I've locked/archived this thread/blog and have started a new discussion over here: http://forums.demigodthegame.com/454943/
Please join me if you like.
Am I streaming?
Well, I started a thread back in August (https://forums.joeuser.com/411269/) that's seen a lot of activity and actually had quite a few good bits of information for new and old players alike. I figure it's time to start a new thread and perhaps keep the OP up-to-date with useful information, etc. Feel free to use this post for any LoL discussion, etc.
Super fast background: I played a lot of Demigod as pacov/cheesuscrust. Back in August 2011 or so, I started getting heavily involved in LoL and folks have been kind enough to chime in with tips and links to various sites that have been quite useful to me. In addition, I've been able to keep up with folks that I've played Demigod with in the past and meet some new folks that play LoL and frequent these message boards.
Here's some of the things I've learned in the previous thread:
New Player tips
Great site I visit every day for LoL related news - http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends
pacov's misc info
Here's a guide I made
pacov's Guide to Improving at League of Legends and Moving Up in Elo
k - so I'm just going to put down some of my thoughts. I'm not amazing at this game, but I do certain things that improve my odds of winning in ranked and so far its panning out just fine (bronze 5 to gold 5 in about a month or so). We all have varied skill levels, so some of this might be useful and some not. Caveat complete.
Prerequisite- you need to know how to play every single role. You don't have to be a god at every single role (more power to you if you are - I'm certainly not). You need to be able to play at a serviceable level in every single role and excel at least at 1 role (preferably 2). In my case, I'm good at support and adc. I'm not great, but have serviceable mids and jungles and so so tops. Knowing what you are good at and bad at is very important. If you don't know, I can probably tell you - but you really should know... Anyway, you need to have enough champs to make solid picks in any role and you need to be able to cover any role if it comes down to it. I'll talk about how to get better at specific roles in a bit.
Champ select advice - Don't be the "fill" guy unless you really feel like you are awesome in all roles. Call your preferred role immediately when you hit the lobby. Say "adc pref." Do this as soon as you hit the lobby. Some people believe that if you call a role you magically get it. This is stupid, but if you call something out, folks will often accomodate your request. If you are feeling wishy washy for whatever reason, call out multiple roles in order of what you want to play - "adc/mid pref." In my experience, you generally do not want to call support. It's a very important role, but you want to be in a position to carry every single game if possible. If you aren't calling out a role, you are hoping that other players can carry you. If you are hoping that folks will carry you, you don't deserve to win. You need to know your best roles and you absolutely should request them.
Solo or duo in ranked? - Well, my 1st thought here is that you should solo. If you solo, you have to rely on yourself. IMO - its a much bigger test of skill to play solo and win than to duo. Do you want someone to carry you or do you really want to know that you are actually good? That said, provided you have the right duo partner, you can increase your odds of winning quite a bit. The simple math is that instead of having 4 teammates as unknown quantities, you only have 3. If you have a good duo teammate, you know what you can expect. When you duo, you get the most bang for your buck by having complimentary roles. Support/adc is good; jungle/mid also works. Even if you don't have direct symmetry in roles, if you are an amazing mid and I'm an amazing adc, our odds go up quite a bit if we both get those roles. Our odds go way down if we can't get those roles and are forced to play out of positions that we are weaker. For example, Bryff is a good mid. If he duo's up with me, the only way he will get to play that role is for me to call mid, take it myself, and then put myself into a position like support where I can't carry out of (I'm always 1st pick, Bryff is always last pick when we duo)... that and I have to show the mid I'm picking at the start which means Bryff gets hard countered. In short, we can expect that we will be a disadvantage when duo queuing. Now, if Bryff queued up with someone at a lower elo than himself that was solid, he'd likely be 1st pick and be able to get mid and have a better chance of carrying the game. Anyway, you need to keep in mind where you end up in pick order when duoing if you aren't looking to go adc/support. If you want that, you can usually get it.
