[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to the Four Wards podcast.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Hey, what's up? It's Eric Brah, voice of Draven, Jerks and Velkoz. And you're listening to the Four Wards podcast here to help you move forward and lead.
Hello and welcome to episode 459 of the Four Wards podcast. I'm your host as usual. I'm Jack Zoman and I've got with me three other wards to help you move forward in League of Legends Crush. You has returned to us this week the never present.
[00:00:51] Speaker C: Hooray.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Man, it was not very long ago that you were proud of being ever present.
[00:00:58] Speaker C: Yeah, well, things change.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: We've also got Pillow Pet.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Hello there.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: And Mike of many names.
[00:01:07] Speaker D: I'm pretty sure I've stolen that ever present line now at this point.
[00:01:11] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Yeah, you're the closest to ever present other than me that we have.
[00:01:17] Speaker C: And the default host doesn't get the title.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: No, that's the rules. I'm the one who edits the show together. I'm here every week by necessity. I don't get to be ever present on this show.
It's fine, it's fine. Guys. I've managed to pull myself away from Path of Exile two long enough to bring you a podcast this week.
All right, guys, we are the Forwards podcast. We have a Discord. Come join the Discord. Come hang out, Come play games, ask us questions. Chat. It's a great time. Link is in the episode description.
We also stream on Twitch. I can be found again streaming Path of Exile 2, specifically right now at Twitch TV. Jacksomen Crush can be found at Twitch TV CrushU.
I'm gonna plug him because he's actually been streaming recently and he was supposed to be here tonight. Freeshooter has started streaming some Elden Ring gameplay at Twitch tv. Freeshooter. That's right. There are three E's in free.
Pillow Pet can be found at Twitch tv. Pillow Pet and Mike has also been streaming recently at Twitch TV Katsura444. All of those links are in the episode description as well.
We do have to give some shout outs though. Codex Ninja, Pillow Pet and Robigon support us at the shout out tier on our Patreon. Thank you guys so much for making it so that we can actually afford to do this show.
We do have a patreon. It is patreon.com theforwardspodcast $1 a month just tells us that you love us. $5 a month gets you access to an exclusive feed of some behind the scenes audio of our prep work before each show. Sometimes it's actual podcast prep, sometimes it's just us bullshitting. It depends. And then $10 a month will get you shouted out just like Codex, Ninja, Pillow Pet and Robigon.
Last but not least, listeners.
Dota Fan saved y'all. We got one new question this week. We need questions right into theforwardspodcastmail.com so we can answer your questions on the show.
Alright with that, our topic for tonight because this is not a patch week, even though it's been two weeks since the last patch, we had to come up with a topic. And what we came up with is we're going to talk a little bit about the concept of limit testing and then about branching out from your limit testing and into new stuff.
So let's start with what the hell is limit testing, guys?
[00:04:01] Speaker A: So like the quick and easy explanation of limit testing is just going and doing something you normally wouldn't do to see what your champion can do.
Like to see where you stand like in a situation like just walking up in 1v1 someone that you normally would be scared to 1v1 and seeing if.
[00:04:22] Speaker C: You win doing something when you are not sure of the outcome.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Yep.
This would be.
I'm level two on Silas. Let me see if I can dodge the CC and all in this person. That's limit testing.
[00:04:39] Speaker C: One of. One of the most interesting things of limit testing is that it's. It is literally different for every person because like for someone who's new to the game, literally everything is limit testing.
For someone who's been around the game for a while, not much can be limited tested anymore. Except for like, let's play a new champion that I've never played before or something like that.
Yeah, it's. It's interesting. Talk about it that way.
[00:05:06] Speaker B: I. I definitely used that Silas as an example of a game I played on the fifth where I absolutely just beat the out of a Lux. And then it didn't matter.
[00:05:19] Speaker C: Just yesterday I was like, I'm playing Nocturn. There's a Jarvan. I think I win. He tried to fight me over Scuttle Crab. I'm like, I'm pretty sure I win level four versus Jarvan as Nocturne.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: As long as you shield one of his skills. Yes.
[00:05:30] Speaker C: I failed to spell shield any of his skills. I still beat him.
[00:05:34] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:05:34] Speaker C: I had to use creative use of flash. He tried to throw a flag at me and I flashed away from the flag in order to get my Q to come back off. Cooldown. Then I hit him with a Q and turn around and killed him. And I had like 10 HP left. So it was, it was very, very close. And that was with me not hitting the spell shield like, so that was, that was a limit test. Like, I'm pretty sure I beat Jarvan here. Pretty sure. I think I had to hit a spell shield though, and I didn't. And I'm like, well, maybe I just lose. Well, maybe I can win anyway.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: I would say, like when you start limit testing, it's gonna be very easy to be discouraged when you start limit testing because most likely when you first start it, you're going to lose that limit test.
And it's, it's important to not get discouraged and to continue trying and pushing yourself out of a comfort zone to find out what your champ can do.
That being said, don't just keep running in and continually limit testing in the same game because once you've lost that first time now you're going to be way behind on resources. Then your limit testing now is just going to be a lot harder and.
[00:06:45] Speaker D: Feeding that also being said, once you've done the limit test once and it fails, you may be on the end of a feed fest depending on what you did at that time.
So even if it was a one tiny mistake that got you there, don't be afraid of going out later and doing things because there's always a point in a game when you can maybe do something of an impact.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: Yep. I would also say in that same sense, your limit test success does not necessarily dictate whether or not it was the right thing to do. Sometimes when you limit test, your opponent will just make a stupid mistake. I'm going to use that Silas example. I said I'm against a Lux. I'm Silas.
I bait out her root and I dodge it with my E and all in her and kill her the next time around. In this particular game, the Lux I was against was very bad. She didn't learn from her mistakes.
What she should have learned was to hold the root.
You just, when Sylas walks up, he can't dodge it anymore because you're in melee range. It comes out instantly, basically. Then you root him and you walk away. But she didn't do that.
My limit testing, I continue to succeed because she didn't learn from her mistakes.
If I had been against a better player the second time or third time I tried to do the same thing, she would have reacted differently and the outcome may have been different.
And that's the important thing to take away when you're limit testing is you need to go, oh, that worked. Why did that work? Oh, that didn't work. What did I do wrong? Not just, oh, that worked. That was good. Oh, that didn't work. That was bad.
[00:08:39] Speaker D: So having just looked at my match history, there is another thing that this is not necessarily limit testing.
Mindless aggression isn't limit testing. Just pushing and going and going and going. That's not limit testing. I was in a game three days ago where we were winning very heavily and then someone would not stop just going in.
Jackson on this one, it was pike and he refused to stop going in 1v1, 1v2, 1v3.
That's not limit testing anymore. Now you're just feeding.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: So this might not be like great advice, but this is what I like to do personally when I'm limit testing and like to touch back what Crush said earlier. Usually for me now it comes out to limit testing is when I'm trying out new champions and trying to expand my champion pool or switch to a different role. So lately I've been playing a lot of Gragas and Jayce just trying to pick up the champions because I've enjoyed them. When I first start a new champion, the first thing I do is I limit test. I want to see where I'm at with this champion, what it does, what its damage output is at level one to through through three. Usually level three when I got abilities. And then after that, I'm like, okay, now I'm gonna step back. I'm gonna learn this champion a little bit and I'm gonna grow from there. So for instance, when I first started playing Gragas, I was feeding in these lanes because I didn't really know a whole lot of the combos. Like when I first started playing Gragas, I did not know that my belly bump, my E would stop on Minions. I thought I went through a minion wave because I didn't pay that much attention to it. And then I started learning all these champions. Now I'm at a point where I'm going mostly positive in all my games with very low death counters. Because I start, I feel like I started off knowing, okay, this is what much how much damage I can expect going into a level three fight and where I know, okay, I did this much damage. I did this. I can auto once here. And now I got to get back. Like, I've limit tested my trading patterns. Not to all the way from just a 1v1 death battle. I limit test with my trading patterns.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: Yep.
A lot of times when I play like artillery mage skillshot type champions, a lot of my limit testing is just I'm going to fire this skill shot at them and see how they react.
And then I know because I've fired this skill until it's back off cooldown. I need to play safe. I have just spent a tool.
