League of Legends: The Highlight of my Childhood
Let’s go back in time to the year 2011, where League of Legends is about to get big.
At the first ever League world championships, 8 of the top teams in the world congregated at Dreamhack Summer to battle it out for the title of best team in the world and $50,000. Team SoloMid and Epik Gamer would make it out of their respective groups as the first seeds, and therefore the favorites to meet in the finals, but it would be the second and third seeds from Group A, against All authority and Fnatic, that would ultimately wind up in the championship match after fighting through the playoff bracket. In front of an online audience of an unprecedented 200,000 people, the stage was set for the two teams to duke it out and determine who the inaugural world champion would be.
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At the end of the match, Fnatic would rise as the victor, cementing their place in League of Legends history. In the afterglow of the tournament, the size of League’s playerbase would absolutely explode. Around the time of the 2011 world championships there were about 5 million registered accounts, and by the end of the following year, there were seventy million — roughly fourteen times what it had been the year before (citation needed). For a game that had virtually no developer-backed advertising, how did a game like League of Legends get so huge so quickly?
In the early 2010’s, the Internet was a much different place. Smartphones had not yet become the monolith of society that they are now, and so there were a lot less people online. Social media was still in its infancy. However, there was one website that stood above the rest, one that even nearly a decade ago was still an absolute powerhouse: YouTube.
The rise of League of Legends came not from multi-million dollar advertising campaigns or celebrity endorsements. Much like one of its contemporaries, Minecraft, League’s explosion in popularity came from word of mouth, and YouTube was at the center. People like Dunkey, with his short and comedic videos; TotalBiscuit, with his viral review of the game, “WTF is League of Legends?” and his subsequent commentary videos; the eccentric Athene with his infamous Ryze; and others like them were all juggernauts in the early League YouTube community. Them, and others, helped expose millions of people to this relatively obscure game. And among those millions of people, one of them was a 13-year-old kid with an ancient computer and a lot of free time: me.
For months I had kept hearing about League. To be honest, it didn’t really appeal to me at first. It didn’t really seem like my style. At the time, I was deep into World of Warcraft, so League wasn’t exactly immediately within my realm of familiarity. It wasn’t until a friend had convinced me to play it that I actually gave it a chance. It wasn’t long until my days in Azeroth ended, and my days in Runeterra had begun. The game was so fun, so new, so different from anything I had ever played before. I loved how strategic you could be with it, I loved how fast-paced and exciting it was, I loved to win. I fell head over heels for the game. I started playing League every single day. I would think about it during class. I would talk about it to my friends who soon enough all started to play as well. League had quickly become the most important thing in my life, as silly as it sounds. And why wouldn’t it? I was 13. I had no responsibilities, and I was breezing through school easily. A game like League lends itself to spending long hours playing it, so naturally a middle schooler like me would have all the time in the world to dedicate to playing it, watching videos about it, and learning about it. League of Legends came into my life at the perfect time. From February of 2012 and onwards, League was the only thing in my life that mattered.
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My obsession with League of Legends quickly led to me becoming a student of the game. I tried to learn everything I possibly could. I learned how to play almost every champion I could, looked up guides, and absorbed as much information as possible. I was determined to improve at the game. I wanted to prove myself. And sure enough, I started to get better, albeit very slowly. At the turn of 2013, I had nearly a year of playing under my belt when something came along that would alter the course of my League career.
The introduction of the North American League of Legends Championship series, or LCS, was my first glimpse into the world of eSports. It was the first time Riot, the developer of League, held an official professional season. Prior to 2013, League’s pro scene was mostly grassroots, with teams either competing in online tournaments or traveling to certain events like Dreamhack or ESL. These tournaments generally weren’t sponsored by Riot in any way, aside from the world championships in 2011 and 2012. That all changed in 2013 when Riot opened up official, professional leagues across the world. Professional gaming was a totally foreign concept to me at the time. Video games have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, but it wasn’t until I was 14 years old that I learned that there exists a video game equivalent to something like the MLB or the NBA, where teams of professionals would play for thousands of dollars.
This concept blew my tiny little teenage mind. I watched the LCS every single weekend. I quickly decided that I liked TSM and Dignitas the most because I liked their players. People like Dyrus, imaqtpie, scarra, and Reginald were all personalities at the time that I enjoyed, and I loved to watch them play. I loved the excitement of my favorite teams playing on the big stage and hearing the commentators talk about the match as it unfolded. Plus, the storylines of the teams were just as compelling. The rivalry between TSM and CLG, Curse getting 4th place every split, Cloud9 suddenly just appearing and destroying everyone that summer, I could go on. This was all brand new to me as someone who’s never really been too big on traditional sports. Watching LCS fueled my desire to become a better player, and I began to aspire to play professionally myself one day.
