#teamfind

League remains one of my favorite games, and every 6 months or so, I look for new ways to find community in the game. Because "community" and "League of Legends" in the same sentence is a bit of a joke. Every MOBA for that matter. Match-making where you never see the player ever again is not "community" from the player's point of view. It's all random. Naturally, players often treat other players as though they are just the in-game champion. Because they are. You'll never see that player again unless you and they actively try to connect again.

The only social feature in the game is instant messaging (specifically, XMPP). Sure, you can join chat rooms, but you are only going to find those rooms from out-of-band communication. You can add friends to your contacts after playing with them, but in general you'll end up firing off a few game invites which get rejected or ignored (most likely because they are afk), and either end up removing them or enjoying your collection of unused contacts.

Digression: I managed to make friends in game in exactly one case since 2011, but that was because my summoner name is a conversation starter.

League of Legends is seriously missing a guild-like or team-building feature. Have a great match? What if everyone voted to play again together? I've tried it (through friend requests), and often the second game falls apart fast, but it's an interesting idea. The Team Builder is in beta, but we'll have to wait and see if it works. I'm skeptical that it will build sticky teams, but I am optimistic that it will improve solo play.

I've uncovered a few guilds through tumblr and Google searching, but I found most guilds to be inactive throughout most of the week and those who get something up and running have to deal with a lot of trolls. Getting past the trolls, people would get too caught up in "What League are you in?" instead of focusing on teamwork. There's something about the MOBA genre that makes people take themselves too seriously.

There's pug.io, which was a weekend project and not very active. It has the neat idea that you can find a time to play and send a public low-friction link around to get a pickup group lined up. That means that you'd need enough people in your network in play League and want a set time to play. If you do, you could post the link publicly (or in your status message) and get some people together, but you probably don't have that kind of access to a network of players given the lack of social features in the game.

I saw Teamfind a few weeks ago, and I tried it out this weekend. I'm going to share some "quotes" that I found while looking for other players. I'm not going to use verbatim quotes, because I don't want to identify anyone (and the internet is searchable, you know). Note that I'm talking about player perspectives here, and not about Teamfind itself.

From the player side, two trends stand out to me outside of the base looking-for-group status, both on opposite ends of the spectrum it seems:

"I do not like playing solo queue because of trolls."

"I would like to become a professional League of Legends player. ... Currently I am in Bronze 3."

Players are either frustrated with solo queue (I know I am) or have a dream about being a pro player (even if it's mostly a dream).

Looking at team postings, most are stale. I narrowed down the thousands of team postings down to 30 or so using Teamfind's filters. Many have not been touched in more than a month. I posted messages at the start of the weekend to a few people who've been online recently. Silence. Messaging people in-game works okay, but you have to let them know that you found them on Teamfind or else they might wonder why a random person added them in game.

Here are the trends I see in team postings:

"diamond and plat only"

"Looking for a support."

"Our ultimate goal is to be in the LCS."

"We want to make a name for ourselves."

Teams are either non-existent where a player posted a new team and have yet to get one started, or they are very serious about being the best team in the world. Can you make a pro team out of a single want ad? I seriously doubt it (and I'm trying not to laugh out loud, sorry). Get real, please.

Also, a lot of people like playing with Skype. Ugh, skype. The constant noise in the background and idle chat, how can people like this? I strongly prefer push-to-talk. There were not many mentions of voice chat systems, and of those mentioning voice chat, most use raidcall with a few teamspeak mentions. (I mostly use mumble and ventrilo.)

Here's where it breaks down. If you are trying to build your team, you'd do it like you recruit for anything else. Get some players into Normal queue, see if they are a good fit, meet their friends, and see if they are a good fit. Instead, and I can only speak to this as an outsider, it looks like people have extremely high standards and quickly pass on people they meet in Teamfind. Then they get discouraged that they cannot fill their roster, they stop looking, and their team posting gets stale. That's my experience, anyway.

I get it. I'm a casual (but serious) player, and the service attracts to serious players. But the serious players I see are seriously lacking awareness. Listen, you don't have enough access to good players; otherwise you wouldn't be using the service. If you can stop gunning for LCS and enjoy playing with people who take the game seriously enough to have some good matches, soon you'll have access to enough active players to build a roster. Youre first ranked team will not be your last. It takes several iterations and a lot of dedicated resources. Get real about that, and your dreams of LCS glory might actually start making sense. Otherwise, it's all delusion. Go watch a Twitch stream instead.

