Streamer Mode in League of Legends hides your Riot ID from opponents, teammates, and third-party trackers like op.gg and u.gg for the duration of a match. Enable it in the client at Settings > Client > General > Streamer Mode. There are three toggles, each scoped to a different layer of anonymity.

One catch worth knowing up front: Streamer Mode does not hide you from your own friends list, and it does not hide your matches from your post-game profile or op.gg history. If you're trying to play without your friends knowing, that's a different problem (see how to appear offline).

How to Enable Streamer Mode

1. Open the League client and click the gear icon in the top-right.
2. Make sure you're on the Client tab on the left, then select General.
3. Scroll down to the Streamer Mode section and tick the options you want.

The same setting covers Teamfight Tactics. VALORANT has a similar feature but with different scope (party-only, no progression hiding) under Settings > General > Privacy.

The Three Toggles, Compared

All three options only apply to active games. Match History and Replays are not affected by any toggle, so anyone can still look up your post-game profile and see exactly what you played. Streamer Mode is a live-game shield, not a permanent one.

Party members are excluded. Even with "Hide My Identifying Info From Everyone" on, anyone you queued with as a premade can still see your full Riot ID and identifying information. The toggles only blur you from non-party teammates and opponents. The likely reason: you already chose to queue with these players, so anonymity inside the party would break coordination with no privacy gain.

One practical consequence: Streamer Mode does almost nothing in Clash, where your entire 5-person team is your party. Your Clash teammates see your real Riot ID regardless of which toggle you tick. The opposing 5-stack is still hidden, but that's a niche win.

Does Op.gg Respect Streamer Mode?

Yes, but only during the live game. Since Patch 25.20 (October 2025), Riot's API stopped serving player identity data to third-party apps for anyone using Streamer Mode while a match is in progress. Op.gg, u.gg, Porofessor, Blitz, and the rest cannot pull your name, rank, or recent matches mid-game. They show the player as "missing from in-game info."

The moment the game ends, your match appears in your op.gg profile like any other. Streamer Mode does not retroactively hide post-game data. If you need full profile concealment on op.gg specifically, that's a separate feature: op.gg's profile privacy setting requires you to link your Riot account on op.gg and toggle the profile to private. The two systems are independent and you can use both.

Premade Detection Breaks

The biggest practical effect of Streamer Mode is one Riot doesn't advertise. When even one player on either team has Streamer Mode on, third-party apps lose the ability to detect premades for the entire lobby. Riot confirmed this on Reddit: the API doesn't expose enough information for op.gg or Porofessor to tell who's queued together. If you've used these tools to scout enemy duo bot lanes, expect that intel to disappear in Streamer Mode lobbies.

Who Can Still See You

Streamer Mode is not invisibility. The following always remain visible:

• Your friends list. Riot's support article spells this out directly. Anyone on your friends list still sees your Riot ID and your "In Game" status the entire match.
• Your own match history and replays. The toggles affect what other players see. You can still pull up your own profile, op.gg, and replay folder normally.
• Reports. The report system still resolves your Riot ID server-side, so getting flagged for griefing or AFK works as usual.
• Post-game match data. Once the loading screen clears and the post-game lobby loads, third-party trackers can pull the match like any other.

If you also want the friends list silent, layer Streamer Mode with a tool like Deceive. Streamer Mode handles opponents and trackers; Deceive handles your social graph.

When Streamer Mode Actually Helps

• Streaming or recording content where viewers can stream-snipe by typing your Riot ID into a tracker.
• Smurfing when you don't want opponents identifying you mid-game and dodging or focus-firing.
• Climbing on a known account if you have a follower base that recognizes you in champ select.
• Scrim privacy against opposing scouts for amateur and semi-pro teams. Your own teammates always see you, but the opposing party is hidden from third-party trackers during the match.

For casual play it's mostly noise. The "Hide All Names (Only For Me)" toggle is occasionally useful on its own as a focus mode, but the privacy gain from the other two doesn't matter if nobody was looking you up to begin with.

FAQ

When was Streamer Mode added? Patch 25.S1.3 (February 2025) shipped a single combined toggle. Patch 25.20 (October 2025) split it into the current three options and added the API-level protection that breaks third-party live tracking.

Does Streamer Mode work in ranked? Yes. All toggles are queue-agnostic. There's no penalty for using it in Solo Queue, Flex, or any other mode.

Can I still see my own rank and stats? Yes. Streamer Mode hides information from others; your own client shows everything as it always does.

Will my friends know I played a Streamer Mode game? Yes. The friends list shows you in-game throughout. Match History on your profile is also visible to anyone who looks it up after the game.

Can my premades still see me with the strongest toggle on? Yes. Riot's tooltip is explicit: party members are excluded from Streamer Mode. Anyone you queued with sees your full Riot ID and identifying info as normal.

If a stream-sniper adds me as a friend, can they bypass Streamer Mode? No. Friends list and party membership are different things. Friends can see your "In Game" status in their sidebar, but they can't see your Riot ID inside the match unless they queued with you as a party. Solo-queueing the same time as a stream-sniper friend doesn't put them in your party.

Does in-client spectate respect Streamer Mode? Yes. A friend or stranger spectating your live game sees champion names instead of your Riot ID, the same as any in-game opponent. Spectators are never classified as party members, so the exclusion rule doesn't apply.

Does Streamer Mode hide me on op.gg permanently? No. It only blocks the live-game lookup. Post-game match data appears on your op.gg profile as normal. For permanent op.gg hiding, link your Riot account on op.gg and use their separate profile privacy toggle.

Does it work in custom games? The toggles are scoped to matchmade games. In custom lobbies players invite each other directly, so Streamer Mode behavior there is less consistent and less useful.

What about Tournament Realm or pro play? Tournament Realm and competitive matches use separate broadcast and spectator infrastructure. Streamer Mode is a public-server consumer feature.

To delete your League of Legends account, log in at Riot's account deletion support page and click the Delete My Account button. Riot locks the account immediately, then permanently erases it 30 days later. You have a 25-day window to cancel by replying to the confirmation email; after that, it's gone.

Your Riot account is shared across League of Legends, VALORANT, Teamfight Tactics, Wild Rift, Legends of Runeterra, and 2XKO. Deleting it deletes everything on all of them. There is no way to delete only your LoL data while keeping the rest.

Step-by-Step Deletion

1. Open support-leagueoflegends.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360050328454 in your browser.
2. Click Delete My Account. You'll be prompted to log in to your Riot account.
3. Confirm the deletion request. The account locks immediately and you'll receive an email at the address on file.
4. If you change your mind, reply to that email with a cancellation request. Your message must reach Riot at least 5 days before the 30-day deletion date, so you have roughly 25 days to back out.
5. After 30 days the account is permanently deleted. Your username, Riot ID, and email are released for anyone else to register.

If the Button Doesn't Work

The deletion button can fail when the account is currently suspended or when the linked email is no longer accessible. The fallback is a manual support ticket. Open the support portal, choose Account Management, Data Requests, or Deletion, and select Account Deletion. Riot's agent will ask you to verify ownership with:

• Username and Riot ID
• Server / region
• Approximate account creation date
• City and country at registration
• The original registration email

Get as many of those right as you can. The verification is strict because Riot has to be sure you're not deleting someone else's account.

What You Actually Lose

Deletion is permanent and total. There are no partial deletions, no archive option, no second chances after the 30-day window.

• League of Legends: all skins, champions, RP balance, BE, rank, match history, mastery, friends list, and Honor.
• VALORANT, TFT, Wild Rift, LoR, 2XKO: the same. Skins, agent unlocks, ranks, all of it.
• RP and other currencies: not refunded. Riot's policy is no refunds on deletion. Spend what you have first if it matters to you.
• Riot ID and username: immediately released after deletion finalizes. Anyone can register them, including someone who'd want to impersonate you.

If you want a copy of your data first, request it before you start the deletion. Riot exposes a data download through the same support portal under Data Requests.

Consider Deactivating Instead

Deactivation is the reversible alternative. It locks your account so no one can log in, but Riot keeps the data on file in case you come back. There's no public web form for it; you submit a support ticket asking for account deactivation and a Riot agent processes it.

One caveat: deactivation is described in older support documentation and isn't called out in the current 2025 deletion article. The option still works as of this writing, but Riot may quietly retire it. If long-term certainty matters and you genuinely want the data gone, full deletion is the cleaner answer.

If you just want to appear offline or log out cleanly, neither requires touching account deletion.

Can You Delete a Banned Account?

Probably yes. Riot doesn't auto-delete permabanned accounts (they stay in the database for fraud and ban-evasion checks), and the deletion flow asks for proof of ownership rather than account standing. The web button may refuse to load on a suspended account, in which case the support ticket route is the path to use.

Riot has not published an explicit policy on deleting banned accounts. If you hit a wall, the support agent on your ticket will tell you whether there's a hold and why.