How do you get better in roles that you are not good at? - Well, here's what I do. And this is really what I do on a regular basis. I think about what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. For instance, I realized that I don't play any hyper carry ads. So, I read up on hyper carries like vayne and kog maw. I look for guides on how to build them (most adcs are the same btw ), I look for vids on how people play them (eg how do I all in with a specific champ - is there a combo - when do I all in - what's the best way for me to burst - how should I behave in lane with this champ). Then, I fire up a custom game and try out the mechanics of whatever champ vs AI. Usually I learn a few tricks during that custom on how to position myself, etc. Then, I'm off to normal games where I'll request the role or character I'm trying out. Now, people still report your for being awful in normals, but it really is where you need to try out characters to see if you are any good or not as the bots are useless for proving your skill level to yourself. So, fire up that normal and ask to play a role (again - after you've tried out the champ against bots). If you don't know anyone you are with and you are quite awful, I suggest muting everyone at the start of the game. Then, do your best. Continue with this until you feel like you have a serviceable skill level in whatever role. And keep in mind what you need to work on. For me, I noticed I didn't really have alot of mids for ranked, so I started practicing some with gragas against and karth. That way, I'll be able to get the job done if I need to play mid. The next thing I need to do is put more time into being better top lane. Again, because while I prefer adc/support, I might need to play top for the team. So, best to be ready for it. Put your time in and practice roles.
One last thought - there are certain things you can generally expect in ranked. 1 - if you are 1st pick, you generally can call whatever you want. Common knowledge, I'm sure - but I'll add - CALL WHATEVER YOU WANT. 2 - if you duo queue, you generally can lock down both adc and support. It works best if your adc is 1st pick, ofc. I've bumped into like 10 random dedicated supports in all of my games of LoL. People generally aren't going to call support. So, if you are 1st pick and duo'd, just call adc and then your duo partner can almost always get support.
Lol King profiles for ranked tracking
I'm not going to update this regularly, so just consider it a snapshot (I'll add a date when I update them). Anyway, I enjoy seeing folks progress through ranked and keeping tabs on that sort of thing from time to time.
Snapshot updated 05/28/2014
Character guides
come listen to cow express himself about his relationship woes. 5v5 in house games live in a min or 2 - cow talking now
http://www.twitch.tv/1pacov1
in house games continue...
K - so we had some fun games. In all of our games, we did the Thunder and I team captain bit. So, at the very least, we made sure everyone was happy with the teams. That said, Thunder and I might just be absolute shit at picking teams to balance as a good chunk of the games felt a little lopsided. Anyone else share that opinion or am I just remembering it wrong? If I'm correct, any thoughts on how we might adjust things? I think the only thing I can accurately predict is how my lane matchup will go - and I don't always know who will be laning against me, so even that's kinda useless for balancing pre game. Thunder seems to think Hedgie is good at balancing things out, but he wasn't on last night.
One cool thing about last night - we had a ton of people on deck and ready to play. I think at one point we lost like 3-4 people and immediately were able to replace them. In the past, if we lost 3 all of a sudden, that would be it for the night. It was a really pleasant surprise.
Other stuff - bryff's pal is coming along nicely and getting better at support. Still quite a bit to learn, but I think we'll get him there. Noticeable improvements from when we just started playing a few days ago.
It's hard to pick balanced teams when there's new people thrown into the mix that we don't have a good feel of. The more regulars we start having for these games, the better the balance will be I think.
Having said that, I have to disagree with the games being "lopsided" cause balance seemed pretty okay to me. Its tough to figure out how things are going sometimes cause we do tend to be focused on the success (or failure) of our own lanes in this game.
Thing is that we both have pretty good coordination in these games so it's not like normal games with randoms where if you lose a team fight, the other team goes off to farm lanes and steal the enemies big golum. In the in house games, if you lose a team fight or get caught you lose towers/inhibs so things can go from winnable to game over in a hurry.
ok - as long as other folks aren't seeing it that way then. Really hope I get better at figuring out the balance.
I wish the ui had a way to quickly compare how other lanes are going; for instance, if I'm bot lane, I have no idea if our top is getting destroyed in cs, etc. It might seem a bit more cluttered, but I'd love to see an overlay that at least would compare the lane you are in's cs. I typically check that when I'm adcing, but not for other lanes, so I just have no clue if a particular lane is getting dominated unless you see a ton of deaths, no towers, etc. Doubt I'll ever see that in game... hopefully they'll at least add the enemy's cs if you click on them. That would make it super easy to check out the adc if I'm adcing. I bet we'll see that in game someday anyway (as it makes a hell of a lot of sense).
