Coach Curtis unironically managed to make the only non cringe and best apology video of our generation, and I didn't even realise It was an apology till the end ❤
if he gonna post videos how to play better and use high elo concept, then you have to be better than last time because everyone is getting better globally so what.... thats why a magician never reveals his secrets.... gl hf on climbing, now you have to figure out how you reach your desired elo by yourself, YES BY YOURSELF, and noone can manipulate you, thats why its called hero to zero, not zero to hero, ironically who cares ELO? right? = BUSINESS, MONEY, JOB, I LOVE WHAT IM DOING, noone loves oneone in a race or sport, none trust anyone, and none respect anyone, because you have to know / understand better.
@@RegiJatekokMagazin Yeah, never trust any coach in any game or sport, because they really don't want to help their students get better and compete with them...Dude GTFO
I've definitely seen this happen. I hired a coach to help me get to Platinum last year. During that time, I learned a ton about the game just going from just gold 4 to plat 4. Going back to playing in normals with my casual friends, I realized how much I knew now, and how much my opponents in platinum knew compared to the casual players in normals. I'd point out things that would seem obvious to myself but had gone completely over the head of my friends. All that to say, the mental stack capacity or knowledge of the game for any player can't be assumed just from time spent with the game. Every player learns different skills from playing different champions and roles, and many people have never had a better player directly teach them what they don't know about the game. Playing with my friends and talking with my coach also showed me that people can develop intuitions that are completely wrong. Casual and new players have a very narrow view of the game so their game knowledge often lacks the necessary information needed to make it optimal. A coach or just a higher elo player who has a broader view of the game is needed to help expand that game knowledge by starting with what is known and expanding slowly into the unknown. Telling a casual player, "Just CS better," means "Don't miss last hits," to them; as they don't yet know how wave mechanics affect CS numbers more than just last hitting. Communicating information in a way that doesn't leave room for misinterpretation is crucial for better coaching in the league scene and teaching in general.
I would also add, since I'm still learning the game, when I hear "CS better", I try and go for the last hit only to get attacked heavily. Especially when I'm behind in the game and struggling to keep up. It always makes me feel like I CAN be better, but I'm NOT getting better due to knowing very little about match-ups. I do play casually as I'm still level 24-25 as of this post. I know I can't say much as I'm not in ranked yet (Or ever will be considering what type of people inhabit it), but I try my best to get better and at least learn a few things to keep me alive.🥃
@@OneZenDarius Don't worry dude, it takes time to learn league. The fact you are consuming content is a great sign, however, you need to put in the work and hours >:(
Yea, man, that sentence is kinda funny when used in the proper context, but because of influence from game communities like League's and Dark Souls it became hella toxic. Fk that shit.@@scno0B1
Love the ability to admit your own mistakes and the things you viewed incorrectly. This kind of thinking is all too rare out there. Your content inspires me to be better in league and in life. I feel like your philosophy towards self reflection and self improvement has helped me to improve in many areas of my life.
I still disagree with this take, yes champion mastery definitely matters more than fundamentals, but this still doesnt disprove that fundamentals matter less than advanced tactics, the og reddit post is still wrong in thinking that at low-elo you should start by learning the advanced tactics of the game rather than the fundamentals, maybe in a future season where the meta changes so mucher and wildly up to the point where the “advanced” so called tactics actyually become the fundamentals and viceversa, as it is rn, fundamentals will get you much further than where advanced tactics alone will, and also not to mention that youll still need to learn everything about the game unless youre a OTP playing just a single champ, and good luck OTPing in Draft where people will likely ban your strongest pick if your 2• best is below average.
As a teacher myself it is refreshing to see a League coach who is so down to earth and reflective of their practices. It breaks my heart to see coaches who are rude and belittle players with less experience who are merely wanting help and advice. I enjoy your videos even as a jungler because you break down concepts better than most other coaches I know of and you seem both knowledgeable and reasonable. Kudos and keep it chill!
5:35 YES. THANK YOU Coach. I've been preaching this to Skillcapped for ages, but they really just didn't get it. A lot of high ELO players can be so good at the game, but have AWFUL insight when it comes to understanding teaching what's necessary. They made fun of your Zed video for being too in depth, but looking back, I learned more from that one video than a year's worth of Skillcapped content, so the joke is really on them. Got my full refund after I failed their "climb guarantee" at least lol
They actually do have videos on how to master champions, I don't know if they added it after you posted this comment or not. I tried skillcapped last month and I think its actually helpful in many ways if you actually use the things they teach in your games. Definitely not saying that its guaranteed to climb after using skillcapped, but its definitely helpful in my opinion.
Thanks Coach! Personally, I think the original video did serve an audience. I was stuck in bronze because I just tried to do too much with the muscle memory I had built on my champion. Anxiety made me do things that didn't make sense and miss key abilities. I needed to change my mindset. So getting some CS with a particular emphasis on the first 10 minutes and why I was missing it before, patiently waiting for the enemies to make obvious mistakes while valuing my life, and just grouping with my team got me into silver on a huge win streak. I just sort of relaxed and let the game play out. The games felt really easy instead of stressful. And that was from your video. Also turning chat off. I'm still steadily climbing through silver now, most of the games feel very easy, and I'm having a blast.
IMO the best way to learn farming waves, is to a watch a high elo one trick of that champion, and see how they manage and clear the waves with their champions in all state of the game. That alone helped me.
At the end, if you try to do too much, you'll end burning out. Just get consistency to be more useful to your team. If they are at your elo they are probably at least doing some things right.
I wish I was having your experience. I went from bronze to hardstuck iron, and I keep getting matched with obvious smurfs further depressing my rank. I use Porofessor to check ranks and there's plenty of people that are either current or recent gold players in my games too, on top of botters and the aforementioned smurf accounts. I reported a bot/smurf account to Riot's twitter and nothing was done for months. The ranked ladder is really, really bad this year for low elo.
It's a never ending journey. I'll be honest, this has been the most satisfying part. The constant 'trying to solve' the coaching craft, having to alter my previous takes and evolve. I hope to continue for many years to come!
I’m glad Curtis seems to be one of the few coaches who understands that teaching is a skill in itself. Another thing I appreciate is the comments about ‘muscle memory.’ I work in the top tier of my field, and sometimes people ask ‘How do you do x thing’ or ‘why do you do x thing?’ and I don’t like giving answers because the answer is often just ‘idk man just intuition’ or ‘just muscle memory and practice.’ I genuinely don’t like not being able to explain my moment to moment decisions but that’s just how it is.
In psychology of mastery there is the stage "unconsciously competent". This is when you are so expert you don't even know how you do things. Coaches are beyond this and know how to explain the underlying assumptions. This is why experts often make bad manager/coaches, until they realize this :)
I've noticed that I have way more problems with explaining skills I've just learned thanks to tons of practice vs those I've consciously tried to improve. Whenever my friends asked me with programming help, I had no idea how to teach them - I just kind of intuitively use my knowledge. Meanwhile, when I and my roommate are in the kitchen, I can point out tips and techniques I've learned from various cooking videos. Even with just LoL, I never had any idea how to explain the things I've picked up over my years of playing, a lot are just muscle memory. But I have been able to give others advice since I've started actively trying to improve, because I know what things I've changed to get better.
Smartest league coach I've come across so far. Most "coaches" I've seen are just good players with good intuition that don't really understand how to convey their knowledge effectively, doubly so with their tendency to have a limited vocabulary for doing so. This guy has a level of introspection that is rare among league players. Good to see.
You really nailed with this 3:11 Its almost impossible to isolate skills in this game. Yeah we have practice tool but few skills can be polished using it (buffer abilities with flash, jungle clears, weaving autos and abilities...) but still theres lot of things that only can be integrated on your musle memory by just playing games. The learning curve this game is infinite and thats one of the reasons lot of people stick to it. Amazing reflection about coaching.
Coming from a sports coaching background, there's a swing between the mindsets of "Figure it out yourself" to "This is what you're supposed to do". The people who figured out HOW to do it right now dictate WHAT to do, but ironically not HOW they figured it out. The result is a generation of learners who go through the motions, but don't built the mental resilience and mechanisms that enable them to be able to repeat that on their own. This shines when, as a coach, I try to demonstrate a skill _badly_ ... and I can't. What beginners instinctively do is so far removed from my current skill level that I cannot put myself in their shoes and do what they do. All I can do is recognise where they are coming from and teach them how to overcome their barriers as they are _right now._ Your reflection shows a similar realisation of the disregard for the knowledge gap between a veteran and a new player. You have to guide them on learning the champions in the game, but in regards to the complex mechanics, it''s more important to teach the general principle and allow them to figure out HOW to best apply that principle. What I found in my long climb out of Silver was that the less I "listened" to pro guides, the better I understood HOW I would accomplish my in-game objectives, as long as I knew what they were. Simple things like "This is a cannon wave, I should shove and reset - but if I can't do that, I'll take the sub-optimal play and adapt" or "My goal as support is to ward the jungle, but if I have no team support i have to leave it blind instead of risking being picked, so I have to adapt my pathing and change my priority". These are the high level decisions that win and lose games. Mechanics come into play when there is interaction, but the decision making from respawn on where to path to can influence the outcome of the game. The review process can evaluate WHAT decisions were made, and really understand WHY the player made them. That will uncover the underlying problems that prevent them from reaching the next level.
I am thinking about getting back into league and watched your old Annie game yesterday (probably thanks to the algo thinking I needed it) , and let me tell you, as someone who has like 6000 hours split between mobas with a little over half being dota, I questioned your methodology... And I'm really glad to see this one today. I don't know you or you content very well, but your intellectual honesty is refreshing to see.
This is the most in touch video I’ve ever seen in the league community. The amount of knowledge that’s packed into what players expect you to have as base knowledge is absurd. I’m so glad you were able to recognize this and package it into a video, especially given your credibility and status as someone like me - a gold player with no will to improve, just enjoys the game would never be taken seriously if I created this video.
Nice video man. As a coach I can relate to that completely. There's a huge difference between a coach that knows where the issues come from, and a coach that simply says what he sees. There's so many bad habits in low elo that only better players can recognize and verbalize it to the player, in a way to improve him.
Wholesome Coach Curtis, reviewing your old video and reflecting on your performance in the bronze elo game was really good to highlight the skills you showed off without thinking much about them. My favorite coach on League from germany who coaches all elo brackets always emphasizes that you should know your own champion and the enemy's before even thinking about trading, wavestates etc.. Without champion mastery you won't be able to execute on any fundamentals because you are still struggling with everything else going on in the game. The things he prioritizes for beginners are mostly simple matchup analysis and how to get leads in lane/jungle. 😊
I think the video that you made was fantastic. it really left a good impression of you as a coach on me. The weird thing is you DID make points on how to get good CS and not die a lot. These 3 sentences explain EXACTLY what you did during laning phase and it's the points that you made during the video. *"I'm just letting him push waves into me and trying to cs, I'm not even trading with him"* *"He's roaming but I'm not following his roams"* *"I see when the canon wave spawns and I recall to spend my 1300 gold"* now you didn't go deep into the last point which maybe some players won't realise why this is good exactly, but I think when you're a bronze player it doesn't really matter if you don't know WHY it's good, you just have to know that it IS good. These 3 sentences explain EXACTLY what you did OVER AND OVER AGAIN and it's the points that you made during the video. *"I'm walking to the wave nearest to my base/me and collecting it"* *"I'm hovering around my team when it looks like they're going to fight (aram/drake/baron/random skirmish)"* *"I see the teamfight doesn't go down and I try to kill the splitpusher"* mechanics come from simply playing the game a lot, watching high elo OTPs and mains playing and trying to get your gameplay to look like theirs. Macro Similarly comes from playing the game a lot and watching high elo players make decisions, which if they're a streamer they often mention what they're doing and why they're doing it. You could have made the video a lot better than just commentary over gameplay, with an editor, a shorter video with key points summarized and displayed to the viewers, but imo you still got unjustified backlash, I don't think you deserved much of it.
