User blog:Asperon Thorn/From the Crown of Thorn: Today is a Good Day to Die

First rule of League of Legends: Don't die.

Second rule of League of Legends: DO NOT DIE.

At somepoint while following those two rules, destroy the Nexus.

For any of you that have had an experienced player take you under his wing and give you some advice or teach you about the game those two rules will probably sound very familiar. Dieing is just not good. Dieing a lot, or feeding, is especcially bad. In fact, if you are feeding you probably would have served your team better by just not leaving the well (base) at all. For the most part this is excellent advice to new players who just don't seem to understand the impact of dieing. "eh I will just respawn again in a few seconds," they think to themselves. But they don't realize that with each death they are making the other team that much stronger. So emphazising the "don't die" rule(s) is often the best way to get the point across so that they can figure out when the best time to press "Q" "W" "E" or "R" is, without needing to worry about the intricacies of ganking, jungling, team fighting, map control via wards etc, and when to sacrifice damage output for armor or MR. Discovering which fights they can win and which fights to flee from is probably the most important thing to learn as a new player.

This period of discovery is, however, the most frustrating thing for experienced players that not only know their own damage output, but have also reached the point in which the can reasonably estimate their opponent's and their partner's damage output. Hand in Hand with that, is that experienced players can, within reason, guess the timing on when their target can expect to receive help. This can lead to a lot of awkward moments, in which an experienced player will dive into a fight expecting their teammate to immediately follow (or sometimes made the assumption that their team mate was going first and they were simply diving in to add damage) only to see that their teammate never left the safety of their tower. The net result ussually looks incredibly n00b - ironically it is the experienced player that looks like a n00b as he dove in and died while his less experienced teammate followed the wonderful words of wisdom "Don't Die" To the letter. Sometimes, if it is a player that is not a friend they will even give you such useful advice as "Stop Feeding."

This new player philosophy is never more evident than when I am playing a smurf account.

Smurf ac*count: [smɚf] [uh-kount] noun - A low level account created by a high level player in order to play with people at lower skill levels.

As far as I can tell there are two reason's to play smurf accounts, one that is benevolent, and one that is malevolent. I play my smurf account because I have some friends that are new to the game and when they want to play against people rather than bots I switch to a smurf account in order to prevent other level 30's from dropping into the matchmaker. However, I have seen quite a few malevolent smurfs in those games that are quite obviously not playing with any friends (mostly because their team seems to hate them as much as anyone else.) and it seems that the only reason that they are playing a smurf is because they like to rock Yi and stomp "noobs" because they can no longer do it at high levels. It works brilliantly until they run into another smurf that knows how to beat the crap out of Yi and then they bitch and moan. (on a Tangent from this Tangent, had a great chuckle out of a Smurf Yi that called "mid" on his team and faced me playing Annie on a level 5 account. After I killed him twice he left the lane and gave me his tower, but had gone on a killing spree against my noob team including my friends. However, everytime he popped up around me - Tibbers, disintegrate, flame, auto attack disintegrate -- dead Yi. Malevolent Smurfs never do learn that lesson as to why they are getting stomped at 30, get some goddamn defense.)

Back to the point of the article. "Don't Die" can be incredibly frustrating to experienced players as there are just times that you need to expose yourself to fire. I am here to tell you that sometimes. sometimes. . it's ok to die. Sometimes it IS ok to go out into a fight that may cost you your life. But if your team pulls then win, if there is trade of death that goes both ways, then it's alright. If your life is snuffed but you take out that Tryndamere that would have carved up your whole team, then it was worth it. If your body is found floating down the river alongside 4 opponents corpses. . that too is Ok.

So next time your teammate dives lend them an auto attack or a Q. Because when someone goes 1 vs 3 and manages to get all 3 down to less than 100 health but dies, the noob is actually the teammate that stayed at the tower. Countless are the number of times that Sivir's boomerang would have served better flying over my head then safely in her hand. 5 feet away.

Next time From the Crown of Thorn, "For the love of god what made you think you could win that fight, or that I could have made a bit of difference?" Or "Don't blame me for YOUR bad decisions."

Asperon Thorn 17:30, April 13, 2011 (UTC)