The 7 Habits of a Highly Effective League of Legends Player Part 1

I'm going to be writing a new series that I've entitled The 7 Habits of a Highly Effective League of Legends Player. The inspiration for this piece is Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The aim of this series is to help enable and empower the reader to take charge of their League of Legends career and become successful. This could apply to raising ELO, reduce raging, and increase enjoyment while playing. I cannot guarantee that you’ll reach Diamond or Platinum from reading this since the focus is behavioural and not so much mechanical skill, and you need both to reach high ELO. However, I guarantee that if you take these habits to heart, you'll enjoy your time spent on League of Legends a lot more than you currently do.


Habit #1 – “Be Proactive”


The first habit has a lot to do with looking at what shapes who you on. In League of Legends, we are shaped by our experience, and ELO. As an inexperienced player you are treated as if you don't know the game as well as someone who has played since beta, and as such, you will perform in a manner that you're expected to. ELO influences us in a similar way, and with the addition of borders for S2 standings, a player will likely under perform if they are on a team with all Platinum players when they only reached Gold last season. The Gold player may have worked hard to improve and may be just as good as the Platinum players now, but because they're expected to do worse, they will do worse in most cases. These two factors are external determinations that are used to gauge our aptitude to perform, but the fact that they are external shows that they don't have to dictate how we perform.


The basis of human intelligence is the idea that we can decide our responses to stimuli. In the case of League of Legends, the stimuli are our experience and our ELO (the perception our team/enemy has of us). As humans, we have the choice to play as we are expected or play how we know that we can play. The difficulty is applying this principle, and this is where the first habit comes into play.


The idea of habit #1 is to switch from being a reactive person to being proactive. To do this, you need to take the initiative. You can't wait for others to judge your skill based on your experience or ELO, but instead, you need to make the first move. In the context of a League of Legends match, you can do this in a number of ways such as:

• Speak up in champion select and be cooperative
• Get first blood (don’t give first blood)
• Win your lane
• Make plays early on
• Play safe (ward/ping/call mia)

There are numerous ways of taking the initiative, but the idea is to set a precedent yourself rather than letting other factors set it for you. A fine example of this would be my life. I've faced stereotypes and expectations that others have placed upon me, but they've never dictated my success. Since I started streaming and putting myself out there online, I've heard a lot of people saying things like, “He's good for how he plays.” They see my limitations and put the expectation of my capability on me, but I choose to ignore such comments because I know I can do better. I know I can and will improve. My ELO may be at 1k now, but my understanding of competitive play and the game far exceeds that (at least in my opinion). My limiting factor is not my physical capabilities as people like to think, but it is the fact that I'm still finding the best way of playing for me. I don't play or limit myself by the expectations of others, but rather, I try to prove them wrong by taking the initiative and improving myself whenever possible.


The essence of being proactive is considering what is in your power to influence or change (your cs'ing skill, your behaviour, your map awareness, etc) and separating it from things you can't control (teammate's attitude, teammate's performance, enemy's skill, etc). The idea is that you should focus on things that you can control instead of getting stuck on the areas that you cannot control. An example of this would be playing top lane and getting ganked a lot. You can control this by warding and improving your map awareness. Alternatively, you have no control over your teammate rage quitting after they die in lane, so you shouldn't focus your energy on this matter. Not only will this help you improve your gameplay, but you'll enjoy yourself far more if you don't get upset over things that you cannot control.

The Barriers of Esports

I've been following Esport for years now, and it has been grown exponentially in the last year due to the growth of online streaming sites like Twitch TV and Own3d TV, and the large investment of capital from game companies like Riot Games. Despite the growth, I've noticed a few barriers for the current esport games and future ones.


Scope Creep


The first issue I noticed with the development of an esport for various online games is the concept of Scope Creep. Scope Creep is a term used by project managers that basically says that the project's scope has slowly grown too large. Essentially, the project evolves past what the company can manage to develop without compromising the quality of the product/service.

This is seen a lot in the gaming industry because advancements in technology are becoming so rapid and competitive that every new game needs to innovate to succeed. This is difficult for gaming producers and publishers because they have a market scope that is quite large. For example, MMORPGs are divided into a wide variety of segments such as casual, elitist, pve, pvp, etc. While games like World of Warcraft have been successful for years in targeting multiple segments, they fell short in the esport domain (competitive pvp) because they were restricted by the other market segment's demands. This is generally seen by the issues with balancing pve dps and pvp dps for games in the MMORPG genre.

