or worse, back in Bronze 5.

So I practiced and practiced for months, usually playing a game a day, often more. Still I could not break out of Bronze 4. So I did something drastic:

I took lessons. I paid AotW Lemons for two 1 hour lessons a week apart. He was a great coach, and helped me a lot. We played a game each session, with me as Cait (my main) and him as support. We were on Skype, and he told me what I was doing wrong as it happened, and told me which things I did well.

Turns out I was doing pretty well with CS (getting gold from killing minions), but badly with positioning. I was not using Cait's range to its fullest advantage.

One month later, I was promoted to Bronze 2. From the bottom of Bronze 4 to Bronze 3 I went on a winning streak of about 7 ranked games in a row. Here's the chart of my LoLKing score:



The results of the game that promoted me follow:



My duo partner was Skarner, a Silver 3. Note that I'm in a game with nobody ranked lower than Bronze 2 here, and I went 13/7/14 with Ziggs mid. The things Lemons helped me with on bot lane have improved my game all over the map.

So if you're a long-time struggling LoL player who is still stuck in the bottom ranks, let me recommend you take a few lessons. It's worth the money and time. Also, LoL is a game that gets more fun as you get better at it!

Next target: get to Silver 5.