Gaming
esports
The 11 types of League of Legends player
If you ever see these players in their natural habitat, tread carefully.
It is no surprise that many different types of people play Riot Games and Tencent’s League of Legends, as it has maintained over 100 million monthly players globally in the last two or so years. The game was released October 2009 and was pulling over 100 million monthly players by 2016, but ultimately saw a huge fall in playerbase between 2016 to mid-2018, mostly due to forced meta changes (tank meta, anyone?) and stale mechanics from the viewpoint of someone who had been playing the exact same game for years.
Riot Games did manage to bounce back in the second half of 2018, however, and has maintained those crazy numbers ever since. In fact, since June 2020, the game has gone above and beyond and surpassed 115 million monthly players across 145 countries. That’s a lot of players and, not to generalize, but, if you play this game a lot, you’ll notice a lot of similarities in the various characters you meet through your solo queue adventures. For better or for worse, these players appear often enough in your games, despite what rank or division you might be.
These 11 types of players are:
1. The Silent One
Rammus only ever says like two words, but still does his job.
© League of Legends
This player often comes in two forms: the one who just plays the game and does their job effectively, or the one whose influence on the game revolves entirely around spamming the question mark ping on their allies and griefing when they don’t get their way.
The first version of The Silent One is the very underappreciated rock of the team, often playing what is needed to fill out team comps and willing to sacrifice a lead if it means winning the game. These players seem to be exactly where they need to be at any given moment, assuming they’ve become very intimate with their minimap and have a strong idea of where the enemy team could be lurking The only issue with this player is that you have no idea what they are thinking or what they want to do, aside from a very vague pings. Just talk to us!
The latter version of this player is the person who has maybe typed two very passive aggressive messages all game but lets their presence be known entirely through spamming pings, blowing out the ears of any foolish players using headphones. Sometimes they ping the jungler every 15 seconds to gank their lane, sometimes they ping their midlaner’s teleport if they don’t immediately come help them, but they will never type to you in chat. Why does this player do this? Are they chat restricted, maybe? Are they fueled entirely on rage and have completely lost the ability to form words? Do they go wild and lose all reason when they see the colour red? We might never know.
2. The Flamer
Local 0/4 fire mage coming to your solo queue games near you
© League of Legends
Very opposite to the last type of player. This person will tell you exactly how they feel about you, your champion, your mechanical play, your build, your Summoner Name, and even your choice of which button you bind Flash to (Flash on D gang, rise up). This player has the ability to type at speeds previously thought impossible by humans, where the sheer force of their fingers crashing down on the keyboard has the power to cause tremors on the other side of the planet.
Unfortunately, they only use this power to call you bad, and then tell you to uninstall the game. This player has done all the research possible on you and, seemingly, knows everything there is to know about you after a small three-minute interaction. They know enough to say you are hardstuck and will never escape this rank, despite also being the exact same rank. This person can type novels about you and your prowess on the Summoner’s Rift but, after the first two paragraphs, you’ve realized they’re just repeating themselves and this is now the third time they’ve told you to uninstall the game.
The only upside is that these players often care a lot about winning and, if you can ignore their messages (or just mute them), they will still work together with the team to try and win. Probably don’t check chat too much or consider unmuting this person until after you’ve broken into the enemy base and are in the process of knocking down their nexus.
3. The One Who Watches Too Much LCS
Sometimes known as the Twitch Fanboy, this player will pick champions, runes, and build paths that are popular in professional play. Exactly like their favourite player does, regardless of matchup or team composition. This player will try to pick a galaxy-brained 200 IQ flex pick in solo queue just to end up playing something they’re not familiar with and is serviceable at best in the role. Don’t bother telling this person to just pick something they are good at, because they will defend their pick by saying X team won with the pick last weekend, and if you think it’s a bad pick then you are delusional and like, really, really bad at the game. If you lose the game, this player will blame their entire team and say things would have gone better if everybody played around their pick. If, by some miracle, you win, this player will take the exact same pick into the next game and grief that game, too. If you see them on the enemy team next game, camp them and steal their LP (League Points)!