EU / GDPR Users

If you're in the EU, EEA, or UK, you have a separate right-to-erasure under GDPR that Riot honors. The mechanism is the same: same support article, same button, same 30-day window. The legal basis is different (a statutory right rather than a voluntary deletion), but you don't have to file the request differently. Riot's GDPR-specific page exists for legal completeness and points to the same flow.

Things That Aren't Account Deletion

Two requests get conflated with deletion:

• Uninstalling League of Legends. Removing the game from your PC frees disk space but leaves your account intact. Use Windows Add or Remove Programs, find Riot Client, and uninstall League. Your account stays exactly as it is.
• Changing your Riot ID. If your goal is to dump an embarrassing old name, you can change your Riot ID for free at riotgames.com without deleting anything.

FAQ

How long does the deletion take? 30 days from request. The account locks immediately, so you can't play during that window.

Can I cancel after the 30 days? No. Cancellation has to reach Riot at least 5 days before the 30-day mark. Once deletion finalizes, the data is gone.

Will my username be available again? Yes. Username, Riot ID, Summoner Name, and email all release immediately when deletion finalizes. Riot doesn't hold them in reserve.

Will op.gg and other sites still show my old games? Probably for a while. Third-party trackers cache match history independently of Riot's servers. Riot deletes their copy; the public copies on op.gg, u.gg, and similar sites age out on their own schedule.

Can I delete just my LoL data and keep VALORANT? No. The Riot account is unified across all of their games; deletion is all-or-nothing.

What if I never log in again, do I get auto-deleted? Not in the normal case. Riot's August 2022 inactive-account policy targets a narrow group: 3+ years no login, zero lifetime currency purchased, under 20 hours played, and no rare items. Most accounts that have ever bought RP or unlocked a skin are safe indefinitely.

To get out of Low Priority Queue (LPQ) in League of Legends, finish 5 full matchmade PvP games without leaving or going AFK. Each of those games starts with a queue delay of 5 to 15 minutes depending on your tier. Once you complete the requirement, the delay disappears and your queue returns to normal.

That is the whole exit path. There is no support ticket that clears it, no Honor reward that skips it, and no $5 booster Riot will sell you. The only thing that gets you out is finishing real games.

How Long Is Low Priority Queue?

LPQ has 8 tiers. The first one most players hit is Tier 1, which adds a 5-minute wait to each of your next 5 queues. Repeat offenders climb the tiers and the punishment escalates fast.

The "20-minute LPQ" you've seen quoted on older guides is wrong. The maximum delay is 15 minutes, and that's only at Tier 3 and above. After a Tier 4-7 lockout expires, you're dropped back to Tier 3 and still owe the 5-game requirement.

What Counts as a Game That Clears LPQ

Not every game you finish counts. The match must:

• Be a matchmade PvP queue: Normal Draft, Normal Blind, Solo/Duo, Flex, ARAM, or Quickplay all qualify.
• Last at least 10 minutes. Anything shorter, including remakes triggered by a teammate's AFK, does not count.
• Finish without you being flagged as AFK or as a leaver. If you DC and don't reconnect, the game does not count toward clearing the penalty.

Co-op vs. AI applies the LPQ delay to your queue but the wiki notes it does not reliably count toward the requirement. Custom games and Practice Tool count for nothing. ARAM does count, which is the fastest practical path because games are short and you don't risk a 30-minute Solo Queue grind.

The Champion Select Dodge Trap

If you queue while in LPQ and then dodge in champion select, two bad things happen at once: you eat a normal dodge penalty on top of the LPQ wait, and the queue delay timer for your next game restarts from zero. The dodge does not count toward your 5-game requirement either way.

Lock in your champion. Even a clean dodge is worse than playing out a bad lobby while the LPQ clock is running.

What Triggers Low Priority Queue

LPQ is the LeaverBuster system. It only fires when you fail to finish a match you've already started. The two ways to trigger it:

• Leaving an in-progress game: closing the client, force-quitting, or otherwise abandoning the match.
• Going AFK: Riot warns you at 3 minutes of inactivity and the system flags you at 5 minutes.

Champion select dodges do not put you in LPQ. They have their own separate penalty (a queue lockout plus −5 to −15 LP if it was a ranked lobby). LPQ is reserved for players who left after the loading screen.

Does LPQ Hurt Your Ranked LP or MMR?

LPQ itself doesn't touch your MMR. It only adds queue time. The damage is downstream.

• Direct LP loss for AFK in ranked. When you AFK or leave a ranked game, that match is recorded as a loss with an additional LP reduction applied to the next several ranked games in that queue. This is separate from LPQ and stacks with it.
• Honor falls to the chat-restricted floor. Repeat offenders drop below Honor 3, which makes them ineligible for end-of-season Victorious skins (which require 15 ranked wins and Honor 3+).
• You can still queue ranked while in LPQ. The system delays the queue, it doesn't block the mode.

Is Low Priority Queue Permanent?

No. There is no permanent LPQ. The system caps at Tier 7 (15-minute delay plus a 2-week lockout), after which the lockout expires and you go back to a 5-game clearing requirement at Tier 3.

What is permanent is the next escalation: continued AFK and leaving behavior past the LPQ ceiling moves accounts onto temporary suspensions, and from there to permanent suspension. By that point you've stopped seeing the LPQ message and started seeing a ban screen instead.

Fastest Way to Clear It

Queue 5 ARAM games back-to-back. ARAM is matchmade PvP, the average game is 16-18 minutes, and there's no champion select dodge risk because picks are randomized. With a Tier 1 delay you can clear in roughly 90 minutes of wall-clock time. Solo Queue games at 30+ minutes each turn the same penalty into a 4-hour evening.

Don't queue and step away. The 3-minute AFK warning still fires in champ select if you're idle, and an AFK flag during a clearing game restarts the count.

FAQ

Does Low Priority Queue stack across queues? The delay applies to whichever queue you join next. You can serve out the 5 games in any matchmade PvP mode you want; the 5-game tally is account-wide, not per-queue.

Will a friend's AFK put me in LPQ? No. LeaverBuster flags the player who left, not their team. If a teammate goes AFK and you finish the game, that match counts toward clearing your own LPQ if you have one.

Can I appeal LPQ? Riot Support won't lift LPQ even with a confirmed power outage or hardware failure. The system is automated and the only documented path out is to finish 5 games. Save the support ticket for actual ban appeals.

Does LPQ reset over time? No. Skipping the game requirement and waiting it out doesn't work. The 5-game counter only ticks when you finish qualifying games.

The fastest way to level your Battle Pass is to complete daily and weekly missions first, then play normally. Missions supply the majority of the BXP needed to finish the free track — gameplay time-in-game fills the rest. Game mode choice barely matters; party size does.

How BXP Works

Battle Pass XP (BXP) comes from two sources: missions and time played. For gameplay, every minute of any matchmade League of Legends game earns 1.3 objective points. Points convert to BXP at a 1:1 rate via a repeating mission (50 BXP per 50 points). Two multipliers apply on top:

• +30% for winning the game
• +30% for playing in a premade party (at least one friend)

These stack. A win with a friend earns 1.3 × 1.6 = 2.08 points per minute — nearly double the base rate of a solo loss.

Which Game Mode Levels the Pass Fastest?

All matchmade LoL modes earn the same base rate of 1.3 points per minute. ARAM games are shorter (~25 minutes vs. ~35 minutes for Summoner's Rift), so they earn less BXP per game — but the hourly rate is nearly identical once you account for queue and loading time.

Bot games are significantly worse — matchmade human games earn roughly 4–5× more objective points per minute. Play against real players regardless of mode.

The party bonus applies identically across all modes. Playing with one friend increases your effective BXP rate by 30%, which over a full Act adds up to several extra free milestones.

Missions Come First

Missions account for the bulk of the BXP needed to complete the free track. Prioritize them in this order:

The daily mission is the highest-priority habit: 100 BXP for a single win. Miss it and you've lost the equivalent of ~80 minutes of solo play. The weekly general mission (500 BXP) is worth completing every week even if you only play a few games — earning 175 objective points takes about two normal games.

Additional BXP missions unlock throughout the Act for events, champion mastery milestones, and featured game modes. Check the Missions tab at the start of each week.

How Long Does It Take?

The free track has 48 milestones at 500 BXP each, totaling 24,000 BXP — including 8 Hextech Keys and a Glorious Champion Capsule. An Act lasts roughly 6–7 weeks.

Riot's stated design goal is that players who complete daily and weekly missions finish the free track before the Act ends without grinding. The math supports it — missions alone contribute roughly 15,000–18,000 BXP across a full Act if completed consistently.

Honor Bonus BXP

Players at Honor levels 3, 4, and 5 receive occasional 150 BXP drops at random intervals. Level 4 and 5 receive them more frequently. These are a small bonus on top of normal progression — not a meaningful farming lever on their own, but a reason to keep your honor standing healthy by honoring teammates after games. Honor also affects key fragment drop rates separately from BXP.

