League of Legends: Getting out of Bronze

This article will mark the debut of a series of articles on League of Legends and how to get better at this incredible game. I have been playing the game for three and a half years now, since late 2010 and I feel like I am finally getting good mechanically as well as knowledgeably. The reason it took me so much time was because I didn't take the game seriously, I barely played ranked and I didn't focus on improving, but all of that changed in the summer of 2012 as I began to work on my mistakes and try to finally climb the ladder.

A breakdown of the different ranked leagues

Anxiously and after much hesitation on whether to press that "Play" button or not, I did my ranked placement games and landed in Bronze I, losing 6 games and winning 4 [1]. I rated myself much higher than Bronze players so this hit my ego pretty hard.

Here's the thing though, even if you landed in Bronze it will only make you stronger when you climb out. Getting out of Bronze was one of my proudest achievements in League of Legends and I've been climbing ever since. Anyone can get out of Bronze if they truly wish and are dedicated on improving. These three steps are all you need to master to climb out of Bronze, I guarantee it.

Let's start!

STEP 1 : Accept your fate and love yourself

Let me start with a quote:

I clearly don't belong in Bronze! My teammates are always keeping me down and then I get trolls and AFKers every game. It's impossible for me to climb, you'd have to be incredibly lucky to get out of Elo Hell.

I'm paraphrasing a player in Bronze III that asked me for help once. You probably wrote those same words or even thought exactly the same at some point in your League of Legends life. To be completely blunt, this is the worst kind of mindset to have as a player. It will prevent you from getting better.

You played your placement matches and you ended up in Bronze. That is where you belong, end of story. Accept it! You don't deserve to be a Gold player, your skill isn't "at least as good as Silver player's".

But.. but my teammates...

No. If you TRULY were a Gold player you would have landed in Gold League or in high Silver (if you were really unlucky) no matter what teammates you had, don't you think? A Gold player is capable of carrying and winning against Bronze and Silver players consistently. Are you capable of carrying Silver players as a Bronze League player? You probably aren't since you can't even carry Bronze players. You ended up in Bronze League. So don't call yourself worthy of Gold or Silver players because you simply are not. Look at your profile, it says you're in Bronze, so you are a Bronze player. Accept it! Say to yourself:

I am a Bronze player.

Again:

I am a Bronze player.

Say it how many times you need until you realize you are a Bronze player. Embrace it. There is no shame in accepting that a person is in Bronze, the real shame is not wanting to improve by being delusional about one's current status. If you always think you're better than everyone else in your League then you will never get better as a player. You're underestimating the players that are playing in the same League as you, this prevents you from learning because you automatically consider everyone lower in skill than you, which is simply false as otherwise you would have already climbed out of Bronze.

You are equal to everyone on your League, you're not better than them until you climb to a higher League.


Step 1 is definitely the most important and one that holds truth for every League player that wants to climb, whether they are in Diamond or in Bronze League. It's not because the system dislikes you or that your teammates are keeping you down. If you ended up somewhere, you can only blame yourself because you're the only one controlling your game. The other players? You can't control them. You can only control your champion and how your champion affects the game. It's all on you. You are 100% of the game.

STEP 2 : Get your game down to a T

The quote:

Practice makes perfect

The most striking thing about Bronze and some Silver players is that they hop from role to role a lot. Take these two example images of two players, one in Bronze III, the other in Challenger:

Bronze III and Challenger - Click to enlarge

If you want to learn, you want to learn from the best. Notice how the Bronze player will play support one game then another game he will go mid or jungle. In theory, there isn't anything wrong with playing a bunch of different roles as this means you will get to know a lot of champions and different lane matchups and have a better overall understanding of how the game flows. In practice however, you are nothing but a jack of all trades but master of none.

The Bronze player has no in-depth knowledge of every possible matchup with his champions, of every possible trick, of every possible outplay. He probably doesn't know how to play both Rengar and Gragas to their fullest extent. Two champions that go in different lanes. Yet he still plays them. The Bronze player doesn't have the experience of the 1000s of games of ADC that the Challenger player has. The Bronze player might even know more about top lane than the Challenger player does but in bot lane? In bot lane the Challenger player is unbeatable because he knows every lane matchup, how they function and what their weaknesses and strengths are.

This is what you will do: pick a role and play that role exclusively. You need to master the champions in that role, you need to know every possible lane matchup (what champions you will face and how those champions interact with your own champion), you need to know what the purpose of your role is. If you like to jungle, play 50 games of Elise, 50 games of Lee Sin, 50 games of Amumu, 50 games of Udyr etc. Play more than that. Play until you know your role in and out, preferably in normal games so you won't have to worry about your rating or losing LP.

