User blog:Nidhogg101/Critical Thinking: Opponents

Good day everyone,

Today we're going to talk about our common enemy: our opponents. Who are these people? Where do they come from? They never give up and never give in. No matter how many times you beat them, there's five more at the beginning of your next match. Their sole purpose in life is to ruin your day by making you lose. Opponents are the fundamental obstacle of the game: They attack you, they defend their Nexus, and they hoard gold. Obviously, nobody likes our opponents, because they're meanies trying to stop us from having fun.

We spend a lot of time on this wiki talking about how opponents might react to decisions we make. Fragile but devastating damage-oriented item builds are easily countered; your opponents will simply stun you and scatter your atoms to the four winds. Builds that forgo damage in favor of immense durability are also dealt with swiftly and efficiently by our enemies; they will pay no heed to the lump of health standing in their midst and overwhelm your poor allies until you are the only one left and an easy target. And on and on we go: opponents will dodge skillshots, initiate fights, assert map pressure and ward strategic areas. Predicting how, when and why opponents do what they do is key to understanding how to beat them.

When we are advocating our own strategies, we like to talk about how helpless our opponents will be against us. Someone might describe, for example, how their combo will instantly annihilate an opposing champion. In contrast, when we criticize others' ideas, we do the opposite: your build is too squishy! Your opponents will dodge your spears and kill you instantly!

The truth is, our opponents are players just like us, and except in the case of extremely awkward matchmaking, they are our skill level. Assuming that our opponents do everything right will lead us to playing fearfully and ceding territory and objectives we could have contested. Conversely, operating under the assumption your opponents suck will get you killed. A lot.

So, how do you interpret what your opponents are like, and what they will do? Check the title: we're going to do some of my favorite activity, critical thinking! Observe your opponent's movements, item build, and rune setup. If they play aggressively, assume that they will continue to play aggressively. If they ward a lot, assume there will be wards. If you never see wards in your opponents' inventories, you can assume that they are playing in relative darkness. If you think about the enemy team like the boss of a Zelda dungeon, these observations are the throbbing weak points under their heavy armor. So put on your deerstalker cap and think like Mr. Holmes!

In summary, we will get more out of the game (and have more fun) by understanding our opponents as human beings like ourselves, as opposed to almighty beings of supreme omnipotence or cannon fodder for your destroying pleasure.

tl;dr I will not summarize six paragraphs of text to subsidize your laziness. Learn to read or GET OUT.

( Is he gone? good, I hate that guy!)