WASD controls are coming to Ranked in patch 26.9 (April 29). Whether they're worth using depends on your role: support and top lane players get a comfortable fit with no real mechanical penalty, marksmen (ADCs) face a genuine DPS tradeoff built into the system, and jungle players lose the most to 8-directional pathing constraints. Here's what actually changed and what it means for your champion pool.

What WASD Mode Does

WASD mode replaces mouse clicks for movement. You hold directional keys to move your champion and use your mouse exclusively for aiming abilities and attacking. The two inputs are fully independent, which is the main appeal for players coming from FPS games.

The key constraint: WASD movement is 8-directional. You can move horizontally, vertically, or at 45-degree diagonals. Mouse click-to-move allows any angle. That gap matters most in the jungle, where precise pathing around walls and camps requires angles WASD can't hit cleanly, and when chasing enemies moving at non-45-degree angles.

Why Marksmen Have a Real Penalty

Riot built an attack delay into WASD to prevent it from being a straight upgrade over mouse. The mechanic is class-based, not universal:

• Melee champions: no attack delay (removed in patch V26.02)
• Non-marksman ranged champions: reduced attack delay
• Marksmen (ADCs): full attack delay, which scales with attack speed up to a cap
• Ezreal, Kai'Sa, Kindred: reduced delay despite being marksmen

The delay means your autos fire slower than optimal mouse orbwalking when you hold movement keys and attack simultaneously. Auto-attack animations also can't be cancelled by movement inputs once they begin, unlike mouse click-to-move.

There is a workaround: releasing your WASD keys just before each auto fires, then re-engaging movement afterward. This avoids the delay entirely but requires a specific rhythm that takes time to build as muscle memory. It's the equivalent of the manual stutter-step timing mouse players use when orbwalking.

Riot's data shows near win-rate parity between WASD and mouse across their testing pool, with mouse retaining a small edge. In a developer post, Riot stated the data came from players with over 1,000 games on a champion. No breakdown by role or class has been published, so the aggregate number likely masks the gap for marksmen specifically.

Which Role Should You Use WASD On?

For new players or anyone coming from FPS games, WASD can feel more natural than learning click-to-move from scratch. The separated movement and aim inputs also reduce hand strain, which matters for longer sessions. The accessibility benefits are the strongest case for WASD regardless of role.

Which Champions Feel Best (and Worst) on WASD

Since melee champions have no attack delay, most bruisers, tanks, and melee supports play identically on WASD and mouse in terms of DPS. The movement differences remain, but there's no DPS cost to worry about.

Among marksmen, slower-attacking champions absorb the delay more easily. Jhin, Miss Fortune, and Caitlyn are commonly cited as workable WASD picks. Their attack cadence is forgiving enough that the timing workaround is manageable.

Kalista, Jinx, and Vayne are harder on WASD because they rely on tight orbwalk timing where the delay compounds across many rapid attacks. The higher their effective attack speed, the more the per-attack penalty adds up.

One genuinely ergonomic advantage: champions that want to move while holding aim on a skillshot, like Pyke, benefit from WASD's input separation. You can hold a movement direction with keys while your mouse stays locked on a target. It doesn't give access to angles or timings mouse can't reach, but it removes the mental split between movement and aim during hook setup.

Jungle champions that depend on precise wall-hops and curved pathing, like Lee Sin, Nidalee, and Elise, struggle with the 8-directional movement constraint regardless of the attack delay changes. The pathing limitation is the issue there, not DPS.

These reflect community consensus from playtesting and are directional, not precise. Balance patches affect champion classifications and kits, so treat specific names as a starting point.

How to Enable WASD in League of Legends

1. Open the in-game Options menu (Escape key)
2. Go to the Keybinds tab
3. At the top, select Keyboard (WASD) instead of Mouse (Point & Click)
4. Save and close

Riot recommends testing in Practice Tool before taking it to ranked. Per-champion keybind customization is available starting patch 26.8, so you can run WASD on specific champions without changing your defaults for others.

Settings Worth Configuring

Per-champion keybinds: Set different layouts per champion, including smart cast toggles. Useful for players who only want WASD on a subset of their champion pool.

Rotate WASD relative to lane orientation: Pressing W moves your champion up and to the right along the Summoner's Rift lane axis instead of straight up the screen. Reduces finger strain for players who mostly move diagonally along lanes, and helps on laptops with limited simultaneous key detection.

Discrete cast options: Auto Attack, Cast Ability, Interact, and Select Object are now individually bindable. Worth customizing if you want precise control over what each key does.

Move cursor with any input: Any key can be bound to directly move your mouse cursor. This was the most-requested accessibility feature from WASD beta testers.

If you play support, top lane, or a melee role and have been curious about WASD, the V26.02 changes removed the main mechanical penalty for melee champions. For marksmen, the delay is real but manageable on the right champions with the timing workaround. Check the ranked settings above to configure your layout before your next game.

In North America, 1,380 RP costs $10.99. Here's the full RP bundle table for NA, plus European pricing, a per-skin cost breakdown, and the history of how the prices have changed. League of Legends is free to play — RP is the optional premium currency used for cosmetics.

RP Bundle Prices (North America)

Gift Cards vs. Buying In-Client

Riot Points gift cards are sold at Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and GameStop. Under normal circumstances, gift card prices match the in-client prices exactly — there's no inherent advantage either way.

The exception is sales. Amazon occasionally discounts RP gift cards during Prime Day and other seasonal promotions, making retail cards the better option when that happens. It's worth checking Amazon before large purchases during sale periods. Outside of sales, buy in-client. It's faster and carries no risk of a lost or invalid card.

How Much RP Does Each Skin Cost?

Most skins are purchased directly with RP. The table below shows each skin tier, the RP cost, and the cheapest single bundle that covers it. For a full breakdown of every skin type in the game, see how many skins are in League of Legends.

The Exalted row deserves a note: Exalted skins aren't purchased directly. They're obtained through the Sanctum, a gacha system where each pull costs 400 RP (Ancient Sparks). The hard pity triggers at 80 pulls, making the worst-case cost 32,000 RP — roughly $250 across multiple bundles. This is the most expensive skin acquisition path in the game.

Mythic skins and Prestige skins also can't be bought directly with RP bundles. They require Mythic Essence (earned through events and passes) or event tokens.

RP Prices in Europe

European players pay the same numbers in euros as NA players pay in dollars — €10.99 gets you 1,380 RP on EUW, same as $10.99 in NA. EUR prices are consistent across all eurozone countries on EUW and EUNE; there's no per-country variation within the eurozone. UK players pay in GBP with separate regional pricing.

Some non-eurozone European countries have their own currency tiers: Poland (PLN), Czech Republic (CZK), Romania (RON), Hungary (HUF), and Norway (NOK) all have dedicated in-client pricing rather than using the EUR rates.

When Did Riot Last Change RP Prices?

The most recent North American price change happened on August 19, 2022 — the first time Riot had adjusted NA RP prices since the currency launched. Riot framed it as an inflation adjustment, but the mechanism was notable: prices didn't go up, the RP amounts went down.

Before the change took effect, Riot ran a double RP promotion from July 14–31, 2022 as a one-time goodwill offer. There have been no further NA price changes since August 2022.

Globally, Riot made sweeping regional adjustments in September 2024 — though North America was not among the affected regions. The 2024 update hit over 20 markets, with some seeing steep increases (Philippines +40%, Vietnam +41%, Ukraine +73%) and others getting reductions (Mexico −9%, India −4%, Czech Republic −9%). These changes were driven by exchange rate shifts and an effort to reduce cross-region VPN exploitation of cheaper servers.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many RP does $10 get you?

The closest bundle to $10 is $10.99, which gives 1,380 RP. There is no $10 bundle.

How much is 1,350 RP in USD?

1,350 RP is the price of an Epic skin. The $10.99 bundle (1,380 RP) covers it with 30 RP to spare.

How much is 1,820 RP in USD?

1,820 RP is the price of a Legendary skin. You'll need the $21.99 bundle (2,800 RP), unless you already have leftover RP from a previous purchase.

How much does 13,500 RP cost?

$99.99. This is the largest standard bundle and the best per-dollar value of the commonly purchased tiers.

What is the cheapest way to buy RP?

Buy larger bundles — the RP-per-dollar rate improves as you go up. The $99.99 bundle gives 17% more RP per dollar than the $4.99 bundle. Watch for Amazon gift card sales during Prime Day if you're planning a large purchase.

League of Legends is a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena), and there are several other games in the genre worth trying. Each one changes the formula in a different way: camera angle, mechanical complexity, platform, match length, or how you unlock characters. This guide compares the major options from the perspective of someone who already plays LoL.