The worst part about solo-queue is that you can own your lane but lose the game. You can totally outplay your opponent and demonstrate to everyone watching that you are better than him and that you deserve to win, but you can still lose. Because the system is plagued by one of the worst diseases to ever contaminate competitive gaming – the undeniable fact that sometimes, your own skill is taken out of the equation. Face it: if your teammates suck, you're going to lose. You're going to lose a game you deserved to win. That's the worst part about solo-queue.

Or, at least, it seems that way. In 36 of my last 40 games, at least one person – and usually more than one – on the losing team said something to the effect of “bg”, or “this team”, or some other bullshit. Some implication that they had played well and indeed would certainly have won the game, if only they hadn't had the shitty luck to be paired up with a group of idiots.

This blog is for those people.

Remember that it is not simply enough to be better than average to deserve a promotion. In every tier, in every division, players vary in skill level. It is perfectly normal skill variation for you to win your lane most of the time, but still lose often enough to keep you from getting promoted. Ok? Sure – maybe you're better than the average Silver IV player, but that fact alone does not make you good enough for promotion.

You know what does? Abnormal skill variation. You've got to be so good compared to the rest of your division that you just dominate every game so hard that your win rate is absurdly high. You've got to be so good that the game is less fun for your opponents because of how hard you shit on them. You've got to be so good that people would whine endlessly about how it was unfair for them to have to face someone like you, and that Riot should develop some sort of ranking system so that you don't get matched up against – oh wait.

But hey. I don't blame anyone – and this is a strategy blog, right? I'm here to help you! But if you can't get over that oh-so-common mindset that winning your lane means you should win the game, or that being better than average means you deserve a promotion, than you are probably not open to any sort of learning at all and should never click on a link like this again.

So let's get started. You're shitting on your lane opponent, you've got a great early lead. The game is winnable. How do you ensure victory? How do you make yourself so abnormally good for your division that you need to be promoted out? You've got to push your advantange, and two easy ways to start doing that is learning how to deny and how to roam.  I'll cover pushing your advantage with words (it's more of a general mental framework than a technical or mechanical gameplay decision) and then link to two great guides on Roaming and Denying.

On pushing your advantage

Champions power curves vary. Consider Vayne and Miss Fortune: We're not quite at the level of knowing who “should” win at specific levels, so we've got to speak in generalities. Now, in general, MF should stomp on Vayne early. Vayne should scale better than MF. But eventually, both Champions are going to hit a hard cap of effectiveness. Remember that the longer the game goes on, the closer everyone is going to get to that cap.

That means that even though you're snowballing hard, if the game goes on long enough, your early lead isn't going to mean a damn thing. This should be obvious, and we know it is intuitively – would you rather be down 30 to 50 or 0 to 20 – but most players don't actively put this sort of knowledge into play.

You've got to put as much distance as possible between your power level and your opponents, as fast as you safely can, and then take advantage of that difference to secure game winning objectives (see part 1).

Anyways.  Here is an excellent guide to roaming (though dated, the core concepts are still very relevant) and here is one for denying (also dated, also good).

Teamfind now gives you the ability to post a message to your stream. Anyone who's interested in your realm will be able to read it.

A year ago today, I told Rzn and Neilyo about a site I had launched just moments before - Teamfind. It turns out that they had been streaming, and the response was overwhelming. We're pleased to say that the community is now almost 30,000 strong.

Since the beginning, it's been our mission to make finding a team (or players for your team) as easy as possible. This is what we've done.

Team Lobby

Today, I'm happy to announce that Teamfind now includes the ability to create and manage your teams. Not only that, you can now participate in the Teamfind lobby system. As a player looking for group, you can have a look at the Team lobby and see a list of team ready to play at that very moment. If you're a team looking for more, you can also see a filterable list of players to recruit to your team.

Achievements

Now you don't have to wonder whether someone's stretching the truth. You can know exactly what they've accomplished.

Class selection

You can now display what classes and roles you need for your team.

    New Premium Features

We've also revamped the premium offerings. By default, you can be on up to 3 teams (one of them you own), and you can increase that by supporting us with a premium account! We're also putting in features for those of you who need the extra organizational power (for a regular team or guild group) - you can get larger team rosters and enable the team messaging tab as well.