History of Professional League of Legends Part 1: Development of the Standard-Style

League of Legends (“League”, hereafter) is an action-strategy game with a thriving pro scene. While on its surface, League is a game about micro – the controlling and manipulation of each player’s single character (“champ”) – there is also a significant element of macro-level team strategy and decision making, particularly in the professional scene. I thought it might be fun to explore the history of the League metagame, the predominant strategies used and how they’ve evolved over time. If this continues, I might also branch outside strategy into pro-scene drama because young nerds being paid money to play video games make awful decisions sometimes and it’s pretty funny.
Chapter 1 is going to setup a lot of basic terms for those without much league experience. Sorry in advance to the elite gamers in chat.

Position and Role Strategy – Development of the Standard-Style

League is an evolving game whose history will be described in terms of patches. On average, league is patched about once every two weeks, though many patches are quite small and do little to shift the ongoing metagame. As of writing, league is on Patch 12.8, the 248th¹starting from Season 2. Season 1 LoL is a part of competitive history in the same way that the rock and berry phase of human history was civilization. patch during real competitive history. Despite the many patches and meta changes over the years, the way that League games play out, especially in the first 10-15 minutes of a match²A professional league match can last from 25-60 minutes, depending on the patch., has remained quite similar over the years. Teams pick certain types of characters and deploy their players on map in many of the same ways every time. An experienced player could name a champion and tell you what lanes (or jungle) they play in. Sometimes we get crazy strategies brought by particularly creative teams or sharp meta changes driven by developer patches that can shake up this playstyle in cool ways. But to really appreciate the exceptions to the metagame, we should first examine what the typical meta is. What is the standard style, and how did we get here?

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Chapter 1: The Map

Unlike many other competitive video games (Counterstrike, Halo, StarCraft), League is played on just one map: Summoner’s Rift. Fundamental strategy ultimately derives from the map’s layout. When the map changes, the strategies change to reflect it. When objectives move places, or their relative importance rises and lowers, player behavior shifts to reflect it. The core map elements have remained unchanged over time: there are two home bases, three wide lanes that connect each base, a river that cuts across the center, and a twisted maze of jungle in between.

OK aside but like, it’s a forest? Not a jungle? There’s nothing tropical looking about the trees in the “Jungle”. Even the Jungle in League’s predecessor, DotA, was ALSO A TEMPERATE FOREST BIOME? BECAUSE IT USED ART ASSETS FROM the LORDAERON REGION of WARCRAFT III? WHY DID WE START SAYING JUNG-

The wrench is that the Nexus is guarded by defensive turrets that shoot at you. Beyond those, there are three additional rings of turrets expanding outward from each base, each defending a slightly farther chunk of territory. To damage a turret, the turret farther out must be destroyed first, making a quick strike at the base impossible.

The full objective then is to advance and destroy at least one contiguous lane of turrets to expose the Nexus, and then destroy it.

A second wrench: players are weak. You need to be much, much stronger before you can destroy even the first outermost tower. There are two axes of individual player strength: EXP and Gold. As you gain experience, you level up, increasing your base stats (damage, health), and gaining additional ranks of your champ’s abilities. Gold can be used to buy items, which provide additional stats, unique stats not gained on level up, or new abilities.

So how do we get exp and gold? Killing an enemy player grants a chunk of experience and some gold, in addition to removing them from the map while they wait to respawn. Players also earn some gold passively over time. However, most exp and gold will come in the form of…

Minions

Every 30 seconds, a set of small npcs allied to each team will spawn at each base and march down the three lanes of the map. Left alone, they will meet in the middle, smack each about a bit, and die. On death, nearby enemy players will gain EXP. In addition, if a player lands the killing blow on a minion, they will also earn gold. The total minion kill count is referred to as creep score (“cs”), named after my uncle Ronald.