Kudos for recognizing and acknowledging the mistake. It's nice to see you're actively learning how to teach better and reassess your process. Your points about champion-specific priorities make a lot of sense.
This is the video that made me subscribe and will eventually get me to sign up for MLA as well. I am not a bronze player but SO MUCH of the pre-diamond coaching content has always been just hand-waving "don't die, get 10 cs/m and congrats you are diamond now it's so easy" bullshit. This isn't just a League thing, many competitive games have this issue where all of the people who make instructional content are so out of touch with what the game is like now outside of their 1% bubble that coaching is the last thing they should be doing. WoW Arena PvP is another prime example I've seen this in where coaches have been playing the game since 2003 beta and take for granted all that they have subconsciously learned over two DECADES. It takes a lot for a person in your position to really drill down and examine their own process to see what should be changed or improved. In my experience most are not capable of it and the end effect they have is a lot of players leaving either the game or their coach's content because it doesn't accomplish anything but make them feel worse about themselves. If it's "so easy" then why are they struggling so much? It must mean because they are just horrible... this is how they see it.
What you brought up in this video explains why even when I take year+ long breaks from the game I can come back and climb up to plat pretty quickly. Despite taking such long breaks I still have well over 15,000 games played. I've played LoL on and off since it was in beta. So many mechanical things I have committed to muscle memory, I have new friends with game counts in the hundreds who struggle in silver and I really never sat and considered the massive difference of play time between us. It was always just "oh it's so easy bro, just farm up and don't die, don't make silly mistakes", but there's a lot that goes into that. I've never figured out what keeps me hard-stuck around mid/high plat but if I had to guess it's probably because every time I come back to play the game I usually don't stick around for more than 4-5 months, just enough time to climb, get a good feel for the meta and then quit and do it all over again.
Really glad you addressed this, because honestly that video was one of the last videos I watched from you in a long time. I felt like you completely undermined the complexity of all the nuance you were performing subconsciously and even though I didn't know everything you were doing, I knew there was way more to it. Really enjoyed this video.
We lowbies appreciate you Curtis. Your humility and focus on practical pedagogy in league is commendable. I've enjoyed watching your guides and have learned a lot. Keep up the good work!
I love this video.Been playing for over a decade now. I saw you and your aforementioned low elo annie video just two days ago and really felt that it under explained all the micro interactions that was going on. Now this video came out in such perfect timing. it takes a quality person to analyze and reflect on their mistakes- qualities befitting a great coach. Thank you for this self reflection! You've got a new subscriber!
Props to you for making this video. I just watched your last video as it was in my recommended and I was "upset" with your last video for almost all you said here. Very good follow up video to recognize all the little things that were missed in the first. Well done!
This video makes me realize I've always used the term "fundamentals" to mean something different than others. When I think "fundamentals" that means what champions do, how to move, what makes tower go pew pew and kill you, what items are, how gold works, how XP works, keeping track of yourself in fights, etc. I would consider stuff like wave management, trading, leaning, roaming, backing, etc. as a level above "fundamentals", in the "basic skills" that require you to first have a strong grasp on fundamentals. It's also worth noting that "basic skills" are an incredibly challenging thing to learn, especially to fully automate all of them to free up your mental stack. That's just because League is a hard game though so it's to be expected. The most rewarding thing about gaining mastery in "basic skills" is when you suddenly start noticing that you're naturally thinking more about advanced concept/macro/etc.
Really good video actually. I remember when I just started playing the game like 2 years ago, it was impossible to even look at the minimap, everything was so overwhelming. I had no idea what champs did, so I didn’t even know if I was safe to walk up or not in situations, if I should fight or not. There is this idea all high Elo players say that “you’re in low Elo because of bad decision-making, not mechanics” without realizing how insane their mechanics are compared to low Elo players. It always pissed me off.
Absolutely agree. People say league is easy and well, after 10+ years of experience, well, duh its easy. Its hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesnt know anything about league.
It's a really interesting conundrum in trying to find where your knowledge-base and the knowledge-base of your audience overlaps, it's probably the hardest part of communicating. Kudos for recognizing a weakness and addressing it.
Great VID Coach Curtis , I started to learn league better by OTP'ing, and the fact u said Learning Objectives make me so happy , so glad you are brining your wisdom to new elo's. Great Job.
I had an adc coach one time. I was low gold at the time. And he actually went 5 vods I had and was shocked at the amount of PVP that was happening. And he told me of fundamentals I could improve on and then instantly just ways to PVP better. (Trading/mid-late team fighting) As someone who plays all roles outside of jungle. Has been in the MLA and had random coaches. Max rank been d4 currently e4. Each rank is different. Many higher elos say they are all the same but I don't think so. Different things are more important in these divisions! Adaptation is key. Off ramble - coach Curtis content is one of best content I've ever seen of this game. I super hope to be back in the MLA sometime soon again and the content doesn't stop coming. Thanks for taking the time!
So essentially, there is no "one concept works for all" when it comes to climbing. There are tons of things. However, If one thing _had_ to be the highest in priority, it would be "champion understanding" not just of what you play, but of what you're up against too.
I saw the video he put up last year just moments before this one, and touched on these same points. I must say it is admirable that you are this self aware Curtis, must respect for your understanding and your desire to help people not just get better, but actually enjoy a game, that has a very steep learning curve especially for beginners, actually have fun. You a real one man! Cheers.
That was actually the last video of yours that I watched. And I quit league within a month because I felt “it’s so simple, I’m just dumb.” My mental had changed though and I appreciate this video! There are many things that are hard to grasp for players like me. I often forget that my opponent is another player trying to win. My eyes gloss over and I’m just enjoying my champ. Intensity has changed everything for me. Hopefully I hit gold for the first time in 9 seasons 😅
I had a similar comment on that video (almost exactly that one you quoted?) and I genuinely appreciate your reflection on that. It shows how mature and how great a coach you are, trying to understand lower elo players' perspective. "Champion mastery comes even before fundamentals" 100%. Back when I commented on your video I was stuck in gold, now I'm still in low elo but slightly higher (high emerald) and what helped me improve was watching high-elo streamers discussing all matchups for my main. Understanding the matchups -- which ones I can win early lane into and which ones I cannot -- is almost the sole reason I climbed. Of course, that came in hand-in-hand with farming a little better and managing my wave a little better too. Couldn't do that when I 1v1'd the wrong champ at the wrong time and died level 2. Couldn't manage my wave either into certain matchups like heimer or irelia, until I watched high elo players handle annoying lanes. Thank you for this vid, it's incredibly insightful.
Massive props for making this. I'm way late, but I discovered the first video last night and was listening with steam coming out of my ears because I'm a low-elo support Karma OTP (hundreds of games) who doesn't flash offensively without a clear advantage and goal and never dies (but also loses consistently more than winning). I still got benefit from the video, but yeah, my experience was different than that of the players you were addressing. I really appreciate you understanding how this topic can be tackled better and then tackling it! Thanks for making content for players like me.
I had never seen a video of yours, saw the one about the reddit post and didn't watch it since you had this video in a pinned comment. I am very impressed by the depth of analysis you have not only of league but of coaching and what people need. I have spoken a lot about mental capacity over the years, saying I understand what I need to do but doing it while trading and farming and watching the map doesn't feel possible. You are actually the first person I've ever seen bring up this subject. Legend.
As a player that tried PC lol coming from mobile i can actually say your points are very valid. Almost all games i played (which are not many by any means) went awfully just because i would not understand how other champions i was facing worked and what the items did. Also the keyboard and mouse are a big trouble for me but i guess all of this i just mentioned comes as you said with time and practice. Understanding higher concepts made me hold a bit more of an advantage to gap my mechanical and overall knowledge disadvantage but i for sure know that if i sat down everyday to play a game i would at least be around gold by now if not higher but i don't want to think like i could because if i learned something in years of gaming online is that ego is, by far, the bisggest thing preventing your progress.
Thank you for posting this video. I was watching the video you did before this one that you felt you had to correct, and I'm glad I came here to see this. I'm 40...I'm far past my gaming prime, and recently have been actually trying to get good at league. I peaked at silver years ago, I stopped playing due to frustration with the process and info I was constantly getting, but am now trying to work my up starting from Iron. I always felt like the difficulty of this game was overlooked immensely. Nobody wants to admit that a video game like this can be hard, but in all the games I've played in my life, including stuff like high-end raiding in WoW and in the very early competitive CS scene, this is by far the most difficult game to master. The knowledge and muscle memory required is absolutely insane, really like playing an instrument is the closest thing I can liken it to. It's truly very difficult. Thanks again for this video :)
After having watched the previous video, I felt pretty much how you described (thinking this guy doesn't even know how good he really is vs the average player in this Elo). As someone who teaches other people for a living (I teach people how to drive) learning how to communicate and break things down to the base level varies greatly from student to student. What I have noticed going back and forth is that most people assume things like "CS Better" is the root skill to learn but really that is a second-tier interpretation/overarching skill group. For example, When I teach someone to drive forward and then switch them to reverse, I remove the terms "left and right" from my vocabulary when talking about steering. That is actually second-tier knowledge and ends up confusing more than helping. The direction you turn the steering wheel is opposite of what you are visually seeing when turned around looking out the back window. Instead, you switch the wording to something along the lines of "steer in the direction you want the car to go." Learning to correctly communicate what you want to convey so that it is retained is the real fundamental skill. You have cracked the code Coach. Keep it up!
Hey Coach Curtis, I'm loving the philosophy here for teaching people relevant and efficient skills. I've done some learning methodology work and I think I have a good trial for you to remake a video about playing in bronze. Pick your least played position, then your least played champion in that position. This will set you much closer in personal champion knowledge (can't do much about your total knowledge), and will show players how to win without relying on muscle memory. Playing without flash will also help reduce your skill advantage as flash is the most mechanically complex summoner spell. Putting yourself in high risk positions early (lvl 1 invades, roaming, kill chasing) will also help showcase the general knowledge of League trumping the fundamentals on laning/jungling. Ideally there would be a way to completely remove your mechanical advantages, but minor things like increasing your ping (I usually notice 18-25ms on your vids) to around 50ms or playing tired (ie playing after your job, not as your job) to slow down your subconscious reaction times will mimic the behaviors of average players more closely.
I say this as someone who has played for 10 years and just hit Platinum a week ago with a high pressure (yes that's code for 1.0 kda) jungle playstyle, because even though pressure could be considered a fundamental, there isn't a script that can execute perfect pressure. CSing, spacing, timing, wave management are all predictable and scriptable actions, as in there is a sequence of actions that is near optimal every game, but pressure is dynamic and responsive to 10 different players making deviations from their "fundamental" scripts. Playing purely as a force that acted in opposition to my opponents helped me learn so much about how to deny resources from the enemy and close games.
I made a comment on your original video that touches upon the exact same thing - what you considered "simple" is actually tons of experience and muscle memory. It's great to see you address this even after a year now! I would say everything up to high plat/low emerald (gold/plat pre rework) is just understanding League, i.e., all the champs, items, towers, minions, jungle camps, objectives etc. I think it's really nice that you as a coach only coach above a certain level. As you said, below a certain level of experience you simply get better by playing, regardless of coaching. It's really great you acknowledge that and do not prey on the money of these players!
The only difference I see between bronze and gold is that lower elo player ragequit/flame/troll more. I played duo with my friend (we are good returning player) and we had a hard time climbing bronze and low silver. The third of our game were 4v5. When we reached high silver/gold, we just clapped everyone with a 70% WR until plat 2. We stopped to play LoL for other game so we didnt reach our ''real rank'' but it was so easy to win with more experienced and chill players.
The last point you make is really acurate. I stopped playing League like 5 years ago. And a few months back my gf nephew told me he played LoL and we duo for some games. Even in my rustyest state i blew his mind. Missing a few skillshots or cs is nothing compared to the mental state you adquire trough years of play. Map awareness, general player behavior and treath assestment is so important and so hard to adquire. And only looking the game trough the eyes of a new players can make understand that.
