Rime is a prominent League of Legends content creator and coach who has been in the esports industry for years. His experiences in the different careers associated with League, along with his expertise with the game itself, are invaluable for novice and veteran players alike. I got to interview him about his journey in gaming, his biggest lessons in coaching, and his advice for players aspiring for improvement.

Hi Rime! You’re a prominent League of Legends coach working with Cloud9 Training grounds, and coaching players across all elos. Tell me about yourself!

Rime: I’m 23 years old, living in Canada and happily working remotely. I graduated with a bachelor’s in business last July as a marketing student. My competitive experience with League of Legends is one split of amateur and two years of collegiate for my school. I began attending and then found out we had a school league team and joined immediately. We never played internationally, but we were pretty decent.

You’re also a League content creator, how did that start for you?

Rime: It was just during my free time in college, you know, finish class, go home, and then just grind on Twitch, grind on YouTube, create thumbnails, stream League of Legends. I streamed close to 2,500 hours, and around that time I hit Twitch Partner and YouTube Partner. I was hard on the grind in all my free time, until I started at C9.

You touched on it already, but you played League professionally for a long time, and now you coach. I’d love to hear about your introduction to League and journey to Challenger.

Rime: I started playing League in Season 3, Season 4. I originally came from a StarCraft background, but kind of switched to League because it was what my friends played. I was a hardcore OTP and a huge fan of the game, but stuck in Silver for a few hundred games at least. Progressively I got better and better over time, like as I got older and started taking things more seriously. In grade 10 or 11 I was hitting Diamond 1 before the other ranks [Master, Grandmaster, Challenger] existed, and then grade 12 was when I hit Challenger as a top laner.

So after hitting those peak ranks, when did you decide that you wanted to pursue coaching?

Rime: If I’m being honest, I wasn’t really pursuing coaching at the time. I was bouncing between “do I want to stream or do I want to pursue pro play?” and the mix of that is to stream yourself, trying your best, trying to climb the ranks, and maybe play on a team here and there. Coaching was just one of the things that I did on stream.

I did coaching here and there, and then last February, given all my experience coaching, I saw that there were openings at Cloud9. And they kind noticed me because I had a very open profile with all my Twitch recordings and my vocal presence on social media.

Could you tell me about what you do as a coach?

Rime: The main thing that we do is camps – there's role based camps, where you'll be coaching like five mid laners or there's four week camps, which are pretty common. 4 week camps are about coaching a team of 5 together, and that’s a lot more macro based. Some individual stuff, but a lot of team macro: warding, matchups tracking, set up for objectives, all that good macro stuff. We also run a league, which is 10 weeks where you coach two teams for the same game title. So League teams compete over the course of four months, and it’s like Swiss or Round Robin, where you're just playing all the other teams throughout the league and then playoffs start.

Having worked with so many players in this proto-competitive environment, what are the primary ways you see individual players improve at League, and how does a good coach facilitate that?

Rime: I guess the main thing that helps people improve their game, the biggest thing for me is always gonna be figuring out how they play. Like when I watch coaches, I think one thing that kind of lets me tell if a coach is doing a good job is that a good coach kind of doesn't give the answer. They're kind of like asking questions like “why did you do this?”, and the answer helps figure out the player’s thought process. Once you’ve figured out their thought process, you can offer them solutions that work with how they want to play the game.

So speaking of that “approach to the game” that differs for people, how do you break that down and help people analyze their own approach critically?

Rime: When you ask a player what their game plan is before the laning phase starts, they’ll actually refine their plan just by thinking about it. Basically, the best mindset to have is that if you force yourself to think about it, the decision is obvious. I always remember that League is a really, really hard, super complex game – there's so many things that go on with different matchups, laning phases, roams, knowing who to play around, what your win conditions are, etc.

People have very clear weaknesses because there's just so much to learn in League, and you really can't learn it all. Just by having somebody kind of spectate you or ask you questions about what you’re doing you can kind of pinpoint those weaknesses. It's a lot easier for someone to go from Plat 1 to Diamond, if you explain jungle to them at a Gold level, because most of the time they understand jungle or top lane at a Bronze level, because they just have no experience on those other roles.

A lot of people seek improvement and coaching in the Silver-Gold elos, what tips would you give to those lower ELO solo queue players?

Rime: The biggest tip that I would give, and one of the things that I use to personally climb, is just having a narrow champion pool. You don't wanna be playing every champion. If you have a Gold player, a hundred games played on 50 different champions, two games each, they're gonna have a really hard time climbing. Whereas if you have a player that says, “I'm gonna play this role, I'm gonna play these three champions for this role, and I'm just gonna climb.”

The reason that's really good is because a lot of the time you find yourself in a game and you think to yourself, do I win this one versus one? Do I want to trade? Do I win this all in if I want to hundred to zero him right now? When you're in that position of not knowing that is the worst feeling. They could play aggressive, make you back up and lose a trade, but if you stick to a few champions, it's gonna be a lot easier to climb. And if you stick to the same item builds as well.

Someone that I coached was like a, it's funny, it's an Iron Veigar player, lowest rank I've ever coached–

Actually, tell me more about the story. I would love to hear about the iron Veigar player, it’d be a great place to end off on.

Rime: Yeah, I coached someone, an Iron 4 Veigar player, with like 200 games played. It was the lowest rank I've ever coached. It was a really nice person, they’red just an adult – like you come home from work and you just wanna play some League and you just didn't have the people to explain the game to you, so you just don't know a lot of things.

So you clean up the build paths (which is the biggest thing in every game) and you just play really aggressively in lane. If you don't know whether or not you win just go for it – trade heavy, all in them, ult them. The best way to learn is to limit test.

If you're up gold, if you're winning lane, if you have good CS, look to punish your lane opponent – fight them, go fight other people, don't recall when you’re full health, go for that limit test. With a narrow champ pool, narrow builds, you get used to the specific damage output. Because if you're going Electrocute Veigar with Everfrost-Rabadon’s every game, you're going to start to get a good feel of how much damage you do. Just knowing that you win those 1v1’s is gonna help you so much.

I watched that player climb from Iron 4 to Bronze 4 in one month. That's just from sticking with the low variability between games.

You can find Rime on Twitter, Twitch, and Youtube to see more of his coaching, analysis, and advice. Thank you for reading!