10 Small actions that can harm/improve your game

Just a couple of stupid mistakes and small hints that might help you improve and win a few more games.

1. Negative attitude in champ select

This is actually the action that gave me the idea to write this post.

If you are in champ select don’t call anyone a “noob”. The people you’re currently in the game with are going to be playing with you for the next 20 minutes minimum. So you don’t want to give them an excuse to hate you and start ruining morale. It sounds stupid but morale is incredibly important in league, teams with their heads down will lose games.

So also don’t mention how you’ve had nothing but “noobs” all day and how you hope this team is good. 9 times out of 10 this flags you up as someone who will rage in the game and can result in people losing faith in you before the game has started.

2. Using Lolking.net etc as facts

Lolking.net, and websites like that, are incredibly useful tools and can tell you interesting information about both your own team and the enemy team. if you search for the person you’re against and they’re playing their favourite champion against you, then you know that they could cause you some trouble.

But don’t flag up how the AD carry on your team is a bad AD carry because in his last game he went 2 7 4, because you’re going into the game with the wrong attitude. I realise that a lot of this post is talking about morale but if your team is happy, your team is more likely to win and you’re less likely to ignite a spark in someone who’s then going to start raging and really ruin your teams chance of winning.

So you can use lolking to get additional information for your team but use it in a positive way.

3. Raging

Not really much to say here that hasn’t been said before in 1000s of other articles.

If you rage, you are less likely to win games. There are facts and numbers shown to us by Riot but there is also a ton of anecdotal evidence from every player. There is just no excuse for this.

Do Not Rage.

4. Not buying wards

Again not much to say here that hasn’t been said before. There’s a great section on warding written by Lolast.com’s own Johan Dinesen here.

But I will just say buying wards wins games. Every death you prevent, every jungler you catch and every Baron attempt you prevent will help you climb the ladder.

5. Selecting OP champions when you haven’t played them

Just because you saw MegaZero play Riven really well or Scarra dominate on Diana doesn’t mean you can. You need to know the niches of a champion before you should be playing them in ranked. Just because you know what the champions abilities do doesn’t mean you’re good enough.

Why is Scarra building Lich Bane on Diana? Is it to counter the heavy magic damage of the lane he’s against? Is it because he can proc the sheen often on that character? You may not lose because you don’t know the details i’ve listed here but in a close game it could cost you.

6. Killing a tower and not pushing the advantage

When you drop a tower in league you open up a different situation within the lane and how you react to this new situation can win or lose you the game. Some games can be won by just continuing to push top tower but most of the time you need to exert your pressure elsewhere in the game.

If the opposing top laner follows you away from lane then he’s missing out on CS that you can get back to your lane to stop going under your tower and if he doesn’t follow you can dive/take other objectives with a 1 man advantage. It’s really lose-lose situation for them unless you aren’t putting enough pressure on the map in which case they can just farm themselves up and end up stronger than you.

So if you see them just farming, do something about it. Take towers, kill the other laners, steal buffs, do dragon, call your jungler up to gank them. Anything that isn’t passively farming in lane.

7. Lack of communication/pings

This is a bit of a double edged sword but having better communication is usually good unless you’re going about it the wrong way and annoying your teammates. But lets just look at a few things you can do to help your team.

• Ping whenever you see the jungler
• Ping when you’re coming to gank, both when on the way and when going in
• If you’re jungling tell your team how you want them to react to you ganking. Sometimes its worth them going all in as you approach, sometimes you need to make the first move.
• Tell your jungler where the wards are and when they expire, wards last for 3 minutes so you can quickly say “Ward, River, 11.13″ to tell your jungler when to gank. You almost always catch people out if you come as their ward expires

During champ select make sure you communicate with your team. Just saying “top” isn’t the best help. If you’ve got a limited champion pool tell your team. “i’d like to go top Renekton” is much more useful and your team can try and build around it.

8. No Variation in item builds

Players don’t always react to the enemy team comp with their item builds and it does separate the good from the bad players. If you’re against an AD mid you need early armour espeically if you don’t have armour runes on your AP page. If you’re against an AP top then an early hexdrinker can swing the lane in your favour.

Enemy team is running double AP? Ask your team who’s getting an early Bulwark.

AD carry getting fed? Where are the Randuins and Frozen Heart being built?

These small changes in item builds can give you team the advantage in a teamfight to win you the game.

9. Going back to base when your team needs you

This one frustrates me almost more than raging does. Summoners seem to back at the stupidest times and given there are 5 players all wanting their next item you can end up with your team not being able to pressure the map just because there are too many of you in the base.

Sometimes its worth waiting for that big item but if the enemy team has grouped up you need to react to it now, not in 40 seconds when the turret is down so you could buy another longsword. Also be wary of the baron/dragon timings. If they are up within the next minute then now might be the best time to back so you’re at full strength and ready for the fight/quick baron.

10. Use timestamps on the chat to time dragon/baron

Here’s a little hint that I was told about a while ago. If your team saw Baron/Dragon die then you get a message appearing in the chat log telling you when it was killed. You can then use this message, with the timestamp feature of the game, to calculate when Dragon/Baron will spawn next.

Baron’s respawn timer is 7 minutes from its death and Dragon’s is 6 minutes. It doesn’t do this for the smaller camps in the game but you can quickly add “OB” for our blue or “TR” for their red and then calculate the time that you should be back, ie 5 minutes later.