MOBA Comparison Table

Dota 2

Dota 2 is the closest relative to League of Legends. Both descended from the same Warcraft III mod, but Dota 2 kept mechanics that LoL removed to lower the barrier to entry.

What LoL players will notice immediately:

• Denying - you can last-hit your own creeps to deny the enemy gold and XP. There's no equivalent in LoL.
• Turn rates - heroes take time to physically rotate before moving or attacking in a new direction. LoL champions turn instantly. This makes kiting feel different.
• Courier - a dedicated unit delivers items from the shop to your hero in lane, so you don't need to recall to buy.
• Roshan vs Baron - Dota 2's Roshan drops the Aegis of the Immortal, which instantly revives the holder at full HP on the spot. Baron Nashor grants a team-wide buff instead. ("Nashor" is an anagram of "Roshan.")
• Active items - Dota 2 items have more powerful active abilities. Items like Blink Dagger, Black King Bar, and Force Staff are build-defining in a way most LoL items aren't.

Unlock model: Every hero is free from day one. Dota 2 monetizes exclusively through cosmetic skins and the seasonal battle pass. No grinding required to access the full roster.

Playerbase: Dota 2 averages around 450,000-650,000 concurrent players on Steam, with an all-time peak of 1.29 million. It's smaller than LoL but has a loyal, long-term community.

Match length: Typically 40-50 minutes, longer than LoL's 25-40 minutes. Games can run over an hour in late-game scenarios.

Smite 2

Smite 2 entered free-to-play open beta in January 2025 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. Its defining feature is the third-person camera: instead of the top-down view in LoL, you're behind your god, and every ability is a skillshot because you can't see behind you.

Characters are gods drawn from real-world mythology: Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Chinese, Hindu, and 10 other pantheons (81 gods available as of 2026, with more added regularly). The game has full crossplay and cross-progression across all platforms.

Unlock model: Free weekly rotation, plus God Tokens earned as you level your account. The Founder's Edition ($29.99) unlocks all current and future gods permanently.

For LoL players: If you want a MOBA that feels meaningfully different from LoL rather than just harder or simpler, Smite 2's camera angle changes everything about positioning, warding, and teamfight awareness. Console support is a bonus if you want to play from the couch.

Heroes of the Storm

Blizzard's MOBA strips away two mechanics LoL players might not realize they dislike until they're gone: last-hitting and the item shop. Experience is shared across your entire team, and individual progression comes from a talent system where you pick from branching upgrades at milestone levels (with major power spikes at Level 10 and Level 20).

The roster of 90 heroes pulls from Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, and Overwatch. Each map has unique objectives (collecting tribute, escorting a payload, capturing seeds) that force team fights at specific locations, making macro decisions the primary skill expression.

Current status: Heroes of the Storm entered maintenance mode in July 2022. Blizzard cancelled its esports league in December 2018. The game still receives balance patches and seasonal rotations but no new heroes or major content. It was added to PC Game Pass in March 2025 with a bundle of 30 free heroes.

For LoL players: If you're burned out on the item system complexity or hate last-hitting, HotS is a refreshing change. Games run 15-25 minutes. The reduced population means longer queue times at higher ranks, but casual and mid-rank play is fine.

Wild Rift

Wild Rift is League of Legends rebuilt for mobile. Same champions, same abilities, same universe, but adapted for touchscreens with twin-stick controls and a camera that's always oriented with your base at the bottom-left.

As of early 2026, Wild Rift has 137 champions compared to LoL's 172 on PC. New champion releases lag behind the PC version. Console development was cancelled in 2024, so it's iOS and Android only. Wild Rift has its own exclusive ranked tier, Sovereign, above Challenger.

Match length: 15-20 minutes, achieved through a smaller map, faster gold gain, and shorter respawn timers.

For LoL players: Worth trying if you want League on the go. The core gameplay translates well, but the control scheme takes adjustment. Expect a smaller champion pool and a different meta shaped by mobile-specific balance changes.

Mobile Legends: Bang Bang

Mobile Legends launched in 2016 and is the dominant mobile MOBA in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines and Indonesia. It's built for short sessions on lower-spec devices, with matches running 10-15 minutes.

The game drew a copyright lawsuit from Riot Games in July 2017 over character and map similarities. The case was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, not on the merits. Mobile Legends has since developed its own identity with 132+ heroes and a dedicated competitive scene (the M-Series World Championship).

For LoL players: If you want the fastest mobile MOBA experience, this is it. Simpler than Wild Rift with faster matches, but the trade-off is less mechanical depth.

Pokemon Unite

Pokemon Unite is the most casual MOBA on this list. Matches are hard-capped at 10 minutes, and the win condition is scoring points by depositing Aeos energy into enemy goals, not destroying a base.

Available on Nintendo Switch and mobile (iOS/Android) with cross-play. Over 200 million downloads as of mid-2024.

Unlock model: Pokemon are unlocked via Unite Licenses, purchased with in-game currency (Aeos Coins, earned slowly) or premium currency (Aeos Gems, paid). The game has drawn pay-to-win criticism over Held Items, which are upgradeable with real money for stat boosts, though mitigations have reduced the gap since launch.

For LoL players: A low-commitment alternative when you want a MOBA session that's guaranteed to end in 10 minutes. Don't expect strategic depth comparable to LoL.

Honor of Kings

Honor of Kings is the world's most-played mobile game, with a reported 260 million monthly active users and $2.6 billion in revenue in 2024. It's developed by TiMi Studios, a subsidiary of Tencent (which also fully owns Riot Games).

The game launched as a Chinese-market mobile MOBA and drew early criticism from Riot for being heavily inspired by League of Legends. Tencent had originally asked Riot to make a mobile LoL; when Riot declined, TiMi built Honor of Kings instead. It has since developed its own roster and identity, though the mechanical DNA is similar.

International availability was limited for years (the Western version, Arena of Valor, didn't gain traction), but Honor of Kings launched globally in June 2024.

For LoL players: The closest mobile experience to LoL in terms of mechanical feel, with a massive playerbase. If you're in a region where it's popular, the competitive scene is well-developed.

Deadlock

Deadlock is Valve's new MOBA-shooter hybrid, currently in early access on Steam with invite-only access. It's a 6v6, third-person game played on a 3-lane map (changed from 4 lanes in February 2025) where players use both hero abilities and gunplay. The economy uses "Souls" instead of gold.

Despite having no public release and no marketing, Deadlock hit 125,000 concurrent Steam players in February 2026 after its "Old Gods, New Blood" update. The roster is around 38 heroes and growing.

For LoL players: This isn't a direct LoL alternative. It's a fundamentally different game that borrows MOBA structure (lanes, towers, items, hero abilities) but plays like a third-person shooter. Worth watching if you're interested in where the genre is heading. No release date announced.

Which MOBA Should You Play?

• Want more complexity? Dota 2. All heroes free, deeper mechanics, longer matches.
• Want a different perspective? Smite 2. Third-person camera changes everything. Console-friendly.
• Want shorter, simpler matches? Heroes of the Storm (PC) or Pokemon Unite (Switch/mobile).
• Want LoL on mobile? Wild Rift is the official mobile port. Mobile Legends and Honor of Kings are alternatives with larger mobile playerbases in certain regions.
• Want something new? Deadlock is the most ambitious experiment in the genre right now, if you can get access.

If you're sticking with League, LoLTheory gives you real-time item recommendations that update as enemies buy, so you're always building for the game you're actually in.

Sign in at account.riotgames.com, find the Riot Account Sign-In section, and update your password there. If you're locked out, use the password reset page instead.

Your Riot account password is shared across all Riot games. Changing it for League of Legends also changes it for Valorant, TFT, Wild Rift, and everything else on your account.

How to Change Your Password (When You Know It)

1. Go to account.riotgames.com and sign in
2. Find the Riot Account Sign-In section
3. Enter your current password, then type your new password
4. Click Save Changes

This logs you out of active sessions on other devices.

How to Reset Your Password (When You're Locked Out)

1. Go to recovery.riotgames.com
2. Enter the email address linked to your Riot account
3. Check your inbox for a password reset email from Riot
4. Click the reset link and set a new password

The reset link expires after 24 hours. If you don't see the email, check your spam folder.

Recovering Without Email Access

If you can no longer access the email address linked to your Riot account, the reset flow won't work. You'll need to submit a support ticket to Riot and verify your identity to regain access. Be prepared to answer questions about your account history (purchase records, creation date, IP address, etc.).

Password Requirements

Your new password must meet these rules:

• At least 8 characters long
• Contains at least one letter and at least one number or symbol
• Passes the on-screen strength meter (simple patterns like "password1" will be rejected)

After changing your password, consider enabling multi-factor authentication from the same account.riotgames.com page. Riot supports email codes, the Riot Mobile app, and third-party authenticator apps like Google Authenticator. You can also use the Login Management card there to log out of all active sessions across every device.

Looking to make other changes to your account? See our guides on how to change your Riot ID, how to change your region, or how to log out of League of Legends.