The problem of Scope Creep isn’t isolated to the MMORPG genre. Developers of most games are trying to be the jack-of-all-trades instead of mastering one. What does this have to do with esports? Well, if there are no developers who wish to be the masters of competitive pvp then the games we use to showcase the esports scene will always be somewhat lackluster. Since I primarily play League of Legends and its growth in the esports scene has been incredible, I’ll be looking at the concept of Scope Creep as it applies to League of Legends.

Riot Games, the creators of League of Legends, has a philosophy that pushes them to the goal of being “the most player-focused game company in the world” (http://www.riotgames.com/about). While I absolutely love this goal, I can’t help but notice the difficulty in accomplishing such it since every player will want something different. Riot has chosen to focus on a few primary areas to achieve this goal such as esports, customer service, steady champion updates, steady gameplay balancing, improving player behavior, and quality of life improvements. With all of these focal points in mind, is Riot falling into the Scope Creep pitfall? I’d like to argue that they have found a good balance with the exception of one area. The area I’m thinking of is in fact esports. I know what you’re all thinking, “But Keith, they’ve had a record breaking year with regards to esports success!” You’d be right in thinking this, but I’m looking towards the future. I’m thinking of the longevity of the game and esports as a whole.

Let’s take a step back and consider traditional sports for a moment. Most sports you watch on television have been around for eons, and their gameplay has become very standardized in comparison to most esports who have new patches that can change the game dynamic drastically. This change in gameplay leads to a volatile environment for the professional scene that some would argue keeps it exciting. I would agree but that’s because I keep up with the changes. At the current rate of change I believe that if I were to stop following the game for a few months, it would be very difficult to start watching again and enjoy it to the same extent as I do now. I realize that my argument here is very biased, but let me try to give a better analogy. It’s 5-10 years from now, and I’ve drifted away from watching League of Legends tournaments, but my nephew is at the age where he’s starting to get interested in it. If we were watching hockey or football together, I could explain the game to him, despite me rarely following the games, but I wouldn’t be able to properly explain an esports game because of the constant changes shifting the meta. This is where Scope Creep comes in. Riot wants to please its playerbase by continually changing/adding to the game, but this undermines their goals of longevity and growth in esports. In fact, I would argue that this is an issue every potential esport game faces.

Am I suggesting that esports and League of Legends is destined to fail?

This is far from my point. I’d wager that sports like hockey and football started out just as volatile as esports are now. My point is simply that as players we can’t have everything. If we want League of Legends to become a permanent sport and not just a fad then Riot Games may want to focus their scope and standardize the game after they feel that they’ve reached the quality of traditional sports. This could be done by better utilizing their tournament realm since it could have far fewer updates and gameplay changes, but this creates a disparity between the game that amateurs play and the one that professionals play, which is a very bad directions to go towards since one of the underlining psychological principles behind fandom is relating to the professional you admire. It’s hard to relate with someone who plays essentially a different game.

My suggested solution (for League of Legends) for the above issue is quite drastic and may be horrible to do currently, but one day, it may be a suitable direction. My solution would be to halt all gameplay changes to Summoner’s Rift except balancing and yearly updates. I would adopt a similar model as item development by introducing new champions/changes into the other game maps and at the beginning of each season consider which champions/changes should transition to Summoner’s Rift.


Visibility


A huge problem faced by the esports scene is the ability to attract more viewers. This issue is based around two problems with visibility. First, you only hear about esports if you're already a gamer. This vastly limits the growth potential of esports, and it could be very detrimental in the future as companies are deciding whether it is worth it to put money into developing the esports scene. There is really no easy solution to this, but I'd like to see more buzz generated for the larger tournaments outside of the online domain. It is true that a majority of your target market is online, but it is important for esports to have a presence away from the internet so that people become aware of it.

The second visibility issue is with regards to gameplay. I've read a number of blogs and articles that go over what makes a game successful as an esport, and one of the biggest points they make is that it needs to be easy to understand. This means that the objectives, strategies, and risk vs reward decisions should be apparent to a brand new spectator. This issue is evident in League of Legends because it is hard for a new viewer, who has never played, to understand the champions and their roles. All of us players have no issue understanding things like the differences between various ap mids, but for a new player or someone who just happened to check out a tournament broadcast they would have no clue. While the casters do help with this issue, I find that they focus a lot more on the higher thought process involved in the gameplay and not the basics.

