Most people that play League of Legends have a desire to experience coordinated team play. Whether it be with a group of complete strangers, or close friends, the game is much more exciting and fun to play with all 5 players talking and coordinating strategies to overcome the enemy team. Sadly in my experience most of these teams fall apart for one reason or another. This guide will help ensure your team doesn’t suffer the same fate, and be on your way to climbing the ladder.

Communication

This tends to be the biggest problem that most teams face. Communication is usually either completely wrong and inappropriate, or it is nonexistent and the team is left confused on what their gameplan is. Both of these can be incredibly detrimental to any team trying to thrive together, so here are my tips.

Quiet Team: If you fall into this category then fixing the problem could be as easy as a little bit of pre-game prep. Try to give certain people responsibilities, maybe the jungler calls out early game objectives, or the support is responsible for calling out warding positions. Just letting people know what you you expect of them can go a long way. It is also a good idea to identify a main voice in the team, identify someone that gets the last say so there is no confusion.

Inappropriate Communication: This in particular is my number one cause for teams to disband or players to be kicked. First off you should never point out mistakes that happen during the game. This is the leading cause of fights during games and only serves to tilt the person that you call out. In game you should never be hanging on mistakes, you should be looking for ways to fix them, so for the sake of team morale look ahead, not backwards. Next off is joking should be kept to a minimum in game because it floods the voice comms. There is almost always something important to talk about, so focus on that rather than your dank memes.

Take Five: During League of Legends emotions tend to flair up when things don’t go your way and this can lead to people thinking illogically about what happened in game. Due to this it is good to make a habit out of taking a 5 minute break after each game before you decide to discuss the events. This allows everyone to cool down and gather their thoughts on what went wrong. Anyone that watches TSM Legends will note that this is a technique utilized by them too.

Improving

The goal of any team should always be to improve from game to game. In order to do this, the only thing that you can do is slowly work through all the problems you run into as a team and figure out how to efficiently solve them. There are many methods that I’ve ran into in my time on teams and here is what worked and what didn’t work.

Reviewing Vods: The most common way to identify mistakes and solve them, but I feel it is incredibly flawed and here’s why. League is a very diverse and complex game, it is rare that any two similar situations will come up twice and reviewing something only prepares you for those very specific moments. This method also manages to very time inefficient, you tend to get only a very small amount of info from it and it can take upwards to an hour to review a game with a team. Finally it can create a very toxic environment with a bunch of teammates sitting down saying what they “think” went wrong, and can cause a lot of arguments. This method is usually reserved to coaches and analysts to take useful information from games and figure out a way to relay it to the team.

Research: A better method than the reviewing vods, doing your own research can really help you improve. Basically you can play a few games and decide as a team what you need to improve on. There is an entire internet full of people more knowledgeable about the game than you that can teach you something. Just make sure that you focus your research on macro level play, which is like decision making and objectives. Improving your micro level play, or mechanics, can only be done through practice and time, which is why playing a healthy amount of solo queue is also important to improve.

Coaching: This is by far the best and most easy method to improve as a team. Get a free coach from online and they’ll do the things I stated above for you and tell you what you need to do as a team in order to get better. They can watch games and take bits of information that none of you may even see and inform you on mistakes that you are committing in game. They can also teach you their basic knowledge of teamplay to give you and your team a running start to 5’s. There are no downsides to getting a coach besides the coach being lackluster and giving bad info, but I suggest you get one and see how it goes.

Tournaments

This is what you and your team have been working for. You get to take everything that you learned and put it into practice against other teams to test just how good you are. This is the final goal for most teams, to partake in and win tournaments. It’s time to put everything on the line, and here are a few tips increase your overall success in this format.

Study your enemy: Unlike when you play ranked 5’s, you have full knowledge of who you will be playing against ahead of time so use this to your advantage. Study the enemy team and the picks they like to bring out and ban away the one trick ponies. Don’t tunnel vision on taking or denying your enemy's their picks, make sure you are sticking to the gameplan that you have made going in. Comfort is always better than counter picks, remember that.

Make a plan B: Nothing is more soul crushing than that perfect comp your team made being completely banned out before the game even starts. Before going into the game make sure that you at least have one backup plan you can fall back to if the pick ban phase doesn’t go great. I’ve had a tournament or two lost when a key champ to our star comp was no longer on the table, causing us to draft a comp that didn’t make sense. Don’t let that be you.

Give it your all: You’ve been putting a lot of work in to get to this point so don’t hold back! Bring out whatever your best champs are and stay optimistic. Comebacks are really easy to come by in League and with the added pressure of a tournament, mistakes are bound to happen. And if by the end your team gave it their all and came up short don’t worry, there is a lot to be learned from losses especially when you give 110%, so take it as a learning experience.

Conclusion

I hope you could take something from this guide and apply it to your own team. Try to get some free coaches on the net, mind your communication and lay it all on the line when it comes tournament time. If you are interested in learning a little bit of the bot lane keep a look out for my “Bot Lane Basic” guides I’ll be releasing in the upcoming weeks. Thanks for reading!