The Importance of Solo Queue
There is a clear reason for which people
get motivated to play Ranked Solo Queue: trying to get up in the
Ladder. The journey from Bronze V to Diamond I ( maybe even challenger )
is a story that has been produced all around the web with the tales of
fortunes - or misfortunes - told to us in beautiful written text,
sincere emotional and sometimes inappropriate comments ( aka rage ) or
even videos of these adventures, with the actors varying from anything,
being the players themselves or even Mulan and Tarzan. Anything goes to
describe how this aspect of League of Legends is going in our lives on a
daily bases. But the importance of Solo Queue doesn’t rely solely on
achieving success in the ladder, or giving us a happier day. In fact it
has an even larger and usually silent importance if you consider the big
picture: With the proper conditions, Solo Queue improves players.
The reason I choose to focus on
distinguishing Ranked and Normal Solo Queue is based on the average
quality of the games: Whilst, as we all know, it is common to find
trolls in any game, ranked or normal, I tend to find that these
“off-the-meta players” are more common in normal games, as they should
be. Ranked games have a purpose associated with them – to go up in the
ladder – thus games are more serious.
Solo Queue is the game for most of us.
The average player is not bound to any professional team, has no
scheduled practice or any demanding events to go to. It’s all about
playing the game and winning League Points; It’s about getting that
Platinum border at the end of the season, or maybe the new Elise Skin.
But Solo Queue is more than that: It’s the cornerstone of League of
Legends play for everyone. It is the process by which all players must
go through to improve themselves. Complacency in Solo Queue, on the
other hand, is a route towards a worse player, and that doesn’t concern
only the normal gamer. Complacency may very well be a reason that
explains why some pro players or teams underperform sometimes: because
playing the game by themselves is not seen as important as it should. It
is not taken seriously enough because people don’t see the real
benefits behind it. Instead, they choose to focus on the negative
aspects of Solo Queue and broadcast them around, when there are many
positives to take from it.
Theory versus Work
The Internet is filled with a great
variety of guides regarding how to improve in League of Legends and
though most of what we read may prove to be useful in some way, these
guides often discard the most important of factors when it comes to
improving our skills: Playing.
There are all kinds of strategies and
tips related to various aspects of LoL: champion guides; last-hitting
suggestions; jungle tactics; first blood secrets; what matchups to pick
and how to win them; Virtually anything we desire to improve on can be
found with a detailed explanation on the internet. But a fundamental
mistake we make is that reading is not nearly enough. League of Legends
is a bit like mathematics, where if you don’t practice your knowledge
you end up not being able to do anything when the time comes to prove
your worth. Theory by itself won’t win you games: It can be crucial to
know beforehand what your task looks like but in the end it comes down
to how well you execute your play, in a game where you can have so many
variables that it is often really hard to write down your predictions
and strategies in a few words of text.
I’m not in any way disregarding the
importance of reading about League of Legends and its different aspects -
I doubt there will be many times in your gaming life where knowledge or
knowing too much is actually a bad thing. But knowing is only half the
way, and as far as League of Legends goes, I’m not sure that it is even
as much as “half”. The most important factor in improving your game is
practicing what you have learned from reading all those guides or
watching pro players' streams. And by practicing I mean playing the game
yourself.
Practice builds Perfection
Being a hard worker is a feature that
helps us to succeed with most things in life, and League of Legends is
no exception. Your mechanical skills won’t improve themselves, you have
to work to improve them – and for this to happen you need to play.
Simply being fast with your fingers or playing a decent Vayne is not the
equivalent of being a mechanically skilled player: A good technical
player is the outcome of hours playing the game, feeling the champions
and as such, having the ability to execute their skills to a near
perfect level.
To be good you need to be technically
good overall and mechanically good with different heroes. Of course
nobody plays over 100 champions at a great level, it’s impossible: Not
because they don’t know the science on how to do it but because they
lack practice, that special link that exists between a player and his
champion after playing him so many times. Champion pools change for a
player since it is not possible to play all the champions and, even the
few you play, you won’t play them forever and once you adopt some new
champion you will either most likely play with others less or simply
dedicate more hours into League of Legends, and this last option is not
always possible. In order to become good however, you need to spend time
with a few at least, and when I say time I don’t mean playing a full
day of a particular champion - I mean playing a lot of games, over
different days, with that champion. Pro players dedicate 10 hours (
sometimes even more ) playing solo queue and this is not just because
it’s their job, it is also because that’s how they get good and this is
by no means a statement implying that for you to be good you need to
follow their practice method and play 10 hours yourself – this goes to
show that being mechanically skilled requires work, a lot of work, and
even though nobody should be told that they must play 10 hours to be
good, they should be aware that being good requires hard work in playing
a lot.