What LoLTheory's Overlay Does

LoLTheory's in-game overlay recommends items based on what the enemy team is actually building, updating every time someone makes a purchase. The enemy support finishes Frozen Heart and their jungler completes an armor item? Armor penetration gets weighted higher because the effective enemy armor profile just shifted.

The recommendations account for your runes, summoner spells, current items, and skill order.

No major tool does this. Most give you a build at game start and leave you on your own.

Why Win Rate Data Lies to You

Most recommendation tools rely on item win rates. The problem is that win rate data is systematically biased in ways that push you toward bad decisions.

Three biases worth knowing:

The Mejai's Problem. Mejai's Soulstealer shows roughly 80% win rate. Not because it's broken, but because nobody finishes it in a game they're losing. Subtler versions of this affect dozens of items. Any "win more" item gets its win rate inflated.

The One-Trick Tax. That off-meta item with a suspiciously high win rate? It's mostly bought by one-tricks with thousands of games. They'd win with almost anything. The item isn't good. The players are.

The Zhonya's Paradox. Zhonya's Hourglass shows a terrible win rate because you buy it when you're desperate. The item is doing its job, but the data says it's bad because the games where you need it are already going poorly.

Riot has acknowledged this directly: "Winrate has long been an unreliable stat for judging an item's power because purchase timings and champion selection so heavily biased these numbers."

LoLTheory's model adjusts for all three. Gold differences so snowball items aren't overvalued, player champion skill so meta builds aren't undervalued, and enemy matchups so defensive choices get fair consideration. The goal is to isolate each item's actual effect from the context it's purchased in.

An Overlay That Adapts While You Play

The overlay updates every time an enemy purchases something. Not between games. Not at loading screen. During the game.

The model evaluates your full context: runes, summoner spells, current items, skill order. Armor penetration is evaluated based on how much armor the enemy is actually building, not just "they have a tank."

Each card tells you not just what to buy but why: "Good Against → Magic Damage," "Good Against → Heals," "Generally Good." You didn't have to notice the purchase, do the math, or alt-tab.

It Starts Before the Game Does

The overlay isn't the whole product. Before you load in, LoLTheory recommends a full build package: runes, items, summoner spells, skill order, optimized together for your specific matchup. Not runes from one source, items from another. One model, one recommendation, calculated as a unit.

It also recommends champions and bans in champion select based on both teams' draft. The in-game overlay continues that logic into the match, adjusting as the game develops.

For the full picture, see What is LoLTheory?

Try it in your next game. Champion select features are fully free, and the in-game overlay includes a free tier. Download LoLTheory.

LoLTheory is a desktop app for League of Legends that helps you make better decisions from champion select through the end of the game. It recommends which champion to pick, what to build, and which items to buy next — adapting in real time as the game develops.

I built LoLTheory as an ex-Master player with a data science and economics background because most tools recommend a static build regardless of what's happening in your game.

Champion Select — Who to Pick and Who to Ban

Win rates and scores for every champion, updating live as both teams pick. Score = win rate minus risk, where risk is the quantifiable chance a pick could hurt your team. If your mid laner first picks Xerath, the system can help you think about how to cover him.

Ban recommendations factor in your teammates' current hovers — accounting for both how well the enemy champion performs against your team and how likely the enemy is to actually pick it.

Shareable link: Generate a link from the app showing the best picks for your teammates. Share it in chat so they get real-time recommendations too.

Flex pick detection: The system factors in the chance enemies don't go to their expected lane, adjusting both win rate and score calculations. Mouse over enemy roles to see lane probability estimates.

Three recommendation modes handle player experience differently:

• Personalized — uses your ranked game history from the last 10 patches. Best for maximizing your next game's win rate.
• Fixed — assumes 25 games on every champion. Best for expanding your pool or reading the meta without personal bias.
• Classic — works from raw win rates without experience adjustments. The most responsive to meta shifts.

Enemy threat highlighting shows which picks pose the most risk to your team.

For the full breakdown on how these modes work, see Recommendation Modes: Personalized, Fixed, and Classic.

Build Recommendations — Your Whole Setup, Optimized Together

Runes, items, summoner spells, and skill order — recommended as a single package, not independently. This matters because rune choices affect which items are optimal and vice versa. Most tools pick runes from one data source and items from another.

Builds adapt to both team compositions. Your build against a full AD team looks different from your build against mixed damage.

Lock a first item or keystone rune and the rest re-optimizes around your constraint — useful when you have a specific playstyle or strategy in mind.

The enemy damage breakdown bar shows the physical/magic/true damage split from the enemy team, helping guide your defensive itemization.

In-Game Item Overlay — Builds That Change as the Game Does

An in-game overlay that updates your item recommendations every time an enemy buys an item. Top 3 recommendations, each labeled with why: "Good Against → Magic Damage," "Generally Good."

The model corrects for known biases in item win rate data — snowball items, defensive items, and player experience effects all distort raw win rates. There's a deep dive on how this works and why it matters.

The system currently analyzes 5 items + boots per build.

Free: 1 game analyzed per day, stackable up to 5. Premium: unlimited and ad-free.

How It's Different

Adapts during the game. Most tools give you a build at game start and stop there. LoLTheory's overlay updates as enemies buy items.

Corrects the data. The model adjusts for biases that make raw item win rates misleading — so recommendations reflect actual item effectiveness, not distorted stats.

Optimized as a package. Runes, items, summoners, and skill order are calculated together for your matchup, not pulled from separate "highest win rate" lists.

Try it in your next game. Champion select features are fully free with no limits. The in-game overlay includes a free tier. Download LoLTheory.

Wave management is controlling where and when minion waves crash to create advantages — more gold, safer lanes, roam windows, and gank setups. Every laning decision you make (trading, roaming, recalling, setting up ganks) is downstream of wave state. There are three wave states you can create, and knowing which one to use in a given situation is what separates players who "win lane" from players who just farm.

The Three Wave States

There's also a neutral state — matching your opponent's push so the wave stays centered. This is the fallback when none of the other three are clearly better. If you're unsure what to do with the wave, keeping it in the middle is almost never wrong.

When to Use Each Wave State

The core question is: what do I want to do next?

A useful framing from high-elo coaching: think of wave management as tempo — net free time after your "duties" (clearing minions, recalling). Fast pushing creates tempo by finishing your duty quickly. Freezing trades your tempo for denying your opponent's. Slow pushing banks tempo for a future crash.

How to Freeze a Lane

Keep 3-4 extra enemy caster minions alive just outside your turret range and only last-hit. The enemy wave slightly outnumbers yours, so it stays on your side. For the full breakdown of freeze mechanics, matchup considerations, and how to break an enemy freeze, see our guide on freezing.

Two things to know about freezing that the dedicated guide doesn't cover:

• Freezing gets less valuable over time. Post-15 minutes, the game rewards pressure and map movement more than lane denial. At that point, slow pushing and fast pushing are almost always better.
• Freezing is elo-dependent. In Silver and below, you can freeze and opponents often have no idea how to respond — the main counter (roaming to create pressure elsewhere) is a skill most players at that level haven't developed. In Diamond+, players freeze briefly to deny 1-2 CS while the opponent is walking back from base, then break it themselves.

How to Slow Push

Kill the enemy caster minions first (they deal most of the wave's damage) while leaving the melee minions alive longer. This gives your wave a slight numbers advantage, and the push builds over 2-3 waves until a large wave crashes into the enemy tower.

The 3-wave crash is the most common slow push play. In the early game, slow push the first 3 waves into the enemy tower. The result: you'll be around 19 CS while they have roughly 6. After the crash, you have a window to ward, roam, contest scuttle, or recall.

When slow pushing makes sense:

• Your opponent is half health and not basing — the slow push forces them to either take a bad trade or lose the wave to tower
• You can't freeze (the wave isn't in the right position) and you can't safely roam yet
• You want to set up a dive — a 2-3 wave crash gives you minions to tank tower shots
• An objective is spawning soon — start the slow push, then leave for the objective as it crashes

Recall timing: Plan your recalls 1-2 waves in advance. The ideal recall is right after a slow push crashes into the enemy tower — you lose minimal CS because the tower kills your minions and resets the wave. Never recall on a cannon wave unless forced to — cannon minions are the highest-value minion in a wave and take a long time to die under tower, so the wave won't reset cleanly.

How to Fast Push

Use all your abilities and auto-attacks to clear the wave as fast as possible. The goal is to shove it under the enemy tower, buying yourself free time.