[00:11:24] Speaker A: And that brings up another good point repeatedly.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: Okay, what is this guy going to do? And once I've noticed a pattern, then I'm like locked in and I start predicting what the guy is going to do and then I'm limit testing of can I force him to make the wrong play.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: And that brings up another good point. Not every champion is going to have the same kind of limit test. You're not. Like when you're in a top lane with a melee matchup, it's going to be an all out brawl limit test. When you're playing ADCs, it's going to be a poke limit test. When you're playing mages, it's going to be the same kind of okay cast, like learning your opponent's like movements and trying to hit skill shots. You can't just walk up with like a Zerath and right click and limit test because it's not going to work.
[00:12:10] Speaker C: Right.
[00:12:11] Speaker D: Speaking of things like that, one of the things that I've, I've actually come notice this one is mages should be using your auto attacks a lot. That's part of your limit testing. You need to be using those within your trades if you can.
You're gonna do a lot more damage. And this, this is coming from a game that I also had recently where I was playing Syndra into Katarina and I consistently got her with one auto attack left. But I was playing so far back because it's a Katarina that I never got to use that auto attack. If I'd been playing a little bit farther forward, playing into the stun range, I would have had kill after kill on her.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I think one of the only.
[00:12:54] Speaker C: Real things about limit testing, I want to say left, is it was touched on earlier. Be prepared to lose. Like limit testing is a mindset of trying to learn something, not necessarily of trying to win.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: Exactly. Good point.
So like, I'm still in my inting phase with Jace. Like I'm usually in double digit deaths at the end of the game because I have not completely picked up what I can and cannot do with Jace.
[00:13:24] Speaker C: Right.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: And that's okay. Like I'm allowed to lose games, you're allowed to lose games. You're allowed to have bad games and you're allowed to learn from those games.
Like, you do not have to lose all your confidence because you had a game with. I'm looking. I was 10 and 11 and then I had a. Let me find the 12 and 14. Because I had 14 deaths does not mean I need to be like, okay, I entered a lot. How can I int less next game. And then the next game you have less deaths, and then you have less deaths after that. And then you just keep going until you're at a point where, like, you're getting double or triple the kills and you are your deaths. And then you can. Then your confidence will keep growing from there.
[00:14:10] Speaker D: I have one more minor point that I just thought of real quick.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:14:13] Speaker D: Don't be afraid to switch up what you're doing with a limit test.
[00:14:18] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:14:19] Speaker D: You can think of. This is what I'm going to be trying to do as I go in. Don't be afraid to stop and rethink that and go, no, this is not the right play for the moment that I'm in. Something has changed. The scenario has changed. Now it's time to do a different thing.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: I have absolutely had times where on Silas, I. E forward to aggress on my lane opponent and I see the enemy jungler pop out. So instead of doing the E2 on my lane opponent I. E to the jungler to get away from my lane opponents and get away that way.
[00:14:52] Speaker D: That's. That's a great one. Another one. Like, I've been doing a lot of amumu jungle, and I've been starting off fights. We're going in aggressive. We're starting into a fight. And then there's a jinx in the back corner that's now all alone and squishy. And oh, wait, if I just stop that. We're going back in to save her. I will do everything in my power to save her life.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: God, you and I played a game where you were amumu where you just fucking popped off with the most godly peels I've ever seen out of any amumu.
[00:15:24] Speaker C: You can do it.
[00:15:27] Speaker D: That is exactly the game I was thinking of because it started off really aggressive. I was able to get in there. I was able to win fights. We were winning 1v1s, 2v2s. I could be aggressive in there. And then there's a point in time in that game, in mid combat where it goes, all right, I'm in the middle of, oh, no, I need to be going over there. Right now I'm going to flash in front of this stun, throw a different ability out.
Don't be afraid to switch it up. A limit test can be something like that. Hey, this is now a different game. We're trying it this way here. We're doing everything in our power to do this thing, but it's a little different than what we thought we were doing.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: We haven't mentioned it yet. And another thing that's going to completely change up your limit testing on a. Even if you played the character a hundred times, is your rune like, what rune you're running? So, like, your limit test, say with like, electrocute, is going to be a lot different than your limit test with Conquer. Like, I think Silas can run both those runes. Correct.
Like just using him, for example. Like with a Silas, you're gonna probably go in and just try to proc. Electe. There's your burst. Now you're going back out. With conqueror, you're gonna completely try to get. I'm sorry, I just hit my mic. You're gonna try and completely stack up that conqueror and keep that tempo with conqueror running. Whereas, like, electrocutes an in and out kind of rune.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: Yeah. You're not even going to build the same items. If you go conqueror versus Electrocute. Electrocute, you're going to be going like lich Bane, a storm surge, just burst people build. You're very squishy. Conqueror, you're going like Rod of Ages, Liandries. You want to get into fights and stay in fights kind of build.
[00:17:07] Speaker D: Yeah, that, that. That is another. Your. Your item build now determines a limit test. If you're just going, hey, I think this might be a good idea for this one. Now you're limit testing. Even if it's just an item build point, you don't know what the outcome is, but it seems like the right choice.
You're limit testing here.
[00:17:23] Speaker A: And this is one of the major things I love about League is every single game is different. Like, yep, you could have limit tested a thousand times and it doesn't matter like in maybe the thousand and one game, because it's going to be a hundred. Like, it's just going to be a completely different game. It's going to be similar play styles, but I mean, you just don't know that you're going against another human being. Their reactions are going to be completely different. They might not even step out from tower, like, and give you a chance to, like, target them. So you're going to be just farming with gold, like with minion gold.
[00:17:55] Speaker B: The number of times I have played a game of league where I make a decision because I'm predicting my opponent to do a thing and either I predicted correctly and it pays off or I predict incorrectly and I'm left scratching my head like why the fuck didn't they do that?
It's absolutely wild to me. Both happen with regular like all the time.
And that's just kind of what limit testing is, is just trying shit and seeing what sticks.
[00:18:27] Speaker D: And sometimes doing this you will learn something about a champion you did not know it could do.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: Oh yeah.
[00:18:33] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: Flash interactions, all sorts of fun tricks you can do.
[00:18:40] Speaker B: All sorts of fun stuff. What was it? There was something about Urgot that you told me pillow pet that I did not know until.
[00:18:46] Speaker A: That the alt will time out automatically. Like you don't even have to reactivate it. And if they're at the health threshold, it'll pull them in automatically.
[00:18:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I had no idea. I'd always like mash trying to reactivate it.
[00:19:02] Speaker D: Yeah, that. That gives you. Knowing something like that gives you a point of I can play super aggressive knowing I'm getting a kill here. In a moment I'm gonna go in and try and get a fear on four people or something like that. There's. There's so many ways little interactions that you didn't know can change your entire experience of a gameplay.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: And as Mike would always say, just play Viego and you'll earn all champions.
[00:19:24] Speaker D: Eventually between Viego and Silas, you'll learn them all.
[00:19:29] Speaker B: Can confirm as someone who plays both of those fuckers.
Alright, so let's talk about the other side of limit testing for a bit. Is branching out. When should you try something totally new, something out of your wheelhouse?
I'm gonna start with a simple one of. I think the first time I had played Rammus in like five years was a few months ago.
And I picked him literally because the enemy team was all AD with like a master yi and a jinx. And I'm just like, this seems like a good game to play. Rammus. I know what he does. I just haven't played him in like five years. Fuck it, we're playing Rammus. And since then I've played him a couple more times because now I'm a bit more comfortable. So I branched out, played him and I'm like, okay, now I get how Ramis works. I can pick him when I. When he's an appropriate pick now.
So yeah, the first game that I picked him was really risky.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: So yeah, like, like my Idea, like, branching out is kind of similar. So mine is to figure out my counters.
Like, if I go. If I go against a champion, like, on my main, and I just struggle super hard, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna go play this champion a few times and try to figure out what this champion does. And it's either then I learn that I either love that champion and I start playing it more, or then I just can get on my main now and I know how to beat that champion. But usually when I'm branching out, it is to figure out a counter, with the exception of Gragas, just because I just love Gragas's playstyle. So that's why I picked him up. And I just. He's just. He's got a fun trading pattern to me.