4. The Cynical One
Amumu - League of Legends
© League of Legends
This player is quick to give up on teammates and essentially abandon games at the slightest inconvenience. Enemy top laner got first blood? Surrender ASAP. Enemy jungler invaded our jungle and stole half my jungler’s camps? It’s over, next game. Our ADC just missed cannon minion? Noob team, please report. While there isn’t one role in particular that is especially bad for this, games have practically ended within the first ten minutes because mid and/or top ‘didn’t roam and help secure the Rift Scuttler’. Sometimes this player takes it to the next level and is already saying GG in the pre-game lobby, just because their team didn’t ban Yasuo or something.
5. The One Never at Fault
This player is never to blame for a game’s loss. Stubborn, hard headed, and also understandably frustrated at the predicament, they are quick to start shifting blame at everybody but themself. Just lost a team fight hard? Team didn’t focus the carries. Just got ganked by the jungler, teleported back to your lane, then got ganked again? Noob jungler didn’t help. Just brought the entire enemy team into their low health carries? It was an easy fight and they should have turned on the enemy team. Whiffed their ultimate completely? Game must be lagging and Riot needs better servers. Just lost a 1 on 1? That champion is broken and it was GG the second they were let through pick-and-ban.
6. A Literal Child
This one is as straightforward as it gets. A literal child is bound to be in every other game you queue up for, and there is a good chance their mechanics are better than yours. Old players like us are no match for their fast fingers and high tempo gameplay so we might as well just move over for the next generation. This player got a little extra free time today and they’re going to spend it by stealing your LP.
7. The Sheep Herder
Swain - League of Legends
© League of Legends
This player tries their hardest to wrangle up their team and push for objectives or power plays. Unfortunately, The Sheep Herder is doomed to be stuck in the cycle of solo queue and despair. They see themselves as a leader, a beacon of hope for solo queue, and someone extremely familiar with the macro side of the game, capable of creating teamwork and cohesion with four complete strangers. What this player keeps forgetting, however, is that they are playing solo queue and the likelihood of his team backing him up or playing together is little-to-none. It is much more likely that the rest of the team is running around, doing their own thing, and ignoring the other side of the map. On occasion, this player will find success using this method - but is only ever able to recreate it once every dozen games.
8. The Off-Role Player
This is the player who queued up for their two main roles and ended up having to play another. Typically, this is the ultimate coin-flip player, as they either are useful (or serviceable) or completely invisible. In either case, The Off-Role Player has already informed everyone in all-chat that they don’t normally play this role and if they were playing their main role, the game would pretty much already be decided. It is very hard to predict what you’ll get with this player, but win or lose they’ll have brought up the fact that they’re playing off-role approximately fifteen times before the laning phase even begins. On the off-hand chance they end up hard carrying the game to victory, you will never live it down. Three years from now and this player will pop up in a lobby just to remind you that one time you got dumpstered.
9. The Meta Pioneer
Singed - League of Legends
© League of Legends
The Meta Pioneer can be that extremely frustrating teammate that builds items on a champion that doesn’t make sense, but saw it in an ARAM once, OR they could be that genius who just found the single most powerful combination in the game. Unfortunately, it is very unlikely that the person in your solo queue game just created a new meta. More often-than-not, they’re just griefing close games because they don’t want to play the game in the way most people play it.
This player calls every unpopular champion and item build “the tech” and claims to be pioneering a new playstyle, even if that playstyle means their four teammates won’t be able to play the game themselves. Any criticism or questions towards their choice of item/character/runes (or a combination of any of the three) will be met with a lecture on how you are ‘just a slave to the meta and pro play’, while they are innovating and trying something new. This often seems to be at the cost of everyone else’s fun. Yeah, we’re looking at you, support Singed player with Smite.
10. The ‘Smurf’
This player starts every lobby by saying they will win you the game if you just give them their preferred role / favourite champion, essentially dooming the game to be an absolute one-sided slaughter. We jump into every lobby dreading to see someone claiming to be a smurf but is anything but a little blue person living in a tiny mushroom house. Sometimes we’ll be in that state of bliss right before you fall asleep and suddenly hear “give me mid, I’m smurfing” echo before waking up in a cold sweat.
11. The Actual Smurf
This player is actually smurfing in your ranked game and will most likely climb tiers above you. Make no mistake about it, they ran over the game and whether or not you were on the winning side of this smackdown, you vividly remember thinking “why does that character do so much more damage when they play it?” A fun game to play is ‘Smurf or Booster?’ where you follow certain smurfs and, after about a week or two, see if they still play the same champions, play with the same people (smurfs often duo queue), or are generally playing at the same level they were when they were in your game.