If you are not consistently winning in your role, you will NEVER leave Bronze. You need to win 3 games out of 5 in your Silver V promotion series. Three games in a row, otherwise you won't pass. If you don't pass, you don't deserve to be in Silver V.

STEP 3 : Just don't type

Probably the biggest problem I've encountered when I was in Bronze but also when I spectate Bronze players or read the long, angry stories they type in the chat is that they ALWAYS blame their teammates for their loss. If they won the game it's because they carried. If they lost it's because of their teammates. It just doesn't work that way.

Once you start typing the game is over for you

I've seen players raging and typing incredibly long-winded rants in the in-game chat. They will spend more time typing in the chat and blaming their own teammates for whatever irrelevant mistake they did 10 minutes ago rather than focusing entirely on the game.

Here's the thing: arguing with your teammates isn't going to help you win. As soon as you start typing in the chat to blame one of your teammates your chances of winning the game decrease by 50%. The person that did the mistake probably knows better than you that they messed up, no need to shove it even further in their face. It will only make things worse. Remember? They are your teammates, they are your friends, not your enemies. You have to work together, not against each other.

Just remind yourself whenever you want to blame one of your teammates: just don't type. Just don't type. Just don't type. It's in the past, focus on what you can do now.

Have you ever considered that maybe your teammate isn't as bad as you think? That maybe his opponent was simply better than he was and he got outplayed? That it wasn't his deaths or mistakes that made you lose the game but rather your inaction, your refusal to give him a hand when he was behind or you aggressively blaming him in chat making him actually play worse? Don't make your life harder than it already is.

TL;DR

1. Accept that you're not the best around and need to improve
2. Focus on your game and mastering a role
3. Don't type in the chat if it's to bring someone down

I believe a player's mentality plays a much bigger part in their success than most people give it credit and it's often a neglected aspect when people ask "how do I get out of elo hell?" or "what champion can I carry with in bronze?", they don't see that it isn't necessarily the champion they play but more so how they behave and interact with their teammates. League of Legends is a team game after all.

-

^{1. Did you know that your very first placement game is the most important one? If you win your first game, it's almost guaranteed you won't end up in Bronze League (unless you finished in Bronze III or lower in previous seasons, of course). This is because of the higher MMR gains and losses from your first games. The system is trying to place you on the ladder, so if you win the first game you will get (this is a guess) something like +50 Elo but if you lose you will lose around -45 Elo, which will set you back quite a bit, as even if you win your next games you'll only get +40 Elo to +30 Elo.}

On VGX awards 2013

Today the VGX award show took place; a full 3 hour event that served only to show what a joke the videogame industry really is. Not to say the previous VGAs weren’t a trainwreck either, but with each passing year everything just seems to sink deeper and deeper.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love videogames. I have been playing them since I can remember. But I hate the videogame industry. I hate videogame journalists. I hate big publishers like EA, Activision and Capcom. I hate this new wave of “artsy” games. I hate the fact that people who know absolutely nothing about videogames are trying to hype them up to something that they aren’t. I hate everyone who calls themselves gamers.

It’s almost as if these kinds of events are done in complete mockery. Hell, why wouldn’t they be? The entire premise is basically to spoonfeed opinions to people who don’t know anything about videogames (even if they pretend to do). We are told what games are the “best” without leaving the door open for any criticism. We are told which games we should buy because they’re so promising, yet we’re given barely any actual information about them. The entire medium of videogames journalism is built upon this; to tell people “hey this game is so amazing you should completely trust us and then go and buy the game and not complain about it ever, otherwise you’re ignorant and know nothing about videogames”.

I’m not sure if Joel McHale is actually a videogame enthusiast in any level, but today he showed much more common sense and logic than any other “gamer” I’ve ever met. He knew the entire show was nothing but a fancy charade thrown together at the last minute to serve as advertising and just said “screw it”. Why act professionally when the event itself is in no way taken seriously by the very people who run it?

As I’m typing this there’s thousands of people ranting frantically on twitter and forums all over the internet about how Joel acted like an immature prick. Ironically enough none of them actually know anything about videogames; they’re all the type of people who only go on IGN to read reviews and copypaste their opinions on every game that’s released. They’re the type of people who tell you that The Last of US has the best writing in any videogame so far, when clearly they’ve never played masterpieces of narrative like Planescape: Torment or the Legacy of Kain series. They’re the type of people who praise linear games with barely any actual gameplay in them and subpar writing such as Gone Home because Kotaku told them it was a milestone in making games more mature; yet they fail to see the amazing visual designs in games like Age of Empires 2 and the level of maturity in Knights of the Old Republic 2.