Fast push when:

• You need to recall and want the wave to reset
• Your opponent has already left lane (roamed or recalled) and you want to punish by crashing the wave into their tower, denying CS
• You're roaming — a cannon wave shove is the best roam timing because the enemy takes extra time clearing the high-value cannon under tower, extending your window
• You need to get to an objective quickly — arrive at Dragon or Baron at least 40 seconds before spawn to set up vision

Don't fast push when:

• Your Flash is down and you have no vision — pushing up without an escape is how you die to ganks
• You're pushing against a roaming champion — you're just letting them leave lane for free while you hit minions
• You have no follow-up plan — shoving the wave without warding, roaming, or recalling just gives the opponent free farm under their tower

How Wave Management Differs by Lane

Top Lane

The most effective lane for all wave management techniques. The lane is long and isolated, which makes freezes devastating (the enemy has a long walk back to safety and junglers rarely visit). Slow pushes are strong before Rift Herald or TP plays.

Mid Lane

Freezing mid is difficult. The lane is short, meaning the enemy doesn't have to walk far to farm even against a freeze. You're also more vulnerable to ganks from both sides. Mid lane wave management is mostly about fast pushing for roam windows and cannon-wave timing. If your opponent roams, push as quickly as you can — either follow once you see they've committed, or take tower damage and deny them CS if the roam fails.

One mid-specific trap: assassins can clear vision on their roam path, fake a roam, then sit in a bush and kill you when you follow. Approach river bushes cautiously or push and play back until you have information.

Bot Lane

Bot lane has four champions influencing the wave, which makes precise control harder. The ADC dictates wave position; the support's job is to set up and maintain that state.

What wave state to hold depends on your support type:

• Engage supports (Leona, Nautilus, Alistar): Keep the wave near your tower. The long chase distance means your CC chains have time to connect before the enemy reaches safety.
• Enchanters (Lulu, Nami, Janna): Push the wave. A minion advantage makes your skillshots easier to land and gives you a buffer against incoming ganks.
• Mage supports (Brand, Zyra, Lux): Push and zone. Use your range to poke when the enemy commits to CS.

Support roam windows: The cleanest roam is a rebound roam — crash the wave into the enemy tower, then leave. The wave bounces back toward your side, so your ADC farms safely near their own tower while you're gone. Before roaming, always check the wave state. If the wave is drifting toward the enemy, your ADC risks getting frozen on — break it first, then go.

If the enemy support roams on a bad wave, punish it: shove the wave into their tower and pressure the ADC. Don't just match the roam and leave your ADC alone in a worse position.

If your support dies, freeze near tower so they can catch up on XP when they return.

Common Wave Management Mistakes

• Pushing with no Flash and no vision. You're overextended with no escape. Even if you "win" the push, one gank costs you more than the CS was worth.
• Pushing without a plan. If you shove the wave and then stand in lane waiting for the next one, you've gained nothing. Every push should have a follow-up: ward, roam, recall, or pressure the tower.
• Not pulling waves when the opponent is low. If your opponent is low HP and can't contest the wave, don't let it crash into their tower. Pull it back by tanking a few minion hits — this sets up a freeze and denies them the ability to safely farm or base.
• Sacrificing a clean recall for tower plates. Plates are tempting, but a clean recall with good timing is usually worth more. Staying for one extra plate often means the wave resets badly, you're low on HP, and you lose tempo on the next wave cycle.
• Joining a teammate's failed play. If a teammate dies in a skirmish, don't run over and die too. Use their death timer to fix side-lane waves or take jungle camps — you're converting a bad situation into resources instead of compounding the loss.

Wave management is one of the highest-leverage skills for climbing ranked. It determines your gold income, your safety, and how much pressure you can exert on the map. If you're looking to make your advantages stick, LoLTheory can help with the other half — optimized item builds that adapt to what you're actually facing in each game.

Tilting is when frustration takes over your decision-making. You stop playing to win and start playing on autopilot — making worse decisions, missing things you'd normally see, taking fights you'd normally avoid. The term comes from pinball (physically tilting the machine in anger) and migrated through poker into competitive gaming.

The fix isn't "just don't get mad." A 2024 study on tilt and emotion regulation in gamers found that tilt severity drops when players use specific strategies — distraction, reappraisal, and session limits — rather than trying to suppress the emotion.

The Three Types of Tilt (They Need Different Fixes)

Not all tilt is the same. Treating it as one thing is why most advice doesn't stick.

1. Teammate Frustration

You're angry at your teammates and you stop caring about winning. This is the most common type — a UC Irvine study of esports players found that 60% of tilt triggers are people-related. The danger isn't the anger itself. It's that once you stop caring, your play gets dramatically less sharp. You'll miss things you'd normally catch, even if you're still going through the motions.

What helps: Mute early and selectively. The blanket "mute all at game start" advice is common, but you do lose real communication. A better approach: as soon as you think there's any chance someone might tilt you, mute them immediately. If you find yourself starting to argue, stop and ask: "Is this helping me win?" It never is. It's not your job to educate a stranger you'll play with once.

2. Lost Confidence

You made mistakes and now you don't trust your own decisions. This is the hardest type to fix because a huge part of League is making plays — going in, taking risks, creating opportunities. If you're not confident, you stop doing that, and your impact craters.

What helps: Shift your frame. Try champions or strategies you've been curious about — give yourself a reason to not be at peak performance that isn't "I'm bad right now." You're still trying to win, but you've reframed the session from "I must perform" to "I'm adding tools to my toolkit." This makes grinding through the rough patch less painful and often surfaces new things that work for you.

3. Life Outside the Game

Something external has you off — a bad day, a failed exam, a personal problem. You're not fully present. The effect is similar to teammate frustration: your decision quality drops because your attention isn't all there. This is useful to recognize even if you still choose to play. You won't perform at your best, and knowing that in advance can prevent a spiral when things go wrong in-game.

How to Reset Mid-Game

The critical window is the 30 seconds after a tilting moment — a bad death, a stolen objective, an AFK teammate. That's when the spiral starts. If you can interrupt it there, you can usually salvage the rest of the game.

The doorway trick: When you die and you're frustrated, physically get up and walk through a door — to the bathroom, the kitchen, anywhere. This isn't just "take a break." Research on the doorway effect (Gabriel Radvansky, University of Notre Dame) shows that your brain treats doorways as event boundaries. Your brain files away the previous context and opens a new one. You'll come back with a genuinely clearer head, not just a forced calm. You have time while dead. Use it.

Narrow your focus. Don't think about the game state. Don't think about your tilting teammate. Think about exactly one thing: what is the highest-value play I can make in the next 30 seconds? Sport psychology research calls this self-distancing: instead of "I'm playing like garbage," shift to "what is the next correct decision?" That reframe measurably reduces anger and improves decision-making under pressure.

Don't type. If you're about to type something in chat, wait 10 seconds. If you still want to type it, mute the person instead. Nothing productive has ever come from a ranked chat argument at minute 15.

Preventing Tilt Before You Queue

Set a session limit before you start. Decide "I'm playing 3 games" or "I'm stopping after 2 losses" before you queue the first game. This prevents the sunk cost spiral where you keep queueing to "win back" LP. Commit to the limit before emotions are involved.

Check your state. Are you tired? Hungry? Already frustrated from something else? If you start a session in a compromised state, you're more likely to tilt early and less likely to recover. This sounds obvious but most players never actually ask themselves before queuing.

Remember what you control. You're one of ten players. Some games your team will win regardless of what you do. Some games they'll lose regardless. The games that matter — the ones where your play actually determines the outcome — are the ones where tilt is most costly, because those are exactly the games where your decision quality needs to be highest.

After a Tilted Session

If you tilted through a session, the worst thing you can do is queue again immediately. The second worst thing is ruminate about what happened.

Write one sentence. Not a full game review — just one sentence about something you could have controlled. "I kept fighting when I was behind instead of farming." "I didn't mute the Draven after the first argument." This externalizes it and prevents the spiral of replaying the frustrating moments in your head.

Then walk away. Breaks and shifting to another enjoyable activity are the most reliable way to reduce tilt severity. Come back when you can honestly say you're ready to focus.

Tilt and Your Rank

Tilt can genuinely suppress your rank by a division or two. A player who tilts regularly is throwing games they have the skill to win — and those thrown games are disproportionately the close ones where their play matters most. If you fix nothing else about your gameplay but reduce how often and how badly you tilt, you will climb.

The most tilt-proof mindset is treating each game as practice. If your goal is to improve rather than to gain LP, a loss stings less because you can still extract value from it. That doesn't mean you stop trying to win — it means you evaluate your session by whether you played well, not by whether you gained LP.

Playing from behind means your job changes. You're no longer the player who wins the game through aggression and outplays. You're the player who stops the bleeding, avoids making things worse, and enables the teammates who can still carry. Most players never make that mental shift, and that's why a 0/2 lane turns into an 0/7 one.

The First Rule: Stop Making It Worse

When you're behind, you have less ability to influence the game positively. You can't force fights, take 1v1s, or pressure objectives as effectively. But you still have full ability to influence the game negatively — you can still throw, still take bad fights, still die and hand over bounty gold.