It’s key to understand how large a portion of the overall game economy is stored in the pungent bodies of these small minions. A player kill is worth about 300g. A minion wave has an average gold value of 125g, which goes up over time (up to 195g at 25 minutes). At 20 minutes into a game, a strong player who has been fighting a lot might have 5 kills, earning 1500g³This is actually more than in truth, since we’re ignoring that repeated kills on the same player in a row net less and less gold each time.. Meanwhile, a player left in a peaceful lane will have earned at least 4,500g from minions alone. Teams need to spread out on the map to capture these gold streams.

Jungle

Another source of gold is contained in the jungle – the maze-like corridors between the lanes and the river. The jungle is split into four quadrants by the river and middle lane. Neutral-faction npcs (“monsters”) spawn regularly in the jungle quadrants, and can be fought and killed for exp and gold just like minions, though the jungle monsters tend to hit a lot harder.

A player getting their gold from the jungle will find they earn less money and less exp than their teammates who farm the lanes (“laners”), since monsters respawn in their camps more slowly than minions spawn in lanes. However, junglers do get one very significant advantage over the laners: they can’t be seen. Turrets, and the minions who walk down the lanes, both provide vision to the allied team. The jungle, however, is in the fog-of-war. Junglers can use their downtime between killing monster camps to surprise attack enemy players (“gank”). Given their relatively uncontested source of income (compared to laners who have to fight an opponent directly for every minion kill), and ability to roam the map freely, junglers are often the player around which game strategy centers, particularly in the early and mid-game. They provide an important source of map pressure, and are often calling the shots on who should do what and go where – since laners are busy looking at their opponents.

Follow the Money

In summary, each team has four sources of money and exp available: one source from each of the three lanes, and a fourth from their half of the jungle. So, teams plop a player in each lane, both to collect the gold and to defend their turret from the enemy. A fourth player goes into the jungle, killing camps and making plays around the map.

But what about the fifth player? Where do they go? There is no money left to collect on the map. And since exp is shared by players nearby, any lane they join will be crippled by having effectively half the amount of experience they would otherwise. This fifth player fills a very different role – one that has evolved organically as a result of this lack of resources.⁴In later seasons, this player would be cemented purposefully into the metagame through artificial support by developer-introduced game mechanics. More on this later. The short answer to “where do they go” is that the fifth player doubles-up with one of the laners, specifically the bot laner. To fully understand the fifth player, we need to examine the kinds of characters chosen by the other four players, and identify the gap this leaves in the team composition.

Chapter 2: Team Compositions

The growing 159 champion roster of characters includes all the traditional character archetypes: fat tanks, control mages, assassins, sustained dps archers, and 1v1 me bro edgy duelists. There are lots of broad team comps that pro teams use to win games: poke comps that try to maintain distance and wear down opponents, engage comps that group and force team fights over important objectives, skirmishing teams that look for constant 2v2s or 3v3s. Despite the variety of ways that teams approach fighting, it is unusual to see many champs on a team from the same underlying archetype such as three assassins or multiple squishy mages. One reason is generic to games in general; diversifying your team shores up weaknesses. However, the other big reason is that the map itself incentivizes this diversity.

This town ain’t big enough fer two wizards

Discussed above, one player will be in each lane in order to collect the minion gold streams. These lanes are not made equally, and the lane you play in dictates character choice.

While the top and bottom lanes are identical (if flipped), the middle lane is different. It’s much shorter. When minions march down the lane, they will crash together between the two towers (yellow arrow). This is the space around which laners will be fighting and farming. For mid laners, the distance between this spot and the outer turret is very short. You need only take a few steps backward to be under the safety umbrella of your outer turret.

This safety is the perfect environment for an immobile mage, characters like Orianna, Xerath, or Ziggs. While any immobile, squishy character would benefit from the safety of mid lane, mages were particularly suited here in the early days of league because mana-regeneration was hard to come by. Mages can’t rely on their comparatively weak basic attacks to trade hits with their opponent, or even clear the minions. They needed to cast spells, and when their mana pool inevitably emptied, the short distance meant they could return to base, refill their mana, and get back to lane quickly.