This was a good video especially the last part for a new player knowing how your 1 champion interacts with over 130 other champions can be overwhelming but is crucial for getting better
Your first video definitely helped make my climb as a returning player easier, but I understand the sentiment of this video. I was definitely helped by the more broader tips like letting the wave push into you and playing off mistakes and it made my climb super easy abusing that shurelyas veigar build. I think watching a variety of league content, even outside coaching, teaches you a lot about the game and emulating what you watch in your own games to really work it out goes a long way at least for me. If you want to really improve at anything, just watching and building familiarity is invaluable in your free time.
So I just left a comment on the video that this guy is making this video about; its amazing that he made such a turn around. He spent time teaching and learning from these people he made a bad take on; and he realized it and came to fix that mistake. Coach Curtis; well done; thank you for the content and the humility. Great work
I actually needed this, i started at the other video then saw your comment so came here. I've played since s1 off and on over the years, with about 7 of those years being an active player. I never broke out of silver - made it a game away from Gold 5 times. I hated that so much at one point that I developed a hatred of myself when I played ranked because I felt like the knowledge I acquired was useless since I didn't have the skill. But I just didn't look for the right knowledge. I played Dota for the other portion of those years and play both games now, made it to Crusader (gold) and again, crapped out 1 game away from Archon (plat) and then had a 10 game lose streak, in which I quit ranked - couldn't afford to feel that way about myself. However! I did come back to league last year and play both league and Dota now and let me tell you, some fundamentals from Dota are immensely helpful in league (although I still try to block my minion wave mid and deny my own creeps - oops). I've been only playing normal in league at the moment (ranked is the only way you'll get your role in Dota) because I don't want to take it too seriously, but some of those normal games were gold/plat elo just because I was csing better and had a different perspective on minimap awareness and a ton of other little things that Dota took more advantage of. I took years off for my mental state to recover and its in a good spot now. I feel like even though I'm not really in my teens/gaming prime and am on the brink of the "old man" 30 mark - It really is fundamentals that are helping me improve. My mechanical skills were acquired over time through other means. I took fundamentals from Smite/Dota2 and implemented them in League because I never thought of them before. Dota taught me how to cs better than a training camp ever could since enemies can deny their own creeps (cutting your gold completely and denying a portion of xp) it forces you to pay attention to both your and their wave - even as a support(pos 4/5) denying your own wave and managing it via pulling jungle camps into the wave in order to bring it to your Pos 1(adc) or 3 (top) Dota has pos 4 - a roaming support that sticks with the offlane (top laner in league) then rotates across the map primarily like a jungler - taught me how to think about map awareness and roaming. I'm not saying this to go against the fundamentals section, actually to agree - because in Dota - i HAD to stick to learning a singular hero because if you try to counterpick all the time with Dota's insane amount of hero's with no set roles you will absolutely get wrecked, and I was a jack of all trades master of none player. The fundamentals came over time while I was learning Chen because he forced me into learning how to micro the creeps - and with no damaging abilities at the time - that was his only offense/defense. he had a .1% pick rate in most ELOs. I desperately wanted to learn him, and I lost more games in a row than I could count- now 200 games later my winrate with him is above 53% even thought my elo didnt change a ton - I still got way better at the game and was able to transfer those skills to other Dota heroes and eventually to league. The fundamentals were absolutely a benefit that I grabbed - but it REQUIRED the understanding of a singular champion in order to maintain them.
Absolutely great video man. That was exactly what I got out of Alois stuff. That noone of the fundamentals people preach on the net are useful to me if I don't know my champions limits to win lane. If I can win trades, I can then apply all I know to either grow my lead. Or not lose it. But if I just sit back and focus on not dying I'm simply giving up my entire sides prio. And simply hoping for a lucky team. Which isn't the way to go to climb at all. Learning how to play with and around jungle at all times, while also getting a lead/preparing on lane. Helped a ton
It’s amazing that you’re admitting this now because this, especially the last point of the difficult of the game being underemphasised is exactly what I thought when I first watched that video as well as other coaching content. These high elo coaches explain certain concepts as if they are self evident and easy to process for someone unfamiliar with the game or mobas in particular. The best way I ended up improving at the game was watching high elo Chinese and Korean players and seeing exactly what they were doing with waves etc and forming the pattern recognition there. League coaches are generally extremely bad at teaching imo
I remember posting something similar about how high elo advice is often really not actionable several years ago, and I remember getting downvoted to shit. I got really frustrated at one point, and was like "I'm getting 7-8cs/min, picked a mechanically easy champion, not dying, and games still feel out of my control. What gives?" because everyone made it seem like if I did those things, the rest of the pieces would fall into place. And let me tell you, they did not. I am glad that at least some people are starting to come around to the concept that games below gold are basically unrecognizable compared to Dia+. Lots more random things happen, macro is messy etc. so as a result, people playing what in their minds is "correctly" because of these truisms, don't see results, because there are a lot more complicated things at play that those truisms don't actually solve.
7:59 , this!! I was playing league from beta to season 5 on a top tier level. My fundamentals are still great, been playing other MOBAs for years. But I don't have fresh muscle memory, I don't know what some champions do, how to efficiently lane with or versus them and I'm struggling in high plat. A lot of people that want to improve in this game (or any game), feel like there needs to be some secret to climbing. There isn't really. Yes, you need to know some techniques and strategies but it really comes down to how much time you put in to the game. When you play 200th game in the same lane matchup, you will do so much better than when you played it the fifth time. PS: Curtis, this is really good catch on your part. I believe that every high level coach should watch this video
i want to tell you curtis that even tough you mostly regret the video, some of the things you said in it were bery helpful and i actually remember seeing that video and feeling that it helped me. for many years I played this game with a lot of pressure on myself to be aggressive and stomp my lane which would always get me in trouble, in your video you explained how low elo games tend to work and it made it easier for me to win on my own. i realized that the most efficient way to have an impact is to focus on farm economy and instead of making solo plays and splitting i should just embrace the aram because thats what everyone else is doing. i climbed with this strategy so thank you. also i think ur right about champ mastery being the most fundamental.
Oh my God, so much respect to you man for realizing your mistake and, not just apologizing, but also explaining your updated view. May God bless you, Curtis.
Something I find funny from this is I remember years and years ago when I made it to gold the first time in season 5, my advice for climbing was to just go play 500 games of normals and you'll probably climb just off that. Now its more like go play 500 games and every so often have someone spectate you can point out things that are fundamentals you are lacking so that you can slowly add them in over time to more completely understand what you are doing. Also when in doubt, pull a Gbay and put a sticky note over your KDA that says "Look at your f**king miny map", that works too. Great video! (:
Lmao, I JUST made a comment on your Playing in Bronze video that said basically the same thing as your last point here, then RUclips recommended me this video. Huge respect for admitting your mistakes and explaining it out in detail like this.
I just happened across the original video this is responding to and was thinking exactly this. Good deal realizing it. Massive respect and I'll definitely be looking at more of your content because of it.
I was literally thinking about the video last year, about how you said keeping it simple and being confused. Thanks for finally clarifying it is not as simple as it looks
Finally someone gets what coaching and teaching means. It's not about pointing out every f thing a player does wrong. Which is something most coaches does when they vod review. It's about identifying what aspect a player needs to improve, create a plan or learning strategy and work at it structured. As he states, that's how it's done in all other sports.
I haven't played league for over 6 years. I occasionally watch league content to stay somewhat in the loop and it scratches the itch enough that I don't feel the need to play. Just stumbled on to the prequel video to this one. I've seen it floating around and decided to finally watch it. It was good. Very informative and interesting. I'm more of a watch a person try wacky builds for fun rather than a serious game watcher. But you do give some very interesting insight. I hit silver 2 back in 2013 on placements and never ranked or climbed again. Just played casuals when I was active. I once remember playing a ranked game for shits & giggles with a friend to help and I was unranked. During the time, Ive already played over 1,000 games. Understood my champion and win conditions. My whole game macro was weak but my strengths were in top lane and dueling. Needless to say I destroyed a gold renekton I was laning against. His whole team flamed him on AllChat for losing to an unranked player who was unranked for many seasons. I told them to relax because regardless of rank, i destroyed their whole team anyways. So renekton wasn't to blame and that Ranking and game knowledge/skill were 2 seperate categories that shouldn't be put together too closely. A lot of things go into play why someone loses and the videos from you reminded me of that moment back in 2015. I don't play league anymore, but I have really vivid fond memories of it. Haha, I just don't have the time anymore. Now I play the adulting game. Clock in on time and try not to sleep deprive myself before work and save up for vacations to keep me sane. Lol
We need knowledge of advanced concepts to be able to CS properly. Understanding it shows how much better a coach you are than others. Thank you for that
I usually do not comment on videos but for the first time I saw a LOL video where someone really took the time and taught about it before doing a video. I saw the first video and in the end of this video where you said that you did many things because muscle memory I remember exactly a play you did on lux where you placed a ward and stay in the bush to kill her when she comes to break the ward.. I remember noticing that your position inside of the bush was exactly perfect to don't be revealed by the swiper while lux break the ward, you positioned the ward a little ahead and stay a little behind just enough to have range and don't be revealed.. this is the exact example of muscle memory that a low elo player would never do. So congrats for this video, for the first time I see a really good one and I hope this conclusion helps you to be a better coach!
Man, you are huge. I had to stop playing league a while ago due to not having available time anymore (just killing time on wild rift recently), but I still watch your content. You are a fantastic and professional coach and content creator. Keep on the amazing work!
honestly, just hearing him say "this game is hard" already makes me and others feel better about playing. It is a very fucking hard game. Lower elo players (myself included) make mistakes all the time, but everyone says that the game is so easy so we sometimes just feel like we're dumb and incapable of basic gameplay, which is not true for a good part of us. If people were more patient and empathetic, playing the game and learning would be a much better experience, which would lead to better results. Thank you.
I just discovered your videos randomly, and what you said in that video was what I felt when looking at the previous. I totally agree with what you said, and two points in particular: - Mastering your champion is more important than mastering fundamentals It's really true and at school my group made a project in which we wanted to predict win or lose in a LoL game based only on state at min 0 (meaning who are the players and what champ they play). It turned out that at any elo the most important factor to winning the game was the skill of a player on the specific champion they are playing, by far. The second factor of success was its rank in the ladder, but in the end it was almost useless. (For people interested, we managed to predict the right outcome of the game 69% of the times) - Underestimating the difficulty of the game I think anyone who has a friend who recently started League will agree with that, because when you start a game with them, it's obvious that Iron 4 players would crush them 100% of the times, especially people who never played MOBAs or video games. There are so many things in League of Legends to understand and do instinctively that we only realise we are doing it when we see people NOT doing it. The game is hard, and as you said, you may spend 10k hours in it, you could still end up platinum, and that would already be good. Appreciated the content.
Bro, it's so awesome to see you growing as a coach, analyzing your own mistakes and learning from them, as well as digging deeper into your experiences to get to the real meat of the matter. Inspiring stuff - and I also find the advice valuable, since I'm a silver player.
I am a Silver player, I have played the game on and off with friends since season 4. I personally think your previous video has fantastic information in it, but I can understand how it could be missed (give the points you make in this video). Like you mention, the many years I have played league allow me to infer things subconsciously that a newer player to the game might not be able to. I'm glad you are bringing up the issues you do in this video.
