Time as a silent Game-defining Concept

The Timing of Decisions

If you have ever played Zilean on League of Legends you will be familiar with his quote “All in good time” – unless you’re playing without sound! There is no big discussion that Zilean’s concept is all about time. But as Season 4 closes upon us let's take a look at the lessons we should take from a year of Summoner’s Rift and how Zilean was right all along.

Time in League of Legends has grown to become a much more established notion since the early days. Today in a game, be that a simple solo queue contest or a professional match, much of what influences the outcome of the game is deeply linked with Timing. Conceptually we can play out a game beforehand, but execution is the real deal breaker. Whilst thinking the game helps us predict and approach the game with better knowledge of what we are doing, it’s executing our thoughts that actually matters. A common example of this is simply looking at two teams right at the end of champion select and make a prediction on the outcome of the game just by looking at teams and players. Sometimes we get it right, the picks were perfect on one side and that side eventually wins. But we don’t get it right all the time, and that makes League of Legends beautiful. The trick is to transfer into your execution what you have conceived as a strategy, and this comes down to the two main attributes of a player: Technical Skill and Decision Making.

If Technical Skill is something unique to each player that comes down to how gifted you are and how much mechanical work you put into your own development as a player, Decision Making is all about having the ability to quickly decide the best course of action to use ( obviously! ) and when to use it. It’s about Timing. Often we find ourselves in the awkward position where a carefully devised plan turns out to be slightly off, we die and the enemy champion survives with 10hp. We can analyze whether we played that fight properly or not and maybe we didn’t. But often when we put some thought to it, it was really hard to do it in another way, and we blame our dear Luck.

Some aspects of League of Legends are bound with Luck, but making an excuse out of it is as common as it is wrong. During the game it is almost never about luck, certainly not as many times as we make it to be, it’s about Timing. Poor Timing. And Timing can be improved by experiencing the game - aspects and situations of it – and learning from that. Learning to an extent that once we are confronted with the same situation in another match we know how this will play out, because we have seen it before. We adapt our play, we adapt our decisions and the Timing of our decisions to make it work and, often, we don’t even know that we have just been through this process of improvement.

The ability to use Time ( and consequently Timing ) in our favor can make a huge difference in how our matches unfold. Playing your game with awareness for your surroundings and interpreting that information is literally the difference between a win and a loss - And I suspect that with what we have been able to preview so far from Season 4, reading the game you see will be even more important. In League of Legends very often winning games comes down to how to take advantages and how to use them in order to see the game out, both of these are incredibly related to Timing aspects – This is Execution.

We value Technical Skill a lot, as we should: It is a defining feature of a player. The more mechanically skilled a player is, the better a chance he has at getting really good. Mechanical skill also makes a great difference throughout the match itself: From small aspects like farming gold to spectacular kiting skills with Vayne. But Technical Skill for a really good player is not enough. Without the aptitude to make sharp decisions with little time and under pressure, part of that Technical Skill alone goes to waste. Decision Making is about Timing: Having the right strategy on how something is going to play out and apply it at the exact moment of time in order for it to be as successful as it can be. The rest is about mechanical skill and play, as the board game moves before your eyes exactly like you predicted and unfolds at the desired ending. Decision Making walks side by side with Technical Skill and to be really great you need to master both.

If in theory Time and Timing may seem pretty standard ideas to understand, although not always perceptible, how does it change the practical side of my game? I’ll leave out the obvious discussion on how important it is to know jungle camps spawn time or the occasional enemy Shen's Stand United ultimate. Understanding Time in a League of Legends game goes beyond that, to the point where to fully grasp some champion’s potential you have to be intimately aware of Time and be very clinical with your play. Failure to understand these concepts and to be able to see and apply them to game analysis will result in dismissing champions that otherwise are viable and may very well suit our play style more.

Assessing the game and our champion picking

In the past year League of Legends Meta game, especially in the professional scene, has developed from the standard “Controlling the Game and Team Fights” way to win to a more clinical approach to the match. Objective control became an early key word in the beginning of 2013 and since then other concepts have been introduced to us like Vision Control through Mass Warding or Rotations. But this doesn’t affect concepts alone. Champions who were once stoic first picks or first bans like Morgana, Amumu or Malphite have fallen through the ranks and despite the occasional ban or pick on one of these, we don’t see them chosen as often.

How we approach our champion select is often dependent on how we view the professional scene to be developing, we absorb the conceptual play shown to us by professional players and we try and replicate it by picking or banning these famous flavor of the month champions, whilst dismissing other champions simply because they were not shown to us as potential picks. Doesn’t mean they are not good, doesn’t mean we stop seeing them: simply means we award them less value. This happens because, for once, the pro players don’t play these champions and they obviously know a bit more about certain aspects of the game than the rest of us mortals.

Understanding how a champion works is the key to making it viable, even if it is only in clutch situations. There will be times when a pro player actually comes up with a new champion for a specific action or strategy and it has tremendous success, not because the champion got super buffed or others got badly nerfed but because this champion was used in a way that fits the Meta and was good for that current match.

So how do we evaluate and decide how is a champion made to be played? In theory we don’t. We play it, and play it the right way: we thought about it hard and devised a plan for it to work. We can’t answer this question in a straightforward way being 100% sure with every champion. We can talk about the champion’s kit, what it offers, what potential can it reach depending on builds and roles and how will it fit the meta. And then we try and match this champion versus others, what they offer and what they don’t. The important issue here is to know what can this champion do and what he can’t do, which in game translates into what you should try to do with it and what you shouldn’t.