My suggested solution for this involves the creation of a new viewer stream that has casters explain the basic fundamentals of the game that the general audience would find tedious. Moreover, educational broadcasts and pre/post game shows that help delve deeper into the gameplay and decision making of professionals. These are not new concepts and are done for regular sports, so I believe they would be a welcome addition to tournament content.


Please post your thoughts and questions below! I’m going to continue delving into the realm of esports and League of Legends by trying to make use of my business degree.

The Evolution of the MMORPG Genre

With the release of games like Tera and the up-and-coming release of Guild Wars 2, we are seeing a shift is style from the MMORPG gameplay that we are used to from games like World of Warcraft and EverQuest. The shift is based around the combat system in an effort to become more action orientated. This means that there is more of an emphasis on positioning, targeting, and evasion of your enemy than in the predecessors of this genre.


Is this a good or bad thing?

The MMORPG genre has remained quite stagnant for the last decade as seen by World of Warcraft's dominance of the market. This level of stagnation has harmed the development of the genre and gaming as a whole because companies for sometime avoided innovation. In some regard, you can't blame them for this since the current generation of gamers isn't kind to new ideas and reject change quite a bit. It is a bit ironic since most gamers desire more from their gaming experience, but when something new arises they bombard it with ridicule, but this is another issue entirely that I will address in another post.

Additional to the ridicule received from players, game developers also face the issue of deciding what aspect of the genre to innovate. Making a bad choice in this area could be disastrous since the game's entire development is based around this decision. A fine example of this is seen by Star Wars: The Old Republic who decided to try and innovate the leveling experience by having fully voice acted stories that the players follow as they level. The issue with this was that they focused too much on this aspect, and when players hit max levels, they had nothing innovative and original to keep their interest. The pvp and raiding was very much identical to games like World of Warcraft.
Now I don't want to be too critical of Star Wars: The Old Republic, Bioware was success in the aspect of gameplay they decided to master. In fact, it was the most enjoyable levelling experience I've ever had in an MMORPG, but after I finished levelling, I was quite disappointed to not see this innovation flow into the rest of the game as much as it should have.


So spending insane amounts of resources on a minor aspect of gameplay is bad?

Yes!

Having a competitive advantage is important, but your advantage must keep the customer's needs in mind. If you fail to effectively identify what your customers want then you'll be producing a product/service that has no demand. A prime example of this being done success (we hope) is Guild Wars 2. Like Star Wars: The Old Republic, they've made use of voice acting and dynamic/fluid questing, but they didn't go to the same level of depth. They spread their focus more so that they could bring innovation in other areas such as combat style.


Tips for Innovative Design

• Pick a current feature of the product and expand on it. This method is far easier than creating a brand new feature.
• Make sure your innovation is what the customers want. Do not waste your time building a box if your customer wants a circle.
• Don't compromise current features for furthering your innovation. Even if you're innovating, the rest of the product needs to meet the minimum standards expected by your customers.

Starting A Movement

Today in my Organizational Behaviour class, we went over how to successfully create change in a business. My professor started off by showing us this 3 minute TED video that captures virtually everything you need to make a successful change/movement.




There are a lot of things in such a short video, but the key points are:

1. Leaders need guts to create a movement/change.
2. The initial followers active as leaders and must be treated as equals.
3. Leaders are responsible for nurturing followers.
4. Movements/change must be public.
5. More followers = less risk for newcomers.
6. Focus on the vision/movement/change rather than the people.

There are more subtle points, but these are the more important ones in my opinion.

Shaping of Reality by Networking

This is a follow-up to my Perception and Shaping Reality post last week. This week, I'd like to explore how we can bring about a change in perception. I'll be looking at how humans naturally form "tribes"(networks) as described by David Logan in his TEDx Talk. The main point I'm taking from his talk is how we can improve our own networking and increase our individual/organizational clout.

Perception: What we see lies upon the surface. What is lies underneath the surface.

To change how disabled people are perceived, we must expand the tribes(networks) that hold the values of acceptance and understanding. I know many non-profits, and advocacy groups try to do this already, but their reach is usually limited to the reach of their members. That is say, they rarely expand past their current tribe. As stated in David Logan's video, great tribe leaders are those who expand their tribe's influence by introducing people to other people. This is somewhat of an absurd concept since you'd think that you're just expanding the other person's tribe, but I would like to suggest a possible explanation. The act of introducing one person to another is a show of confidence and power. You are asserting yourself to the other 2 people and taking a leading role. This means that they will be more likely to follow your values in the near future. In essence, you've influenced 2 tribes with one action instead of 1. This act has allowed you to establish clout(social power) among both the tribes.