In mathematics pedagogy, which is basically studying how to effectively teach math, they are also breaking away from fundamentals as something you spend so many years on and they're probably going to do this in science in general I imagine. Basically it's more important for beginners to understand the big picture of the journey that they're going to go on rather than spend a ton of time tediously doing something that they'd naturally pick up because their brain will want to get it out of the way and get to the thing that matters. You can explain calculus to someone who really only knows some algebra in a way where they can conceptually understand what's going to happen; they're going to calculate areas between curves and an axis, and they're going to do this basically by splitting it into a bunch of blocks, but they don't actually need to do that. Our brains learn new things through scaffolding and reincorporation. As you teach new concepts on your way to doing integrals, you can attach each new thing to the big picture. It's a classic way to keep things in your working memory and your long-term. League is a pretty complicated game, there's a lot of macro concepts, and there's a lot of interactions, but if you teach game mechanics and metagame trends, which are much more conceptual and fun for people to learn, they will simply play and farm better naturally, because they know that they need to control waves and things like that, which is much more interesting and engaging than "you need to last hit every canon or people will spam you." They'll be more engaged, remember the concepts better and they'll be able to use them functionally because they're in their working memory as well. I'm not that good at League I don't play that much, but I do know the correct way to play and it's so much easier to win games as a support if sometimes you just blast a way of just to show the person that if we just push it right now we will have to go pressure, or will be able to back and they'll be in an awkward position where they kind of have to stay and we get kills that way, it just proves to people so quickly that they're focusing on the wrong things.
I’m glad you pointed out how important understanding what each champ does is. When I started playing in 2017, this was my biggest problem. I ended up maining jungle because you rarely interact with the other jungler in low elo, so I didn’t need to know how match ups played out, who wins fights, etc., which gave me a bit more breathing room to learn the basics. I’m still silver though, largely because I don’t have the drive to reach for gold/plat. I’m perfectly fine making mistakes in my game, so long as the people I’m playing with also make those mistakes.
Just knowing what all the champions do is a huge hurdle for new players or players that haven't played in a long time. I played a lot soon after release and knew all the old champions well, but I took quite a long time off from the game, and when I came back I was constantly bodied by champions that I'd never seen before. I didn't feel like it was worth the time for me to learn all the champions that came out since I last played. I don't think I ever am going to play again, but I still occasionally watch videos about the game that I think might be interesting.
I just came from the fist video and you hit the nail on the head. I was thinking the whole time watching the first video that you are a person with years worth of experience and totally see instantly when they over stepped and how to punish them. All of the movement and understanding of what could happen helped you in a way most new players don't even understand. Great follow up video. I suck at the game and tilt easy. The people in this game are the worst lol. I played a game last night where a raka and I owned the lane. But she got so tilted about what was going on in other lanes that she sat in base and typed for the rest of the game. Such a big lead was tossed simply because she could not keep it together and hit her buttons. She found it more enjoyable to tell everyone what they were doing wrong than simply play the game. Our top lost hard but I think we would have won if she simply kept her sanity. That is the biggest factor for me. After games like that my mental starts to break down thinking that another troll is going to just ruin the next game as well. Neace is correct when the first thing he tells most clients is to just turn chat off and ignore the trolls lol.
This is such a great re-examination. I was aware of these concepts from teaching and coaching other topics and it's great to see a League coach recognize it and self correct instead of just clickbaiting like some coaches.
curtis, you're making a really important point here. i think, as you correctly stated, most league players take for granted the complexity of the game. each fundamental could be broken down to many skills. playing through the ranks myself, i always felt that there were more to the core concepts, but could never verbalize or explain it. you do it here really well. for example, how do you cs well if you dont understand wave states, trading or come into a matchup with a gameplan? how do you "not die" if you dont understand the limits of your own champion well.
This was amazingly well said. my ultimate pet peve in lol is when you die to a gank top lane and someone pipes up and say "just play safe" as your wave is bouncing into a freeze towards your laner.. Yeah no one fucking teaches what "play safe" means. They might as well just say, "hey man, win lane" once you finish leashing the jungler
I just watched the video he's talking about for the first time like 15 minutes ago, and while it was absolutely hilarious, throughout it I was also thinking "dude he's actually playing so well here, he's kinda gaslighting the viewers". Then to see him address this and sincerely own up to it gave me such a warm feeling inside - Curtis is not only a genius but such an awesome person overall.
I appreciate your videos so much Curtis. Both the stuff you put out on your own channel and on BBC is some of the most informative league content I can find. I recently discovered another channel that I feel like is trying to do what you're talking about in this video by vod reviewing games at every Elo and talking about specific examples of wave state management and tempo which is the most helpful for a high bronze/low silver player like me
This video hits on all the points I believed was the problem with coaching off of the few coach videos I've seen around. It's more about identifying problems both in detailed mechanics and even more importantly in general thought process. Because once you get the thought process down you can more easily pick up those good habits and intuition of how to play the game.
"No content about low elo gameplay should be made by a high elo player". Yes. I was thinking this during that Annie video. You were making expert decisions at every turn, even if you weren't playmaking expertly. It was good of you to notice this, and I'm sure this has helped you significantly in your coaching. I am a coach in my sport and I've always tried to find ways to train in video games as well, but find it prohibitively difficult to do. Instead just playing the game because the "queue now" button just works better.
Another point I'd like to make on this as someone who only started playing League in Season 9 and only ever fully committed to the game in Season 10 and only again ever began playing Ranked in Season 11, is that the steady power creep and increase macro concepts added to the game over the years definitely enabled those learning over those eleven seasons to learn at a slower pace. Back in Season 1 there was no real jungle, drakes, barons, scuttle. There were no jungle items. There were no jungle ganks. There were 40 champions you had to learn 40 interactions. And many of those champions quite infamously had far simpler kits. Warwick, Nasus, Ashe, Malphite. The number of champions with rather simple to understand kits back in 2009 has been memed on since. Since then 124 more champions have been released, along with jungler items, baron, drakes, elder, more jungle monsters, the alcoves, brushes, less vision tools, and a lot more complex kits some of which directly impact the way you can cs or play the game. Even just between 2009 and 2010 what worked for largely every champion in 2009, suddenly had to be tweaked and revised. Kog'maw's passive, Malzahar's minions, Akali's shroud, Vladimir's healing the game state changed. But you only had to learn about them as they came out. To be thrown into a game with 164 champions to learn, some of which have wildly difficult to understand mechanics like Akshan, K'sante, Aphelios, Nilah, Viego, Neeko and Renata. Neeko directly being a champion that completely throws any attempt to learn wave management/csing fundamentals out the window. When you're learning how to space in League and suddenly a champion like Yone exists with the dash, movement speed increase, tether/dash and ultimate while doing insane amounts of hybrid damage. And then factoring in how quickly games can snowball. A new player can get completely caught off-guard by a Yone's chase potential, or Neeko disguising as a minion, or Evelyn's ganks via invisibility, or they can lose a fight because they didn't know Viego gets untargetability/healing/ult resets/entirely new abilities/items of the champion he just killed. And then suddenly they're behind, the games snowballing out of control. And any learning potential is snuffed out by the game state. And THEN you factor in just how toxic the community has gotten since then. How much we put each other down, especially in lower elos. then factor in the mass amounts of bot accounts, account derankers, smurfs, boosters, toxic people that were banned on one account and are now on their second or third. It's a veritable learning hellscape to be thrown into. And it can whittle down your confidence, make you not want to play, and keeps you trapped from game to game in a tilted mindset. It was somehow only last week that I realized just how much move speed Quinn's attacks on vulnerable targets grant her and if that sounds silly, well, that's my point. As a matter of fact, I actually have a greater understanding of the champions released since Sett in 2020 (when I largely started more heavily committing to the game) than I do have a lot of champions in the game because they're the champions I was drip fed since I started playing. As opposed to the mass of 147 champions that existed when I started playing.
I will never forget the time after I spent months playing jungle and all of a sudden I could move better. Just the act of being able to click where I wanted to be with kiting took me years. My time as a jungler also allowed me to always know where the enemy jungler was when I started playing top. I would call out the enemy jungler with no vision and my teammates wouldn't believe me until it was too late.
great Video!! in addition to the points you mention I want to talk about one thing that is even more important in my understanding: Fun! the best learning experience is when I am having fun. And it is not fun to “learn how to farm better” or anything like that. I want to learn how to do Riven Animation cancels, I want to learn how to do flashy mechanical outplays, I want to learn how to place seaky wards etc. Not because it will improve my gameplay the fastest, but because it is super satisfying to learn and to see my improvement.
I apreciate this video. I get what people are trying to do when they go "let me win this bronze game to show you how to carry" but it just makes me feel even more dumb because I feel like I should be able to do what they do and then I just can't. So then the only conclusion is "well they can do it and I can't so I'm just bad" which is true, but obviously I would like to know why I'm bad so I can fix it instead of just thinking I'm bad and that's that.
Appreciate the honesty here. As a new player in Bronze, this game can be very overwhelming. Having said that, even a year or so in, I encounter fresh players and they're easy to punish. Not saying I'm a good player, but experience/muscle memory/game intuition is paramount for League. Thanks for keeping it real.
Amazing video, well done walking back a previous statement and showing your understanding of a new position. I learned quite a bit watching this as well, and now actually understand this concept, too!
Bro this video adressed something i''ve thought too and its good that you adressed the things you were wrong about. Mucho texto incoming: I have played this game from the depts of bronze 4 all the way to mid platinum over several (7-8) years and the average player has gotten so much better than it was in previous seasons. i made a second account to start ranking fresh and placed silver 2 because practically i rank there everytime im drunk and chilling in vc with friends. Here's a list of the things i've seen plyaers in silver 1- Gold 4-3 do (mainly from the toplaner/jungler POV) Mantain a freeze for over 5 waves and denying xp. Toplaners zoning xp from the first 3 levels. Players doing the classic slowpush into dive with a jungler and denying the enemy 2-3 or more waves. THIS ONE impressed me the most: A support roaming top at lvl 5 and freezing 2 waves crashing, something that allowed their struggling toplaner come back and stomp the enemy laner. An adc kiting the fed enemy darius so good that he rage quitted and thus they won the game because he was the win con. The average/gold players arent really people playing brainless all the time (there are some exceptions of course, i've seen people who you would be impressed to know they managed to get plat 3). Although a good percentage of the people ranking they are playing on auto mode (but doing an average performance in farming, trading and tracking the enemies jungler + cooldowns is already pretty dificult enough, especially with all the new bs champs riot makes) People tend to "dickride" the high elo streamers they see and pretend they're high elo themselves. When in reality if youre past mid platinum you're already in the top 10-15% of players in your server. Sorry for the wall of text and the possible errors, i'm an ESL.
This is so SPOT ON! I've been playing League since like season 3 and through the seasons I almost never did a proper "learning" like actually trying to master wave management or watching some guides, tutorials. I gained the skill gradually over thousands of games that stored into my muscle memory and intuition. Only when I reached gold I started watching LCS and other pro players to learn from them & it helped. But I agree with Curtis here, the most crucial aspect is mastering your champion & understand other champions as well.
Coach Curtis unironically managed to make the only non cringe and best apology video of our generation, and I didn't even realise It was an apology till the end ❤
We play league, it wasnt an apology.
it was to let everyone know we tethered beautiful that game
if he gonna post videos how to play better and use high elo concept, then you have to be better than last time because everyone is getting better globally so what.... thats why a magician never reveals his secrets.... gl hf on climbing, now you have to figure out how you reach your desired elo by yourself, YES BY YOURSELF, and noone can manipulate you, thats why its called hero to zero, not zero to hero, ironically
who cares ELO? right? = BUSINESS, MONEY, JOB, I LOVE WHAT IM DOING, noone loves oneone in a race or sport, none trust anyone, and none respect anyone, because you have to know / understand better.
@@RegiJatekokMagazin yo wtf are you trying to say
I thought that award went to Miranda Sings 😏
@@RegiJatekokMagazin Yeah, never trust any coach in any game or sport, because they really don't want to help their students get better and compete with them...Dude GTFO
Between Coach Curtis and Midbeast, it’s clear to see OCE produces the most humble players in this community
Can’t forget the big homie Nathan
The humble midbeast has defeated faker, dopa in soloq, solokilled doinb but still so humble.