Clockwork Aggression and what we’re missing out on

Season 3 was about efficiency. Being able to have a positive impact in one’s team was a measure of the ability of a player. It was about dedicating time and resources to achieve a certain goal, to gain an important advantage and as such, ultimately, it was about how well you managed to put the resources you chose into use during a specific scenario. But more than that, many times it was about being good enough to use your abilities to have such an influence in the game that you actually set the pace of the match: When to be aggressive, when to force fights, when to siege. Dictating the pace of the game is only possible through well thought play and clinical execution and often we neglect the importance our own play can have in dictating the plays.

A common example of this is Warwick. It is not an unusual pick ( especially outside of the Pro Scene ) yet often appears to be a champion that fails to live up to its potential, especially when it comes to dictating the game. Warwick has a 90 sec cooldown ultimate at level 6, which takes about 6 to 7 minutes for the average jungler or top lane to reach. From then on, every 90 sec Warwick has a spectacular chance of causing something to happen in another lane, very much likely a kill if well played, thanks to a 1.8 sec suppress where the target, if he is unable to cleanse it, will stand literally still for 1.8 sec, enough time to combo burst damage or any kind of hard to land CC as a follow up to Warwick. This becomes even more evident if you consider that Warwick is a pretty decent champion to tank a turret, even at lower levels.

This ultimate called Infinite Duress can be potentially game breaking, especially if used to gain significant advantages such as mid lane control or stealing an enemy jungle buff. Consider that Infinite Duress has a 90 sec cooldown at level 6, half the time a pink ward lasts. Failing to set up such plays as Warwick is fully wasting this champion’s ability to greatly influence the game. The early game is Warwick’s time to shine thanks to this power, compared to the mid and late game where teamfights are more common. Warwick is lackluster in some teamfights, since he is easily interrupted and chain CCed. To win games you must understand when you need to shine and you need to engineer how you will do it, and this comes from understanding the Meta game, understanding the game you’re playing, what is happening and what are playing with and against.

There are other champions whose abilities work on the clock to turn the game in your favor and, surprisingly, most of them get often dismissed, with the exception being Twisted Fate, whose ultimate provides his game style with similar aspects to the ones described above. Malzahar is another great example: His ultimate has a longer cooldown than Warwick’s but, both work rather poorly in team fights since they are easily interrupted and both can be critically successfull. Malzahar makes up for some weaknesses with a decent silence CC, decent damage and good laning. Malzahar is a pusher, which works wonders if you’re trying to do work somewhere once the clock hits midnight.

All you need is vision, awareness of both your jungler and enemy jungler, and awareness of time. Every 120 seconds that ultimate should be doing work in somewhere. Not doing so is wasting power and opportunity in a game that is about efficiency, not waste. Some champions are not made to shine in teamfights, in particular when it comes to their ultimates, but they are still made to shine somewhere else. Champions may have a stronger kit or weaker kit, but to properly judge that we need to properly play them and understand to what extent can they influence the game.

Working the clock to attempt to dictate the pace of the game early is sometimes a strength that we relinquish without noticing, by trying to play these champions in similar ways to other champions, when in fact they have this clutch feature that we are not using that would allow us to change the game. Warwick and Malzahar were two examples but there are more that follow the same philosophy like Pantheon, Urgot or Rengar.

Some champions have abilities we dismiss because of how little they might affect our own laning phase compared to Tryndamere’s Undying Rage, or because of how we simply do not value their team fight contribution compared to, for example, an Amumu’s ultimate. But we fail to comprehend how powerful they can be when used somewhere else. These “time-bomb abilities” ( nothing to do with Zilean this time! ) become stronger and more impactful the more you correctly use them to help your team and ultimately to help you. Sometimes we surrender our judgment to the big numbers on damage or ratios, neglecting that an ability is not all about these factors. They may have the power to be really impactful, but they have to be used at their own time.

Closing: A year after

League of Legends is such an extraordinary game: It is fun, tense, filled with joy for success and tears for the unlucky ones. All of these ingredients combined together with our passion for the plays formed an incredible Season 3. But what I would single out as impressive was the speed. Not only the rate at which LoL has grown but speed at which the games themselves were played. They were increasingly fast-paced, hard to call, filled with preparation and strategies, sneaky plays that end in big climactic victories or turnarounds that resulted in unexpected losses. It is a vibrant game and this is not just the excitement around the professional part of the game with the Kassadin backdoor, the LCS, All-Stars, EU vs NA or the World Championship with Faker: Watching the game is fantastic, but so is playing it.

Sometimes we even get caught by the pace of the game itself, lost and wondering what to do. An easy double kill in the first two minutes can be a mountain too high to climb, even for professional teams in the Quarter-Finals of a big tournament. But that’s how frenetic this game has become: You need to be on your guard at all times or risk defeat at a game you no longer control. How many times have we not seen a decision to go for Baron Nashor, right there out of nothing, that proved to be exactly what we needed to win that game? How many times have we not seen the same decision prove our undoing?

The beauty of LoL is that it can change in a second. It will if you’re not paying close attention. Split second moves can decide a battle, even a game. That’s how much Time and Timing have grown as a concept we must understand and work with in order to improve. League of Legends grew, much because of how much the e-Sports side evolved. But it wasn’t all about that; the game itself changed. This year I think Time was more important than ever. How do you rotate to Top lane and when to do it? How do I gank this lane and when do I do it? Maybe next year the game will be even faster! Maybe next year Zilean will be banned or picked in most games, and then clocks gain a whole new dimension of importance! Who knows? Only Time will tell, and that’s part of the beauty.