Those ambitions were marked by humble beginnings. Before LCS started, near the end of 2012, I hit level 30 on my account, which at the time was the maximum level. This meant I was able to play ranked, but nothing could have prepared me for how absolutely horrible I actually was at the game. Prior to 2013, the ranking system was entirely based on elo, a ranking formula that’s commonly used in other games like chess. Generally you started out at around 1200 elo, which meant you were ranked in Silver. This is usually where most players are ranked — they’re not so terrible at the game that they’re stuck in bronze, the lowest ranking, but they’re so average at the game that they can’t climb the ranks any higher. Not only was I so terrible at the game that I was stuck in Bronze, but at the end of the year I was at around 3 or 400 elo, which is so pitifully low, that I genuinely feel like you had to try to rank that low, as in intentionally lose games or something. I’d expect that very few people in that elo were just actually, seriously that bad at the game. Now, I don’t have the data to back that up, but that’s just what my gut is telling me. In short, I was terrible at League of Legends. But through it all, I still felt a fire deep within me, telling me to keep going. I really was serious about wanting to play professionally. League created a spark in me that I never knew was there. It created a drive in me to persevere, to keep playing through the frustration of losing constantly, and I think I owe a lot of that to my interest in watching LCS. Had it not been for that, I might have just dropped the game altogether.
I spent all of 2013 grinding ranked once again. The ranking system had changed to how we know it today, so now instead of being just Bronze, I was now Bronze V, the true lowest rank. If I remember correctly I probably peaked at around Bronze III. So, again, I was still awful at the game. 2014 started out not looking much better. But after not very long, I ended up making it to Silver! This was huge, and I was proud of myself, but I wanted more. My ultimate goal was to get to Gold. That summer there was a stretch of several weeks where I played for probably six or seven hours every single day, slowly scratching and clawing my way up the Silver ranks.
Something I haven’t mentioned up to this point is that this was around the time I truly started to embrace my main champion, Jayce. He was the 100th champion added to the game, and I bought him soon after his release in mid 2012. I immediately fell in love with playing him. He was an extremely strong champion in the right hands, and I was confident in my skill with him. He was my go-to champion. So in that summer of 2014, I played Jayce every single game I possibly could. And sure enough, my rank began to climb higher and higher. Eventually, I was at Silver I, just one promotion away from Gold, and that’s when the pressure was on.
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After spending over two years grinding, studying the game, and improving, I finally got to Gold. This was genuinely one of the biggest, if not the biggest achievement of my 15 year old life. Never before had I worked so damn hard for anything. I never wanted anything so badly. There were few things in life that I cared about as much as this. This meant everything to me. And in the greater context of my life as a whole, the fact that I got to a decently high ranking in a video game isn’t what mattered — it was the fact that I dedicated myself to a skill, worked my ass off at it, and saw results that at times seemed unreachable. That’s what mattered.
This was the highpoint of my time playing League. I ultimately peaked at Gold IV. Like I said, I was thrilled. But… there’s a problem with League of Legends. Just trying to climb to Gold was hard enough as is, but beyond the game itself, there was another obstacle in the way — an obstacle that every League player has faced before. Something so pervasive, so problematic that it ultimately cut my time with the game I loved for so long short. I am, of course, talking about…
there’s something else I’ve failed to mention up to this point, something that anyone who’s played League can attest to. It’s an issue universal in any online game, but for whatever reason it seems to pop up a lot more in League. I am, of course, talking about…
…Toxicity.
It’s no secret that team-based, competitive online games are homes to some of the worst filth the Internet has to offer. People will say horrible things to you, grief and throw games, harass you, you name it. Riot has never acted like they don’t know this; they have systems in place like reporting, honor, and for all the boomers out there that remember it, the Tribunal. The problem I have with all this is that… well… these systems almost never actually work.
Let’s first take a look at the Tribunal as an example. The Tribunal was a system back in the early days that allowed the community to judge report cases and determine if the person reported should be punished or pardoned. People who used it would have a rating that determined their accuracy in judging cases. In 2011 Riot released some statistics about the Tribunal, and a surprising point I found is that more than half of players who were punished in the Tribunal never wound up there again. This is all well and good, but the problem with the Tribunal is that people who were really “good” at it received Influence Points (which later became blue essence) for their efforts. This led to skewed results, as the easiest way to get IP was to just blindly punish players without actually reading over the case. Thus, sometime in 2014 it was disabled and no good replacement for it has ever come to fruition.
This isn’t to say that toxic players never get punished in League; they definitely do. It’s just that it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. Reporting people sometimes works if they went AFK or said a bad word or something. A lot of the time the only punishment that happens is that the offending player will just get a chat ban for a few games, or maybe a suspension for a day or two. And they usually only get punished for saying naughty words and not so much for running it down mid and dying over and over. In short, there’s really no incentive for shitty people to, well, not be shitty. And nothing exemplifies this more than the story I’m about to tell…
Games of League of Legends can be long. They generally last anywhere from 25–40 minutes, but every now and then they can go for much longer. Some time after I reached Gold, I was playing a game of ranked that was going for almost an hour. It was an extremely close match, with the lead constantly swinging back and forth. No one on either team was doing particularly badly. It was about as close as it gets. I don’t exactly remember what happened, but we must have lost some team fight or objective or something, and probably lost a turret or two as a result. I guess an hour-long game of League of Legends can take a toll on you, because after that the Rammus on our team decided that he didn’t want to win anymore. He just killed himself a bunch of times and then went AFK. And that was it. We lost. I spent an hour of my life playing a match that was decided not by my individual skill and my team’s ability to coordinate with each other, but by one fucking asshole who decided that he wanted to ruin the entire game for everyone else. I was so angry after this game that I actually almost broke my keyboard from slamming it so hard. This was my breaking point. I had dealt with lots of people like this guy in the past, but none of them had ever done something so egregiously terrible like he did. It was then that I realized that it wasn’t worth the energy dealing with trolls, griefers, and AFK’s every other game. League had gotten to be extremely toxic, and to this day I genuinely believe that it brings out the absolute worst in people.