@@adve1s he also reached challenger in korea, very humble
coach cupcake, nathan mott, coach curtis, midbeast, shernfire, etc. all these people are oce goat's
Tell that to FreakyGaren ddt7
I've definitely seen this happen. I hired a coach to help me get to Platinum last year. During that time, I learned a ton about the game just going from just gold 4 to plat 4. Going back to playing in normals with my casual friends, I realized how much I knew now, and how much my opponents in platinum knew compared to the casual players in normals. I'd point out things that would seem obvious to myself but had gone completely over the head of my friends. All that to say, the mental stack capacity or knowledge of the game for any player can't be assumed just from time spent with the game. Every player learns different skills from playing different champions and roles, and many people have never had a better player directly teach them what they don't know about the game. Playing with my friends and talking with my coach also showed me that people can develop intuitions that are completely wrong. Casual and new players have a very narrow view of the game so their game knowledge often lacks the necessary information needed to make it optimal. A coach or just a higher elo player who has a broader view of the game is needed to help expand that game knowledge by starting with what is known and expanding slowly into the unknown. Telling a casual player, "Just CS better," means "Don't miss last hits," to them; as they don't yet know how wave mechanics affect CS numbers more than just last hitting. Communicating information in a way that doesn't leave room for misinterpretation is crucial for better coaching in the league scene and teaching in general.
I would also add, since I'm still learning the game, when I hear "CS better", I try and go for the last hit only to get attacked heavily.
Especially when I'm behind in the game and struggling to keep up. It always makes me feel like I CAN be better, but I'm NOT getting better due to knowing very little about match-ups.
I do play casually as I'm still level 24-25 as of this post. I know I can't say much as I'm not in ranked yet (Or ever will be considering what type of people inhabit it), but I try my best to get better and at least learn a few things to keep me alive.🥃
@@OneZenDarius Don't worry dude, it takes time to learn league. The fact you are consuming content is a great sign, however, you need to put in the work and hours >:(
This is made up to boost your own ego
just cs better is just saying "git gud scrub" xD
Yea, man, that sentence is kinda funny when used in the proper context, but because of influence from game communities like League's and Dark Souls it became hella toxic. Fk that shit.@@scno0B1
Love the ability to admit your own mistakes and the things you viewed incorrectly. This kind of thinking is all too rare out there. Your content inspires me to be better in league and in life. I feel like your philosophy towards self reflection and self improvement has helped me to improve in many areas of my life.
100%. This is rare, and needed!!
I still disagree with this take, yes champion mastery definitely matters more than fundamentals, but this still doesnt disprove that fundamentals matter less than advanced tactics, the og reddit post is still wrong in thinking that at low-elo you should start by learning the advanced tactics of the game rather than the fundamentals, maybe in a future season where the meta changes so mucher and wildly up to the point where the “advanced” so called tactics actyually become the fundamentals and viceversa, as it is rn, fundamentals will get you much further than where advanced tactics alone will, and also not to mention that youll still need to learn everything about the game unless youre a OTP playing just a single champ, and good luck OTPing in Draft where people will likely ban your strongest pick if your 2• best is below average.
As a teacher myself it is refreshing to see a League coach who is so down to earth and reflective of their practices. It breaks my heart to see coaches who are rude and belittle players with less experience who are merely wanting help and advice. I enjoy your videos even as a jungler because you break down concepts better than most other coaches I know of and you seem both knowledgeable and reasonable. Kudos and keep it chill!
5:35 YES. THANK YOU Coach. I've been preaching this to Skillcapped for ages, but they really just didn't get it. A lot of high ELO players can be so good at the game, but have AWFUL insight when it comes to understanding teaching what's necessary. They made fun of your Zed video for being too in depth, but looking back, I learned more from that one video than a year's worth of Skillcapped content, so the joke is really on them. Got my full refund after I failed their "climb guarantee" at least lol
They actually do have videos on how to master champions, I don't know if they added it after you posted this comment or not. I tried skillcapped last month and I think its actually helpful in many ways if you actually use the things they teach in your games. Definitely not saying that its guaranteed to climb after using skillcapped, but its definitely helpful in my opinion.
Thanks Coach! Personally, I think the original video did serve an audience.
I was stuck in bronze because I just tried to do too much with the muscle memory I had built on my champion. Anxiety made me do things that didn't make sense and miss key abilities. I needed to change my mindset. So getting some CS with a particular emphasis on the first 10 minutes and why I was missing it before, patiently waiting for the enemies to make obvious mistakes while valuing my life, and just grouping with my team got me into silver on a huge win streak.
I just sort of relaxed and let the game play out. The games felt really easy instead of stressful. And that was from your video. Also turning chat off.
I'm still steadily climbing through silver now, most of the games feel very easy, and I'm having a blast.
IMO the best way to learn farming waves, is to a watch a high elo one trick of that champion, and see how they manage and clear the waves with their champions in all state of the game. That alone helped me.
The subtle turning chat off 😂
At the end, if you try to do too much, you'll end burning out. Just get consistency to be more useful to your team. If they are at your elo they are probably at least doing some things right.
I wish I was having your experience. I went from bronze to hardstuck iron, and I keep getting matched with obvious smurfs further depressing my rank. I use Porofessor to check ranks and there's plenty of people that are either current or recent gold players in my games too, on top of botters and the aforementioned smurf accounts. I reported a bot/smurf account to Riot's twitter and nothing was done for months.
The ranked ladder is really, really bad this year for low elo.
Turning chat off is unironically the quickest way to increase your enjoyment of the game, it's like a cheat code for free mmr
Cool to see the evolution of your coaching methodology. Been following for a couple years now. ❤
It's a never ending journey. I'll be honest, this has been the most satisfying part. The constant 'trying to solve' the coaching craft, having to alter my previous takes and evolve. I hope to continue for many years to come!
I’m glad Curtis seems to be one of the few coaches who understands that teaching is a skill in itself. Another thing I appreciate is the comments about ‘muscle memory.’ I work in the top tier of my field, and sometimes people ask ‘How do you do x thing’ or ‘why do you do x thing?’ and I don’t like giving answers because the answer is often just ‘idk man just intuition’ or ‘just muscle memory and practice.’ I genuinely don’t like not being able to explain my moment to moment decisions but that’s just how it is.
In psychology of mastery there is the stage "unconsciously competent". This is when you are so expert you don't even know how you do things. Coaches are beyond this and know how to explain the underlying assumptions. This is why experts often make bad manager/coaches, until they realize this :)
I've noticed that I have way more problems with explaining skills I've just learned thanks to tons of practice vs those I've consciously tried to improve. Whenever my friends asked me with programming help, I had no idea how to teach them - I just kind of intuitively use my knowledge. Meanwhile, when I and my roommate are in the kitchen, I can point out tips and techniques I've learned from various cooking videos.
Even with just LoL, I never had any idea how to explain the things I've picked up over my years of playing, a lot are just muscle memory. But I have been able to give others advice since I've started actively trying to improve, because I know what things I've changed to get better.
Smartest league coach I've come across so far. Most "coaches" I've seen are just good players with good intuition that don't really understand how to convey their knowledge effectively, doubly so with their tendency to have a limited vocabulary for doing so.
This guy has a level of introspection that is rare among league players. Good to see.
This coach doesn't just optimize your game sense...but the actual coaching itself.
You really nailed with this 3:11
Its almost impossible to isolate skills in this game. Yeah we have practice tool but few skills can be polished using it (buffer abilities with flash, jungle clears, weaving autos and abilities...) but still theres lot of things that only can be integrated on your musle memory by just playing games. The learning curve this game is infinite and thats one of the reasons lot of people stick to it.
Amazing reflection about coaching.
Coming from a sports coaching background, there's a swing between the mindsets of "Figure it out yourself" to "This is what you're supposed to do". The people who figured out HOW to do it right now dictate WHAT to do, but ironically not HOW they figured it out. The result is a generation of learners who go through the motions, but don't built the mental resilience and mechanisms that enable them to be able to repeat that on their own. This shines when, as a coach, I try to demonstrate a skill _badly_ ... and I can't. What beginners instinctively do is so far removed from my current skill level that I cannot put myself in their shoes and do what they do. All I can do is recognise where they are coming from and teach them how to overcome their barriers as they are _right now._ Your reflection shows a similar realisation of the disregard for the knowledge gap between a veteran and a new player. You have to guide them on learning the champions in the game, but in regards to the complex mechanics, it''s more important to teach the general principle and allow them to figure out HOW to best apply that principle.
What I found in my long climb out of Silver was that the less I "listened" to pro guides, the better I understood HOW I would accomplish my in-game objectives, as long as I knew what they were. Simple things like "This is a cannon wave, I should shove and reset - but if I can't do that, I'll take the sub-optimal play and adapt" or "My goal as support is to ward the jungle, but if I have no team support i have to leave it blind instead of risking being picked, so I have to adapt my pathing and change my priority". These are the high level decisions that win and lose games. Mechanics come into play when there is interaction, but the decision making from respawn on where to path to can influence the outcome of the game.
The review process can evaluate WHAT decisions were made, and really understand WHY the player made them. That will uncover the underlying problems that prevent them from reaching the next level.
I am thinking about getting back into league and watched your old Annie game yesterday (probably thanks to the algo thinking I needed it) , and let me tell you, as someone who has like 6000 hours split between mobas with a little over half being dota, I questioned your methodology... And I'm really glad to see this one today.
I don't know you or you content very well, but your intellectual honesty is refreshing to see.
This is the most in touch video I’ve ever seen in the league community. The amount of knowledge that’s packed into what players expect you to have as base knowledge is absurd. I’m so glad you were able to recognize this and package it into a video, especially given your credibility and status as someone like me - a gold player with no will to improve, just enjoys the game would never be taken seriously if I created this video.
Nice video man. As a coach I can relate to that completely. There's a huge difference between a coach that knows where the issues come from, and a coach that simply says what he sees. There's so many bad habits in low elo that only better players can recognize and verbalize it to the player, in a way to improve him.
Wholesome Coach Curtis, reviewing your old video and reflecting on your performance in the bronze elo game was really good to highlight the skills you showed off without thinking much about them.
My favorite coach on League from germany who coaches all elo brackets always emphasizes that you should know your own champion and the enemy's before even thinking about trading, wavestates etc.. Without champion mastery you won't be able to execute on any fundamentals because you are still struggling with everything else going on in the game.
The things he prioritizes for beginners are mostly simple matchup analysis and how to get leads in lane/jungle. 😊
I think the video that you made was fantastic. it really left a good impression of you as a coach on me. The weird thing is you DID make points on how to get good CS and not die a lot.
These 3 sentences explain EXACTLY what you did during laning phase and it's the points that you made during the video.
*"I'm just letting him push waves into me and trying to cs, I'm not even trading with him"*
*"He's roaming but I'm not following his roams"*
*"I see when the canon wave spawns and I recall to spend my 1300 gold"*
now you didn't go deep into the last point which maybe some players won't realise why this is good exactly, but I think when you're a bronze player it doesn't really matter if you don't know WHY it's good, you just have to know that it IS good.
These 3 sentences explain EXACTLY what you did OVER AND OVER AGAIN and it's the points that you made during the video.
*"I'm walking to the wave nearest to my base/me and collecting it"*
*"I'm hovering around my team when it looks like they're going to fight (aram/drake/baron/random skirmish)"*
*"I see the teamfight doesn't go down and I try to kill the splitpusher"*
mechanics come from simply playing the game a lot, watching high elo OTPs and mains playing and trying to get your gameplay to look like theirs. Macro Similarly comes from playing the game a lot and watching high elo players make decisions, which if they're a streamer they often mention what they're doing and why they're doing it.
You could have made the video a lot better than just commentary over gameplay, with an editor, a shorter video with key points summarized and displayed to the viewers, but imo you still got unjustified backlash, I don't think you deserved much of it.