While Joel straight called out Tim Schaefer on wasting all the money he got from Kickstarter on hiring voice actors instead of using that money to actually work on his game, people keep bashing him for “rude” jokes and comments. These people that know nothing about videogames are getting incredibly upset about some random celebrity bursting their happy perfect bubble. What kind of world do we live in that making jokes about something so trivial causes such an uproar? I fail to remember who said this, but it’s the best way I can really put this whole situation into words: “Just because your feelings get hurt doesn’t mean you’re right”.

It’s all very reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New World. People don’t actually stop and think “hey, this isn’t such a good game as every reviewer is telling me. I think developers can do better than this”. Instead we get websites and “journalists” that keep shoving their opinions down our throats and presenting them as facts. The entirety of gaming journalism is compromised of a much stabilized PR-journalist relationship, in which every piece of information is very carefully controlled. A new game comes out, X website gives it a fairly good score while pointing out some “flaws” so as to keep the image of still being legit reviewers, and then everyone goes and buy the game. The reviewers get their special edition copies of the game, and everyone is happy. Because what happens when someone ISN’T happy and complacent with whatever product devs put out? The balance destabilizes. The delicate and perfect equilibrium is broken, so now we’re not allowed to say that a generic AAA title is bad. If a games journalist were to do this, he’d lose all his good contacts in the industry. Suddenly he’d no longer be invited to stay in fancy hotels, he’d no longer have exclusive previews of games. His entire career would sink.

What happens when as a consumer you do criticize a game that’s been hyped out to be amazing? You get all these “professional journalists” sinking down to the level of a 10th grader and calling you names; saying you’re a big whiny baby who just can’t appreciate a “good” game and that your opinion doesn’t matter. And of course, you get thousands of people spouting that same thing to you.

Why? Because people still don’t know ANYTHING about videogames. They have no legit experience with games; they cannot tell right from wrong until it’s just blatantly obvious. You can say that Bioshock Infinite is an average shooter at best with uninspired writing and instantly you’ll get hordes of fanboys telling you that you’re wrong and that you just “don’t get it”. All because IGN told them so.

You’re not allowed to disagree with anyone anymore. Game developers can no longer put any kind of jokes in their games, because someone out there gets offended. People who don’t actually get invested in videogames go out of their way to tell you “hey this game is bad and should change to appeal to ME”. Nowadays games have to cater to everyone everywhere, because that’s just the way to maximize profits. Journalists have to be extremely selective about what they say. For all the supposed open mindedness of the modern gaming audience, they sure are closed to what people outside their perfect hug-box have to say.

It’s a sad thing really. It’s no mystery that videogames have always been about the profit. But at least there used to be more passion involved in them, more creativity. Nowadays everything is just so… processed. An IP turns out to be successful? Well then, time to copy that formula and then strip it off a bunch of its core elements in order to appeal to a wider audience. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen in other branches of the entertainment industry, but with videogames in particular it’s just so blatantly obvious.

With each passing year the costs for developing videogames get higher and higher. Just recently we got Grand Theft Auto V with a budget of over 250 million dollars. And therein lies the problem with the industry. Games get these super inflated budgets, which in turn require more sales to make up for the investments. If a game doesn’t sell 6 million copies at launch, it’s a flop. So what do the big publishers move? They go for the safe bet. Activision keeps releasing Call of Duty rehashes each year. EA keeps trying to find more and more ways to make people waste money on games that aren’t even properly developed.

Now some might say “hey, that’s what we have indie devs for”. Well sure, we have CD Project Red, the now defunct GSC Game World and other similar “indie” devs, along with Kickstarter projects and the like. But there’s only so many actual alternatives to AAA games that come out each year and that are actually good. Sure, there is a good amount of indie games released each year, but those are different kinds of indie games. Most of them just play on the 8-bit nostalgia wagon that seems to have taken over lately, without being actually very good games. I personally find nothing interesting about generic pixel art with gameplay I’ve seen a hundred times already. Because really, 8-bit games were never about having just very few pixels on screen and beeps for music. Character sprites were never drawn in Microsoft Paint. But that’s a different topic entirely.