How do I establish clout?

The key is to attend as many social gatherings, conferences, dinners, fundraisers, clubs, etc. as you can. A lot of people use these events to network, but most don't fully take advantage of the situation. I would suggest that after you've attended an event where you networked, you should follow up with the people you've met. Go for a coffee, develop a relationship outside of the particular event you met at. This added step lets you move from acquaintances to being friends/colleagues.

How do I use my clout?

With the establishment of personal or organizational clout, you can move on to my next suggested step for motivating the shaping of perception. Start a cause/movement that fits within your established values (the values that your tribes follow) and elicits action by those who see it. You need something to be eye-catching and 'viral' for it to be successful. A fine example of this concept in recent media was the Kony 2012 campaign. The Invisible Children organization spent years establishing its clout at universities throughout the USA so that when they made an eye-catching video it went viral immediately. I find this to be the hardest part because you need to create content that generates action. You may have the clout necessary for your friends/colleagues to spread the message, but the people who see it need to act upon seeing your video. To help with this conundrum, you should look to expanding your networks in a few particular circles; university students, film makers, and communications professionals.

Following-up the action

This step is often left out in most practices. It is synonymous with the last step of many business models that relate to feedback/monitoring performance. This step is often overlooked because the project/product has already been finished, but it is critical for insuring the success and growth of future endeavours. In the non-profit world, this is why donors usually receive some form of thank you, and shaping perception is no different. If you don't follow-up by sending thank you's, or asking for feedback then your supports/tribes/networks will think that the cause was successful and no more action is needed. This is rarely the case since most causes require years of protesting, and fundraising for to be completely successful. Just as our existence is continuous, so are the issues we face.

Summarized Steps:

1. Establish personal/organizational clout by attending networking functions.
2. Follow-up meetings with your new contacts to develop personal connection.
3. Start a cause that aligns with your network's values.
4. Create a video, site, blog post, event, etc that can catch the attention and elicit action.
5. Follow-up to tell everyone it isn't over yet.
   

Questions or comments about my thought process/suggested steps are welcome.

Perception and Shaping Reality

This TEDx video inspired me to write on a topic that I've always found fascinating since it pertains to my life quite a bit.

Essentially, the concept of perception that we know today is formed around our cultural norms, and these norms are typically defined as a collective agreement by the majority. While the acceptance of norms usually needs some form of majority to be adopted, the drivers of these norms are typically a minority. A prime example of this is how celebrities influence current trends. So based on the above classifications, perceptions are cultural norms that the majority has accepted, but a minority created. What does this mean for finding ways to change or shape perceptions?

It means that anyone can do it! The trick is finding out how. I'd like to believe that to shape our current and future perceptions, we need to first look to the past and determine why the current perception exists. Since I'm personally invested, I shall focus on why people in wheelchairs are seen as being 'disabled,' useless, and/or inept. I like to think that the root of this perception is simply that people are ignorant of the truth, but to really change things, I need to delve into the traditions of our predecessors and find out how they treated people who were different. Of course, there isn't much mystery behind this question. Our history is riddled full of subjugation, segregation, and degradation. We, as a species, shun what we don't understand because we fear the unknown. We need to feel in control to feel powerful, and on some levels, we feel we have a divine right to be powerful. We see this all the time with statements like: "We're the top of the food chain," "We're the chosen ones." Even though these statements may very well hold truth, our species acts like a spoiled brat who deserves all the shiny new toys.

Ahh, but I digress. I am to be focused on perception and not on all the indignities of humankind. If we look to the past, we see the purging and segregation of physically disabled individuals. In today's society, this would be considered horrific, although segregation does still occur, but it not as horrific as in the past. So, the root of our perception of disabled individuals is based around the past acts of purging and segregation. With the root defined as best as we can, we can move forward to erasing them from our current society, right? Only if things were that simple. The issue is figuring out how a minority creates a norm that the majority will not only accept but will act on. We can't all be famous and influence millions by tweeting about our clothing. Of course, there has be another way to influence the majority besides being a celebrity, or else, people like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Ghandhi wouldn't exist.