[00:21:16] Speaker D: Yeah, pretty much the same thing. There's. There are certain times when I There. There are patterns that the game seems to go through. And recently I've been seeing a ton of Katarina mid. And so my. My branches. I've been trying to find the way to face Katarina mid because there's plenty of champions that I know that I can beat her. 1v1 in. But that doesn't always matter because Katarina can just run away and go fight someone else, accidentally get a triple kill, and suddenly the fact that I was beating her with Tristana heavily in lane doesn't mean a thing because now she's 24 and 7 and she's built a tank.
Now I need to go, well, what can I always do into something that I can't control? Like that.
Found Cindra's pretty much my favorite counter into Katarina. Because it doesn't matter if Katarina is bouncing all over the place. You just send her flying. And Syndra is going to have the damage to annihilate at least one person. Always.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I. I definitely have picked up Syndra for that very reason recently.
[00:22:32] Speaker D: It's. It's my new counter into Katarina. Because even if she goes somewhere else.
Oh, okay. You've. You've fed on the ad carry. I can just delete your ad carry in a second.
I'm. I'm Syndra. Oh, you're playing ap.
Cool. I can play slightly farther back than you can. Engage and delete you. As long as you're not playing Tank. You're playing Tank. Bounce out of here. I'm gonna go kill one of your other people.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Well, I'd say, yeah, definitely I would.
Again, touching on, like, the counter aspect as I. From what I'm learning Mike, that's what you're. You're picking up. You know why you picked up Syndras? To try to learn how to counter Katarina more.
[00:23:22] Speaker D: That's my current one. There is another thing that I've done with. With branching out and getting other champions. It's finding people that have something similar in their playstyle to something that I play normally that is different in a different reason that is good in the different situations.
So, like, I really, really, really like Tristana as an ad carry. I think she's great in mid. I think she's great in bottom. I think she's really strong.
But she doesn't always work in the same way in. Into a game. Like, she's very heavy into. Let's take turrets and then wait until late game or do early fights.
But she has, like, different flaws in different places.
And so I'm. I'm searching for another ad carry that would replace Tristana in the bot lane when I don't think I can get that. That three second burst fight. What do I do in those situations where I can't get that in? I want to have another ad carry that has something similar to that that I don't quite do it. And I'm still looking for that champion right now. That's. That's something that I'm trying to find.
[00:24:35] Speaker A: What resources have you guys used to try to find champions that you've wanted to pick up? Like, do you have, like. Do you watch a streamer that tells you. That gives you, like, an idea, but like, oh, man, I like watching this guy because he plays the same stuff I do.
[00:24:49] Speaker C: All right.
[00:24:51] Speaker B: I literally do the thing we always tell our listeners not to do. I see a cool thing in pro and I'm like, I want to do that.
And then I try to do the cool thing I saw in pro.
[00:25:02] Speaker D: I do that a bunch too.
[00:25:04] Speaker B: Yeah, don't do that, listeners. To be clear, like, I am the poster child for do not do what I do. I'm doing it wrong.
[00:25:13] Speaker D: But both of us have way too large of a champion pool. We don't. We don't have a man roll. We don't do things. We do things that you're not supposed to do.
[00:25:21] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: And it holds us back there.
[00:25:25] Speaker C: There's a. There's a YouTube channel that I watch. They talk about patch notes and so forth every so often. And sometimes they'll. They'll mention, like, builds that are showing up in Korea or whatever to try out. And I'll try those sometimes. Like, those will sometimes give Me an idea. Most of the time it's like things that are cheese and don't work most of the time and work sometimes, but like every so often when it's something that's like, oh, this actually looks like it would work and be fun to play. So.
[00:25:59] Speaker D: This isn't a personal example, but I actually have a good one for a champion that is a similar archetype that is used in wildly different situations.
So Ad carry is pretty common. Mage Ad Carry, not a very common scenario. You're not going to see a lot of them. Ezreal, who's really just the safest Ad carry probably in the world. And then smolder. Very different play style. Also mage Ad Carry, he's pretty much sitting there casting spells at you.
How he plays the other one. Lucian's another one. These people, they're similar enough that you can probably, if you play one of them, you've got another one that you can pick up. All of them have very different situations where they are very strong.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: Yep.
They have different ways to limit tests to like, if you're used to Ezreal, the like windows where you can go in and be aggressive on Israel are very different than the windows where you can go in and be aggressive on Lucian.
Even though they're both definitely caster 80.
[00:26:58] Speaker D: Carries and all three of them are like highly different purposes. Lucian's a bully. Ezreal is.
[00:27:05] Speaker C: Yeah, I was gonna say you can get.
[00:27:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:08] Speaker D: Smolder is risky, but when the late game comes, oh my. Does he do damage?
[00:27:18] Speaker B: Absolutely.
Any other thoughts on branching out?
[00:27:24] Speaker A: All right.
[00:27:26] Speaker D: Just do something that's fun. If it looks cool, try it. Go for it.
[00:27:30] Speaker B: Just do it in norms.
[00:27:31] Speaker D: Just do it in norms.
[00:27:33] Speaker B: That's what normal games are there for. You should join the discord and play normal games with members of the community and try shit out. We don't mind.
[00:27:42] Speaker D: It gives us chances to try shit out.
[00:27:45] Speaker B: Speaking of the community, we had a discussion in our discord about voice chat, about whether or not League should have voice chat. What would that even look like in a way that is hopefully good. There was a test recently in China that I think you brought up, Mike.
[00:28:06] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:28:06] Speaker B: So let's talk about voice chat for a bit. Let's start with what did they do in China, Mike, and how did that go?
[00:28:15] Speaker D: So they, they did an open client voice chat. They. They put what a lot of people have been asking for. Hey, it's a client side voice chat. You can get in, you can go in and you can talk. And what I pretty much have been fearing at all times immediately happened.
It was a toxic fest really quickly.
Like bar none immediately reports in 70% of games. I think I saw.
[00:28:46] Speaker B: Oh my God.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:28:48] Speaker B: To be fair, what is the report percentage in games without voice chat? Before I go saying oh my God. Because I would not be surprised if that number is still as high as like 50 or 60%.
[00:28:59] Speaker D: I don't know that number but I should probably look that up.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: I will tell you it's a hundred percent in my games.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: So yes, saying either reporting a teammate or reporting someone on the enemy team who was visibly horrific.
[00:29:16] Speaker D: You're an outlier. You're a statistical anomaly. I don't understand how games would you work that way.
[00:29:20] Speaker B: I'm aware.
It's so rare when I have a game where no one did anything reportable. There's always someone on the enemy team spewing slurs or someone on my team hard inting or spewing slurs.
[00:29:39] Speaker C: I'm trying to remember the very last. The last time I ever had someone actually like say an actual say a slur or anything even even like meant to be a slur. Like that is using some normal word as if it were a slur kind of thing. I'm like.
[00:29:58] Speaker B: Happen every week.
[00:30:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:00] Speaker C: My last saying saying to go back to practice tool or go back to tutorial.
[00:30:05] Speaker A: It's like my. My last game involved that's someone being very creatively like telling someone on my team to go get a specific disease spelled with abbreviations so it wouldn't get caught.
[00:30:21] Speaker B: I see those regularly. I have seen straight up assuming people's race or ethnicity and then using those slurs about whatever they assume this person is. I've seen a lot.
[00:30:35] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:30:36] Speaker B: Of specifically because again I play on NA American anti black slurs.
[00:30:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:45] Speaker B: It's frustrating. And in voice chat stuff like that is going to be amplified a lot. Not as in it happens more but as in it's going to hurt a lot more when it happens. I actually think it does happen less with voice chat in most games. I don't hear stories about people in Dota screaming slurs at each other every game.
[00:31:14] Speaker C: Having known some Dota players, that happens too.
[00:31:17] Speaker B: It does happen.
[00:31:19] Speaker C: It's not every game like voice. Not with yeah voice chat. To me it would probably like if it were implemented immediately we probably wouldn't see a decrease immediately. We would probably see it would expose things more.