Déjà Vu
Besides technical skill there is another
very important aspect that Solo Queue silently improves in us:
experience, which is key in LoL. Imagine you have played a lot of games
where a certain bad situation has occurred to you while say, for
instance, failing your second buff at level 1 against a Tryndamere with
Ghost/Smite summoners. The fact that you have experienced this situation
many times before helps you prevent it, because you have experienced
it. Sometimes you don’t even consider it, you just do it because you
know in your gut that this will happen, because you have seen it before.
Playing Solo Queue gives you experience with concrete situations that
you handled in the past and this wisdom allows you to, once faced with
the exact same scenario, play it right. In fairness, this implicit Déjà
Vu concept can be applied to many aspects over a LoL game, be that with a
particular duel that went wrong between your champion and a specific
enemy champion, a gank on bot lane, bad build options versus certain
teams or a bad split-push decision. All of this adds to how much you
know about the game you play and consequently it improves how you
approach the game in the future. You may not always learn it the first
time, you may not always find the right answer afterwards, but in the
end it’s all about the concept: Playing more prepares you more. What you
do with that preparation depends on factors such as how focused you
were or how quickly you adapted, but the experience is there.
After enough times experiencing the
exact same scenario you begin to predict it implicitly and this improves
your overall reaction to the flow of the game, be that a spectacular
decision to go for baron or a gank you have seen before and were able to
predict this time. But it's not all about these Déjà Vu: for example,
simply the fact that you experiment on champions during a more or less
competitive match improves your play by enlightening you on different
matchups and how to trade in different scenarios against different
champions. Trending is also a very important factor here: what champions
are people using more now, where their strengths lie and what their
weaknesses are.
The right way to do it
As always there is a right way to do it
and a wrong way to do it, and doing it wrong decreases efficiency on
what could potentially be a much better outcome. Solo Queue games have
factors that affect your concentration and play, affecting how you
learn, what you take from the game and how you adapt to it. I’ve heard
and read this so much and still it never gets old: Solo Queue requires
the right mentality, and so does learning. Entering the game with the
fear or discomfort from possibly losing those precious League Points is
not really a good way to start it. Losing happens, and that’s one of the
most important lessons you can take from playing a lot of Solo Queue.
You will lose a lot, sometimes 10 or more games in a row. It is very
depressing but it happens - it will happen. Losing will always take a
toll on you, no matter how prepared you are. How you handle it is the
important part and this comes from finding the right balance between
taking Solo Queue serious and not letting yourself go down because of a
hard loss. The attitude is often a problem when it comes to improving
your rank, even more of a problem when it comes to improving your play.
But Solo Queue can actually benefit this aspect if you look at it more
rationally rather than emotionally. Statistically it is not that common
to have a huge difference between wins and losses, especially for people
who play less than 1000 games a season. Losing is part of the game.
Another good idea to have in mind while
playing Solo Queue is how will you improve on that particular game. What
specific actions will you take to improve? Setting up goals for
yourself is often a good way to observe improvement in your ability to
play. It doesn’t have to be very difficult goals, but actually simple
small things help a lot. For example, try to have 80 cs by 10 minutes
the next time you go mid, or try to roam at least once in those 10
minutes or even both. And from then on, set higher targets for your
play.
The Demons of Criticism and Complacency
Solo Queue play gets bashed every hour
of every day on almost any social network, website or community that has
anything related to League of Legends Discussion. What happens in Solo
Queue is subject to such a biased and relentless scrutiny that sometimes
it almost seems that the system is utterly unfair and useless - League
of Legends seems be the game with the most unfriendly community and
where skill matters the least when compared with luck. Everything about
Solo Queue and the system associated with it seems so negative that
apparently it is the main cause responsible for players leaving the game
or apparently, in worst case scenarios, players losing friends. I find
it very hard to absorb all of this as true because in fairness I think
that most problems don’t reside in how random Solo Queue can be, or on
how unlucky some people think they are with matchmaking. In my view, the
problem often resides with our inability to cope with a loss, the
responsibility of a loss or bad move, or even to cope with being blamed
without reason. We don’t look at ourselves enough and ultimately we take
seriously the part of the game that should be taken more lightly. We
become demotivated, we shift blame, we lose focus and ultimately we
become complacent.
League of Legends is not a perfect game
and flaws, even little ones, can be found almost anywhere. But Solo
Queue gets criticized too often and consequently we disregard its
importance so much that we forget how it can help us. We have this
terrible concept regarding the matchmaking being so bad that no matter
how good we are we won’t be able to win. We don’t need improving, the
system needs improving. “I won my lane but my team fed so I’m silver III
again”. We become complacent, we play less and less – more importantly,
we value our game less and less – and consequently we become worse. And
this issue is not just about how much time we dedicate into playing the
game. I believe how many hours you play has a degree of importance in
how good you are able to become. But how you do your approach to the
game, how you allow yourself to improve from a game, even the most
terrible ones, that’s the chance you are missing if you don’t play with
the right mindset. It’s not just about complacency on how much you play -
complacency kills your attitude and your potential to learn and reach
your potential, which is probably the worst demon a player can face.
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