I started playing League, for all intents and purposes, once Season 8 was already underway (I’ve had my account for much longer, but upon making my account I didn’t make it through the tutorial game before giving up and leaving my account dormant for years). In March, I reached level 30 and in April I acquired my 30th champion -- which was at that time the minimum number of champions owned required to play ranked -- and immediately played my placement games. I probably experienced the most forgiving placement games anyone ever has, because Riot placed me in Silver II. That season I eked into Gold V the day before the season ended, and the next season I peaked Platinum III. I had no prior MOBA experience before I began learning to play League of Legends, and in fact do not typically play video games that require any mechanical skill at all whatsoever because my base mechanical skill is quite... lacking. How was I able to climb so quickly in spite of all this? Well, it probably helped that I picked the role that doesn’t have to learn the mechanics of last hitting, if I'm being honest.

If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s learn and improve upon a practical skill. I have found that my background as a classical musician helps me understand what I need to do to improve my gameplay to the next level, because it’s strangely similar to setting practice goals as an instrumentalist. Today I wish to share some of my practicing insights with you: a treatise on practice and improvement in League of Legends, from a classical musician.

You Must Learn Your Scales and Your Arpeggios: Basic Building Blocks

Most musicians can play their basic scales very quickly, cleanly, and in multiple different ways. Why is it we still practice these things we can do very well every day, then? Well, two reasons.

1. As we improve overall, our standards will get higher. We practice so we don’t fall behind our expectations.
2. If we don’t use it, we’ll lose it -- precise motor skills require constant upkeep, or they’ll depreciate over time.

Practice tool is your best friend. I know it can seem boring at times, but it is a place to approach all of the mechanical feats you might be expected to perform in-game with zero time pressure, no audience, and infinite redos. It’s important to spend some time in practice tool every once in a while to practice some of the most basic building blocks of your gameplay. Practice your early game CS with no distractions, and therefore no excuses. Stop complaining about turret range discriminating against you and only you, familiarize yourself with it.

Is there a champion you consistently lose to but don't want to actually want to play enough to incorporate into your champion pool? Playing that champ in practice tool is a good halfway measure to learning what someone playing that champion against you will be looking for in the situations you typically come up short when you play against that champion. Don't underestimate the value of perspective, even if you don't wind up learning anything new about the champion.

Slow down your combos -- break them down, become intimately acquainted with each step -- and perhaps you’ll find which step you’re the most inconsistent with (if you didn’t know already). It’s better to execute something well and slowly than quickly and just barely not right. You’ll drill incorrect muscle memory into yourself otherwise, so do your best to fight the prideful urge that tells you you don’t need to practice something so basic.

It Was the Instrument! Being Honest (But Forgiving) About Your Mistakes

I get that mistakes can be embarrassing. I have absolutely fiddled around with my instrument right after messing up to create the illusion that it was the instrument, not me. Musicians joke about this sort of thing all the time. However, League players at times will really take the concept of blaming external factors for minor mistakes to a whole new level.

I want you to suppress the urge to do this. The more you do this, the more it becomes a reflex. It was a ping spike, your malfunctioning hardware. If your ally made a bigger mistake than you did, you can place the responsibility on their shoulders alone. We all do this sometimes, but I urge you to not do this so much that you begin believing your own excuses. At a certain point, you're just lying to yourself to make yourself believe a better player than you actually are. This sort of self-deception is toxic to improvement, because all practice stands on the pillar of knowing your weaknesses.

Just the same as I want you to be willing to accept your mistakes, it's counterproductive to beat yourself up over them. If you're too harsh on yourself about your mistakes, you'll scare yourself away from trying new or risky things out of the fear of failure. Do not play recklessly -- and absolutely do not feed in your ranked games for the sake of "limit testing" -- but in the appropriate settings, feel free to experiment with exactly what kinds of situations you can manage to get out of (or even win in). Being honest about your mistakes doesn't mean bombarding your mental with constant "failures", it means being honest about what didn't work and why, so that you can improve for the future.

The Recording Never Lies: Reviewing Your Own VODs

The practice technique I hated most when I was younger was recording myself playing. Recordings are unflattering; they lay bare your flaws. However, they’re some of the best criticism you’ll ever hear. The thing about fixing your mistakes is that simply being mindful of them will do so much of the work for you, so long as you are mindful on a consistent, continuous basis.

This is another thing that can seem tedious, but I promise it’s worth it. There will be games that you think you understand why you lost, but in actuality you probably missed a lot about the game because you had to focus on what you could do. That’s not a bad thing -- in every game we play, we should always be thinking about what we can do about the situation we’re currently in. VOD review can help you take a step back and gain a broader perspective about the overall wave and macro control you and your team exhibited over the course of the game, in addition to helping you catch some of your micro mistakes. Micro mistakes are probably what make people cringe the most in reviewing their own play, but at the end of the day it’s only a fraction of the reasons we review our VODs. VOD review can teach you so much about maintaining your leads or holding out when behind until you have a chance to come back.

Having trouble forcing yourself to VOD review? VOD reviewing with friends helps makes the experience less miserable -- sometimes even fun! -- and you can pool your knowledge together. Adding another voice to your VOD review can help force you to remain honest and humble. And give your ego a break when it’s time to review your friend’s game. Speaking of seeking out other voices...

Learning from Your Betters

Seek out people who are better than you. Play with them. Play against them sometimes, if you can. Listen to their calls and learn to see the game through their eyes. Just as there’s no faster way to improve on an instrument than being forced to blend in with musicians playing at a higher level than you can, there's no faster way to acquire game knowledge than to simply absorb it from people who know more than you.