So the first priority is simple: stop dying. An 0/2 score is recoverable. An 0/6 score means you've handed the enemy enough gold to snowball the whole game. Every death when you're behind is more costly than a death when you're even, because the enemy is already ahead and you're accelerating their lead.

This means accepting things you'd normally fight for:

• Accept lower CS. Missing a few minions is better than dying for them.
• Give up plates. They're not worth a death.
• Don't contest a fight you'll probably lose just because an objective is up.

What to Do When You're Losing Lane

If you've fallen behind in lane, you have two options depending on your champion and the game state:

Farm safely and scale. Some champions — scaling mages, late-game carries — just need time and gold. If your champion outscales your lane opponent, surviving is winning. Freeze the wave near your tower (not under it — just outside tower range), give up plates if you have to, and wait for your power spikes.

Roam and create value elsewhere. If your lane is lost and your champion can influence other lanes, accept that you lost this matchup and go find value somewhere else. Push the wave out, then move. The key: get ahead of your lane opponent on the rotation. If they follow you and you both show up at dragon, you're a net negative because they're stronger. But if you arrive first, or if you force your lane opponent to stay by threatening their tower when they try to leave, you've created an advantage your team didn't have.

This requires some understanding of wave management, but the concept is straightforward: whenever your lane opponent is not in lane, you have freedom. Whenever you can leave before they do, you have an opportunity.

Being Carried Is a Skill

This is the part most players refuse to learn. Understanding how to carry is important, but understanding how to be carried — how to enable a fed teammate — is equally important and almost never talked about.

When you're behind, your job changes. Ask yourself:

• Who on my team is the win condition right now? (It's not you.)
• How do I avoid becoming a bigger liability?
• How do I enable the teammates who are ahead?

Adjust how you play teamfights. If you normally play a dive champion who jumps on the enemy backline, but you're behind, the right play might be peeling for your fed ADC instead. Or diving with the fed bruiser to enable their play rather than making your own. Your goal shifts from "I kill their carry" to "I make sure our carry survives" or "I make our fed player's dive succeed."

Part of being carried is freeing up your jungler. If you're far enough behind that you can't win the 2v2 — or worse, might lose the 1v2 — your jungler should not be spending time ganking your lane. Every gank attempt in a lost lane is time your jungler isn't helping a lane that can actually convert. Your win condition at this point is other lanes getting ahead, and you enable that by not being a resource drain. If you're the jungler and a lane is lost, do the same thing in reverse: play through the stronger side of the map and only visit the losing lane if the enemy jungler is committed elsewhere.

The players who lose most when behind are the ones with "main character syndrome" — they keep taking coin-flip plays trying to prove they can carry. Executing a mediocre plan together with your team is almost always better than one person trying to do the "correct" thing alone.

How to Build When You're Behind

This varies by champion type, and it's hard to give one-size-fits-all advice, but a rough heuristic helps:

If you're a tank or bruiser: Build tankier than you normally would. Your job when behind shifts toward absorbing damage and providing crowd control, not dealing damage. Getting tankier makes you more useful in that role.

If you're a carry (ADC, mage, assassin): Counterintuitively, building defensive items often isn't the answer. Your value to the team is damage — even when behind, you're still a threat that the enemy has to respect. If you're squishy and the enemy assassin dives you instead of your fed mid laner, that's actually good for your team. Put more weight on your positioning instead of trying to itemize your way out of being behind.

During laning phase specifically: A cheap defensive component (Null-Magic Mantle against AP, Cloth Armor against AD) can be worth it to survive lane and keep farming. Once you've moved into teamfights, the carry vs. tank distinction above matters more.

Playing for Objectives When Behind

Playing for objectives when you're behind is good — but you have to be smart about it. If you bring your ahead lane opponent to the fight, you're a net negative. The enemy team gets more value from their player being there than your team gets from you.

Two approaches:

• Win the rotation. Get to the objective before your lane opponent. If you're already there when the fight starts, your team has the numbers advantage even if you're individually weaker.
• Keep your lane opponent occupied. If you can't beat them to the objective, keep them in lane by pressuring their tower. Anytime they leave, look for tower damage or aggressive plays. This forces them to choose between helping their team and losing their tower.

And when pushing for objectives while behind — don't die doing it. You can be the player who creates a great objective setup, then do something overaggressive, die, and lose the objective you just set up. That's worse than not trying at all.

The Mental Side of Playing From Behind

A lot of playing from behind is really about not tilting. Being behind feels bad. It's frustrating, especially when it's not your fault. But the biggest problem isn't the deficit itself. It's mentally surrendering before the game is actually over.

Someone types "ff" in chat, and even if the team keeps playing, the quality of everyone's decisions drops. They stop trying to find the right play and start going through the motions. Once that happens, the game really is over — but it didn't have to be.

Below Platinum, comebacks are common. People throw leads constantly. Even above Platinum, games are rarely mathematically unwinnable — they just feel that way. Riot literally designed the game with comeback mechanics: champion shutdowns give bonus gold for killing fed players, and objective bounties reward the losing team for claiming towers and neutral objectives. The systems exist to give you a path back. The question is whether you're in the right headspace to use them.

The most useful mindset shift: when a game feels lost, switch from "I need to win this" to "I'm going to practice playing from behind." That's the most tilt-proof frame available, because you can succeed at it even if you lose the game.

When Surrendering Is Actually Fine

A healthy surrender mindset exists. You don't have to fight every game to the nexus. But the bar should be high — not "we're down 5 kills" but "multiple inhibitors are down before 25 minutes and we have no scaling or engage." Most games that feel unwinnable at 15 minutes look very different at 30.

The real question isn't "should we ff?" It's "am I still learning something from this game?" If you are — if you're practicing farming from behind, teamfight positioning, objective setup — then the game has value regardless of the outcome. If you've genuinely checked out mentally and you're not learning or trying, that's when a surrender vote makes sense. Not because the game is unwinnable, but because your time is better spent resetting and starting fresh.

A gank is an ambush — one or more players leave their lane or jungle to create a numbers advantage in another lane and score a kill or force the enemy out of position. The term is short for "gang kill," borrowed from MMORPGs where it meant jumping someone who couldn't fight back. In League of Legends, ganking is the jungler's primary tool for influencing lanes, though mid laners and supports can gank too. A gank doesn't have to end in a kill to be worth it.

What Counts as a Successful Gank

Most players think a gank failed if nobody died. That's wrong. Ganks exist on a spectrum:

1. Kill — best outcome. The enemy loses gold, XP, and lane pressure.
2. Burn Flash — Flash has a 300-second cooldown. For the next 5 minutes, that laner is gankable again with no escape tool. A Flash burn often leads to a kill on the return gank.
3. Burn a key ability — forcing a dash, shield, or defensive ultimate (like Zhonya's Hourglass) leaves the enemy vulnerable to your laner even after you leave.
4. Force a recall — the enemy loses CS, the wave pushes into tower, and your laner gets a free back or plate.

If you burned the enemy's Flash and walked away, that gank was successful. Come back in two minutes and finish it.

When to Gank

The single biggest factor is wave position. If the enemy is pushed past the halfway point toward your laner's tower, they have a long run back to safety. If the wave is on the enemy's side, don't bother — they'll just walk under tower.

Before committing to a gank, check four things:

1. Wave position — is the enemy overextended?
2. Summoner spells — is Flash down? Tab to check or ask your laner. A flashless target is roughly twice as easy to kill.
3. Your laner's state — do they have HP, mana, and at least one CC ability available? If your laner is at 20% HP with no mana, they can't follow up and you're walking into a 1v1.
4. Enemy jungler location — if you don't know where the enemy jungler is, there's a countergank risk. If you saw them on the opposite side of the map, the gank is safer.

Don't force ganks on a timer. Farm your camps, watch the lanes, and go when the conditions line up. Wasting 30 seconds walking to a lane that isn't gankable costs you more than just staying in the jungle.

How to Execute a Gank

The most common mistake junglers make is burning their abilities too early. Here's the pattern that works:

Hold your gap closer. If you have a dash or leap (Lee Sin Q, Vi Q, Jarvan E-Q), don't open with it at max range. Walk at the target first. If they panic and Flash, you still have your gap closer to follow. If you open with the dash and they Flash, you're stuck.

Walk at them before using CC. This applies especially to skillshot CC — Amumu bandage, Elise cocoon, Sejuani ult. Closing the distance on foot before throwing makes the skillshot harder to dodge and forces the enemy to decide: do they Flash now or hold it? Either choice is good for you. If they Flash early, your CC is still available. If they hold Flash, you're close enough to land it reliably.

Make the play easier on yourself. The goal is to reduce reliance on hitting a max-range skillshot. Get close, cut off the escape route by positioning between the enemy and their tower, and then use your abilities. A point-blank Amumu Q is nearly unmissable. A max-range one from river gives them time to sidestep.

Exception: if the enemy is already all-inning your laner or diving under tower, speed matters more than patience. Use your gap closer immediately to join the fight.

