This week I played my first two games of LoL using my older brothers account. He logged on to the LoL client for me and set me up in what is known as a ‘Blind Pick’ game.
The ‘Blind Pick’ game is a PvP (player vs player) game with two teams of 5 players fight for victory. As the game was loading my brother explained to me that the way a game of LoL is won is by one team destroying the other teams ‘nexus’. Each teams ‘Nexus’ is in their base, which are located on the diagonally opposite corners of the map from each other.
The map is split into 3 lanes and what is called the ‘jungle’. I was informed that once I was in the champion select screen I would have to call a role and pick the champion I wanted to use. Calling a role is when you pick what position you want to play in for the game and the options are Toplane, Midlane, Jungle, ADC and Support.
The matchmaker found a game for me and I was finally in champion select (this took about 3 mins) and everyone called their role before me so I had to go support, which is apparently the least desired role. The champion I picked was a little fairy called ‘Lulu’.
While we were in the champion select screen my team was already arguing with one another over who had said ‘mid’ first and my brother said this was normal and that the Oceanic server (server for Australia, New Zealand and the pacific islands) was the most toxic other than the Brazilian server and I should expect to see more fights soon.
I got into game and I had to pick 1 of 4 spells to start with and buy items (the game gives recommended items to buy) then I went to bottom lane to fulfill my role of support.
I was in the bottom lane with my “ADC’ who is the champion that does a lot of damage but dies easily, my role as support is to keep them alive. It turned out it was hard enough to keep myself alive…
Within a couple of minutes I had been killed by the enemy team, and I respawned back at my base. There is just so much to process on the screen and everything happens so fast.
My brother over my shoulder kept telling me to upgrade my spells and where to go but it is too much to process, I die again.
My brother starts laughing and tells me that my team is all abusing me in the chat menu. They are calling me a scrub and a troll. Someone says that I am cancer, not exactly constructive criticism.
The games follows this pattern until the 20 minute mark where my team surrenders and all agrees to report me, this is common when someone plays badly I am told by my brother and it doesn’t actually have any effect as people rarely get banned. I end the game with the score of 0 kills and 12 deaths but I am told I actually did pretty good for my first game. My brother says it takes around 2 months just to learn the very basics.
So after a brutal attempt at breaking into the gaming world I would say that my first impression of playing LoL is that it is a very hard game to learn, requiring extensive knowledge of the game in order to play well. Despite these difficulties for new players the games community has no patience for anyone trying to learn.
I don’t think I’ll be attempting to play again anytime soon.
Digital Asia 