This has always worked extremely well for me, and bit by bit I've watched myself surpass many of the people I used to learn from. If you're the highest ranked player amongst your friends, seek out some new friends. You'd be surprised how often higher tiered players actually enjoy teaching less experienced players. Here are a few places to begin looking for more League-playing friends.

• LCS team and player Discords
• r/LeagueConnect
• r/botlanetinder
• Joining the League club at your school or university, if applicable to you
• Showing up to local LANs
• Join an online team! There are plenty of teams in every tier, at varying commitment levels. Try r/teamredditteams.
• Also, consider just... adding teammates you enjoyed playing alongside from your matchmade games.

Try to learn from these players over time. Feel free to ask them questions about their decision making, matchups, and team composition. Ask them what areas they think you need to improve upon most; if you survey enough people to spot some similarities in their answers, you've just found yourself a practice goal.

Practice Goals

It's one thing to know what you want to improve at. But if you're taking my advice and truly humbling yourself, chances are you'll start creating a list of things you need to improve at to become a better player -- starting with the most apparent flaws, the largest gaps that present themselves when you play, all the way down to the smaller things that you're better at but still know you could improve on -- and sooner or later that list will include every skill that exists in the game. And while this list will be true, as everyone could stand to improve on everything because no one is perfect, you'll notice that the list is both intimidating and entirely unhelpful. So how to we parse down this list, prioritize our goals?

Well, as you can imagine, the elements of your play that most often stick out to you as something that hold you back are a very good place to start. Think about the top five problems in your play you'd like to fix, in order of importance. I want you to get specific about these things too. Don't pick "macro", or even "objective control". In what part of the game is your macro the weakest? Which objectives do you struggle to control? Think things like "transitioning to midgame", something a lot of players (myself included!) struggle with. Perhaps you know you could pick better times to lane swap in order to seize control of the game's tempo as you force laning phase to come to a close. Perhaps you struggle to manage your minion waves before important barons or dragons to set up your team to contest the objective successfully. Perhaps you have a pattern of positioning mistakes you tend to make in lane or in teamfights. Every day you practice, pick two things. At most three, if one of these things is extremely minor (like remembering to buy and place control wards).

It is very easy to overload your brain with the things you need to work on. After all, you also have to focus on the things you typically get right about your play as well. This is why we narrow our focus to specific targets when we want to improve. If you try to work on too many things at once, you will more likely than not reduce the efficacy of your practice in all areas. A flute teacher I once studied with explained this concept about my own inefficient approach to practicing -- as I once had a tendency to try to work on too much at once -- with the following, somewhat strange, metaphor.

You have a block of ice in the freezer. In the middle of that ice lies a diamond, which you wish to reach. Every day that you practice, you take that block of ice out of the freezer and you lick each side of it, then you put it back in the freezer. At the end of the day, you've done somewhere between nothing and barely anything to get you closer to that diamond. What I want you to do instead, each day that you practice, is pick one side, and get a hammer and chisel. Drill your way towards the diamond from one side. The next day, pick another side.

Seeing the Philharmonic: Attentive Viewing Professional and High ELO Play

Watching eSports is fun. There is an attitude amongst the eSports-viewing player base that I've never identified with, however: people who get bored just because there isn't much blood being spilt. Perhaps this is because I began watching professional League play while I was still very new to the game, but I always saw each professional game I watched like a forty minute masterclass in League of Legends. Starting with draft phase, I would learn about team composition and drafting strategy as the casters commented on each decision made by the teams. While one can benefit a lot more from draft strategies in a competitive 5v5 setting -- like 5-person flex queue, competitions, or clash -- I firmly believe the general drafting knowledge has applications in every queue and party size.

I learned so much macro from listening to casters and watching professional play, especially at the time the only way I knew how to play out of laning phase was group as five down mid (ah, the days of old). I paid attention to how these players traded, where they placed and scanned for wards, and how they set up to contest objectives. These so-called "boring" moments are amazing teachers about how to maintain control of your resources and avoid fights you don't want to get into.

Similarly, as you watch your favorite streamers and professional players, be entertained; but also, pay attention to the more routine things with a drive to learn. A lot of the most "boring" moments are often the most telling of that player's mastery: how they know ability ranges to the most exact degree and maneuver in their minion waves accordingly, the areas they do not face check. If you've been flashed on by an opponent and then all-in killed, you might be primed to appreciate how ensuring nothing happens in fact requires a long chain of correct decisions.

That being said, learning from pros and streamers is a lot easier if you seek out those content creators who do their best to be informative and helpful to lower ELO players! Still, if at the end of the day your time is limited and you just want to watch your favorite content, view it with a mindset that constantly searches for the techniques these players employ to be successful. Do your best to figure out why they make the decisions they do and take note of what factors outside of their mechanical prowess cause their success and failures.

Practice and Performance: Knowing What Kind of Game You’re Playing In

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The easiest way to explain this concept is to refer you to this TED talk. I wrote a bit about the kind of attidutes are condusive to helping you improve earlier, and the TED speaker Eduardo Briceño here covers similar advice about mindset as he distinguishes approaching your performance both from a practice and performance perspective. Every game of League of Legends you play, you should always choose whether you're practicing or performing. You can distinguish by queue, or even by account. I personally enjoy using flex queue as my practice zone and solo queue largely as a performance zone; you're welcome to use smurfs or norms, as long as you think about what kind of game you're playing mindfully.

With this, I wish you good luck and happy practicing!