But from what I can tell Riot's systems to at least mute those people is pretty good for text chat. I assume they'll be Working on getting it to work for voice chat too. And then, then I'm fine with it, honestly. Because it means that more. More people are getting punished for that behavior.
[00:32:02] Speaker A: Like, I would assume they would implement some kind of internal AI to immediately ban somebody, like for saying.
[00:32:11] Speaker D: Or at least serving.
[00:32:12] Speaker A: Yeah, some kind of anything. Like there's going to be keywords. Like there would be a text chat.
[00:32:17] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:32:18] Speaker B: So I have a question about the Chinese test. If you know, Mike, was that test opt in or was it opt out? Were you placed in voice chat automatically or did you have to click a button and like volunteer to voice chat?
[00:32:31] Speaker D: I do not remember. I think it was voluntary.
That is. That is a think. I don't remember.
[00:32:40] Speaker B: That's fair. The reason I ask, technically we already have a form of opt in voice chat in League of Legends. There is nothing stopping you from dropping a discord link to a random empty discord just for using for League voice in every game you play. And people can opt in and join that discord and be in call. People do it occasionally.
I usually join those discords when they get dropped. Just speaking personally again, I'm.
I sound like this. So it's relatively safe for me to join calls.
[00:33:17] Speaker C: Yes. And the other thing is that it does require. That does require having a different program installed than just League. That's the. It's a barrier of entry. It's not a large one.
[00:33:28] Speaker B: It doesn't. Because Discord can be used as a web app. Even if you do not actually have Discord installed at all, you can join the web version and still be in a call with someone.
[00:33:38] Speaker D: Some people's computers are literally so bad they can't use a web app and play League at once. It's rare, but it's a thing. Sometimes there are people who have so bad toasters that I don't want those.
[00:33:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:49] Speaker C: Or the web app doesn't pull the right speaker or microphone or whatever.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: I'm going to be honest. If your computer is so bad that you cannot run Discord and League of Legends at the same time, please stop playing multiplayer games. Go play single player games that your computer can handle. You will have more fun and everyone around you will have more fun too.
[00:34:09] Speaker D: Most of the time I'm like, pretty.
[00:34:11] Speaker B: As mean as that sounds. Like as mean as that sounds. If your computer struggles to run League of Legends with Discord open, you're running League of legends at like 20 frames a second. Your computer is holding you back dramatically. Like, there is no amount of computer that can be like, oh, well, you spent $2,000. Now you're a God gamer. But there is absolutely an amount of computer that can be like, oh, you spent $500 on a machine that can actually run the game competently at low settings. You can now play the game properly.
[00:34:43] Speaker C: It's such an interesting discussion about, like, hardware and gaming because, like, once you get past a certain threshold, it doesn't matter at all until you're really high.
[00:34:55] Speaker D: You have to be pushing boundaries to the point where you can actually time things with frame differences. And none of us, none of you are there. None of us are there.
[00:35:04] Speaker B: Yep, it's true. It's. Unless you're literally a professional level player at whatever game you're playing, it does not make a meaningful difference.
[00:35:14] Speaker C: My personal anecdote for weird gaming problems that are solved by a single piece of hardware. I was playing need for Speed. Completely different game from League. It's just a racing game. And there was a specific time trial that I could not beat no matter how many times I tried it, like 12, 15 times. Beat everything else in the game. This one thing didn't want to do it. I was like, you know what? I'm looking to racing wheels. Got a racing wheel beat at first try. Yep.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: I will point out driving games are kind of a special beast in that regard because you drive every single day in America.
So the act of getting a racing wheel, you're suddenly translating that years and years and years of muscle memory and experience to your video game. Of course, you're immediately better.
[00:36:02] Speaker C: Yeah. So there are some cases where hardware makes a difference. League, generally speaking, is not one of those.
As long as you have a certain, like, baseline of.
[00:36:11] Speaker B: As long as you're able to run the game at 60 frames a second.
[00:36:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:36:16] Speaker B: You have very low bar for League.
[00:36:18] Speaker C: Game runs at six frames per second. That's. That's it. Yeah.
[00:36:23] Speaker D: But.
[00:36:24] Speaker C: But back to the. Back to the less than 200 pings.
[00:36:28] Speaker B: Yeah, that. That is valid.
[00:36:29] Speaker D: That is.
[00:36:29] Speaker B: The other part is you need to have an Internet connection capable of keeping you a stable connection to the League of Legends service. As an aside, stop playing on WI fi. Get an Ethernet cable. I don't care if you have to run it through the floor under your door, whatever. Play on Ethernet. It's a hundred times better. I say that as someone who has a $700 Wi Fi setup. That is incredible. It's still not as good as Ethernet.
[00:36:58] Speaker D: It's closing the boundary, but it's not there. Ethernet is so much more stable.
[00:37:03] Speaker A: Yeah. They have drops with hardwire.
[00:37:07] Speaker C: You know, you just now, nowadays, 10 years ago, one Jack said, nowadays WI fi has gotten really good.
It's still not as good as Ethernet, let me be clear. But it is to the point where you will now drop one game in 200. Now like 10 years ago it was one in five.
[00:37:32] Speaker B: With the caveat. This is assuming that you are in a relatively radio not dense environment. So if you are in a home, if you are in an apartment building, get Ethernet. I don't care.
[00:37:46] Speaker C: So, okay, there's a dual edge door to this of if you're in an apartment building, Ethernet's easier for you to do at this point. Like you're at most two, three rooms away from your router. Just, yeah, just run a little long wire.
But even then in a radio dense environment, WI fi has gotten so much better that even in radio dense environments it still works.
[00:38:08] Speaker D: That's because they've changed the frequency types.
[00:38:14] Speaker B: Noticeably degraded compared to Ethernet.
[00:38:17] Speaker C: So, but, but yes, if it is possible for you to do so, get an Ethernet cable and run it.
[00:38:22] Speaker B: Yeah, Ethernet cables are cheap by the way.
[00:38:24] Speaker C: They make really long ones.
[00:38:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the hundred foot ones that I bought to have an electrician run under my house were something like $35 at most.
[00:38:37] Speaker D: I used a 35 foot one I know they got.
[00:38:40] Speaker B: And that's a hundred feet. Like you do not need a hundred foot one for in home use.
[00:38:45] Speaker C: And if you want to get like a spool of it and crimp your own connectors and go hard on it, then yeah, sure, yeah.
[00:38:53] Speaker B: You do need to be mindful of max ranges depending on which Ethernet standard you're doing at that point without a repeater.
[00:39:00] Speaker C: They're large.
[00:39:01] Speaker B: They're large. But you do need to be mindful when you're spooling it yourself. Anyway, this is wildly off the intended topic of voice chat, so I mentioned briefly that I get away with joining Random Discords and having a pretty decent experience overall. As a matter of fact, I've literally had people join our community Discord off of their experience playing with me in a random discord call. That is a thing that has happened.
[00:39:26] Speaker D: It's happening with us.
[00:39:28] Speaker B: That that fella actually looked up my Twitter because he couldn't figure out where to find me to find the discord. And I'm so sorry, but also sorry, not sorry.
Yeah, don't look me up on Twitter.
[00:39:43] Speaker C: Please don't, don't do it.
[00:39:46] Speaker B: Seriously.
But the point was like, that's the experience I have. I join random discord calls every once in a while. I leave it because the person has a horrible audio environment. Like, I'm having to listen to their music as recorded by their microphone, and it's miserable. And I don't know why those people do that, but most of the time it's just fine. I'm just in a call with whoever joined the call. We play the game, we say, hey, better luck next time, or hey, great job. And we go our separate ways. It's great.
But I sound like this. Someone who doesn't sound like this, depending on how they do sound, can have a much worse experience.
Anyone with a female presenting voice gets abused in voice chat in every video game that has it, 10 times as much as someone who sounds like a white man does. Someone with a quote unquote black voice or someone with a thick accent from anywhere that isn't the server that they're playing on. So again, we're on na. Anyone who does not have an American accent gets abused in voice chat aggressively.
[00:40:59] Speaker C: Even the Brits.
[00:41:00] Speaker B: Yeah, literally. You come on American servers and play games with a British accent or an Australian accent, you get blamed.
It's not cool.
