The first time I played League of Legends was in early 2013. My friend and roommate, Josh, had just started playing the game and he invited me to play with him. I’ve been a gamer since I was a child, but this was my first MOBA or even multiplayer online battle arena game. The concept of this genre interested me from the beginning because it’s essentially an MMO (massively multiplayer online) where players can be on different sides of a map and working together towards a common goal – destruction of the opposing team’s base – but there is no “grouping up” or going around as one large group.
This aspect interested me because it totally changed how people played games compared to other genres like FPS (first-person shooter) games where you’re all working together as one unit. In League of Legends you have five different people on each side that have their own roles to fill out so that they can win as a team against another team who is trying to beat them as well! The idea behind this fascinated me from day one and made me want to learn more about league of legends so that I could start playing it more seriously with my friends!
I spent countless hours streaming myself playing league for fun back then, usually only when other people were watching too because it made things way more fun for everyone involved. League of legends teaches teamwork (https://campuspress.yale.edu/amelia/how-league-of-legends-teaches-high-schoolers-the-principles-of-teamwork/) and how to work together in a large group, which is one of the reasons it can be so fun to play with others. I know that there are other games out there that people would argue teach teamwork better than league of legends, but it’s definitely not a bad game for teaching teamwork and cooperation.
I remember playing back in the days when you could only queue up for ranked games with groups of five players who were all in premade teams. This is very different from how it is now because solo-queue players can queue up and play in ranked matches by themselves or in a small group without having to worry about getting matched up against five other premade teams. I actually really liked this system because you never knew what your teammates were going to be like unless you chose them yourself by putting together your own team before the game started! It was also nice because if someone on your team was being toxic towards everyone around them, you could simply mute them or leave the match altogether!
I didn’t take league too seriously during these early years though. I mostly played with friends and watched streams of others playing league for fun. It was a lot of fun, but I didn’t really treat it as a competitive game during this time because I knew that it could be very difficult to get into the competitive scene at this point in time.
My First League Team
In early 2013, I met a guy named Jason through my roommate Josh who was already playing league of legends at the time. Jason ended up being my first real teammate in League of Legends because we decided to team up and try our hand at ranked play together! The two of us decided to take on the support role which meant that we would have to work closely together in order to win games. I really liked the support role because it’s a very rewarding job. You can make or break games for your team by how well you play, and I love having the ability to do that!
The way ranked works is that you’re playing against other teams of people like yourself who are trying to get into the same league as you. Depending on how many wins or losses you have, this will determine which league you end up in at the end of each season. We ended up losing quite a few games and we found ourselves getting stuck in “silver” league after only a few weeks of play time together. I was okay with this because Josh had already been playing for months before we started so he was already right around silver level at this point and he told me not to worry about it since we still had plenty of time left in the season to reach gold!
After losing some more games though, I started getting frustrated with myself for not being able to improve as fast as some others were improving around me since they were all solo-queue players who didn’t have anyone else holding them back from reaching higher ranks faster than their peers.
This was a few years ago, and I started looking towards the pro-scene to try and learn from the best players in the world. I’ve always been a very competitive person, so even though it’s impossible to reach pro status without being invited by a team first, I still wanted to see how well I could do against other people who were already at this level! In order to reach this point though,I knew that there was going to be a lot of work ahead of me.
In conclusion, League of Legends is an amazing game with many different layers that you can peel back and discover over time. There are so many interesting things about league and it’s one of my favorite games!