The central location of the mid lane also favors assassins, like Talon, Zed, or Katarina. While these champs are often mobile enough to not need the safety, their play pattern – leaving lane into the fog-of-war to gank other lanes – benefits from being centrally located. This gives them more options of who to attack, and leaves opponents guessing when the step out of lane into the fog-of-war.⁵You can imagine that an assassin in the top lane who suddenly disappears clearly has only one place to go: mid lane.

Back to the fifth player. Both assassins and mages need exp in order to level up their spells and base stats. A wizard without strong spells is a shit wizard, and an assassin that’s under leveled isn’t much threat to the person they’re trying to one-tap with no counterplay⁶Babyrage. This is why the fifth player doesn’t go mid lane. Mid laners can’t afford to share their exp.

Top, Bottom, or Switch

Such an important source of gold in the bottom-side river means teams have to maintain strength on the bottom side of the map. The lever teams have available to deploy power on a specific part of the map is to put more players there. Dragon is the primary reason why the fifth player doubles up and goes with the bot laner instead of the top laner. To do otherwise would leave your team outnumbered during important fights over a significant gold source.

The 2v2 bot lane dynamic is the most complicated of all the lanes, both the in-game execution and the pre-game team composition decisions. While the exp is forcibly shared, the bot laners need to decide how to split the single lane’s gold income. It’s quickly discovered that splitting the gold is usually a bad idea. It’s simply not efficient to have two middle class players rather than one rich one poor. So, you need one character that can get by with low exp, and one player that can get by with low exp AND low gold. Enter: the AD Carry and Support.

The AD Carry (Attack Damage Carry aka I right click and my character hits stuff) fills two roles so far missing on the team: a late game scaling threat, and a building killer.

Sustained DPS. While some mages can fill the role of late game sustained damage (Cassiopeia, Ryze), items that buff spell damage (particularly in the early seasons of League) didn’t scale most mages up in power fast enough in relation to available damage mitigation items. By the late game, anyone building defensively was probably not going to die to a mage. On the contrary, physical attack items were numerous, powerful, and scaled with themselves. Items that buff physical attack scale with critical hit chance which scales with crit damage which all scale with attack speed, allowing more and more attacks to come out, and on and on. ADs often have abilities that function like items, providing crit damage (Caitlyn) or more attack speed (Tristana) – stats that are fairly weak early on when damage numbers are low, but become monstrous damage multipliers later in the game. Nothing in the game competes with a full item AD Carry for sustained DPS.

Building Damage. ADs also function as the primary structure-destroyer for the team. Every game of League requires that buildings be destroyed to win. While some few mages can put out solid late game dps, since spells don’t work on buildings they won’t help you win the game (kill buildings). For that, we need AD.⁹Aside – a developer change in season 3 made AP Carries/mages able to deal structure damage. This would eventually give rise to the pro scene viability of non-ADCs in bot lane. With so much strength coming from items. ADs just need gold, not levels, making characters like Tristana, Vayne, and Caitlyn the perfect fit for an exp-split lane. And with the safe middle lane taken, the weak early-game ADs benefit from having a buddy to help defend them in the long lane while they scale up.

The ADC has become such a metagame staple role that we still say ADC even in the modern era when non-AD champs are sent bot lane. We say “I’m playing ADC Ziggs”, and it’s understood we aren’t going to play a mage building crit and attack speed, we’re just going to be playing them in the bot lane. We also keep calling them ADC despite the developers attempted rebranding of the role to “Marksman”. Fetch is not going to happen Riot. 

The support must operate with no budget, no levels, no dick. They need to be strong enough to shepherd the AD past the early game until the AD can start to take over the game. The little gold they do collect tends to be spent on wards – temporary consumables to help generate map vision.

Supports tend to have stat-agnostic abilities that are useful past the point where their base damage has become irrelevant, since they won’t be powering up without exp or gold. Stunning moves that take a player out of a game only become relatively more powerful as the character they’re used against becomes more threatening. Spells that move position like hooks (Blitzcrank/Thresh/Naut) or headbutt/pulv (Alistar) would be useful even if they were weak. Since his release, it has long been memed that people would play Thresh even if his spells did no damage.

