User blog comment:Steelside/Do You Believe in Skill Caps?/@comment-68.199.53.54-20120617031519

What is skill in League of Legends? There are a few categories I can think of.

First is mechanical skill: last hitting, efficient and timely use of champion abilities (also summoner spells and active items), and understanding the extent and potential of those abilities. I do not think these need any explanation. This can be improved by practicing alone or in 1v1 custom games. There should not be a skill cap to mechanics. For example, with enough practice, any average player should be able to last hit perfectly if there is no enemy presence.

Second there is strategic skill: making the right decisions to win the game, choosing the right items, and understanding how your team stands against the enemy team. This is how you capitalize on your team's strengths and prey on the enemy team's weaknesses. Your team's picks and bans are also related to this. It's arguably the most important skill to have. There is no skill cap to this. You can learn this through experience as well as observing other players' games. Strategy is a skill of the mind and, as long as you are making the right observations, you should be able to improve this. With that said, it may be difficult to understand errors in your own decisions.

Finally there is tactical skill: This is about executing plays. You need to be able to quickly analyze the situation and act accordingly in order to achieve a favorable outcome. League of legends has the capacity to generate high speed skirmishes in which a single little error results in a large disadvantage for a team. Both mechanics and strategy are directly related to proper execution of tactics, however I think because of the high speed nature of a skirmish, it becomes its own skill entirely. I find this skill particularly difficult to improve on. In a 5v5 brawl I find it particularly difficult to assess the situation and identify my enemies. Events can occur in a flash, and it can be very difficult to self-evaluate how effective your actions were, even if you were successful. You can only improve this skill with experience. This is tied to your reaction time: how quickly your eyes collect information, how quickly your brain interprets that information, and how quickly you are able to form a conclusion and act. While I do not think there is a skill cap to this, it can be very complicated.

tl;dr I don't think there are any hard barriers to players without any handicaps. Experience is a key factor in improvement as well as observation. If you don't know what to improve in your own play, you ought to seek someone else's opinion.