[00:41:14] Speaker A: I'd like to just throw in a little side note here. If you and I don't believe any of our listeners are someone that's going to verbally abuse someone based off the sound of their voice, but if you are someone that will place judgment on someone or harass them based off the sound of their voice, you really need to take a hard look in the mirror and find out where it went wrong. That is unacceptable. Yes. That's just my little.
[00:41:42] Speaker B: To be clear, we are describing behaviors that happen, not behaviors that we approve of.
So when we had this discussion on the discord, I suggested what if Riot had voice changers forced on league chat? You could not opt out of the voice changer. If you're using the voice chat, you have a voice changer. And I was like, you know what would be cool? If the voice changer made it so you sounded like your champion. So every jinx player sounds like jinx, regardless of who they are in reality.
I think that would be a great idea. But also, I don't think Riot would ever do it because of the number of times that they would have their champions saying the N word on streams.
[00:42:31] Speaker D: Not. Not just that, but used in that. Now. Now the voice coders are out there. People are going to use that for many, many bad things.
[00:42:39] Speaker C: I mean, what.
[00:42:41] Speaker A: Okay, okay.
[00:42:43] Speaker B: With that specific example, what is the worst that someone could do with. Now I sound like a League of Legends champion. Because porn already exists.
[00:42:53] Speaker D: What the hell?
[00:42:54] Speaker B: So they got to do. You can't defraud people by sounding like Vi.
[00:42:58] Speaker A: There's already AI out there that can sound like any character in any video game anywhere in the world. Like, I mean, so the technology is there and if someone wants to do freaky stuff with it, like they're. That league is not what's stopping them from doing it.
[00:43:15] Speaker B: That's why the like make the players sound like league champion is my idea. Because fraudsters are already using voice clips of anyone whose voice is on the Internet to sound like them to try to defraud their family.
If they can do that. Because you were on a podcast once.
[00:43:37] Speaker A: There's a YouTube channel that I watch that has Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Biden all play video games together. And it's hilarious.
[00:43:47] Speaker B: Yes.
And that's all just AI voice changers. So yeah, to me, like, if Riot was ever going to actually implement voice chat in their game properly, I think voice changers are mandatory. Whether they do it as the champions or whether they do it as just everyone gets a random voice, whatever. I think that's mandatory. It goes a long way if you can't opt out of having a voice changer. If everyone always has a voice changer, it goes a long way towards removing the identity based judgments that people make.
[00:44:21] Speaker D: So my biggest thing with voice chat and it has always been, yeah, there's going to be toxicity, there's going to be big problems. My biggest thing is the second one person on your team in a ranked scenario says, no, I don't want to do that. And the entire enemy team has decided to opt in. You are now at a strictly competitive disadvantage and it's massive.
[00:44:45] Speaker B: It is genuinely huge.
[00:44:47] Speaker D: The amount of times where voice chat can completely change how a game functions. You're not looking at pings anymore. You're not having to deal with, hey, my champion's gone from lane.
Hey, bot lane, bot lane, bot lane. What are you doing most of the time? That's not a thing.
[00:45:08] Speaker A: The gameplay change when they brought in like targeted pings was huge. Danger pings, missing pings.
What was like all the different. When they brought all the different pings in, like, that was a huge game changer.
Didn't have to type out care anymore.
[00:45:26] Speaker C: Yeah. And it's so obviously I have experience with other games that have voice chat. Um, and one of the most common problems you run into with voice chat in other games and isn't toxicity. You. You get into it sometimes, but it's a low, low Incidence rate. The real problem is that people don't know how to communicate.
[00:45:52] Speaker D: Yep, that is a problem.
[00:45:53] Speaker C: Yeah.
Like being able to communicate succinctly and clearly and in a very fast manner is not intuitive or easy. It's not something that everybody can do.
So I don't think there's going to be a huge gap competitive wise for it. There will be a gap, but it won't be huge.
What I am in favor of having voice chat in the game purely because it for whatever reason people associate a voice with being a person way more than text on a screen. Being a person. Yep, they're both a person. There's a person somewhere in the world sitting behind a computer screen behind that text.
But it is consistent that people will assign personhood to someone with a voice. Just any, any voice humanizing.
[00:47:01] Speaker B: That was my experience for the like 30 hours I've played of Dota 2 is the types of toxicity that happened when people were using the voice chat was much less severe than what I see day to day in league.
[00:47:18] Speaker A: I'd say there'd be a lot less slurs and be just a few more like hey, you're an idiot.
[00:47:24] Speaker C: Yeah, you will get more of that.
[00:47:28] Speaker B: Usually more emphatic than hey you're an idiot. It's like you're fucking stupid kind of stuff.
[00:47:34] Speaker A: But there won't be constructive criticism. There'll be criticism, lots of it.
[00:47:39] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:47:39] Speaker A: And it won't be constructive but it'll be a lot better than I would say what someone feels a lot braver typing than they would say.
[00:47:48] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of people will not say their slurs out loud for fear of their mom in the next room overhearing them but will absolutely type them out.
[00:47:58] Speaker D: That is the thing that happens.
[00:48:01] Speaker B: So I guess to wrap up this voice chat discussion for now, if you want voice chat in your random solo queue games highly recommend. Create a Discord server. Just an empty fucking server. You don't need text channels, you just need one voice call. Drop the invite link to that server in your lobbies.
[00:48:22] Speaker C: Discord allows you now to when you invite somebody use an invite link. You can make it a guest invite link so that when they leave the voice call they leave the server.
[00:48:31] Speaker B: Yep. Discord has this functionality. Use it. That gives you an opt in voice chat with whichever members of your team choose to opt in. And I speak from experience having joined a lot of those.
It's usually a pretty decent experience.
[00:48:48] Speaker D: Usually if you're at all comfortable getting into a call with some strangers, it can be night and day Having somebody be able to go, all right, we're going in in 3, 2, 1.
[00:49:00] Speaker B: Yep. Even the like, quote unquote negative experiences I've had in there was mostly people with way too much background noise.
[00:49:10] Speaker D: And you do have the power to sit there and right click mute.
If there's someone that you can't. You just can't listen to it, or you can leave or kick them into. If there's one person who's making it miserable and the rest of the people there are fine, you can mute. Everyone has that power in Discord.
[00:49:28] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:49:29] Speaker C: Right. Now, I generally find that anybody dropping a Discord link is at least neutral or better person to talk to.
[00:49:37] Speaker B: Exactly. And that's. I think the key with the dropping a Discord link is because it's an opt in with a layer of separation.
The people who are willing to either drop that link or click that link are usually the people who are just saying, hey, I want to win this game. This gives me an advantage.
Let's. Let's chat so we can communicate better.
[00:50:04] Speaker C: Assholes aren't generally interested in talking to other people.
[00:50:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:07] Speaker A: On the opposite side of the spectrum, don't click the discord link at the end of the game because that's not going to be a good time.
That's not going to be fun. Learn from personal experience. They're not there for good discussion.
[00:50:21] Speaker B: Yes, this is true.
All right, let's get some listener questions answered again, listeners, write into the forwards podcastmail.com so we can answer your questions on the show because we are going to run out in the next, like, 15 minutes here.
So we're going to finish up some of the questions that Reigns sent in last week.
Reigns writes, is protecting your mentals by forfeiting early more important than trying to win? Every game you think is winnable depends on your choice. I want to caveat this question with the. You think is winnable? I'm going to drop that. Let's. Let's scratch that.
[00:50:59] Speaker C: I was about to say, like, but.
[00:51:01] Speaker B: Every game is partially because every game is winnable and partially because if you think it's truly not winnable, you're also probably not able to forfeit.
So because you're. The times where a game is truly like, there is no comeback mechanic is when people are being assholes and those assholes will hold you hostage.
[00:51:28] Speaker A: So in my, like, just my quick opinion of this, I do not forfeit games. And I know me and Jax have talked about it. He's got, like, the same mindset I do. I don't forfeit a game if it's a normal. I'm more likely to forfeit that. But, like, if it's ranked, I do not forfeit it. I do not throw away my LP for nothing. Like, I just will not do it. I will go down tooth and nail till, like the very end because there's four other people on that team that can veto my no. Like, so I will not forfeit a game because LP is too important to me for what I do play ranked.