These types of supports can often play a secondary role similar to the jungler by roaming the map and using their stunning or repositioning moves to gank other lanes. They have less freedom than the jungler at this, since they are less covered by fog-of-war, and ultimately need to return to protect their lane partner, making it easier to track their position.

Another archetype of supports include power-magnifying effects. Things like movement speed increases, shields, and healing. Rather than play-making¬, these supports also tend to have play-denying moves to keep their AD safe. Then, in the late game, their buffs multiply the power scaling of their teammates’ gold – even if the support themselves is rather weak.

The duo-bot dynamic would be further reinforced in later seasons when developers made the bottom-lane outer turret flimsier than the other lanes, punishing teams who don’t send 2 players to defend the bot lane. See Chapter 2.

Finally, we occasionally see a third type of support show up. These supports don’t scale well particularly, and do need gold and levels to stay relevant, which they will never receive. Instead, these champs (Miss Fortune, Swain, Pantheon) are so strong in the early game in lane that they can keep their bot lane relevant until the point their usefulness falls off a cliff. Who cares if your team is fighting a 4v5 if your team are twice as storing as their opponents? These picks are usually used either as hidden cheese or specific lane counters.

Bingo, bangle, bungle, I don’t want to leave the Jungle

Jungle-viable champions need to do two things: gank well, and clear camps quickly and healthily. A jungler’s primary role during laning phase (early/midgame) is to threaten the ability to appear and 2v1 any lane at any point in time, creating map pressure and keeping the enemy from freely roaming your side of the map. Common tools for gank-heavy junglers include an ability to move quickly from edge of the fog-of-war to the enemy, hard CC (stun, roots), and burst damage. Some junglers do this job so well they almost need not be able to do anything else (J4, Elise, Lee Sin, Shaco).

Unlike lane minions who mostly fight each other, jungle monsters constantly hit you so the jungler wants to be durable and/or have some form of self-healing. That durability is also needed to safely move around the fog-of-war. If you round a corner and find yourself face to face with the enemy jungler you need to live through that experience. When we see squishy junglers become meta, it’s typically because either they clear so fast it makes their position hard for the enemy jungler to track (Karthus), they have other ways of staying unseen (Eve, Shaco), or they do so much damage the enemy jungler doesn’t want to go looking for them alone (Kha’zix).

The jungler metagame shifts often as gold sources shift. On patches where jungle camps respawn faster, or are worth more gold/exp, we see a shift toward camp clearing junglers and away from gank-heavy ones. Conversely, when camps are worth less, or when early kills are worth more, we see a shift toward champs like Lee and J4.

While the common player meta typically trickles down from pro play, we have seen stark differences in jungle metagames during patches when the game is very snowbally. When catchup mechanisms are nerfed and early leads can quickly turn into game wins, Solo Queue (ranked ladder for the public) junglers LOVE to play gank-heavy champs. They want agency to decide and win the game themselves, rather than rely on dubious teammates, and if they snowball the lanes early with a few kills they can get into their next match quickly. Pro teams (outside of China/EU) historically HATE high variance game states and will instead choose to play passively and farm, preferring to decide game outcomes on late-game strategies and team fights over early-game skirmishes that might go wrong.

It’s also common to see tanks see in the jungle, since they often bring area-damage abilities to help clear camps, and CC to help in ganks. However, the lower availability of gold from the jungle means they will not be as durable in the mid-late game as a laner would be. Solo-tank jungler is not usually viable as a team composition unless your game plan involves winning the game early. Expect tanks in the jungle to have additional front-line support from the Support (Braum, Leona, Alistar) or other laners.

