The Legendary Annals of Crown Prince Rammin': Part III

These are from games played July and early Aug 2013.

Well, I continue my spectacularly slow progress up the League of Legends summoner levels, with gaming time severely limited by family/work responsibilities (many enjoyable I should add) and related exhaustion. Now halfway through L12 (Flash FTW! Woot!). I got myself a 50 wins XP boost pack, since all my mates are L30 and I need all the help I can get with my small amount of playing time. I had  no problems with paying real money for that; the game has already given me plenty of value. The remaining RP gives me enough to unlock a couple of champions when I see ones I was gunning for in sales. [Edit: In fact, just unlocked Morgana and Kog'Maw a few days ago with this. My initial roster is nearly complete: the details and crazy thinking merit another post :-)]

Had some interesting experiences in terms of the community. (Spoiler: almost overwhelmingly positive. Yes, I did say positive.) Kept forgetting to use Fraps to grab stats screen shots so, for the ones I missed, I've used the stats details from the very useful LolKing site.

Game 1

The shame, the shame.

I should get my utter shame out of the way first. 0/9/1 with Evelynn (first time) in Co-Op vs. AI speaks for itself :-) I tried jungling and, being accustomed to Nunu (with his uber-sustain bite and AS/MS buff), completely miscalculated. Luckily the rest of the team were stomping and just passed a few 'WTF Eve?!!' and 'Stop feeding Eve' comments (but also a couple of 'no problems' when I apologised for being so shit). I should have gone straight to lane after the initial death, but the rest of the guys were pushing hard and it was only a Co-Op vs. AI so thought I'd practice. I think at one point I was something ridiculous like 7 or 8 levels behind (blushes). But such hard lessons are definitely the best learnt.

Games 2 and 3

The cunning(?) 3 marksmen gambit fails to pay off.

These showed the negative side of blind pick solo queue matches. Both times I got exclusively Spanish-speaking teams, and both times they locked-in champions with zero regard for team composition.

In the first, we had three marksmen (ADCs) and zero chat messages, with the inevitable result. Tried to support them as jungle Nunu with some ganks but was never going to be enough.

Like the Sinclair C5: looks good on paper, fails miserably in practice.
(No, wait, the C5 looked shit on paper as well :-))

 In the second, we had a more sensible line-up (tank, marksman, support, assassin and apparently jungling Fiddlesticks), with me as support (Soraka). But then Fiddlesticks didn't jungle and three of them went bottom and one top. (I think the other team had three bottom at the start, though they may well not have done; if they did, the smart move would have been to hold them with two (maybe Amumu or Ashe and me) but no-one was responding to chat. So I went mid and somehow went 3/2/2 with Soraka(!) before a horrible loss.

Having said all that, I actually still enjoyed trying to make the best of it and encourage some teamwork, even when the latter experienced the Lead Balloon Effect.

Games 4 and 5

Partly as a reaction to those games, I hooked up with LoL players in the Rock, Paper, Shotgun community (a games blog I've followed for ages which attracts some great, intelligent commentary on gaming). Hopped on to the in-game chat channel, fired off a few messages, joined their Mumble (voice chat) server, and had a couple of games with ultra helpful and friendly guys within minutes (cheers!).

Well, they're stats to be proud of for a marksman in a 55+ mins game :-)

Fraps shot at last! Similar lacklusted marksman scores.

The only problem was that they were all L30 (mostly Silver league ranked) and used smurf accounts (alternative lower-summoner-level) accounts for these games. I assume that they did this for one or more of the following reasons: (a) they didn't want to get a bad game history playing with random people who might be unbelieveably appalling; (b) they think the match-making is broken and would give me too hard a game; (c) they want to help me advance by giving me an armchair ride; or (d) they just wanted some fun playing at an easier level. Maybe it's different reasons for different people but I find it (use of smurf accounts) a bit depressing because it 'destabilises' the matchmaking system (which seems pretty reasonable from my experience). Whatever the case may be, (c) is mostly what applied and, though I was massively thankful for their help and friendliness (and we had two straightforward wins), it all felt a little too easy and not really helping me learn the hard way. You can see from my stats--- as a marksman both times--- that I was rather, shall we say, away from the action :-)

Games 6 and 7

These were more like it. Played Soraka both times: I've done a lot of support because I'm nice and don't demand top, mid or marksman after 0.04 secs :-) Plus I actually like it.

Team Mage Kicks Ass.

Both games were solo queue again but both times I got chatty English-speaking teams who were trying to learn. You can see I was a lot more involved in these games.

The first was still a case of the first 4 people picking what they wanted, which left us with 3 mages and 2 supports, with both of the supports magic-damage-focused :-) But, when I said we looked a little mage-heavy, people were aware enough (and fun enough) to respond 'Go Team Mage!'. But, except for an enemy Udyr who sensibly built Wit's End and MR (and reaped the rewards), they didn't really counter it as they should and we had some decent individual and team play. It's always a pleasure when your Soraka ult saves a player the other side of the map from certain death (Annie top in this case) with perfect timing, and you get an exchange like the one I got here:

Annie: Wow, was that you Soraka?
Soraka: Yep :-)

Building Will of the Ancients (AP and spell vamp for all allies in range, including me) also helped. I'm starting to think more intelligently about item selection now (and have a better recollection of what does what).

Underwhelming stats mask some great bot lane action.
(That sounds so wrong.)

In the second, I experienced a first in winning without a single death on our entire team: I think they surrendered when about 30 deaths down :-)

I was only 0/0/4; Fizz (mid) and Pantheon (top) went on major killing sprees. But we had some great defensive action bottom with Caitlyn and Soraka (me) vs. Blitzcrank and Cho'Gath (oddly not Caitlyn, though she showed up later). We lacked offensive oomph--- it was YourNightM4re's first game as Caitlyn, and he/she took Meditation which was a massive waste with Soraka supporting, whose E massively replenishes allies' mana--- but I had a lot of work to do with Blitz around and made some nice saves. Luckily I took Heal so could do an initial silence and then up to three heals which is always handy. Some other really nice chat exchanges, such as:

Caitlyn: Thanks so much. [After saving her from another Blitz pull.]
Soraka: No probs.

Summary

A bit of everything but enjoying every minute. Would be so useful to be able to specify preferred/required languages for your summoner matchmaking, but I can see how Riot wouldn't want to do that to potentially split the community. (I still think they're missing a trick not doing it though. Had exactly the same frustrations in Left 4 Dead.)