[00:52:03] Speaker D: I think I have willingly voted no or voted yes on forfeiting a ranked game a grand total of five times in league's history. I don't like forfeiting ranked games.
[00:52:17] Speaker B: I've. I've definitely done it a lot more than that. But again, basically the only time I'm voting yes is those games where people are just actually being assholes. If people are spewing slurs, running it down hard, trying to steal camps from the jungler, those are the only games I forfeit because those are the games where you know that if you vote no, you're going to be here for 10 more minutes of that misery because it takes that long for the enemy team to win, despite what's happening.
So those are the ones I'll forfeit. Everything else not. This dude's like 0:10 and he's shit still winnable.
[00:52:55] Speaker C: I. So I have a weird mentality where I won't even forfeit those because to me, if you're being an asshole and trolling and griefing, then you deserve to sit here for next 10 minutes and wait.
You deserve this. Congratulations, you won the prize.
That's my mentality on those. It's very rare for me to actually forfeit. It takes, gosh, like, it is extremely rare for me to forfeit. And this is only in ranked in normals. As soon as anybody says I'm done with this game or anything approaching that, I'm like, all right, cool. Go next. Because normals, I play for fun.
[00:53:36] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:53:37] Speaker C: Ranked, I play to win. There's a difference.
[00:53:40] Speaker A: Now let me touch. I'm sorry, go ahead.
[00:53:42] Speaker C: No, go ahead, finishers.
[00:53:43] Speaker A: Well, no, I was just gonna say, like, to touch on. To protect your mental. If it is really affecting you mentally, that game, man, just you can go ahead and forfeit it. Like, if it's actually affecting you outside of the game. Yeah, sure.
[00:53:56] Speaker B: Here's my take.
[00:53:57] Speaker C: That's where I think I'm different from Jackson. That one where he said that he would just go ahead and find. Go next. When someone is actively trolling and griefing where I'm like, cool, you do that. Like, it's just. It doesn't not affect me mentally, but.
[00:54:10] Speaker B: I'm not doing that because it affects me mentally. I'm doing that because when they're doing that, there is no comeback.
Now game truly unwinnable, as opposed to this game should be unwinnable, but there's still a chance for the enemy to throw.
If a game is going to impact your mental regardless of whether you forfeit or not, you should not be playing another game immediately. You should be doing something else to reset your mental. Chill. Play a different game. Go grab a drink of water, pet your pets, something to reset your mental whether or not you forfeit.
[00:54:46] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:54:48] Speaker D: If you are the one who brings up the early forfeit, you need to be prepared for your team to say no.
[00:54:55] Speaker B: Yep.
And for that matter, do not spam forfeits. If you put up a forfeit and they vote no, play it out.
Don't be that guy. Everyone has experienced that guy who just puts up forfeit on cooldown and makes the game much more frustrating for everyone.
[00:55:21] Speaker C: Like if I, if I introspect a bit and think about it, I'm probably not doing it correctly. Like I think that as soon as there is any sort of negative mental forfeiting the game immediately, just going straight to the next one over the long term might get you a higher win percentage. Like it. Yeah, true. And like not only a higher percentage but like get you more games in as well in order to do that.
So like this is an area where I'm open to being like what I am doing is probably not competitively the correct thing to do, but it is for me. I do not like surrendering ranked games.
I know, I know for real quick example, I know for a fact that like high level players like say the specific example I'm thinking of is Doublelift talked about specifically a game that he in Champion select is like, go next. We are forfeiting at 15 go next.
Because at that level he could tell immediately in Champ select when this guy took this champion, that did not work at all. The game was over at that high level. So that tells me that there is a line where you should just be like, all right, we're done with this game. Go next. For me, it's not that drastic.
[00:56:43] Speaker D: So yeah, the difference here is you specifically asked FFing early.
I disagree with that as a concept. I don't think there are almost any games where FFing by 15 is worth it. You have to be truly devastatingly down to a point. There it is. It is a one in a thousand game where you are that far bad.
[00:57:11] Speaker C: There is one game, one single game I have played in my entire league career that ended before 15 minutes.
We broke their nexus at 14:25.
[00:57:23] Speaker D: I've done that. Yeah.
[00:57:25] Speaker C: We wrecked them that bad. Like, yes. That kind of game.
Sure.
But like, last night, I was 7 and 21. Like, my team was 7 and 21. And someone on the team was like, why aren't. Why aren't you surrendering? I'm like, because it's winnable.
Like, 721 is fine. Even if it was Owen, Owen, Owen. 15. Like, it's fine. Because you know what happens. Easy get bounties.
Of course, the person bringing up the surrender vote was also responsible for the problem.
[00:57:58] Speaker D: Happens a lot. Happens a lot.
[00:57:59] Speaker C: And also stole the bounties when they finally came in. So we didn't end up. We did not win that game. But it was.
It was a. It was a. It was a time.
So.
[00:58:14] Speaker B: Absolutely. All right.
Reigns does have another question, and I don't know how I feel about it, but the question is, with your recommendation of Zach Mid, does the Nunu slash singed Mid style still work too?
When did we recommend Zach Middle?
[00:58:34] Speaker D: I mentioned it.
[00:58:36] Speaker B: God damn it, Mike.
[00:58:37] Speaker A: I will say yes. Singed in Nunu Mid will work.
They have similar playstyles where they just try to roam and impact side lanes. They are not like a champion that will take trading patterns in the mid lane and try to get solo kills. Like Nunu with his snowball, can be in a side lane and five seconds at level three and impact the side lanes. And Singe does the same kind of thing. He just goes down, flings you back, get some poison, runs away. Like. But like, they clear their waves and then they roam.
Like, they have those similar play styles. But is it a good choice? No. Can it work? Yes.
[00:59:22] Speaker D: Of the two, Nunu has seen more play recently. I've seen new new Mids. It happens quite a bit. Singed doesn't work in the mid lane as well as he does inside lanes because of the length of the lane. And he really specializes in being able to go between turrets and playing in that lane in between turrets. There's not really any point in there in a mid lane. You're going from turret to turret turret pretty quickly. The ranges are almost touching.
[00:59:50] Speaker A: I'm drawing a blank. Who is the league guy? Like, who is the guy that's usually in charge of all these balances?
I'm trying to remember his name, maybe?
[01:00:00] Speaker D: No, no. August.
[01:00:03] Speaker A: August. So he was talking. I actually saw a clip where he was going over AP Nunu. He. AP? Nunu is not balanced around the champion. It is balanced around a player, Kesha. That is why AP Nunu has gotten any kind of love. It is balanced around Kesha, I remember saying, which is funny.
But yeah, Ap? Nunu. Nunu is not meant to be played ap. He is meant to be played Tank.
[01:00:31] Speaker B: I hate the AP New Mid so much. It's so degenerate.
[01:00:37] Speaker A: But that was just fun. Fact.
[01:00:39] Speaker B: Rolls in insta, kills the Wave, heals half his health bar, and then rolls back out to gank someone else while you're just stuck trying to deal with the Wave.
[01:00:45] Speaker A: He left you like a one shot of backline minions at level one.
[01:00:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I hate it. So let's. Let's get to our last question. Because I. It works. That's the answer to your question reigns.
All right, our last question comes from Dotafan, who writes, hello. Could you walk through for both the scouting phase and Champion select for Clash? How do you effectively maneuver the different picks and bands between what your team is good with versus the opposing team? How do you determine what three champs to ban first and what to ban for the second banning phase?
So Crush, you and I have done a lot of Clash together to varying degrees of success. Our general strategy was identify first and foremost. Are we first pick or are we second pick? And watch champions, if any appear to be contested. If they have a main on a champion that we also have a main on. That kind of stuff.
[01:01:48] Speaker C: Yeah, like so step one, honestly. Okay, okay, okay. Step one. There are Clash lookup websites. I can't remember the exact name of it right now, but you put in a champion name that is on the enemy team and it'll give you the entire enemy team and then give you links to all their OP GS and so forth.
[01:02:08] Speaker B: Yes.
Literally, just Google Clash, look up lol and you'll probably find it.