Another thought for our 5v5 in house nights - anyone interested in going to like 4 bans? We could just consider malph/shen auto bans. I'm cool with things as is... be nice if riot baked in the feature to custom games to allow for more/less bans, though.
Other random thoughts - I think I'm done with adc thresh. The only way I think he could be viable is if he was used to streamroll early/mid. You'd have to capitalize on his lantern using jungle ganks, but the potential is pretty sick there. In the plus column, he has insanely strong damage on his q passive even without alot of items. BUT - he is slow as fug. And his attack annimation is either bugged or a bit long as I'd miss a few quit shots on folks when it seemed like it should hit.
He completely falls off as adc late game. Lantern is only useful in trying to save someone (late game you'd only want to do this if someone got caught or things went to hell (eg completely non offensive use). He can do little to nothing to peal for himself (his e doesn't knock anyone far enough away). AND - you have to be in the mix to use your ult (eg you can only use it offensively if you are willing to sacrifice positioning - which means you are probably dead and not putting out dmg on the enemy team). In short, pretty rubbish as an adc.
Now, onto him as a support - he has the same relative strengths in early/mid lane. Late game, I tend to think he's kind of so-so. Lantern could be used to get someone out that has low hp safely (but its pretty damn hard to click on if there are 5 characters on top of it). That also means you need to be far enough away that they could hop to safety... which means you aren't really close enough to do anything useful - so, really its not all that useful at all in team fights (and the shield is pretty weak on him as a support). He does have 2 forms of hard cc that can be used to interrupt and 1 slow, but he won't be all that tanky as a support. He might be most useful in keeping someone out of the battle temporarily (hook someone on the fringe to cc them for a 1.5-2 sec).
K - so he does have a ton of cc (long cd's though), he could be a very good peeling bruiser, I'd think. Don't remember if vlad was building him like a bruiser though. As an AP, I really don't know. Not sure how the damage scales - I do know that if you miss your q hook there is a big cooldown, so bursting not so good.
Anyway, I think riot designed him with early game dominance/utility in mind. The soul stuff is ok - probably a bit stronger if he's a mid with deathcap - that would be like a minimum of 100 extra ap mid/late is + deathcap bonus. Eg if he was doing well as a mid, he'd have potential for extremely high ap dmg output... depending on his ap scaling. I get the feeling riot would have anticipated this and nerf'd his ap ratios. Even then, his spells aren't great for nuking.
i think that'd i'd be okay with four bans.
The general argument for increasing bans is that there are too many "must bans" that it is impossible to remove imbalance from champion selection, or after removing "OPs", you only get 1 ban to use "free".
For example, Shen eats up 1 out of 6 bans just about every game. If he isn't banned, he is first-picked.
Having more "free" bans allows you to target counterpicks to the champions/compositions that you want to use. Additionally, even though the game is becoming more and more balanced, there are a lot of champions and even though S-tier champs are mostly gone, there are a huge number of A-list.
The general argument for not increasing bans is that it prevents people from "shining", espiecilaly in competitive play. We'd never see Froggen's Anivia if tournaments had four bans. However, i generallly think that we are a group do not have a lot of signature champions that we have 300 games on, and play at a Diamond level.
i think auto-banning "OPs" would be better, having four bans just to use on anyone might lead to just outright banning-out.
I'm ok with this, but we'd have to agree on a list of auto-bans. I think my main goal with the bans would be to increase the variety of characters we'd play (less of a targeted "f u" ban). Another thing to consider is our overall skill level with certain "OP" champs when considering these autobans. I think its reasonably safe to say that we could get a solid malph or shen on most teams, so they'd be autobans. kha'zix is an example of a champ that is often banned and considered op, but I don't know that anyone we play with has an "op" kha - so I wouldn't think that would be an auto ban. And while blitz is banned most games, I don't personally think that he'd qualify for an autoban... even though he'll likely be banned because he's an annoying sob that can turn a game around. smeh... maybe he should be an autoban. Anywho, I'd wager we all might agree to just considering shen/malph banned pre-game and then we each have 3 addtional bans. That might be a simple enough start.
