League of Legends for dummies

League of Legends is a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena, or MOBA for short, released in Oct. 2009. Inspired by Dota and the custom maps from Warcraft III, League started with only 40 champions, a humble map of Summoner’s Rift, a handful of items, and a bunch of game mechanics that needed polishing. Over the years, League evolved into one of the most popular games that now has over 150 million active players.

Since League is a 13-year-old game, the game has, together with its immense player base, developed from a simple strategic MOBA into an intensive, at times even overwhelmingly intense, mechanical and strategical masterpiece that continues demanding players to improve and work on their mistakes. Picking up this game can be excruciatingly difficult, especially if you have no clue about MOBAs or games in general.

To help you get started with League in your brave quest to conquer Summoner’s Rift, we’ll cover the basics of the game and all aspects surrounding Riot Games so you don’t enter your first games like a complete noob but rather a true Summoner looking for a challenge.

Before you get started

After making the decision to start playing League, your next step should be visiting the official website to create your account. As you’re creating your account, stay mindful of the server you’re choosing because it has a large impact on your ping, and, therefore, gameplay. You can choose from Europe West, Europe Nordic and East, North America, Korea, China, Southeast Asia, Brasil, Latin America North, Latin America South, Oceania, Russia, Turkey, and Japan.

After that, start downloading the game. Remember, the game will first install the client, and as soon as it finishes installing the client, you’ll need to log in to continue installing the game. 

I’ve installed the game, now what?

After you’ve properly installed the game, you’ll be first overwhelmed with the number of shiny features popping out as you try to understand at least something. The first, and the most important concept you need to understand is that you don’t have your own unique character like in, for example, World of Warcraft, but you have a list of champions you can choose from whenever you feel like playing the game. Each champion has five uniquely-designed spells, with four being active spells, and one being passive. On top of all of that, champions have a specific role within the game—they can be tanks, healers/shielders, mages, marksmen, bruisers, juggernauts, and assassins. To unlock a new champion, you’ll need currency called Blue Essence. Once you’ve gathered enough Blue Essence from playing the game and leveling up, you can buy any champion you want, given you have enough Blue Essence.

As you slowly level up your account, you’ll soon discover League has loads of different features, besides champions. First, there are two different types of maps: Summoner’s Rift and Howling Abyss. While Summoner’s Rift is a highly competitive map that divides players into five separate roles—top lane, mid lane, AD carry, support, and jungler—Howling Abyss is strictly a fun-mode map that randomly assigns you a champion. Summoner’s Rift is a more advanced map that includes lanes—an area where your laners spend most of their time killing minions and getting experience, and a jungle—a designated area full of wildlife ready to be killed by a jungler. Unlike Summoner’s Rift, Howling Abyss doesn’t have lanes or junglers, but the map is one lane where all 10 players meet and, eventually, clash. 

Summoner’s Rift has also two separate ranked modes: solo queue and flex queue. Solo queue is designed to be played either on your own or with an accompanying duo to climb the ladder. Flex queue, on the other hand, can be played with up to four friends to climb a separate, flex queue ladder. 

The ranks in League are Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Grandmaster, and Challenger. Each rank in League, excluding Master, Grandmaster, and Challenger, has four distinct divisions: IV, III, II, and I. After you reach 100 LP in each division, you advance to a higher tier. For example, if you won a game while being Gold II with 89 LP, and you got 15 LP, you’ll be Gold I after that win. Bear in mind that LP is the currency used to track your progress in ranked games, so whenever you lose a game, you lose LP too, but whenever you win a game, you gain LP.

But, what’s the goal of the game?

The goal of League is relatively simple: destroy the big red structure in the enemy base known as the Nexus. Although players can get carried away by going on killing sprees and chasing enemies, all that is simply a means to an end. You normally start your League match by entering Summoner’s Rift and buying starter items worth 500 gold. Once you’ve bought the starter items, you go to your designated lane, whether that be bot, top, mid, or jungle. There, you’ll kill lane minions or jungle creeps to get gold and experience. With that gold, you earn from killing minions, or enemy players, you can buy more items to do more damage. 

League also has the concept of vision that’s really important to understand before you head to your first game. As soon as you enter your first game, you’ll notice half of the map is covered in darkness, called the fog of war. To see in the fog of war, you’ll need to have ally champions or minions in that area. As the champions and minions move, however, so will your vision. To temporarily have vision in a specific area without ally champions of minions, you can place vision wards. Vision wards are utility items from the game shop that can be both free and bought for gold, and give you vision for a specific duration of time. 

In League, one of the most important things is objectives. Objectives include any enemy structure like turrets, inhibitors, and of course, the Nexus, and neutral jungle monsters like dragons, the Rift Herald, and Baron Nashor. Each objective, expectedly, gives you gold once you take it down. Jungle monsters, on top of all of that, give you a specific buff that increases your damage, empowers your minions, or gives you more movement speed, depending on the type of jungle monster.

What else is there?

So that League won’t become mundane, Riot introduced skins to the game. Skins are champion appearances that cost Riot Points and give you no advantage over your opponents but rather give your champion a fun recolor and effect update. There are also Prestige Edition skins which simply look like the golden version of the same skin. The Prestige skins are normally tied to a game event like Lunar New Year and can be only bought with either seasonal tokens or Mythic Essence, a newly introduced currency used to explicitly buy Prestige skins. Although the battle passes in League have free quests, you’ll definitely need to buy one if you want to get your hands on a specific Mythic skin.

Wait, people get paid to play this game?

Photo by Michal Konkol via Riot Games

The simple answer is yes, people get paid to 검증사이트 play League. There are two types of people who normally get paid to play this game: professional players and streamers. Professional players, just like any other sports players, have teams they join, practice with, and compete with. During the regular season, teams compete on a regional level. As soon as Spring and Summer split end, the teams head to the World Championship, where the best of the best compete for the Summoner’s Cup. Streamers, on the other hand, are usually high-ranked League players who love to entertain their audience and share their gameplay with others. The most commonly used platform for streaming is Twitch. Since pro players aren’t limited to professional play only, many of them often stream whenever they are not scrimming or practicing picks.

What can’t Riot do?

Other than Riot launching League, Riot 사설토토사이트 started expanding its horizons in 2017 with its first project, Pentakill. Seeing the incredible success that a single song generated, together with a set of Pentakill skins, Riot next year shipped the one and only K/DA skins and the song POP/STARS. Once the community saw Riot as more than a video game company, it continued with similar collaborations with GIANTS and More.

In 2019 and 2020, Riot launched 먹튀검증 three new games to peak the community’s interest even more: VALORANT, Teamfight Tactics, and Legends of Runeterra. Little did the company know the games would become an instantaneous hit, with VALORANT even developing its own pro scene that’s already competing in popularity with League itself.

Only a year ago, Riot has premiered one of the most successful TV shows on Netflix, Arcane. Starring major League characters, Jinx, Vi, and Caitlyn, the show was nothing less than a dream come true for all League fans that finally saw their favorite champions come to life안전놀이터

The latest Riot project we know about is a Runeterra-themed MMORPG game that is set to see the light of the day late in 2023 or at the beginning of 2024. 

All in all, it’s an incredible record Riot is keeping and if it continues in this direction, it could easily replace Blizzard Entertainment and Epic Games not only as the leading video game company but also as the largest entertainment production house that will stop at nothing to deliver a high-quality product.