So what happens with the industry? Well, it’s only natural to assume it will continue to run its course. Games will become more and more diluted, budgets will keep getting bigger, people will keep spending their money. It’s uncertain just for how long this will go on. At least, there’s a guarantee that as long as videogames keep making money, we’ll keep getting Geoff Keighley’s vacant stare at these yearly mockeries of what a videogame show should really be about.

Google Easter Egg: Atari Breakout

Google is known to hide Easter Eggs all over its website and likes to remind us of important dates and personalities' anniversaries.

Just like the PAC-MAN game they had on the front page in 2010 for its 30th anniversary, this time they're celebrating the 37th birthday of classic Atari game Breakout.

Indeed, if you search for "Atari Breakout" in Google Image Search you get greeted with this:

I think some music would help here, I got pretty bored after my third game:

Thoughts on MMORPGs: PART 2

PART 1

Right now, MMOs are headed into a dead end. It's almost impossible to make a good-looking MMO designed to turn a profit from a relatively small population. Because development and upkeep costs are so high, MMOs nowadays need huge player populations or they go belly-up in no time. Is it still possible to do a good MMORPG today, when most of the old userbase has now left and the new userbase is made of people with the attention span of a goldfish? Probably not.

TERA Online looks gorgeous but is incredibly boring

We need a return to equilibrium between graphics, mechanics, competitiveness and storytelling/worlds to explore. Developers and producers are focused way too much on the scale and graphical part of their games instead of creating interesting worlds that players would want to live in. If your game is good from a gameplay point-of-view you won't have to worry about graphics as much, of course they will help sell your game but not always. Interestingly enough, putting everything on the other side of the scale is also a bad move, as evidenced by Star Wars: The Old Republic. Put too much importance on story and it will become an online single-player game that will quickly bore your players into quitting.

Scarlet Blade - Booooooooobs and loli ass

I see a lot of games trying to pigeonhole themselves into niche markets because the market is so over-saturated. Scarlet Blade from Aeria Games is the latest and one of the worst offenders, this game literally sells itself on boobs yet is incapable of backing up anything behind its rack. The game simply has no redeeming features whatsoever. It's probably the worst F2P game you can play these days, the most generic grinding game you'll see.

There is one good reason why we won't have another golden age of MMORPGs like the 1997-2004 years in the near future. Back then, the internet was just starting to spread and most people didn't have computers so it was likely that only the most dedicated players would be playing such games. Nowadays, nearly every kid has access to the internet and online games, which drops the entry barrier extremely low. Obviously, game developers want to cater to that huge market because at the end of the day they only want to turn a profit. 

The worst part in all of this is, the old MMORPGs wouldn't really work today, it's not just the industry that changed, but the consumers of the MMO genre also shifted. You can't give that much freedom to players in an approachable MMO anymore, because griefers used to be somewhat rare, notorious outliers to a generally alright populace. Nowadays griefing videos are celebrated to the point that being a asshole to everyone is the norm.

I remember arriving in Star Wars Galaxies and having no idea whatsoever where to go or what to do, yet everyone was so incredibly friendly and took new players under their wing. Eventually, a group of rebels took me in and showed me the ropes. They gave me a house and good gear, something I will never forget it. Being nice and polite definitely pays in the long run. That is what was so good about SWG. Players could create their very own communities, spread to their own territories and set up their own shops. Socializing was satisfying because we were all strangers to each other. Today, people bring in their close real life friends, stick together for most of the game and simply don't care for the rest of the community.

In the end, what I'm saying is basically this: players want to be empowered. It's probably the number one reason why we play games. We crave freedom, power, social interactions and entertainment. We want to feel accomplished within the limits of the game. We want to express ourselves in our builds and characters, make them our own. When I'm in a guild or a group with people I appreciate and we're tackling hard objectives and then manage to overcome said objectives, it feels great. We worked towards the same goal and managed to derive enjoyment from it. It wasn't so much the fact that we accomplished something but more so that we could share that moment between us, human beings. I guess you could call it emotional affection, or love.

Today, there is no room for dreamers, no room for adventure. We do what the game creators tell us to do. There is no room to build friendships, no room to build animosities.

Thoughts on MMORPGs: PART 1

It seems, to me, the golden age of MMOs is now long gone. That age spanned precisely from September 1997 to November 2004. These two dates mark the release of two highly popular MMORPGs: Ultima Online and World of Warcraft. The first game started the age and the second ended it.

