Replays, coming to official League servers soon, are a highly demanded feature that the community has sought after for years. Of course, there were outside applications and sites that could be used to watch back replays, but having an in-client option would simplify this greatly. Many argue that a replay system is crucial to improving at League of Legends, and that without them, advancing has been much harder to accomplish. Personally, I agree with this to a certain extent.

First of all, I am not arguing that replays shouldn’t be implemented into the game. They are an obvious expansion to the game, and any effort that Riot is making to assist the player improve is a good one. This is not an article claiming these changes are the wrong decision. I am just being critical of the system being put into place, and using this as an opportunity to discuss the best ways to learn the game as a player.

The benefit of Replays

There are a few things that a replay system can specifically help with, such as warding, map positioning, and learning efficient jungle pathing. These three points of the game are very important, and learning them well will give you an advantage in the game and lead to more success. These points of the game all fall into the “Macro” level of strategy, meaning we’re looking at the entire game, rather than on individual play or skill. This would allow the player to plan for future games, and gain knowledge on how different champions work within the game, and how to beat your enemy. A functional replay system would be a fantastic way to learn these specific points of the game. However, when the goal is to improve at the game as a whole, there are better ways to go about accomplishing this goal.

Third Party Replay Programs - How to watch replays now

There are a number of sites and programs that exist already to view back your replays. The most common and most used two sites used for replays are OP.GG and Replay.GG. For the sake of this article, I will be using replay.gg as my example.

Using this system is very simple, you will first be greeted with the main page just by visiting Replay.GG. It asks for your league account name, and the region you play in, as depicted here. Once entered, it will open a page with your recent match history, and allow you to select how you watch the replay with a few different options. You can see below that you can select "show details," this will take you to riots match history site, displaying the game that you selected.

Now that we are here, you find the game you want to watch back and you select "View Replay." This will open a line of code that you must copy and paste into your command prompt. To do this simply search "command prompt" into your windows search, and paste that code into the open box. It is Important that you have your League of Legends client open, and logged in, in order for this to work. Once all of this is accomplished, your league client will then switch into its spectate mode, with your replay playing once it loads.

The Issue with Replays

I believe it has been proven how important watching back replays is to the professional teams, it being one of the most important steps of their practice. However, I believe professional players see this success for a reason. Professional players frankly play a different level of league of legends to the average solo queue player. What I mean by this is, professional players have reached a level of mastery of this game that is not comparable to an average player, which means every mistake must be scrutinized and looked through.

In the hype and the excitement for this system’s release, I believe that a large portion of the community has showed just how much they want to view their replays. However, when you look at the replay system, you can see that it does have some major flaws with it. First, the replay system that will be implemented will not be able to access replays from previous patches. This means if the patch comes the day after your game, you will lose your replay. Second, although this only applies to players in a team setting it is an important point to make, you cannot record communication between players using this system. This does not affect the individual, but when learning the game in a team setting, communication is one of the most important things to master when looking for success. The inability to capture this in the league client will leave these people to have to use an outside recording program like OBS. These issues will not bother certain dedicated solo queue players, but a large portion of the community will be excluded by these blatant issues with the system.

What really works - The best ways to learn

Personally, I don’t believe that the use of a replay system would be nearly as efficient of a training method as other steps that can be taken. In my opinion, Low-Elo players need to focus on different types of improving. The most important steps to improvement in my eyes are:

• Practice - Keep playing the game, focus while playing, pay attention to what is happening in the game and try to gain knowledge and experience from each game. This is the most obvious and important step to get better at anything, if you keep playing the game you eventually grow as a player.
• Watch Top Tier Players’ Streams - There are a ton of different high level players that can teach you what you need to know about playing the game. There are varieties of roles and playstyles that players specialize in, and watching them is a great way to learn the game at a higher level, quickly. These players have such a good understanding for their play that consuming their content is an easy way to catch on to what they do to succeed. This step becomes more efficient if the streamer communicates to the viewer not only what they are doing, but why they are doing it. People in high ratings have a much better grasp of how the game should be played than the “everyman” of League of Legends, learning the game properly comes from these players.
• Patch Notes – Reading over each set of patch notes and understanding what changed from patch to patch is very crucial. Often, an interaction in game will catch you off guard, and being prepared for each match is very important. Something that also comes with studying each patch is checking champion statistics sites. These sites can give us a good look as to what is strong/weak in each patch and what to see in your ranked games.
  
  

In conclusion, what I aim to achieve with this series is finding the most efficient way to improve at League of Legends, and I personally believe that a replay system is not the answer to all our problems as players. I don’t necessarily think that a replay system is a negative thing for the game, or the community, but using it as a scapegoat for all the issues that exist in the game is not the answer. At most, replays play just a part in becoming an all-around great League of Legends player. I don’t believe it is something to completely ignore, but other steps will lead to more success than watching over your own replays.

Like our content? Support us by getting our merchandise in our shop