LoL Myths That Are Quietly Costing You Games

Ten pieces of advice everybody repeats, and what's actually wrong with each one. One-tricking, duo queue, copying win rates, blaming teams, and the belief that mechanics are what's holding you back.

League of Legends Guide

Myths That Cost You Games

Advice Worth Unlearning

Most bad League advice is half right, which is exactly why it survives. Here are the ten that come up most, and the specific part of each one that's wrong.

One-tricking Roles and Carrying Copying Win Rates Farming and Mechanics Blaming Teams Duo Queue Where You Belong

"You have to one trick to climb"

Playing fewer champions genuinely helps, because every game becomes practice rather than learning. The word doing the damage is "one".

A single champion means every bad matchup and every ban is a game played at a disadvantage, and it leaves you nothing to do when the meta stops flattering your pick. Two or three is where the benefit lives. Ten is a mess and one is a trap.

"You can't climb as support" and "the marksman is the carry"

Granted, the support version comes from a real feeling. Support has the least gold, the least damage and the least control over whether the game ends, so it feels like the role where you can least make a result happen. Feeling less in control isn't the same as being less in control: a support decides where the vision is (and so where everybody else is allowed to walk).

The marksman version is the same mistake in the other direction. Whoever is fed is the carry, and by twenty-five minutes that's frequently a top laner or the jungler. Playing every game as though one seat is automatically the win condition is how teams protect somebody who isn't doing anything and ignore somebody who is.

"Copy whatever has the highest win rate"

The reasoning looks airtight: somebody counted the games and the number is right there.

The catch is who generated it. A build with a great record often has it because the people choosing it already know when it's correct, and a champion at the top of a list is frequently there because only specialists pick them. You're buying the item, and the item and its win rate came apart the moment you weren't in the sample.

"Farming is passive" and "you need better mechanics"

The farming myth costs the most games at the bottom of the ladder, because it frames the correct play as cowardice. Minions are the largest source of gold in the game by a distance, and the player eating them is accumulating exactly what the player fighting is spending. After a loss, compare your creep score to your opposite number, then compare kills. In most of those games the creep score gap is worth more gold than the kills were.

The mechanics myth is subtler. Almost nobody below the top of the ladder loses games because their hands were too slow. They lose them by being in the wrong place, backing at the wrong time, or taking a fight nobody needed. Mechanics are the visible skill and the most fun to practice, which is why it's the one people assume they're short of. Watch your own losses before you drill combos.

"You'd climb if you didn't get bad teams"

Everybody gets bad teams. The people above you and the people below you are drawing from the same pool, over the same number of games, with the same luck.

Which makes the difference between you and them something other than the teams. If everyone's teammates average out and some people still climb, the variable that moved is the one sitting in your chair.

The related one is "vision is the support's job". Everybody has a trinket, everybody can buy a control ward, and every role gets ganked. The person who gets ganked is the person who most needed to see it coming.

"Duoing is free LP" and "duo queue ruins your MMR"

Both halves of this get repeated by the same people on different nights, and both are overstated. Duoing with somebody good doesn't hand you their rank, and duoing with a friend who's worse doesn't quietly poison your account either. What it does is change which games you get: the matchmaker treats a pair as a pair, and it has fewer of those to work with than it has solo players.

Some of it is actual rules, though. Your partner has to be near your rank, and the gap the game allows narrows the higher you climb. Above Master you can't duo at all (the Solo/Duo cutoff sits there), so Grandmaster and Challenger are played alone whatever anybody tells you they did.

The useful version of the advice has nothing to do with LP. Duoing with somebody you talk to is the one reliable way to make two people in a lobby play the same game, and that's worth more than any rating effect either camp is arguing about.

"This is just where I belong"

The most comfortable myth on the list, because it ends the conversation. Ranks measure a set of habits at a point in time (nobody assigned you a ceiling), and the habits are the part that moves.

Everything above this line is a habit rather than a talent: how many champions you play, what you buy, whether you farm, when you back, whether you ward. None of those needed better hands, and all of them changed somebody's rank.

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The short version

Play two or three champions. Buy the item rather than the win rate. Farm without apologizing for it. And compare your own creep score to the enemy laner's before deciding what lost you the game.

For the numbers that actually describe your game, our scoreboard guide covers which ones mean anything, and our ranks guide covers the characteristic mistake at each tier.