I’m finally back to writing again! I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about something mentioned in many video guides. This week, I’m going to explain: “How to make decisions in League of Legends”
People say decision-making is the difference between a Diamond and a Gold player. This is true; everyone says this, but there’s no real explanation of how to make those decisions. I hope that this article will help you in doing so.
We will be going through the core components of making a decision in League of Legends.
I’m going to break this down into four parts:
- Foresight
- Risk and Reward
- Decisiveness
- Adaptation
FORESIGHT
Making a decision is easy. A decision is making a simple choice of whether to act on an idea; that isn’t the difficult part. The difficult thing is having consistent and creative visualization for these ideas.
The only consistent way to train your brain to present you with these ideas is to practice thinking. If you ask any successful person, I guarantee they will all practice thinking. They would also visualize new ideas that keep them three steps ahead of their opponents. It would be best if you learned to foresee things.
A Gold player who’s foreseeing trading with an enemy would think about these things:
Should I trade? Would I win the trade? What summoner spells would he use?
Based on their answers, they would decide whether to trade or not. Whereas a Challenger player would foresee things like this:
Should I trade? Would I win the trade? What summoner spells would he use? What’s my plan if ever I do lose the trade? What does he gain if he wins the trade? What could I do to prevent that from happening? Would he foresee my counterplay? How would I react if he counters my counterplay? Are there any other factors that I haven’t considered? Where is his jungler located? What would I gain from winning the trade? What would that advantage allow me to do later? Is there any immediate advantage from winning the trade?
Practicing and thinking about these will improve your intuition when producing those ideas.
At that moment, you would’ve gone from being a reactive player to a proactive player. That is the first step to making consistent game-changing decisions.
RISK AND REWARD
So, if you have an idea and can foresee what will happen, you’ll need those tools to assess Risk and Reward.
Risk and reward is a quick system that you can use to determine whether an idea is worth acting on. If the reward is much higher than the risk, then generally, it’s a good decision. Even if you lose, you know you have the highest possible chances for success. Here’s an example:
Let’s say you get the idea of Roaming —
Risk: Not getting a kill, dying to the enemy, or losing CS (Creep Score).
Reward: Getting a kill, picking up an assist, helping out your ally laner.
At this point, the risk is not worth the reward. This is because getting a kill would be unlikely, but losing CS is almost guaranteed. But you know that being able to roam would be a good decision, and it would help your team win the game.
What you need to do now is to reduce the risk. You wouldn't lose as much CS by pushing the minions into the enemy tower. By knowing the jungler is on the other side of the map, then you would reduce the risk of dying. Knowing that the enemy laner has no summoner spells, meaning they can’t escape, gives you an excellent chance to get a kill.
By doing these things, you’ve reduced your risk and made roaming a much better decision.
DECISIVENESS
It’s obvious that being decisive means making decisions—we all know how obvious that could be. But it also means not being afraid to decide and not lingering on a wrong decision.
Lots of things in League of Legends aren’t straight-up excellent or bad. That’s why a quick, decent decision could be better than a delayed, great decision. This might cause you to miss the opportunity entirely. This is why you should commit to that decent decision or whichever decision you make.
Diamonds and Challengers don’t make the right decisions every time. They make quite a few sub-optimal calls. But when they do make that decision, they commit everything to it. The difference is how much you can commit to that decision.
Being indecisive is a colossal mistake. If you want to steal their jungle camps, go and steal them. Get in there and give it your all. Don’t walk halfway there. Start questioning yourself, and then turn around. This way, you have wasted valuable time walking around achieving nothing. League of Legends is a game that’s won or lost in seconds.
ADAPTATION
In a solo queue game, your team will often have more than one shot caller. This means it’s likely that players will decide on different things. Five players should make a decent decision rather than having your team do other things.
Say you’ve killed most of their team, but they still have a fed jungler. Should you get Baron Nashor, Dragon, or destroy an Inhibitor? Don’t mind it too much; pick one and do it as a team. It doesn’t matter which decision is correct — decide as a team and put your all into making that decision work.
It would be best if you learned how to adapt to your team. You might know your team isn’t making the correct or optimal choice. But they have a better chance of making that choice work with you than without you. Being able to adapt in-game is the type of higher-level thinking that helps players win more games.
That’s all for now! I hope you learned something from this article. Good luck on the Rift!