I'll be stopping here for now. A small teaser of what is to come: What motivates people/tribes? TEDx Tribal Leadership

The Joining of Business Theory and the Medical Field

Background

For my topic of project management, I found an article on the post-project review of the application of project management principles in health and medical research. In the article Researchers’ Experience with Project Management in Health and Medical Research: Results from a Post-Project Review, Janet M. Payne et al. (2011) looked into the reaction project management had on the researchers and “whether it made a difference to the project” (p. 2). The premise of their project was to “provid[e] health professionals … in Western Australia (WA) with educational resources to inform them about the prevention of prenatal exposure to alcohol and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder” (Payne et al., 2011, p. 2). The project management strategy that they employed was based on the guidelines found in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), which focuses on a five step process of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and monitoring (Payne et al., 2011, p. 1). The real merit of this article is how it shows the versatility of project management and how it can be applied to any type of project. Moreover, it tells of the reaction that professionals in the medical and research field had towards this business based concept.

Current Issue

The main issue was applying a business modelled theory to that of a health and medical project. For the researchers, this meant looking at things differently than they would typically, so the key process for their success, in my opinion, was their planning phase, so I’ll be focusing on that primarily. The researchers used a web-based template to help them develop their project plan which included the project purpose, objectives, management of the project, stakeholder management, media communication, publication and authorship policy, risk management, issue management, and project scheduling (Payne et al., 2011, p. 3-4). While most of these steps are pretty straight forward, the researchers expanded upon the management of the project by creating seven specific roles. The roles they decided upon were project champion, project leader, steering committee, project team, chairperson, project manager, and consumer and community reference groups (Payne et al., 2011 p. 3). This subdivision of roles enabled them to divide the work and hold individuals accountable for completing their specific tasks. This focus on accountability and assigning of tasks was further reinforced by the fact that in their project scheduling plan they created a work breakdown structure and a Gantt chart.

Moreover the groups they created, project champion and consumer reference groups were geared for this specific project and showed that they were thinking of their audience rather than getting bogged down with the medical jargon when approaching the development and delivery of their information on alcohol and pregnancy. The responsibility of the project champion was to “promot[e] the benefits of the project to the broader community,” and the consumer references group was tasked with “convey[ing] community perspectives and guidance to enhance the success of the project” (Payne et al., 2011, p. 3). These roles are very important to note on because as David Cohn (2011) said in his article Project Managers – Game On, “some organizations have the wrong vision for a project” (p. 1). He goes on to say that a loss of vision isn’t so bad as long as you learn from it (Cohn, 2011, p. 1). Thankfully for the researchers, they didn’t need to learn this lesson since they were focused on their audience from the start when they developed their project plan.

Results

After creating a project plan, the researchers were able to complete the project on time and on budget. The researchers made use of project management to its fullest by creating a project plan that used a well refined methodology based on the PMBOK Guide, which is one of the top tips for effective project management mentioned by Dr. Ian Clarkson in his article Top Tips for Effective Project Management where he says, “adopting a project management methodology will ‘win the battle’” (2011, p. 1). They also maintained their focus on their audience which enabled them to preserve their project vision. After the project ended, the researchers were given questionnaires by Payne et al., and the results of researchers' opinion of project management was nothing but positive. They claimed, according to Payne et al. (2011), that, “it ‘established and facilitated effective methods of communication and decision making’ … It ‘supported the establishment and maintenance of teamwork … members were clear on expectations’ and roles’’” (p. 5). Additionally, the project was so successful that the researchers said that they “would recommend this type of project management for similar future research projects” (Payne et al., 2011, p. 8). This finding means that current methods of project management, specifically project planning, can be used for medical and health projects to increase the rate of project being completed on time and on budget.

Blog Question

According to the researchers what two things did project management enable them to do?

References 

Clarkson, I. (2011, December 11). Top Tips for Effective Project Management. Retrieved

from http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/top-tips-for-effective-project-management.html. 

Cohn, D. (2011). PROJECT MANAGERS -- GAME ON. (cover story). Quill, 99(1),

18-19.

Payne, J. M., France, K. E., Henley, N., D'Antoine, H. A., Bartu, A. E., Elliott, E. J., &

Bower, C. (2011). Researchers' experience with project management in health and

medical research: Results from a post-project review. BMC Public Health, 11(1),

424-434. doi:10.1186/1471-2458-11-424