By sjj_admin 
Originally published on GameOnAus.com in Nov 2021
One of the great things about doing Game On Aus’s Nuts & Bolts show is watching so many different esports leagues out there. Seeing how professional players handle games is incredible to see and makes for really fun viewing.
I’ve become a big fan of the LCO, Australia’s premier League of Legends (LoL) competition. I’ve watched it this year and loved seeing Peace and Pentanet.GG compete at the Worlds and MSI international events. I feel that having watching it for a while now I’ve got a good understanding of some of the basics so why not give it a go myself?
So it was on Friday I found myself downloading LoL and trying it out. I was a bit worried. LoL doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to the toxicity of its player base. A lot of that might be in ranked play but still had me worried that I’d have a bad time with other players.
After playing through the very short tutorial, I launched into my first game. The first thing I did was let my teammates know that this was my first game and to please be gentle. That’s when a couple of other players spoke up and said the same thing. One of them said they loved the Arcane show that had recently been released and wanted to try out the game.
Luckily there was an experienced player willing to help. With everything I’ve heard about LoL players I’d braced myself for the worst. I hadn’t considered that they might actually be really nice.
This continued into my second and third game with a mix of new and experienced players, the latter being more than willing to help me. In those first few games I had three people add me as a friend because they just wanted to help me.
For the most part I played top or bottom lane, sometimes hopping into mid. These were the easiest positions to learn, hold off the opposing minion waves, push onto turrets when you can, kill enemy champions. There was one game when I was thrown into a support role and I was totally lost. I’m very glad I never had to play as a jungler.
As the night went on games became harder to get into and wait times went up. This is not unexpected. I live in the west coast of Australia, a couple of hours behind the rest of the country. But it also meant that the type of players that were still online were more hardcore and not as nice as some that I’d played with earlier.
In terms of the game itself, at the level I’m playing at, it’s really hard to peg back if you start to get behind. There was a couple of times I was being outleveled in my lane and if someone wasn’t there to help me I would have been in real trouble. Learning which items to buy and how to generate more gold will be something I’ll read up on as I fell down in that area quite severely.
Overall, I had a pretty good time being a noob in League Of Legends. My experience was dependant on the time of day that I was playing. It’s one that I’ll be jumping back into soon.