Kudos for recognizing and acknowledging the mistake. It's nice to see you're actively learning how to teach better and reassess your process. Your points about champion-specific priorities make a lot of sense.
This is the video that made me subscribe and will eventually get me to sign up for MLA as well. I am not a bronze player but SO MUCH of the pre-diamond coaching content has always been just hand-waving "don't die, get 10 cs/m and congrats you are diamond now it's so easy" bullshit.
This isn't just a League thing, many competitive games have this issue where all of the people who make instructional content are so out of touch with what the game is like now outside of their 1% bubble that coaching is the last thing they should be doing. WoW Arena PvP is another prime example I've seen this in where coaches have been playing the game since 2003 beta and take for granted all that they have subconsciously learned over two DECADES.
It takes a lot for a person in your position to really drill down and examine their own process to see what should be changed or improved. In my experience most are not capable of it and the end effect they have is a lot of players leaving either the game or their coach's content because it doesn't accomplish anything but make them feel worse about themselves. If it's "so easy" then why are they struggling so much? It must mean because they are just horrible... this is how they see it.
What you brought up in this video explains why even when I take year+ long breaks from the game I can come back and climb up to plat pretty quickly. Despite taking such long breaks I still have well over 15,000 games played. I've played LoL on and off since it was in beta. So many mechanical things I have committed to muscle memory, I have new friends with game counts in the hundreds who struggle in silver and I really never sat and considered the massive difference of play time between us.
It was always just "oh it's so easy bro, just farm up and don't die, don't make silly mistakes", but there's a lot that goes into that.
I've never figured out what keeps me hard-stuck around mid/high plat but if I had to guess it's probably because every time I come back to play the game I usually don't stick around for more than 4-5 months, just enough time to climb, get a good feel for the meta and then quit and do it all over again.
Really glad you addressed this, because honestly that video was one of the last videos I watched from you in a long time. I felt like you completely undermined the complexity of all the nuance you were performing subconsciously and even though I didn't know everything you were doing, I knew there was way more to it. Really enjoyed this video.
The only mainstream coach that views coaching as an art form, and approaches it with the care that that entails. Superb content as always.
What an amazing video. I remember watching your first video thinking, "Bro is legit using high-level macro knowledge and not mentioning it..."
We lowbies appreciate you Curtis. Your humility and focus on practical pedagogy in league is commendable. I've enjoyed watching your guides and have learned a lot. Keep up the good work!
I love this video.Been playing for over a decade now. I saw you and your aforementioned low elo annie video just two days ago and really felt that it under explained all the micro interactions that was going on. Now this video came out in such perfect timing. it takes a quality person to analyze and reflect on their mistakes- qualities befitting a great coach. Thank you for this self reflection! You've got a new subscriber!
Props to you for making this video. I just watched your last video as it was in my recommended and I was "upset" with your last video for almost all you said here. Very good follow up video to recognize all the little things that were missed in the first. Well done!
This video makes me realize I've always used the term "fundamentals" to mean something different than others. When I think "fundamentals" that means what champions do, how to move, what makes tower go pew pew and kill you, what items are, how gold works, how XP works, keeping track of yourself in fights, etc.
I would consider stuff like wave management, trading, leaning, roaming, backing, etc. as a level above "fundamentals", in the "basic skills" that require you to first have a strong grasp on fundamentals.
It's also worth noting that "basic skills" are an incredibly challenging thing to learn, especially to fully automate all of them to free up your mental stack. That's just because League is a hard game though so it's to be expected. The most rewarding thing about gaining mastery in "basic skills" is when you suddenly start noticing that you're naturally thinking more about advanced concept/macro/etc.
Really good video actually. I remember when I just started playing the game like 2 years ago, it was impossible to even look at the minimap, everything was so overwhelming. I had no idea what champs did, so I didn’t even know if I was safe to walk up or not in situations, if I should fight or not.
There is this idea all high Elo players say that “you’re in low Elo because of bad decision-making, not mechanics” without realizing how insane their mechanics are compared to low Elo players. It always pissed me off.
Absolutely agree. People say league is easy and well, after 10+ years of experience, well, duh its easy. Its hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesnt know anything about league.
Aaaaaand stuff like this is exactly why I love Coach Curtis. Undeniably one of the most humble coaches in the game, at the LEAST.
It's a really interesting conundrum in trying to find where your knowledge-base and the knowledge-base of your audience overlaps, it's probably the hardest part of communicating. Kudos for recognizing a weakness and addressing it.
I used to have trouble in bronze when I first play there. Now the biggest struggle would be staying in it!
Great VID Coach Curtis , I started to learn league better by OTP'ing, and the fact u said Learning Objectives make me so happy , so glad you are brining your wisdom to new elo's. Great Job.
I had an adc coach one time. I was low gold at the time. And he actually went 5 vods I had and was shocked at the amount of PVP that was happening. And he told me of fundamentals I could improve on and then instantly just ways to PVP better. (Trading/mid-late team fighting)
As someone who plays all roles outside of jungle. Has been in the MLA and had random coaches. Max rank been d4 currently e4.
Each rank is different. Many higher elos say they are all the same but I don't think so. Different things are more important in these divisions! Adaptation is key.
Off ramble - coach Curtis content is one of best content I've ever seen of this game. I super hope to be back in the MLA sometime soon again and the content doesn't stop coming.
Thanks for taking the time!
So essentially, there is no "one concept works for all" when it comes to climbing. There are tons of things. However, If one thing _had_ to be the highest in priority, it would be "champion understanding" not just of what you play, but of what you're up against too.
I saw the video he put up last year just moments before this one, and touched on these same points. I must say it is admirable that you are this self aware Curtis, must respect for your understanding and your desire to help people not just get better, but actually enjoy a game, that has a very steep learning curve especially for beginners, actually have fun. You a real one man! Cheers.
That was actually the last video of yours that I watched. And I quit league within a month because I felt “it’s so simple, I’m just dumb.”
My mental had changed though and I appreciate this video!
There are many things that are hard to grasp for players like me. I often forget that my opponent is another player trying to win. My eyes gloss over and I’m just enjoying my champ.
Intensity has changed everything for me.
Hopefully I hit gold for the first time in 9 seasons 😅
I had a similar comment on that video (almost exactly that one you quoted?) and I genuinely appreciate your reflection on that. It shows how mature and how great a coach you are, trying to understand lower elo players' perspective.
"Champion mastery comes even before fundamentals" 100%.
Back when I commented on your video I was stuck in gold, now I'm still in low elo but slightly higher (high emerald) and what helped me improve was watching high-elo streamers discussing all matchups for my main. Understanding the matchups -- which ones I can win early lane into and which ones I cannot -- is almost the sole reason I climbed. Of course, that came in hand-in-hand with farming a little better and managing my wave a little better too. Couldn't do that when I 1v1'd the wrong champ at the wrong time and died level 2. Couldn't manage my wave either into certain matchups like heimer or irelia, until I watched high elo players handle annoying lanes.
Thank you for this vid, it's incredibly insightful.
Massive props for making this. I'm way late, but I discovered the first video last night and was listening with steam coming out of my ears because I'm a low-elo support Karma OTP (hundreds of games) who doesn't flash offensively without a clear advantage and goal and never dies (but also loses consistently more than winning). I still got benefit from the video, but yeah, my experience was different than that of the players you were addressing. I really appreciate you understanding how this topic can be tackled better and then tackling it! Thanks for making content for players like me.
I had never seen a video of yours, saw the one about the reddit post and didn't watch it since you had this video in a pinned comment. I am very impressed by the depth of analysis you have not only of league but of coaching and what people need. I have spoken a lot about mental capacity over the years, saying I understand what I need to do but doing it while trading and farming and watching the map doesn't feel possible. You are actually the first person I've ever seen bring up this subject. Legend.
wow we love to see someone eat some humble pie while still offering amazing advice. the best coaches learn from their students
As a player that tried PC lol coming from mobile i can actually say your points are very valid. Almost all games i played (which are not many by any means) went awfully just because i would not understand how other champions i was facing worked and what the items did. Also the keyboard and mouse are a big trouble for me but i guess all of this i just mentioned comes as you said with time and practice. Understanding higher concepts made me hold a bit more of an advantage to gap my mechanical and overall knowledge disadvantage but i for sure know that if i sat down everyday to play a game i would at least be around gold by now if not higher but i don't want to think like i could because if i learned something in years of gaming online is that ego is, by far, the bisggest thing preventing your progress.
Thank you for posting this video. I was watching the video you did before this one that you felt you had to correct, and I'm glad I came here to see this.
I'm 40...I'm far past my gaming prime, and recently have been actually trying to get good at league. I peaked at silver years ago, I stopped playing due to frustration with the process and info I was constantly getting, but am now trying to work my up starting from Iron. I always felt like the difficulty of this game was overlooked immensely. Nobody wants to admit that a video game like this can be hard, but in all the games I've played in my life, including stuff like high-end raiding in WoW and in the very early competitive CS scene, this is by far the most difficult game to master. The knowledge and muscle memory required is absolutely insane, really like playing an instrument is the closest thing I can liken it to. It's truly very difficult.
Thanks again for this video :)
After having watched the previous video, I felt pretty much how you described (thinking this guy doesn't even know how good he really is vs the average player in this Elo). As someone who teaches other people for a living (I teach people how to drive) learning how to communicate and break things down to the base level varies greatly from student to student. What I have noticed going back and forth is that most people assume things like "CS Better" is the root skill to learn but really that is a second-tier interpretation/overarching skill group.
For example, When I teach someone to drive forward and then switch them to reverse, I remove the terms "left and right" from my vocabulary when talking about steering. That is actually second-tier knowledge and ends up confusing more than helping. The direction you turn the steering wheel is opposite of what you are visually seeing when turned around looking out the back window. Instead, you switch the wording to something along the lines of "steer in the direction you want the car to go." Learning to correctly communicate what you want to convey so that it is retained is the real fundamental skill.
You have cracked the code Coach. Keep it up!
Hey Coach Curtis, I'm loving the philosophy here for teaching people relevant and efficient skills. I've done some learning methodology work and I think I have a good trial for you to remake a video about playing in bronze.
Pick your least played position, then your least played champion in that position. This will set you much closer in personal champion knowledge (can't do much about your total knowledge), and will show players how to win without relying on muscle memory. Playing without flash will also help reduce your skill advantage as flash is the most mechanically complex summoner spell.
Putting yourself in high risk positions early (lvl 1 invades, roaming, kill chasing) will also help showcase the general knowledge of League trumping the fundamentals on laning/jungling. Ideally there would be a way to completely remove your mechanical advantages, but minor things like increasing your ping (I usually notice 18-25ms on your vids) to around 50ms or playing tired (ie playing after your job, not as your job) to slow down your subconscious reaction times will mimic the behaviors of average players more closely.
I say this as someone who has played for 10 years and just hit Platinum a week ago with a high pressure (yes that's code for 1.0 kda) jungle playstyle, because even though pressure could be considered a fundamental, there isn't a script that can execute perfect pressure. CSing, spacing, timing, wave management are all predictable and scriptable actions, as in there is a sequence of actions that is near optimal every game, but pressure is dynamic and responsive to 10 different players making deviations from their "fundamental" scripts. Playing purely as a force that acted in opposition to my opponents helped me learn so much about how to deny resources from the enemy and close games.
I made a comment on your original video that touches upon the exact same thing - what you considered "simple" is actually tons of experience and muscle memory. It's great to see you address this even after a year now!
I would say everything up to high plat/low emerald (gold/plat pre rework) is just understanding League, i.e., all the champs, items, towers, minions, jungle camps, objectives etc. I think it's really nice that you as a coach only coach above a certain level. As you said, below a certain level of experience you simply get better by playing, regardless of coaching. It's really great you acknowledge that and do not prey on the money of these players!
