League of Legends: easy as newbie

The game League of Legends is all over the EVE-player community. It seems EVE players play it a lot, probably while waiting for a fleet to happen or the ore hold to fill. I looked it up long ago and found it a pretty childish twitch game where your progress is defined by your reaction time and memorizing which champion counters what and so on. No thinking or strategy, the job is well known, the winner is the one who executes it better. Clearly not for me who left World of Warcraft raiding for becoming "dancy".

Recently TMC published an article, how horribly hard this game is for newbies, because they are faced with veterans on their second-third account. If you can't make yourself read that steaming piece of crap, I summarize for you: as a newbie you'll be totally farmed by veteran opponents, giving them gold and XP, making them stronger, therefore losing the game to your team more than you'd do by being AFK. For this and other reasons, your team will hate and mock you and you can't even quit since that's bannable offense. This will go on for 100-300 games, each 30-50 minutes long.

What made me download this game and play it about a week is the extremely annoying "EVE-ego": the article literally claims that learning the Oh-my-God so hard EVE Online and simply being here for longer than 3 months is a huge badge of commitment and valor. Yeah, because alt-tabbing every half-an-hour to empty your ore hold is soooooo hard that being able to do it places you to the gaming elite. The frigate-lolling impoverished punks being smug simply for having an EVE subscription annoys me. So off I went to disprove this punk.

So here I am, complete newbie, having slow reaction time, no intention to learn even the names of the champions (units in League of Legends), not to mention their abilities, neither the item builds, practically no experience in playing RTS games, I'm not even liking the damn game, so please guess what my kill:death ratio is.

According to the article, a dedicated but new player is chainfarmed, finishing as "1-12-3" (kill-death-assist). I must be worse than that. And in a sense I am. If I'd be pitted in an empty arena 1v1 by random League of Legends players, I'd be in the bottom 5%. So if you'd guess 1:10 to 1:20, you'd be forgiven.

After a few days of complete sucking, I figured out how to play. Since then, my kill-death is the best in the team in 90% of the games. Only absolute veterans who carry the team all alone can get higher winrate. In the last 6 games it was 3:1. Want that? Want to be the one who call the others "dumb feederx"? Want to be the one who tell the years old veterans to just stay in the base or be reported for intentional feeding? Want to harvest "teamwork" and "honorable opponent" instead? Here it is how it's done:

1. You play a jungler. The game site tells you the names of the champions if you type "jungler" to that empty field. Warwick and Nunu are very cheap.
2. Your masteries are all in the defense field, except 2 in offense, the NPC killing one. All your runes are "magic resist at lvl 18", "defense at lvl 18" and "health at lvl 18"
3. Your spells are smite and teleport
4. At the start buy "Hunter's machete" and a bunch of health potions. Ask your teammates to help killing the blue monster, it's a big golem giving mana regen buff. Use your smite ability to deliver the killing blow when it's below 500 HP.
5. From there you just patrol your jungle (and after some experience, the enemy jungle) and killing the 5 monster spawns.
6. From time to time return to the base for item upgrades: upgrade the machete into a "spirit stone", get a pair of boots and start building "Sunfire Cape".
7. If you find a monster camp missing, having only one small monster in it, the enemy is intruding your territory. Buy Sight Wards and place them at the blue and red monster. When he comes again, he'll be ganked.
8. Your teammates sometime spam "jungler why no gank ffs", just ignore them. When your ulti is up and you are near a lane, visit it and use it on some enemy to harass them, but don't go out of your way for a gank. Sitting in a bush for 30 seconds cost you more than the time spent dead for the enemy.
9. By the time you get Sunfire Cape, your teammates reach the end of their attention span and start leaving their lanes to "gank" (running around pointlessly and getting killed). When you see an empty lane, go there and with the Sunfire Cape, AoE the minions down. Lot of XP and gold. Don't get far from your tower, if the enemy minions are pushed back by your efforts, get back to the jungle.
10. At lvl 10-11 you can solo the Dragon for gold to the whole team. Get the more expensive Vision Ward and place it front of the dragon lair. It will show the enemy wards, destroy those if there is any and run away, come back for the dragon later.
11. Keep ignoring the "ffs jungler why no help i report u" and "ffs come teamfight" requests. You can not be banned for playing as you want unless it's feeding. And you aren't feeding, you don't even have a single death.
12. Watch for besieged turrets! If the enemy minions and especially champions fight near your turret, go there (use the teleport spell if far) and kill them. Enemies can't kill you near towers because the tower kills them first. Here is where you get your hilarious kills, because they "haz skills" meaning they memorized how many hits they need to kill you before the tower kills them. Except your masteries and runes are defensive so they die with a "wut" on their face.
13. From time to time return to the base and get item upgrades, all defensive, except the last one. Spirit Visage, Runic Bulwark, Frozen Heart are my favorites. Put Sight wards to the last slot and keep busy placing them.
14. When your are 2-3 level and 1-2 items above everyone on the field, you can go bold and join the teamfights, with hilarious effects. While your damage is crap, they can't kill you, but they focus on you since they got used to your champion being offensive. Remember, it's not platinum league, it's just a bunch of mentally 12 years old trolls, they won't look up your items and think.
15. At lvl 18 and having your items, you can attack towers head on and tank their damage while your teammates kill it. You can do the same with the Baron monster.
16. Get home, sell the wards and the Sunfire cape, get a Wit's End and a Bloodthirster, and march into their base, if they haven't surrendered yet!

Look at this 4v5 victory (the last guy went AFK after being farmed): While Tristana and Master Yi were classes above me, I wasn't useless feeder, but a defender of towers and tank in the teamfights.

Of course you won't always win. The normal games have a ranking machmaking trying to keep you around 50% wins, so you'll lose. You can tell you lost if you have AFK-ers, childish arguing over who goes mid solo, general bitching. As a general rule, always vote yes for surrender, because if you decline, the one who started it will purposefully lose anyway. Start surrender vote yourself if the game isn't going well. But even a 3v5 is no excuse for bad kill:death: Jungling also let you abandon a failed game without abandoning: being AFK is bannable, leaving is bannable, feeding is bannable but jungling in a quiet corner is not.

The picture below is very important, as it's the obvious proof that "teamfights" are pointless until you are powerful enough to win decisively. The upper half shows mid-game, you can see that both Draven and Fizz have awful lot of kills and good kill:death ratio. Still, they have less levels and cheaper items than me. Enemy kills are simply not cost-effective compared to minion farming because you die and lose time. On the bottom you can see the end result and the reason why people insist on killing enemies: if you don't die, it's great. Draven finished with 1.5x more gold than me, because after I started tanking, he had just one death but 5 kills. But to do so, I needed gear I couldn't get if I get into fights and farmed as the rest of the newbies:

Another 4v5 victory and you can see how: since the enemy was busy trying to get kills while we were busy farming, we simply outgrew them: The last picture is the damage recap. You can see how little I did to enemies, but was instrumental to the victory, exactly because of that: I farmed in early game and tanked in late.

This is the mentioned last 6 games, with 3.8-1.2-8.3 average performance, proving that the above results aren't cherry-picked battles, with my strategy you can consistently have good results:
The solution for a smooth and rewarding newbie experience in League of Legends is exactly the same as in EVE: stay in highsec, earn money, ignore PvP and go for objectives! Remember, League of Legends games are won by destroying the Nexus, not by killing players. You can theoretically win a game without any kills on your team.

PS: I'm not sure if I continue playing as the game is clearly not my genre and my point is proven!