Last thought, it might be fun to have a blind pick game here and there. I'll be on tonight and up for some more in house games if we have enough folks around.
I'd say...
Shen
Blitzcrank
Malphite
I despise the following champs for their lack of absolute counterplay and for the absurdity of their kits:
Olaf
Elise
I can't really think of anyone else I really don't like.
I'm all for auto banning Malphite and Shen.
ok - we'll try that for a bit. Consider it currently a house rule - just make sure to tell your team before we start a game. I'll be on in about 10 min.
hmm... something interesting on pbe right now:
"As an example, we have implemented a system on PBE that will automatically detect toxic behaviors and ban the players the same day—this system will go live today and will immediately punish 167 players with a 7 day ban. Depending on the consistency and severity of the toxic behaviors, this system will hand out bans that range in severity from a 7 day ban to a permanent ban from the PBE environment. This system will start off conservative and may have hiccups at first, but we hope to ramp up the aggressiveness of this system while maintaining a goal of 99% accuracy with a false positive rate of less than 1%."
team games live now - http://www.twitch.tv/1pacov1
karl - thunder thought he saw you spectating after you quit. I saw my stream went down. Just curious - did you log back in to spectate then?
Anywho - really fun games tonight. Last game of the night I got to play my crappy yi. I enjoy that even when I do bad, so yay. Our bot lane in the last game did really well - xel had nice stats as graves and our support went to support town apparently. Side note - I hope no one takes offense. I sadly didn't even know our bot lane did well until the other team surrendered... I was caught up in my awful yi world and had like 0 map awareness outside of a few times when I could roam etc... when I could get trouser not to steal my fucking blue.
Anyway, while its fresh in folks minds, I would like some feedback re: teams in the last game. Did anyone think it was a big mismatch going in? I felt like we'd have strong top, decent jungle presence, so so mid, and god knows what bot... eg that = pacov's assessment of his team going in. Was it a reasonable matchup or really smeh? I appreciate any feedback. Thanks again for the in house games tonight. Night all!
i don't think the teams were "wildly" mismatched - each team had 3 experienced "core" members. (people with 1000+ games that tend to play inhouse a bit).
i think the strange part was that we traded you our best player (Gotnades), while you gave us your (second?) worst player. That might have been a fair trade (depending on what the original teams were), if we didn't already have the weakest player out of the 10 to begin with.
That said, i don't really think that that game was too badly a product of a mis-matched team.
One thing about AP Yi though is even if you rank yourself as "so-so" (ie, lower map awareness, less knowledge of lane matchupes, whatever, because you don't play a lot of mid), AP Yi is "really really" good at farming. You completely blew Sharp out of the water, even with your roaming toplane.
And yeah, i had no idea that bot lane was going to go so well for you
i think the auto-ban of Malphite and Shen seemed to work out well, so that's cool.
cool - we'll prob keep doing that then unless we get some folks very opposed. Makes sense to most of us it seems anyway.
there's the exciting pacov handicapping thing again - I really didn't think gotnades was your best player (eg didn't think I was requesting your best). Glad you folks were willing to try it. I think we have good communication between thunder and myself at least pre game now, so I'm pretty happy about that.
re: yi - yah - my experience with him is that he's great at farming and bullying mid. If I don't land any kills by mid or so, I get pretty shut down. I just checked the cs diff between sharpy and myself...yah... 200 to 131. I don't think I crushed her in lane or anything... I just was very aggressive at taking cs off my wraiths/wolves/her wraiths whenever I could. Was she roaming too much that she fell behind?
no, she just isn't that great at CS'ing - when you died that time at wraiths a few minutes into the game, you were 21, she was 7.
I don't know if we could say for sure that our team adjustments were bad since I was lagging pretty heavily that game. There was one point where myself and a full health Sona were safely under our tower, when a lag spike hit. The minions started moving kinda funky and a few seconds later Graves and Taric magically appeared over Sona's corpse which was kinda frustrating.