The only difference I see between bronze and gold is that lower elo player ragequit/flame/troll more. I played duo with my friend (we are good returning player) and we had a hard time climbing bronze and low silver. The third of our game were 4v5. When we reached high silver/gold, we just clapped everyone with a 70% WR until plat 2. We stopped to play LoL for other game so we didnt reach our ''real rank'' but it was so easy to win with more experienced and chill players.
The last point you make is really acurate. I stopped playing League like 5 years ago. And a few months back my gf nephew told me he played LoL and we duo for some games. Even in my rustyest state i blew his mind. Missing a few skillshots or cs is nothing compared to the mental state you adquire trough years of play. Map awareness, general player behavior and treath assestment is so important and so hard to adquire. And only looking the game trough the eyes of a new players can make understand that.
This was a good video especially the last part for a new player knowing how your 1 champion interacts with over 130 other champions can be overwhelming but is crucial for getting better
Your first video definitely helped make my climb as a returning player easier, but I understand the sentiment of this video. I was definitely helped by the more broader tips like letting the wave push into you and playing off mistakes and it made my climb super easy abusing that shurelyas veigar build. I think watching a variety of league content, even outside coaching, teaches you a lot about the game and emulating what you watch in your own games to really work it out goes a long way at least for me. If you want to really improve at anything, just watching and building familiarity is invaluable in your free time.
Massive respect on how you reacted to the critique. This is how creators should handle this, literally everyone is on your side now. Well done.
So I just left a comment on the video that this guy is making this video about; its amazing that he made such a turn around. He spent time teaching and learning from these people he made a bad take on; and he realized it and came to fix that mistake. Coach Curtis; well done; thank you for the content and the humility. Great work
I actually needed this, i started at the other video then saw your comment so came here. I've played since s1 off and on over the years, with about 7 of those years being an active player. I never broke out of silver - made it a game away from Gold 5 times. I hated that so much at one point that I developed a hatred of myself when I played ranked because I felt like the knowledge I acquired was useless since I didn't have the skill. But I just didn't look for the right knowledge. I played Dota for the other portion of those years and play both games now, made it to Crusader (gold) and again, crapped out 1 game away from Archon (plat) and then had a 10 game lose streak, in which I quit ranked - couldn't afford to feel that way about myself.
However! I did come back to league last year and play both league and Dota now and let me tell you, some fundamentals from Dota are immensely helpful in league (although I still try to block my minion wave mid and deny my own creeps - oops). I've been only playing normal in league at the moment (ranked is the only way you'll get your role in Dota) because I don't want to take it too seriously, but some of those normal games were gold/plat elo just because I was csing better and had a different perspective on minimap awareness and a ton of other little things that Dota took more advantage of. I took years off for my mental state to recover and its in a good spot now. I feel like even though I'm not really in my teens/gaming prime and am on the brink of the "old man" 30 mark - It really is fundamentals that are helping me improve. My mechanical skills were acquired over time through other means. I took fundamentals from Smite/Dota2 and implemented them in League because I never thought of them before. Dota taught me how to cs better than a training camp ever could since enemies can deny their own creeps (cutting your gold completely and denying a portion of xp) it forces you to pay attention to both your and their wave - even as a support(pos 4/5) denying your own wave and managing it via pulling jungle camps into the wave in order to bring it to your Pos 1(adc) or 3 (top)
Dota has pos 4 - a roaming support that sticks with the offlane (top laner in league) then rotates across the map primarily like a jungler - taught me how to think about map awareness and roaming.
I'm not saying this to go against the fundamentals section, actually to agree - because in Dota - i HAD to stick to learning a singular hero because if you try to counterpick all the time with Dota's insane amount of hero's with no set roles you will absolutely get wrecked, and I was a jack of all trades master of none player. The fundamentals came over time while I was learning Chen because he forced me into learning how to micro the creeps - and with no damaging abilities at the time - that was his only offense/defense. he had a .1% pick rate in most ELOs. I desperately wanted to learn him, and I lost more games in a row than I could count- now 200 games later my winrate with him is above 53% even thought my elo didnt change a ton - I still got way better at the game and was able to transfer those skills to other Dota heroes and eventually to league.
The fundamentals were absolutely a benefit that I grabbed - but it REQUIRED the understanding of a singular champion in order to maintain them.
Absolutely great video man. That was exactly what I got out of Alois stuff. That noone of the fundamentals people preach on the net are useful to me if I don't know my champions limits to win lane. If I can win trades, I can then apply all I know to either grow my lead. Or not lose it. But if I just sit back and focus on not dying I'm simply giving up my entire sides prio. And simply hoping for a lucky team. Which isn't the way to go to climb at all. Learning how to play with and around jungle at all times, while also getting a lead/preparing on lane. Helped a ton
It’s amazing that you’re admitting this now because this, especially the last point of the difficult of the game being underemphasised is exactly what I thought when I first watched that video as well as other coaching content. These high elo coaches explain certain concepts as if they are self evident and easy to process for someone unfamiliar with the game or mobas in particular. The best way I ended up improving at the game was watching high elo Chinese and Korean players and seeing exactly what they were doing with waves etc and forming the pattern recognition there. League coaches are generally extremely bad at teaching imo
I remember posting something similar about how high elo advice is often really not actionable several years ago, and I remember getting downvoted to shit. I got really frustrated at one point, and was like "I'm getting 7-8cs/min, picked a mechanically easy champion, not dying, and games still feel out of my control. What gives?" because everyone made it seem like if I did those things, the rest of the pieces would fall into place. And let me tell you, they did not. I am glad that at least some people are starting to come around to the concept that games below gold are basically unrecognizable compared to Dia+. Lots more random things happen, macro is messy etc. so as a result, people playing what in their minds is "correctly" because of these truisms, don't see results, because there are a lot more complicated things at play that those truisms don't actually solve.
7:59 , this!! I was playing league from beta to season 5 on a top tier level. My fundamentals are still great, been playing other MOBAs for years. But I don't have fresh muscle memory, I don't know what some champions do, how to efficiently lane with or versus them and I'm struggling in high plat.
A lot of people that want to improve in this game (or any game), feel like there needs to be some secret to climbing. There isn't really. Yes, you need to know some techniques and strategies but it really comes down to how much time you put in to the game. When you play 200th game in the same lane matchup, you will do so much better than when you played it the fifth time.
PS:
Curtis, this is really good catch on your part. I believe that every high level coach should watch this video
i want to tell you curtis that even tough you mostly regret the video, some of the things you said in it were bery helpful and i actually remember seeing that video and feeling that it helped me.
for many years I played this game with a lot of pressure on myself to be aggressive and stomp my lane which would always get me in trouble, in your video you explained how low elo games tend to work and it made it easier for me to win on my own. i realized that the most efficient way to have an impact is to focus on farm economy and instead of making solo plays and splitting i should just embrace the aram because thats what everyone else is doing. i climbed with this strategy so thank you. also i think ur right about champ mastery being the most fundamental.
Oh my God, so much respect to you man for realizing your mistake and, not just apologizing, but also explaining your updated view. May God bless you, Curtis.
Something I find funny from this is I remember years and years ago when I made it to gold the first time in season 5, my advice for climbing was to just go play 500 games of normals and you'll probably climb just off that. Now its more like go play 500 games and every so often have someone spectate you can point out things that are fundamentals you are lacking so that you can slowly add them in over time to more completely understand what you are doing. Also when in doubt, pull a Gbay and put a sticky note over your KDA that says "Look at your f**king miny map", that works too. Great video! (:
Lmao, I JUST made a comment on your Playing in Bronze video that said basically the same thing as your last point here, then RUclips recommended me this video. Huge respect for admitting your mistakes and explaining it out in detail like this.
Thanks for another quality video Coach! Keep up the good work much love
I just happened across the original video this is responding to and was thinking exactly this. Good deal realizing it. Massive respect and I'll definitely be looking at more of your content because of it.
I was literally thinking about the video last year, about how you said keeping it simple and being confused. Thanks for finally clarifying it is not as simple as it looks
Finally someone gets what coaching and teaching means. It's not about pointing out every f thing a player does wrong. Which is something most coaches does when they vod review. It's about identifying what aspect a player needs to improve, create a plan or learning strategy and work at it structured. As he states, that's how it's done in all other sports.
Takes a real man to go back and address their mistakes / bad info. Great video
I haven't played league for over 6 years. I occasionally watch league content to stay somewhat in the loop and it scratches the itch enough that I don't feel the need to play. Just stumbled on to the prequel video to this one. I've seen it floating around and decided to finally watch it. It was good. Very informative and interesting. I'm more of a watch a person try wacky builds for fun rather than a serious game watcher. But you do give some very interesting insight. I hit silver 2 back in 2013 on placements and never ranked or climbed again. Just played casuals when I was active. I once remember playing a ranked game for shits & giggles with a friend to help and I was unranked. During the time, Ive already played over 1,000 games. Understood my champion and win conditions. My whole game macro was weak but my strengths were in top lane and dueling. Needless to say I destroyed a gold renekton I was laning against. His whole team flamed him on AllChat for losing to an unranked player who was unranked for many seasons. I told them to relax because regardless of rank, i destroyed their whole team anyways. So renekton wasn't to blame and that Ranking and game knowledge/skill were 2 seperate categories that shouldn't be put together too closely. A lot of things go into play why someone loses and the videos from you reminded me of that moment back in 2015. I don't play league anymore, but I have really vivid fond memories of it. Haha, I just don't have the time anymore. Now I play the adulting game. Clock in on time and try not to sleep deprive myself before work and save up for vacations to keep me sane. Lol
We need knowledge of advanced concepts to be able to CS properly.
Understanding it shows how much better a coach you are than others.
Thank you for that
I usually do not comment on videos but for the first time I saw a LOL video where someone really took the time and taught about it before doing a video. I saw the first video and in the end of this video where you said that you did many things because muscle memory I remember exactly a play you did on lux where you placed a ward and stay in the bush to kill her when she comes to break the ward.. I remember noticing that your position inside of the bush was exactly perfect to don't be revealed by the swiper while lux break the ward, you positioned the ward a little ahead and stay a little behind just enough to have range and don't be revealed.. this is the exact example of muscle memory that a low elo player would never do. So congrats for this video, for the first time I see a really good one and I hope this conclusion helps you to be a better coach!
Man, you are huge. I had to stop playing league a while ago due to not having available time anymore (just killing time on wild rift recently), but I still watch your content. You are a fantastic and professional coach and content creator. Keep on the amazing work!
honestly, just hearing him say "this game is hard" already makes me and others feel better about playing. It is a very fucking hard game. Lower elo players (myself included) make mistakes all the time, but everyone says that the game is so easy so we sometimes just feel like we're dumb and incapable of basic gameplay, which is not true for a good part of us. If people were more patient and empathetic, playing the game and learning would be a much better experience, which would lead to better results. Thank you.
I just discovered your videos randomly, and what you said in that video was what I felt when looking at the previous. I totally agree with what you said, and two points in particular:
- Mastering your champion is more important than mastering fundamentals
It's really true and at school my group made a project in which we wanted to predict win or lose in a LoL game based only on state at min 0 (meaning who are the players and what champ they play). It turned out that at any elo the most important factor to winning the game was the skill of a player on the specific champion they are playing, by far. The second factor of success was its rank in the ladder, but in the end it was almost useless.
(For people interested, we managed to predict the right outcome of the game 69% of the times)
- Underestimating the difficulty of the game
I think anyone who has a friend who recently started League will agree with that, because when you start a game with them, it's obvious that Iron 4 players would crush them 100% of the times, especially people who never played MOBAs or video games. There are so many things in League of Legends to understand and do instinctively that we only realise we are doing it when we see people NOT doing it. The game is hard, and as you said, you may spend 10k hours in it, you could still end up platinum, and that would already be good.
Appreciated the content.
Bro, it's so awesome to see you growing as a coach, analyzing your own mistakes and learning from them, as well as digging deeper into your experiences to get to the real meat of the matter.