[01:02:13] Speaker C: Yeah, Leagues in game thing kind of works, but it doesn't really give you a whole lot of history. Now that Clash has been running for a while, the most useful one is the last tab on that where it shows you what they played last in Clash.
[01:02:30] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:02:30] Speaker C: But even then, because Clash is a pickup team style, it doesn't tell you whether they played together or.
Or if they played the same position they're playing now. These websites will.
So once you have the website, the first thing to look for that. The first thing that we looked for was, does anybody have a ridiculous amount of mastery. This person has a million and a half mastery on Katarina. We are banning Katarina full stop. We don't care that they're listed as support.
[01:03:03] Speaker B: Yeah. The only time that we didn't do that was when one of us also mained that champion and we had first pick. I think there were several games where Caitlin was a contested. They had a Caitlin main and you played a lot of Caitlin and we had first pick. So you're like, I'm going to play Caitlin this game. Unless they ban it.
[01:03:23] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Like that's, that's like. That's like. The first level is if any of them have a ridiculous level of mastery with a champion, you need to either band it or pick it. And if you can't pick it first, then you need to pick it, then you need to ban it.
Like, and this is annoying because what ends up happening is you have I mentioned somebody who is not in that role has this champion high mastery.
You still have to ban it because what happens is they don't play it. They play support unless that champion is open and then they take their minute and a half mastery and steamroll the other team with it.
[01:04:02] Speaker B: Yeah, like, and that happened plays instead.
[01:04:06] Speaker C: Right.
So that's. That's the first. That's the first thing I. It is in my opinion, unless you're in like the highest tier of Clash or doing some actual competitive league, then, then champion mastery is probably the first and best indicator of what they are good at playing. You don't need to worry so much about team composition type of things.
[01:04:35] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:04:36] Speaker C: They'll.
At this level, any team, quote unquote, will work.
Like what I said, what I. The example I gave earlier with doublelift doesn't apply at this level. Like you can't just look at a team comp and say, oh, we lose now. That doesn't. That doesn't happen at this level.
[01:04:56] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:04:57] Speaker C: Even in Clash, like there's still a bunch of team comps that are dumb. Like if you see them having Malphite and Rammus and you pick an all ad team, like, that's dumb. But you can win.
[01:05:10] Speaker B: Just please don't do that.
[01:05:12] Speaker C: So like that's like the. That's like the next level is don't pick really dumb teams. Like have. Have a magic damage threat, have a physical damage threat, have some form of engage and for the love of God, have cc. Yeah. Like over and over and over again in Clash games, CC wins games. Like more than anything else.
[01:05:36] Speaker B: The common variable here is in Clash, you are probably against Five people in voice comms with each other in solo queue. You are probably not with voice comms. It's really easy to just be like, okay, kill Ramus, kill Ramus, kill Ramus. And everyone on that team is going to focus everything on Ramus and kill him. Yeah, that doesn't exist in solo queue. You have people off fighting their own little mini fights in the middle of the team fight because there isn't a clear call.
[01:06:10] Speaker C: So that talks about like what three champions to ban first, really, honestly, is find the people who have the high mastery. If no one has high mastery or if it's relatively even or anything like that, that makes it unclear.
Usually what we do is we pick on the people that we have problems with first. Like, I remember one of the very common things is that whenever we were clashed together, Seraphine would almost always kick our ass. If anybody on the enemy team had high mastery and Seraphine or showed any history of playing Seraphine in the last month, like, we would probably just ban it out of. We don't win against this. Like, we specifically, our team never wins against Seraphine for whatever reason. So we just ban it so we don't have to deal with it if they play it.
And that's one of the advantages you get with Clash is that you can actually see if they play it or not before you waste a ban.
So that's the next one would be to cover anything that your team specifically struggle against as a team.
And then finally the last one, once you've exhausted all of those obvious things of we lose to this, we should ban it. Then you get into, okay, what do they actually play? What have they played? Not only what have they played over their lifetime, the mastery score. But what have they been playing in the last month? Like, oh, this person has 200,000 mastery on Yasuo, but have they actually played Yasuo in the last couple months? Same with Zeri or Aphelios or Rise. Anybody who's like, who's had a day in the sun where you could play it for three months and then it gets dumpstered or whatever and then isn't playable. Especially anything that isn't playable right now. Yep, not as high priority of a band, not one of the first three bands. The set, the second set of bands that you wear. The primary reason for those, the usage for those is, okay, we've seen three people pick. There's only two people left. We have a general idea of two or three roles are left open. So if they've picked, I don't know Syndra then you probably don't need to ban mid laners unless they playing it in the bot lane. But whatever.
[01:08:25] Speaker D: You've missed one thing that I remember doing a ton of when we were doing Clash together and that was if the the enemy has one superstar person rank wise or something else. You see there's one person who is Emerald Master, whatever and they're playing with a bunch of their friends. Generally speaking they're your focus target.
[01:08:43] Speaker B: Now it depends on what because like if they're playing ad carry and they main a bunch of right click ad carry specifically there's no point in banning them out. It doesn't matter whether they're playing Caitlyn or Ash or Varys or Callista. They're gonna kick your ass with any of them.
[01:09:01] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Like it's a double edged.
There's two sides of it where one side is. It's the highest level player. You ban him the most and then they aren't able to play. But the flip side is it's a high level player for a reason. They probably have a decent champion pool where they can play almost anything anyway. So trying to ban them out doesn't really do much that is specifically really noticeable on the ADC roll. Because a lot of ADCs are very.
[01:09:28] Speaker B: Similar to each other, very interchangeable basics.
[01:09:31] Speaker A: Another thing I'd mentioned on like a high level player, like if you banned out, I'll just say top lane for example, a top laner, all his champions. It's not really going to matter if it's a high level, high level champion because they're going to know wave control and wave management and they can get through the laning phase just with just with knowledge of their macro and micro.
[01:09:52] Speaker D: So the difference is like they don't.
[01:09:53] Speaker A: Have to interact with you at all.
[01:09:56] Speaker D: There are plenty of people who are like a hyper aggressive player who uses a hyper aggressive champion. Those are the things that you're looking at and going he is their carry. He is doing these things. These cannot be allowed.
[01:10:07] Speaker C: Yeah. So like so for example, if you have a high level player who plays a lot of Darius.
[01:10:13] Speaker A: Oh yeah, that's what that was gonna be.
[01:10:14] Speaker C: Banned Darius.
You ban Darius specifically. We don't try to ban all of their champions. But you Dan Darius specifically because he plays Darius a lot and has demonstrated mastery over Darius and is also the high level player will probably beat you in lane and Darius specifically will snowball very well. Like those aren't specifically related to this is a high level player. It's more like this is just a guy who's really good at Darius and is the best person on their team probably. So make it so that they can't snowball as easily. They'll probably switch and play something like Garen or any other top laner that does just fine. But at least he's not on Darius.
[01:10:53] Speaker B: I just want to share a quick anecdote from a while ago. I forget who I was with, but we were playing a five stack normal game into an Enemy five stack normal. And the enemy five stack happened to be a Trinity Force proper host at the time and his friends.
Obviously this wasn't Clash. We couldn't target ban him out, but we were able to neutralize how much better he was than his friends by just egregiously camping the shit out of him.
And his friends couldn't respond properly because they didn't know what to do. And because we were camping him, he did not have the like shot calling capabilities to be able to make decisions from him personally being behind that were correct for his teammates to then follow. You can do that in Clash 2 when there's you see these mismatched teams where it's one high level player and four lower level players just gamble camp them. Their shot calling will fall apart often.
[01:11:55] Speaker C: What is really great to me is that the opposite actually works way better if there's four people that are about the same level and then a Bronze. If you ban the Bronzes champions, as long as they're not playing support, you have a very high chance of just dumpstering that player and whoever is in the lane against them will just win. Like yep, Target banning the bronze or the lowest person on the team is actually not a terrible idea because unlike the high level player, they probably don't have a breadth of champion pool. They have a narrow pool that they can play and then once you get them off that comfort, they're a Bronze player.
[01:12:33] Speaker B: This is assuming the Bronze account is legitimately their actual account and not just a Smurf in Clash.
[01:12:38] Speaker D: Yeah, that's pretty common. Yeah.
