I haven’t mentioned this before, but I’m a long-time League of Legends enthusiast. If you checked my op.gg, you’d see that I’ve played in most seasons since Season 4—often exceeding a thousand games per season – and I usually place in the higher ranks. While my exact rank varies, I consistently land just below Diamond (formerly Platinum, now Emerald), and I’ve hit Diamond a few times, even reaching Master once.
You can also see there how many games I play on Camille alone every year. Hell, my Camille games alone probably exceed what most people play in total. If I spent just one year playing my backlog instead of spamming Camille – without even quitting League- I’d probably clear it.
So, why do I sink so much time into it? After more than 10 years of playing, could I say that my time on League is… worth it?
League is… good, actually
By now, most gamers are familiar with “League bad” memes. It’s often said that League players are its harshest critics, and for good reason—which we’ll get to later. But first I want to dispel the idea that League is actually a bad game to begin with.
Instead, I’d argue that League is not for everyone. It’s a demanding, often frustrating game that requires a lot from its players. It also comes from a MOBA, a niche genre that was still in its infancy. No other MOBA has matched its success, and even beyond its genre, League remains a massive title, 30 million players daily and 140 to 160 million active monthly users.
Now, I actually have no idea what made League so big, and it’s probably a variety of complicated factors, but after playing it seriously for a few years, I can absolutely say that not everyone is the target audience for its sweaty tryhard ranked system, which is the game’s biggest feature.
Let’s talk a little more about this.
Strategical and mechanical mastery
Of all the games I’ve played, none match League’s unique blend of strategy and mechanical skill. Nearly every moment demands both.
Master coaches often talk about mechanics as something secondary, and for what it’s worth, I agree—League is a strategy game first, and a mechanics-based PvP second. Both are undeniably crucial to a player’s success, and in many cases, they’re intertwined.
For seasoned players, it’s easy to overlook how much even a simple champion like Trundle demands. But even he requires a surprising amount of mechanical execution and strategic thinking—placing the Ice Pillar is not particularly easy when pressed for time, auto-cancelling is not an easy task for someone that is not into gaming, and there are a lot of nuances in how and when you use his W and his R.
You’ll be micromanaging your minion wave, cooldowns, and trades while simultaneously macromanaging objectives like taking towers, saving for a legendary item, or securing dragons. For veteran players, this becomes second nature, but if you stop to really think about it you might surprise yourself with how much you strategize at League if you are decent at it.
I think this is why those great plays feel so good: so much is under you control, and so much needs to be lined up just right, and you need to identify and execute it, that when something good results out of it, we get very excited and happy that we were able to do that.
Which brings me to another point that is often talked about in regard to League.
Is it an addiction?
League can definitely have addictive elements. I know that I have used it as escapism before, but more often than not I just use it as a default “let’s play something” game rather than a deliberate choice.
I wouldn’t call most players “addicted.” Instead, I think League naturally consumes time because players are deeply invested in improving their play or improving their rank. A single League game lasts 20 to 40 minutes on average. But once you factor in queue times, dodges, remakes, and things like breaks, a single match can easily become a one-hour commitment.
This issue compounds in how much it takes to go up a rank. It’s actually a system that is more or less the same as most other games out there, but how drawn-out every game is really makes this a problem for League: you queue into a game, barely lose it, then queue again, win that one, and maybe you queue again because you really want to go to where you wanted in the first game and now you are up 20ish LP and need like 4 more consecutive wins to go up one rank. This can take you two to three hours.
This compounds so much when you want to go into the higher ranks: consider that you need from 3 to 5 consecutive wins to go up a rank, and that you need to go up maybe around 15 ranks to get to, I don’t know, Diamond or Master, and that every game that you lose is going to set you back yet one more game on top of the time you spent on that one, and it becomes clear why so many people become frustrated and go on long grinds to get to the top: it’s a very rewarding game, but for the same reasons it is rewarding, it also becomes frustrating.
That is when it starts to really feel like an addiction: maybe you are hardstuck at Emerald II, and feel like you need to just squeeze some games to get into a rhythm and go up another rank, but you actually are placed correctly in the ladder and are just queuing games endlessly until you figure out “hey, I actually need to get better, not play more“, or just endlessly play hundreds of games at your rank.
How obfuscating it can be to get better at League is also another factor that adds to this cycle: it’s very hard to tell what is the mistake that you made, because maybe you’re getting punished for not properly pushing your wave so you get ganked and died (but you only see the part where you got ganked), maybe you don’t notice your top is planning to splitpush instead of going for the Dragon fight, and you overcommit thinking it’s going to be a 5v5 and lose a 5v4 (but you only see that your top didn’t join the fight instead of considering the game state before committing to it), maybe you die to a random gank and think it’s because you are not warding enough, but it’s actually because you are not properly tracking where the enemy jungler is.
All in all it’s just kind of an impenetrable game to get better at on your own, which leads me to…
Financial incentive
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In recent years, my drive to improve at League has been fueled not just by enjoyment, but also by the game’s clear and accessible financial opportunities. If you are good enough, you can very easily go into boosting or coaching sites and get decently-paying jobs (depending on your region, here in Mexico the pay rates on here would be good) at there with flexible scheduling something you enjoy doing.