And I just wanna make it clear really quickly that I am not exempt from this rule. I have totally raged at teammates, gotten beyond tilted, and given up in the middle of a match. It happens, and it can happen to anyone. Maybe this Rammus was just having a bad day. But honestly, nothing is worth dealing with this to me. Nothing is worth sacrificing my mental health over a video game. By this point in time I had already moved on from my very childish belief that I could go pro in this game. I was incredibly average at it, and I made peace with that. I just wanted to play the game that I loved, and climb the ranked ladder as much as I could. That’s it. But dealing with trolls all the time and then having my day ruined by it just wasn’t worth it anymore. League was starting to become less and less fun, and toxicity wasn’t the only reason.
It’s really no secret that lots of people who started playing League around the time I did have lots of issues with the direction the game has gone over the past few years. I really have nothing new or unique to add to that conversation. I have issues with balancing, champion designs, reworks, you name it. I won’t bore you with all that because I’m sure 99% of the people who are watching this have heard it all already, and that’s not really what this video is about. You can find plenty of other videos on YouTube talking about that kind of thing. Point is, I had some major disagreements with the direction the game was heading, and as a result my interest in League dwindled even further. And so, in the fall of 2014, I decided that my time in Runeterra was over.
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I will be the first to admit that I definitely look at my days playing League with rose-tinted glasses. I was a kid. We all have fond memories of the fun stuff we used to do as kids, and I’m no exception. I loved League of Legends. It was the centerpoint of my life for years. And yeah, I had issues with trolls and crappy balance decisions, but there’s more to it than that. I grew up. And when you grow up, your interests change. I realized that the game I loved for so long just wasn’t the same to me anymore. I had to move on. I didn’t realize it at the time, but a chapter of my life had ended. And it’s a chapter I’ll never forget.
League of Legends came into my life at the perfect time. It scratched an itch that at the time, I had no idea was even there: my thirst for competition. I had something to prove, not only to myself, but to the world. I wasn’t exactly the most respected kid. My whole life I had been picked on and pushed around. You could say I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder. For as long as I could remember I had been made to feel inferior by my peers. And League of Legends opened the door for me to show myself that I wasn’t inferior, that I could prove myself, which is why I wanted to play professionally, even though it ended up not working out that way. League taught me that it’s okay to have a change of plans. I wanted to be a pro at the game for a long time, expecting to be this amazing player and have fans and all that. But as time went on, I realized that not only was I not good enough, but that it ultimately wasn’t something I truly wanted to do. I kinda just lost interest in it. I just wanted to play the game to have fun and to improve at my own pace. But it was okay. I was able to accept it and move on.
You might be watching this and thinking to yourself: “How is this guy ranting on about a dumb video game like this? He’s being so dramatic!” And to that I say: am I, though? Think about it this way: Kids are impressionable. And their interests help shape them into the adult they end up becoming. Some kids like to play instruments; some kids like to play sports. And then there are some kids, like me, who just like to play video games, and want to play them and get better. I’m not about to sit here and claim that my skills at a video game are going to be of any use in the real world, because no, they won’t. The fact that I reached Gold in League of Legends is not something I would put on my resume. It’s the skills I acquired in order to reach Gold that matter, and can be applied to anything else. The discipline, the drive, the motivation to improve and ultimately succeed — the platform in which you learn these things does not matter; it is simply the vehicle which takes you to those skills. They’re universal traits that could be applied to anything in life, and I learned them through playing a silly video game. League of Legends gave me foundations to learn how to be an adult at such a young and impressionable age.
And, in the end, League of Legends was just a damn fun video game. It brought me countless hours of joy. I truly loved it more than anything in the world. I got to spend thousands of hours playing my favorite video game. And that’s really what gaming is all about: just having fun and enjoying yourself. I’ve spent all this time talking about how the game impacted me and all that, but none of that stuff would have happened if I didn’t have a blast playing League.
Even though League is largely absent from my life now, I still go back to play it once in a blue moon. I can still have fun with it, even though I just end up getting frustrated with it after like, 5 games and then I stop playing it again. I will never be as into League of Legends as I was back when I was 15. And that’s okay because that’s just a part of growing up. I will always love League of Legends, even if I don’t play it anymore. And I’ll always be grateful for it. League gave me so much, and I would absolutely be a different person today if it wasn’t for this game. So thank you, League of Legends. Thanks for making my childhood just a bit brighter.