Common Gank Mistakes

• Ganking a pushed lane — if the enemy is under their own tower, you're not ganking them. You're diving, and that's a different (much riskier) play.
• Walking through wards — if you cross the river through a warded bush, the enemy sees you coming and backs off. You've wasted time and shown your position. Check for wards or take alternative paths (behind dragon/baron pit, through lane bushes).
• Repeatedly ganking a losing lane — if your laner is 0/4 and two levels behind, the enemy can probably 1v2 you both. Gank the lanes that are even or winning to build advantages elsewhere.
• No objective follow-up — you got a kill bot lane. Now what? If Dragon is up, take it. If tower plates are available, push. A kill that leads to nothing but the jungler standing in lane soaking XP isn't converting the advantage.

Setting Up Ganks as a Laner

Ganking is a two-person play. If you want your jungler to gank your lane, you need to give them something to work with:

• Keep the wave on your side. Don't perma-push. A wave near your tower means the enemy is overextended and has a long run to safety.
• Save your CC. If you're Leona, don't E onto the enemy the instant your jungler appears on a ward. Wait for the jungler to engage first, then chain your CC after theirs. Layered CC is far more effective than blowing everything at once.
• Ping ward locations. If you know the river bush is warded, ping it so your jungler takes a different path. A 2-second ping saves a 30-second wasted gank.
• Follow through. When the jungler goes in, go in. Hesitating or walking away turns a 2v1 into a 1v1 and gets your jungler killed.

Ganking is one piece of getting better at League — it combines map awareness, timing, and mechanical execution. If you're learning jungle, focus on reading lane states before worrying about flashy plays. The best ganks are the ones where you show up at the right time, not the ones where you hit a max-range skillshot. For builds that help you convert those ganks into kills, LoLTheory's in-game overlay updates your item recommendations as the enemy team builds — so you spend your gold on what actually works in that game.

Getting better at League and climbing ranked are the same thing. Your rank is a function of how much better you are than the people you're playing against — a Challenger player in Silver wins almost every game, which tells you it's absolutely possible to influence the vast majority of your matches. The question is how to close that gap efficiently.

There's no single trick. Improvement comes from a mix of intentional practice, raw game volume, and learning to ask yourself the right questions.

What to Fix at Your Rank

The biggest mistake in most improvement advice is treating every player the same. An Iron player and a Platinum player have completely different bottlenecks, and the same tip is useless for both if it doesn't match where they are.

If you're in Iron, spending time on advanced macro concepts is premature. If you're in Platinum, someone telling you to "just CS better" is missing the point. Find your bottleneck and focus there.

Create Opportunities, Then Convert Them

The single most impactful climbing skill is conversion: turning an advantage into an objective. It's not about kills. A player who gets three kills and then dies trying for a fourth has done less than a player who gets one kill and takes a tower.

Conversion means asking: "What is next?" After a kill, after a successful gank, after winning a teamfight — what objective can you take right now? Tower? Dragon? Can you shove a side wave and force map pressure? Games look radically different across elos because lower-ranked players don't convert. They get kills and then wander.

A simple rule of thumb: look for ganks — even if you're not the jungler — and then convert them into objectives. If your jungler ganks bot and gets a kill, that's a dragon opportunity. If mid lane roams and picks up a kill top, that's Rift Herald. The gank is the opportunity. The objective is the conversion.

The flip side: don't die after getting ahead. You can be the most influential player on your team, get everyone ahead, then do something careless, die, lose an objective, and suddenly your team is behind. One death when you're carrying is worth more than three deaths when you're even.

Play With Your Team (Even When They're Wrong)

Your teammates won't always do what you expect. They'll make calls you disagree with, take fights you wouldn't take, and ignore objectives you're pinging. You still have to work with them.

Executing a mediocre plan together is almost always better than one person trying to do the "correct" thing alone. If your team is grouping mid when you think splitting is better, joining them and fighting 5v5 is usually higher value than splitting alone and watching them lose 4v5. At the same time, recognizing when something is clearly wrong — an unwinnable fight, a lost objective — and choosing not to participate is also a skill.

When you're behind, this matters even more. Your job changes: you're no longer the carry. You're enabling whoever on your team can carry. That might mean peeling for your fed ADC instead of diving the backline, or setting up vision around the fed player's pressure zone. Being carried is a real skill, and the players who struggle most when behind are the ones who refuse to accept that their role has shifted. For a deeper dive on this, see our guide on playing from behind.

How to Actually Practice

There are two modes of improvement, and you should switch between them:

Cerebral mode: You're actively trying to improve — setting a goal before a session, reviewing afterward, adjusting your approach. If you go many games without seeing progress, that's a signal something needs to change.

Volume mode: You're just grinding games. This still has value. A lot of improvement comes from raw repetition and pattern recognition that you can't force through deliberate analysis. Not everyone benefits equally from pure volume, though, so mixing in intentional practice matters.

Within cerebral mode, there are tiers of structure. Pick whatever level you can actually sustain:

1. Full structure: Go into the game with a specific goal, review your gameplay afterward, and refine. This is optimal but most people won't do it consistently.
2. Light structure: Jot down one or two notes after each game — what you did well, what you didn't. Even this is more than most players do.
3. Minimal: Go in with one or two things you want to think about. At the end, ask yourself whether you did them. No replay review, just a mental check.

The key insight is that if you're trying to improve something specific — macro, trading, wave management — you have to actually apply it in-game and then ask: "Did I use this effectively?" That's how the learning sticks. Watching a guide on wave management and then never consciously thinking about waves in your next game means you didn't practice anything.

Layer Your In-Game Thinking

At every rank, the players who improve fastest are the ones asking themselves questions during the game. The concept is layering: you start with a few questions, and as those become second nature, you add more.

Start with basics:

• Where do I think the enemy jungler is?
• Is my lane opponent's key ability on cooldown?
• Do I have vision of the threat right now?

As those become automatic, layer on more:

• In this skirmish, who is the most valuable target for me to focus?
• Has the enemy used key ultimates (Lissandra R, Leona R)?
• What should I do in the 30 seconds after this teamfight ends?

You won't be able to hold many of these at first. That's normal. The goal is to train yourself to run this loop of questions until the early ones are second nature and you have bandwidth for harder ones. This is how decision-making improves: not by learning more facts, but by building habits of attention.

For role-specific questions and checklists, see our guides for mid, jungle, top, ADC, and support.

Don't Autopilot Your Builds

A common mistake, especially below Diamond: building the same items every game regardless of the matchup. Champions change between patches. Items get buffed and nerfed. The build that was optimal two patches ago might not be anymore.

At minimum, check that your build is current before a session. If you want to take it further, LoLTheory's in-game overlay adapts your item recommendations in real time — not just to the meta, but to the specific enemy champions and builds you're facing in each game.

Tilt Will Undo Everything Else

You can have the right champion pool, perfect practice habits, and strong game knowledge — and tilt will throw all of it away. When you're tilted, you revert to autopilot. You stop asking questions, stop converting leads, and start taking fights you know are bad.

Tilt can genuinely suppress your rank by a division or two. If you fix nothing else about your gameplay but reduce how often and how badly you tilt, you will climb. We wrote a full guide on how to stop tilting — the short version is: recognize it early, take breaks when your decision quality drops, and treat rank as a lagging indicator of your actual improvement.

Your Rank (Mostly) Reflects Your Level

If you're struggling to climb, that usually is your elo. That's not a judgment. It's useful information. Small adjustments (avoiding tilt, building correctly, dodging unwinnable lobbies) can bump you a division or two, but if you've been hardstuck for hundreds of games, the answer is usually that you need to improve at something fundamental, not that matchmaking is holding you back.

The right measure of progress isn't whether you won or lost. It's whether you're making better decisions. MMR is a better real-time signal than your visible rank, which lags behind actual skill changes. Focus on the process and the results will follow — it just takes time. Most players need thousands of games to reach high ranks. What lowers that number is how much you learn from each one.

Resources Worth Your Time

Most improvement content is generic tip lists. These are the resources that actually teach why things work, not just what to do:

• Virkayu (jungle) — Master tier jungler with a formal teaching background. Covers pathing, decision-making, and rank-specific advice. The most credible pure-jungle resource available.
• AloisNL (top lane) — EU Challenger since Season 8. His smurf commentary format genuinely teaches wave management, split pushing, and teleport timing.
• Coach Curtis (mid lane) — Former pro, Challenger multiple seasons. Teaches concepts and reasoning, not just execution. Mid-lane specific.
• ShoDesu (support) — 1100 LP NA, #1 ranked enchanter. Produces structured season-by-season support guides covering vision systems, roam timing, and current mechanics like Faelights.
• r/summonerschool — The largest improvement-focused League community. Weekly threads, replay reviews, matchup discussions. Quality varies but the best threads are genuinely useful.