Started from the bottom, now we’re here (here being top)

This leaves us with the top lane. It’s a long lane, without the safety of mid, and the top laner won’t get the security of having a partner around like bot. All alone on an island, the top laner needs to fend for themselves. Duelists and brawlers who thrive in a 1v1 scenario live in the top lane, and can act as off-tanks for their team in the mid-late game. Top is also where teams often run full tanks, particularly if they aren’t playing any in Jungle or Support. Their durability means they can live to make it the long distance back to the safety of their tower if the enemy jungler shows up. More squishy duelists and assassins can be found here too, since they pack enough mobility to have a reasonable shot at escaping to safety should the enemy jungler appear.

The incentives and disincentives for each character type summed over time to create an expected standard for the types of characters played in each lane. Tanks don’t go mid not because they couldn’t, but because the wizard on their team can’t really go top in their place. Aside – when we have seen pro team comps that run tanks mid lane, it often means they go without a mage.

Over time, this resulted in a standard metagame of champs and roles:
• A late-game sustained dps AD Carry in the Bot lane, paired with a defensive, healing, or CC-heavy support
• An immobile mage or very-mobile assassin in the Mid lane
• A bruiser or tank in the Jungle
• A bruiser or tank in the Top lane

Honorable Mention: Flex

Some champ archetypes can overlap across multiple positions. We’ve seen Lee sin as both a top-laner and a jungler. Akali, an assassin, has been seen commonly in both midlane (standard) and top-lane, where she abuses her high mobility to make the lane safe. In competitive, champions who can flex position are highly valued, and can be abused to throw off the enemies picks or dodge counter matchups.

Special shoutouts to the Pantheon, who must hold the gold medal of all flex champs. After his rework (ability update) in late 2019, he was able to be flexed into Top, Mid, Jungle, and Support effectively. Point and click stun, high base damage, and the ability to teleport to anywhere on the map on a 3 minutes cooldown. The pro scene’s wet dream. During the 2019 World Championships, this earned him an unreal 100% ban rate across all 77 games of the main event. Not a single team would allow him through, not because of raw strength, but because of the flexibility he offered a team comp.

Honorable Mention: Globals

The pro scene loves global abilities – moves that can project strength to other part of the map either by firing an ability there (Ashe, GP, Ezreal) or teleporting the player themselves (Shen, Nocturne, TF, Pantheon). The communication level of pro play compared to general Solo Queue means they can abuse these mechanics to a far greater extent than in uncoordinated play. This is also why the spell teleport is so commonly picked in pro play. We’ve seen metas when Top, Mid, and Bot players all take teleport, in order to project strength on multiple sides of the map or shore up positioning mistakes.

Finally, an F in the chat for my poor boy Ryze, who has been plagued by rework after rework as his team-teleporting ult makes him a must-pick in competitive play. Currently in Platinum+ Solo Queue, he boasts the lowest win rate of any champ, at 43.3%. Despite this, he is picked or banned in more than half of competitive games this season¹⁰https://gol.gg/champion/champion-stats/76/season-S12/split-Spring/tournament-ALL/, ensuring he will get no real buffs in the foreseeable future.

Notes

• 1
  starting from Season 2. Season 1 LoL is a part of competitive history in the same way that the rock and berry phase of human history was civilization.
• 2
  A professional league match can last from 25-60 minutes, depending on the patch.
• 3
  This is actually more than in truth, since we’re ignoring that repeated kills on the same player in a row net less and less gold each time.
• 4
  In later seasons, this player would be cemented purposefully into the metagame through artificial support by developer-introduced game mechanics. More on this later.
• 5
  You can imagine that an assassin in the top lane who suddenly disappears clearly has only one place to go: mid lane.
• 6
  Babyrage
• 7
  FFS its not a DRAKE stop SAYING DRAKE
• 8
  Shyvana’s old lore explained a bit of Dragon physiology. Dragons have a form of sexual dimorphism https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Dragon#Trivia
• 9
  Aside – a developer change in season 3 made AP Carries/mages able to deal structure damage. This would eventually give rise to the pro scene viability of non-ADCs in bot lane.
• 10
  https://gol.gg/champion/champion-stats/76/season-S12/split-Spring/tournament-ALL/