Inspiring stuff - and I also find the advice valuable, since I'm a silver player.
I am a Silver player, I have played the game on and off with friends since season 4. I personally think your previous video has fantastic information in it, but I can understand how it could be missed (give the points you make in this video). Like you mention, the many years I have played league allow me to infer things subconsciously that a newer player to the game might not be able to. I'm glad you are bringing up the issues you do in this video.
In mathematics pedagogy, which is basically studying how to effectively teach math, they are also breaking away from fundamentals as something you spend so many years on and they're probably going to do this in science in general I imagine. Basically it's more important for beginners to understand the big picture of the journey that they're going to go on rather than spend a ton of time tediously doing something that they'd naturally pick up because their brain will want to get it out of the way and get to the thing that matters.
You can explain calculus to someone who really only knows some algebra in a way where they can conceptually understand what's going to happen; they're going to calculate areas between curves and an axis, and they're going to do this basically by splitting it into a bunch of blocks, but they don't actually need to do that.
Our brains learn new things through scaffolding and reincorporation. As you teach new concepts on your way to doing integrals, you can attach each new thing to the big picture. It's a classic way to keep things in your working memory and your long-term.
League is a pretty complicated game, there's a lot of macro concepts, and there's a lot of interactions, but if you teach game mechanics and metagame trends, which are much more conceptual and fun for people to learn, they will simply play and farm better naturally, because they know that they need to control waves and things like that, which is much more interesting and engaging than "you need to last hit every canon or people will spam you." They'll be more engaged, remember the concepts better and they'll be able to use them functionally because they're in their working memory as well.
I'm not that good at League I don't play that much, but I do know the correct way to play and it's so much easier to win games as a support if sometimes you just blast a way of just to show the person that if we just push it right now we will have to go pressure, or will be able to back and they'll be in an awkward position where they kind of have to stay and we get kills that way, it just proves to people so quickly that they're focusing on the wrong things.
I’m glad you pointed out how important understanding what each champ does is. When I started playing in 2017, this was my biggest problem. I ended up maining jungle because you rarely interact with the other jungler in low elo, so I didn’t need to know how match ups played out, who wins fights, etc., which gave me a bit more breathing room to learn the basics.
I’m still silver though, largely because I don’t have the drive to reach for gold/plat. I’m perfectly fine making mistakes in my game, so long as the people I’m playing with also make those mistakes.
Just knowing what all the champions do is a huge hurdle for new players or players that haven't played in a long time. I played a lot soon after release and knew all the old champions well, but I took quite a long time off from the game, and when I came back I was constantly bodied by champions that I'd never seen before. I didn't feel like it was worth the time for me to learn all the champions that came out since I last played. I don't think I ever am going to play again, but I still occasionally watch videos about the game that I think might be interesting.
I just came from the fist video and you hit the nail on the head. I was thinking the whole time watching the first video that you are a person with years worth of experience and totally see instantly when they over stepped and how to punish them. All of the movement and understanding of what could happen helped you in a way most new players don't even understand. Great follow up video. I suck at the game and tilt easy. The people in this game are the worst lol. I played a game last night where a raka and I owned the lane. But she got so tilted about what was going on in other lanes that she sat in base and typed for the rest of the game. Such a big lead was tossed simply because she could not keep it together and hit her buttons. She found it more enjoyable to tell everyone what they were doing wrong than simply play the game. Our top lost hard but I think we would have won if she simply kept her sanity. That is the biggest factor for me. After games like that my mental starts to break down thinking that another troll is going to just ruin the next game as well. Neace is correct when the first thing he tells most clients is to just turn chat off and ignore the trolls lol.
Respect for owning up to your mistakes and learning from it. Setting a solid example for the students :)
This is such a great re-examination. I was aware of these concepts from teaching and coaching other topics and it's great to see a League coach recognize it and self correct instead of just clickbaiting like some coaches.
5:16 Alois in shambles
curtis, you're making a really important point here. i think, as you correctly stated, most league players take for granted the complexity of the game. each fundamental could be broken down to many skills. playing through the ranks myself, i always felt that there were more to the core concepts, but could never verbalize or explain it. you do it here really well. for example, how do you cs well if you dont understand wave states, trading or come into a matchup with a gameplan? how do you "not die" if you dont understand the limits of your own champion well.
This was amazingly well said. my ultimate pet peve in lol is when you die to a gank top lane and someone pipes up and say "just play safe" as your wave is bouncing into a freeze towards your laner.. Yeah no one fucking teaches what "play safe" means. They might as well just say, "hey man, win lane" once you finish leashing the jungler
Massive props for making this
I was quite miffed with the original video
I just watched the video he's talking about for the first time like 15 minutes ago, and while it was absolutely hilarious, throughout it I was also thinking "dude he's actually playing so well here, he's kinda gaslighting the viewers". Then to see him address this and sincerely own up to it gave me such a warm feeling inside - Curtis is not only a genius but such an awesome person overall.
I appreciate your videos so much Curtis. Both the stuff you put out on your own channel and on BBC is some of the most informative league content I can find. I recently discovered another channel that I feel like is trying to do what you're talking about in this video by vod reviewing games at every Elo and talking about specific examples of wave state management and tempo which is the most helpful for a high bronze/low silver player like me
This video hits on all the points I believed was the problem with coaching off of the few coach videos I've seen around. It's more about identifying problems both in detailed mechanics and even more importantly in general thought process. Because once you get the thought process down you can more easily pick up those good habits and intuition of how to play the game.
Wow, that video is something. This is exactly the way coaching should be approached, and not only in League. Thank you !
"No content about low elo gameplay should be made by a high elo player". Yes. I was thinking this during that Annie video. You were making expert decisions at every turn, even if you weren't playmaking expertly. It was good of you to notice this, and I'm sure this has helped you significantly in your coaching. I am a coach in my sport and I've always tried to find ways to train in video games as well, but find it prohibitively difficult to do. Instead just playing the game because the "queue now" button just works better.
Another point I'd like to make on this as someone who only started playing League in Season 9 and only ever fully committed to the game in Season 10 and only again ever began playing Ranked in Season 11, is that the steady power creep and increase macro concepts added to the game over the years definitely enabled those learning over those eleven seasons to learn at a slower pace. Back in Season 1 there was no real jungle, drakes, barons, scuttle. There were no jungle items. There were no jungle ganks. There were 40 champions you had to learn 40 interactions. And many of those champions quite infamously had far simpler kits. Warwick, Nasus, Ashe, Malphite. The number of champions with rather simple to understand kits back in 2009 has been memed on since.
Since then 124 more champions have been released, along with jungler items, baron, drakes, elder, more jungle monsters, the alcoves, brushes, less vision tools, and a lot more complex kits some of which directly impact the way you can cs or play the game. Even just between 2009 and 2010 what worked for largely every champion in 2009, suddenly had to be tweaked and revised. Kog'maw's passive, Malzahar's minions, Akali's shroud, Vladimir's healing the game state changed. But you only had to learn about them as they came out. To be thrown into a game with 164 champions to learn, some of which have wildly difficult to understand mechanics like Akshan, K'sante, Aphelios, Nilah, Viego, Neeko and Renata. Neeko directly being a champion that completely throws any attempt to learn wave management/csing fundamentals out the window.
When you're learning how to space in League and suddenly a champion like Yone exists with the dash, movement speed increase, tether/dash and ultimate while doing insane amounts of hybrid damage. And then factoring in how quickly games can snowball. A new player can get completely caught off-guard by a Yone's chase potential, or Neeko disguising as a minion, or Evelyn's ganks via invisibility, or they can lose a fight because they didn't know Viego gets untargetability/healing/ult resets/entirely new abilities/items of the champion he just killed. And then suddenly they're behind, the games snowballing out of control. And any learning potential is snuffed out by the game state. And THEN you factor in just how toxic the community has gotten since then. How much we put each other down, especially in lower elos. then factor in the mass amounts of bot accounts, account derankers, smurfs, boosters, toxic people that were banned on one account and are now on their second or third. It's a veritable learning hellscape to be thrown into. And it can whittle down your confidence, make you not want to play, and keeps you trapped from game to game in a tilted mindset.
It was somehow only last week that I realized just how much move speed Quinn's attacks on vulnerable targets grant her and if that sounds silly, well, that's my point. As a matter of fact, I actually have a greater understanding of the champions released since Sett in 2020 (when I largely started more heavily committing to the game) than I do have a lot of champions in the game because they're the champions I was drip fed since I started playing. As opposed to the mass of 147 champions that existed when I started playing.
I will never forget the time after I spent months playing jungle and all of a sudden I could move better. Just the act of being able to click where I wanted to be with kiting took me years. My time as a jungler also allowed me to always know where the enemy jungler was when I started playing top. I would call out the enemy jungler with no vision and my teammates wouldn't believe me until it was too late.
great Video!!
in addition to the points you mention I want to talk about one thing that is even more important in my understanding: Fun! the best learning experience is when I am having fun. And it is not fun to “learn how to farm better” or anything like that. I want to learn how to do Riven Animation cancels, I want to learn how to do flashy mechanical outplays, I want to learn how to place seaky wards etc. Not because it will improve my gameplay the fastest, but because it is super satisfying to learn and to see my improvement.
Someone managed to articulate the issue correctly. Good job and thank you.
I apreciate this video. I get what people are trying to do when they go "let me win this bronze game to show you how to carry" but it just makes me feel even more dumb because I feel like I should be able to do what they do and then I just can't. So then the only conclusion is "well they can do it and I can't so I'm just bad" which is true, but obviously I would like to know why I'm bad so I can fix it instead of just thinking I'm bad and that's that.
Appreciate the honesty here. As a new player in Bronze, this game can be very overwhelming. Having said that, even a year or so in, I encounter fresh players and they're easy to punish. Not saying I'm a good player, but experience/muscle memory/game intuition is paramount for League. Thanks for keeping it real.
Amazing video, well done walking back a previous statement and showing your understanding of a new position. I learned quite a bit watching this as well, and now actually understand this concept, too!
Bro this video adressed something i''ve thought too and its good that you adressed the things you were wrong about.
Mucho texto incoming:
I have played this game from the depts of bronze 4 all the way to mid platinum over several (7-8) years and the average player has gotten so much better than it was in previous seasons.
i made a second account to start ranking fresh and placed silver 2 because practically i rank there everytime im drunk and chilling in vc with friends.
Here's a list of the things i've seen plyaers in silver 1- Gold 4-3 do (mainly from the toplaner/jungler POV)
Mantain a freeze for over 5 waves and denying xp.
Toplaners zoning xp from the first 3 levels.
Players doing the classic slowpush into dive with a jungler and denying the enemy 2-3 or more waves.
THIS ONE impressed me the most: A support roaming top at lvl 5 and freezing 2 waves crashing, something that allowed their struggling toplaner come back and stomp the enemy laner.
An adc kiting the fed enemy darius so good that he rage quitted and thus they won the game because he was the win con.
The average/gold players arent really people playing brainless all the time (there are some exceptions of course, i've seen people who you would be impressed to know they managed to get plat 3).
Although a good percentage of the people ranking they are playing on auto mode (but doing an average performance in farming, trading and tracking the enemies jungler + cooldowns is already pretty dificult enough, especially with all the new bs champs riot makes)
People tend to "dickride" the high elo streamers they see and pretend they're high elo themselves. When in reality if youre past mid platinum you're already in the top 10-15% of players in your server.
Sorry for the wall of text and the possible errors, i'm an ESL.
syndra missing cs so badly in the background while talking about cs OwO
This is so SPOT ON! I've been playing League since like season 3 and through the seasons I almost never did a proper "learning" like actually trying to master wave management or watching some guides, tutorials. I gained the skill gradually over thousands of games that stored into my muscle memory and intuition. Only when I reached gold I started watching LCS and other pro players to learn from them & it helped. But I agree with Curtis here, the most crucial aspect is mastering your champion & understand other champions as well.