Over those years I've played a ton of MMORPGs, starting on Ultima Online, going through Dark Age of Camelot, Ragnarok Online and ending with vanilla World of Warcraft. These games were absolutely fantastic in their time and captured that sense of wonder and adventure that is so hard to get nowadays. I clocked numerous hours of my life in them, of which I regret absolutely none. Of course, I played a lot of MMOs in between those like Priston Tale, Runescape, LinageAge 2, MapleStory, EverQuest and so on but not for very long as I kept going back to the original games.

After the release of World of Warcraft, everything started to change. At the time, I didn't understand why WoW was so anticipated, everyone I talked to on the internet always mentioned WoW, every forum I went to mentioned WoW one way or the other and  it still continues to this day. As for me, I always disliked the art style of the Warcraft games and WoW was no different. The game seemed really dumbed down from the games I had played in the past and yet everyone was fawning over it, which was quite annoying to me.

There was no stopping the WoW train, so I still gave it a shot and it wasn't as bad as I thought. Vanilla WoW still offered you that sense of wonder and a vast world to explore. You were that little, level 5 dwarf who had no clear idea where he should go, the world seemed immense and you had to walk for long distances. After a while you were ready to leave the Valley to head to Kharanos. You met people along the way like yourself and bonded together to do quests. Those same people probably stayed in your friends list for all the game, maybe you even formed guilds together. You were playing for that exact experience and kept coming back to recapture it, to meet people and form bonds to overcome great obstacles, to form friendships, to experience happiness but sometimes sorrow too. You were part of something and you felt complete. However, the game would soon lose its charm with the repeated release of expansion packs.

TERA Online and the Pegasus system to travel around

Now? You can fly everywhere and cross the world in mere seconds. Everything is some form of currency you can trade. It's all about number crunching and maximizing potentials, data mining sites not helping. You have to reach level cap as soon as you can because the game will only start at level cap (but by then you will probably burn out). This is how most MMORPGs are today.

If I had to make a quick list:

Old-school MMO:

* No hand holding
* 80% of the content is not doable solo
* Some classes require a party to be fully utilized
* Possibility to create class builds by using different stats and skill points
* Sparse use or no use of fast travel
* Level cap doesn't give anything special

New MMO:

* Constant hand holding for everything
* Achievement for not breaking your spine during first two minutes of the game
* 80% of the content is doable alone
* Homogenization and lockdown of classes
* Huge rewards for hitting level cap and only then does the game start (usually PvP/GvG)

Taking Ragnarok Online as an example, back in the day, I didn't really care for the level cap. Sure, I always had it on my mind but it was a very long-term goal and something I kept on the horizon, just to remind me from time to time. The game didn't even have NPC quests at all, it was just one gigantic, hell of a grind. Yet it worked beautifully and you kept coming back and back to play it. People seemed to group so easily, because everyone knew they would profit from it and the game encouraged that, because most dungeons were not doable as a solo player unless you were far ahead in levels. You grinded maps and dungeons for months just to get that sweet 0.01% drop chance card or rare equipment drop and that's how you eventually reached level cap. The game revolved all around drops and it had a wonderful economy.

Good old days on a busy Prontera market day

The game didn't limit you in almost any way. You could go to every dungeon and city as a level 1 player. You could participate in GvG (called War of Emperium or WoE) from level 1 on if you were on a guild. You being level 75 and other people being level 99 (cap) didn't result in your character being blown into pieces in one shot. If you played well you could sometimes beat people higher level than you. The sense of accomplishment was great.

The fight for the Emperium

In the War of Emperium guilds had to fight against each other across various maps to control castles. Successful capture or defense of a castle meant your guild was the rightful owner of it until the next WoE. The rewards for playing in the weekly GvG were clear, you received additional services and rare drops from the castles chests. This turned guilds who were good at GvG into powerhouses and rivalries and drama grew naturally. People would eagerly await the next WoE. They would make videos of their exploits and released nice compilations of it over the next days. I remember having goosebumps and trembling at the start of each WoE, such was the excitement.

Guilds weren't offered to everyone on a silver platter either. You had to grind certain mobs to get an item called Emperium, which allowed you to create a guild, even if it was just you in it. You could start from the ground up as a guild master and slowly make your way to the top, recruiting people along the way.

TERA Battleground matchmaking

Nowadays, games try to artificially create rivalries between players which doesn't allow for passion to come into play. They make use of systems called raids or battlegrounds that force people against each other. It feels forced and meaningless. There's no role playing, no comradeship, no adventure. Any teaming up is simply for convenience because a raid should be made of exactly five or ten people. You have to force yourself to grind these levels for some goal down the line. Most people will give up before then, especially if they have no friends to play with like me.

Continued in PART 2..