I’ve spent so much time into the game and for all of that it would be good to be able to monetize it into something, so at the very least I have some way to leverage it if I ever get stuck in a bender or if I just really want to earn more cash working from home.
But it’s proven so hard for me: when I first reached Master rank, something “clicked” that made me play like I have never had before. I have no idea how to do that or how it comes by, I just know that games sometimes feels so unwinnable that I genuinely worry if I’ll be able to ever win a game again and sometimes they feel so trivial and I’m contributing so much that I wonder why I ever found Emerald rank to be hard in the first place.
League is complex enough that I think that it’s fair to say that health issues, stress, burnout or distractions make a significant impact on your performance, but right now I’m in this weird spot where I know I am capable of playing really well, but on the other hand I’ve been unable to replicate what “clicked” when I first reached Masters and I don’t know what I need to play better. With so many years under my belt, it’s not only “playing more”. I’ve actually considered boosting services, and who knows—maybe I’ll try it out.
What about the community?
The community is one of the more infamous parts of the game. With everything that I just mentioned before this, I think it’s easier to understand why so many people flame and rage at this game—they’re invested, and they can get frustrated because of it.
That’s still no excuse, of course, and if there’s anything I will forever criticize Riot Games for, is not being harsh enough on these people — they have, for their credit, progressively gotten better about it, but it’s shocking how much you can get away in League without getting at least a chat suspension, and I would do so much more than what Riot has done. It genuinely makes an environment where instead of wanting to play better and correct my mistakes, I just want to blame my teammates and think I just got unlucky.
This means that you have to actively think against the environment of people that are playing with you to get better—in fact, I have been playing with chat turned off for a while now, and that is still somehow not enough as a lot of the time I have to turn off pings as well from some players.
There is, sadly, no other solution than what you care to come up with. Riot is doing a bit, but not enough in my opinion. With that said…
Riot Games takes risks, and is transparent about their mistakes
Riot games has done so many things to change the game and make it much better across the years. They have changed epic monsters, changed the items, reworked champions, changed the Rift layout, change the jungle, changed how turrets work and God knows how many other things in my 10 years of playing the game. Some of the things feel so natural to me now that I find it shocking that they were never there, such as how pings work today, or how jungle camps work.
League is therefore always pushing the envelope of both what it can do and its players ability to adapt: both a negative and a positive. What is even more impressive, though, is how open and communicative Riot Games is to their players, who like I said earlier, are generally ungrateful of how much they do for the game.
Not to say they are perfect, but a lot of the time it’s not even something the devs are doing (like the recent lootboxes change), or something that even affects the core game (like an expensive Ahri skin), but sometimes they have even reverted big-time investments: I remember how for a couple of years we would have items that are mutually exclusive from one another (called in-game as “Mythic Item”), meaning that players would not be able to build, say, Luden’s Companion (then Luden’s Tempest) or Rod of Ages in the same game.
This was a massive change which probably they invested hundreds of hours thinking about, and for all its graces, they admitted that it didn’t do what it was supposed to be doing and reverted it. For such a huge change, this is undeniably something that hurt—and they make changes like this semi-regularly. It’s easy for us players to lambast them for what didn’t work, often forgetting all the times that the risks they took often pay off, and we generally take that for granted.
What about other games?
The biggest problem I have with League right now is time. I need to work, exercise, see friends, sleep, play other games while writing about them, and countless other activities. How? By cutting League, I suddenly have an enormous amount of free time.
The real question becomes, then: how much do I enjoy playing League compared to what I’m sacrificing for it?
Part of this project of playing my backlog and writing about what I play is to keep me motivated to play them and engage with them, something that I think League has genuinely taken from me—unless I am super invested in a game, I quickly just default to playing more League and then burning out from it but then I don’t have anything else I really want to do.
Giving me an objective to play and write makes me want to do more. For the last couple of months, I have been playing League, but I have also played a lot of other games, and I’m planning to play a lot more. I LOVE games: they have been a part of my life as long as I can remember. Among my earlier memories of my life are that of me playing Super Mario 64 all the way back in the early 2000s, and it’s only gone up from there. Right now it’s easy to say that video games are an art form, but it wasn’t as easy to say back then—and given how many amazing games I have played in my life, I think it’s worth, well, questing and roaming to find more, and talk to other people about this cool art form that engages very differently from other ones.
League has therefore cost me a lot of games I would maybe find amazing. That’s a hard pill to swallow since not all of my time playing League has been valuable to me, as many good times as it has given me.
So… is it worth it?
Maybe it is. I think the problem that I have had with League is more related to patience and pace: I want to get to Diamond now, and I want to get a good while now, and then just overfocusing on that. But there are so many other games that are also worth spending my time in.
I’ll explore more on how competitive gaming has shaped my perspective on gaming as a whole another time, but for now, I’m happy to see that writing about games is working—I’m starting to strike a balance between competitive and single-player games. Hopefully, it sticks.