This was of course after a nightmare Xerath game I played, where I immediately drove to my ISP's office and traded out my modem and signed up for the "turbo" internet. Went home, tested everything out best I knew how, and then lagged all game long. I've always had not great internet, living on an island and all but my LoL lag has gotten noticeably worse ever since the Vi patch.
I'm gonna do what I can to fix things but I'm not the only one who has had trouble with spikes since Vi went live. My buddy who lives in New Jersey started having really bad spikes like I had last night, about the time I started having minor ones. Apparently LoL was the only game he had trouble with and everything with his ISP tested out fine, and he went through all their steps like removing Pando and turning off Peer To Peer Transferring which fixed nothing.
So yeah, I'm gonna see if I can fix things but I'm also gonna try out some other game my buddy wanted me to play and see if that lags much. If I don't have hug latency issues on that one, then I might be done with LoL.
If so, thanks for the games everybody!
Thunder - a couple of things you can do to find out if the problem is due to your isp. 1st - do a speedtest and get your average upload speed. Download bitmeter (you can find on cnet). Right click on bitmeter and then left click on alerts. Set an alert to warn you when you as a smidge under your average upload speed. Now, this doesn't tell you precisely what the problem is, but it does indicate that your upload bandwidth is the problem. That could mean that you have something else that is sapping your upload speed.
Side note - if you have someone else on your network, this means rubbish unless you are certain they are powered down when you are running this test.
Thanks for the advice, I'll give it a shot but I kinda doubt bandwidth is the issue. I checked my speed after upgrading and it seemed a solid 20 download/2 upload. Also, my roommate wasn't even home for the in house game where I was having the worst issues and said she was only listening to itunes during that earlier game we played. I guess Bitmeter makes sure the bandwidth stays consistent during gaming?
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=2846899
This is a thread full of people who have been having a similar issue around the time I started spiking, which makes me think it's not my ISP.
I was kind of watching one of your games while doing other stuff around the apartment.
People don't necessarily have to be home for their devices to take bandwidth. Lots of devices do some kind of automatic nonsense, even if they aren't infected with all kinds of malware. It is most likely that something like this is messing up LoL.
re: the lag thing - I had issues starting around when you mentioned. For me, they just kind of leveled off. I never quite figured out what the problem was but its been better for me lately. I have carbonite and started making sure that was disabled for a bit. I can't really cite anything that magically resolved my problem. Hopefully you can narrow something down. Nothing gets me yelling at the screen like being frozen and unable to do jack shit...
Are you 20/2 or 20/20? 2 Mbps (b -> little b == 256 KBps -> big upload isn't very good. On the other hand, 20 Mbps up is really excessive.
That said, LoL doesn't have very high upload requirements, and unless you've noticed TS lagging, then that probably isn't the issue.
Usually, stuff like a 1.5 second delay are caused by one of two things:
- saturated download (you have no more download, so you don't get anymore information). This is solved with more download bandwidth.
- dropped packets (the server is either not sending you data, or it is getting lost en route to your house). This is what causes a "ping spike". A "ping" is the measurement of time it takes for a packet to make a round-trip from you to your server, so if your packets are being dropped, for a few seconds your ping will dramatically increase.
If you have cases where like you see the enemy move but your commands don't go through, then that would be your upload not being good enough.
The link you linked does seem to imply that there is an issue with their servers not sending information to people, so it could be LoL's problem, esp since you just upgraded your internet and it used to work on a worse connection. It could also just be stuff like there is construction going on with the internet connection, new wires, etc, and then it'll resolve itself later.
20 Mbps Download and 2 Mbps Upload.
Yeah doesn't sound like an upload problem... just four bar lag spikes, ice skating minions, etc.
Hopefully I'll be able to figure something out when I get home, but it's been pretty aggravating when it wasn't as bad as yesterday. Knowing a day like yesterday could happen is going to take the enjoyment out of the game even when the spikes aren't bad enough to be game breaking.
thunder - do u have a setup where you can plug directly into the cable modem (bypass router)? If so, give that a go one night if your roommate will be a pal and see if you still have issues.
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