[01:12:40] Speaker B: How?
[01:12:41] Speaker C: How? I haven't played Clash in a long time. How common is is Smurfing and Clash still?
[01:12:45] Speaker B: I'm not sure since Vanguard came out. How common.
[01:12:48] Speaker D: Yeah, as of last time we played I don't. I haven't played Clash since Vanguard.
[01:12:53] Speaker A: Now I know to even do ranked on a new account you have to once you hit level 30 I believe have 10 normal draft games on top of to get into class you have to have placed I believe in ranked so 15 games right there at level 30. So a lot of that decent advised a lot of Smurf players to. Nobody wants. No Smurf wants to do 10 normal games.
[01:13:20] Speaker B: Good.
[01:13:20] Speaker C: There's. There. So back when I was playing Clash, Tier three was the worst tier for Smurfs.
[01:13:27] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:13:28] Speaker C: They wouldn't get placed in tier four.
And they weren't.
They were smurfing in tier three. They weren't.
They weren't winning enough to be tier two. Or. Or they were intentionally sandbagging to. To stay in tier 3. Like tier 3 was worse than tier 4 at the time. Like. And it was on the order of. I think at least once a tournament we would find a Smurf.
And like a lot of the times it was a. It was a. It was a.
What I call it. Not. Not a mediocre Smurf, but like a. Like a platinum player actually appearing as if they were silver.
It was that the number. Not like a master showing up as silver.
[01:14:09] Speaker B: Like the number of games we played in Clash where the finals turned out to be the two teams that had a clear. Like, this dude is smurfing from much higher elo than the rest of this tournament. And then we won our next two games after getting our asses kicked by the Smurf. We would have so many clashes that went two and one where the one was our first loss. Because of that. I'm actually glad that Clash now doesn't care about the order of the wins and losses.
[01:14:37] Speaker D: Oh, they don't remember that.
[01:14:39] Speaker C: They do not.
[01:14:40] Speaker D: I have not played since that change.
[01:14:41] Speaker C: Yeah, they changed that. I think I played like twice since then. But yeah.
Yeah. So yeah, the. The Smurfing problem is an issue. Most of the advice that I'm saying right now is with the assumption of the information you are getting is accurate and correct and there is no Smurf.
[01:15:00] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:15:01] Speaker C: If there's a Smurf, it throws a lot of things off. For one thing, you can't be. You can't trust the information you're getting from OP G because they won't have their recent champion history.
[01:15:13] Speaker B: They'll play those 15 games on something they don't intend to play in Clash. Yep.
[01:15:18] Speaker C: And you like those.
It evades the systems being used to try to make Clash Clash. So it makes. It's dealing with Smurfs and Clash is like its own topic.
[01:15:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:15:32] Speaker A: That being said, you're going to be able to know what the Smurf is because they're going to have that exact criteria.
They're not going to have Very many games played at all. It's going to be a low level account, most likely. And it's not going to make any sense when you look at the account and you're going to be like, oh, okay, here we go. Here it is.
[01:15:50] Speaker B: You will know that you are up against a Smurf pretty much every time.
I did have one other thought around pick ban though.
Your second two bands, like the second round bands, those two you get should almost always be targeted at the same person.
[01:16:10] Speaker C: Yes. On the second round.
[01:16:12] Speaker B: There are rare times where it shouldn't be. Usually that's going to be like, hey, the Enemy team has two like three champion players.
And four of those six champions have now been removed. There's two left. Okay. Ban one of each. That's like the only time that banning two different people makes sense. Every other time. Yeah, Just ban the same dude twice. Like two champions this dude plays.
Push him down his comfort level as far as possible.
[01:16:41] Speaker C: So there was, there was a bit the.
There was a bit you didn't read from the question at the last sentence of. Can you simulate what you do for pick and bans best practices?
This is the only thing I'll mention it. Like, I was usually the person picking out what to pick and what to ban as well. Not what to pick, because I would usually just say you just pick your champion. It's fine, whatever. But what to ban was usually what I was looking at.
[01:17:08] Speaker B: It was the normal strategy.
[01:17:11] Speaker C: The normal. It was you if I wasn't there. Basically the normal strategy was I know the first three bands. The first three bands. I know after that I would pick two bands for each person on the team. And then when we get to the second round of bans, we can usually tell who has picked their champion and who is left to pick. So we get to pick. Who do we ban out? Do we ban top laners or junglers or what have you.
[01:17:42] Speaker B: And for us, what would often wind up happening is we would have our two solo lanes left most of the time.
[01:17:49] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:17:51] Speaker B: Or we had just picked a solo lane and then went immediately into two bands in that situation. Like let's say we third picked a top laner. We're immediately banning the two top lane champions that we don't want our guy to have to go against that. The guy.
[01:18:10] Speaker C: That's extremely common.
If you have to. If, if you end up blinding one of the mid. One of the solo lanes, you're. You're doing it right before the double ban, most likely.
[01:18:20] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:18:20] Speaker C: And you double ban against that? Against that Lane.
[01:18:24] Speaker B: Yep. You say, okay, our dudes playing Orn Top. They play these two champions that he doesn't want to deal with as Orn. He'll play Orn into fucking anything else. Those two are now off the table. That's your second round bands.
[01:18:38] Speaker C: And a lot of it for banning and picking strategy for us at least was.
I don't. Because I was the one primarily coordinating bands. I don't have knowledge of all lanes. I know my own lane.
[01:18:52] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:18:53] Speaker C: I assume that everybody else on the team knows their own lane, so I go, oh, you're playing Jax. Who are. Who are the. Who are the two champions that you don't want to play against? And I. And they always did, had an answer for. Here's the two that I want banned. All right, cool. I'm banning those. Like.
[01:19:10] Speaker B: Yep.
Half the time we had no idea what to ban in the second round based on what the Enemy actually played. So that was what we had to go off of is what do you not want to deal with?
That was really common. We'd run into games.
[01:19:26] Speaker C: It didn't happen that often. It was happens. The times that it happened were the two people left were people who didn't have valid match histories or whatever. So it was hard to look up what they had or.
[01:19:41] Speaker B: And they were someone with an account like mine, where they just play fucking everything.
[01:19:46] Speaker C: Right. And even then, some people who have an account that plays everything, usually if you look at their, like, recent history and if they play it flex history, you'll find something to ban pretty quickly.
[01:20:00] Speaker D: I'm a terrible person to play against in Clash.
[01:20:03] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:20:04] Speaker B: I'm thinking more in terms of, like, if you looked at me in Clash, you wouldn't necessarily know what the hell role I'm even playing, regardless of what the website says. That doesn't mean Jax is a really.
[01:20:17] Speaker C: Good example of why you don't listen to Riot's thing. Because Riot has him as Kane. Still your highest mastery. Right.
[01:20:24] Speaker B: Kane is still my highest mastery with Khazakh.
[01:20:26] Speaker C: What was the last time you played Kane in a ranked game?
[01:20:29] Speaker B: Last week, I think.
[01:20:30] Speaker C: Did you really.
[01:20:31] Speaker B: Did you get put in the jungle five days ago?
[01:20:35] Speaker C: God damn it.
Beyond that. But.
[01:20:38] Speaker B: And here's the key. That being said, I have played Kane in the last month and a half once.
It happens to have been five days ago.
[01:20:52] Speaker C: Yeah, like. Yeah, like. But Kane solicitors are highest mastery. Kane gets banned against us sometimes. And it's really funny because he's not the jungler. He hasn't played Kane in forever.
[01:21:04] Speaker B: Yep. I would Say, or we had. I remember when we played with Sparrow.
[01:21:08] Speaker D: Sparrow, yeah, he's an Eve.
[01:21:10] Speaker B: One trick, he would play mid instead. Unless the enemy left Eve open.
[01:21:17] Speaker C: Sparrow was our poster child for why we banned people with high mastery. Because Sparrow did exactly what we were.
[01:21:23] Speaker B: Describing and he would just play mid and play whatever the fuck champions he felt like playing in mid and we would just get a free ban of Evelyn 95% of the time. And the other 5%, I'd be like, cool, I'm playing mid instead. You get to jungle or crush is going to play mid and Sparrow jungle. Because Eve was left up and it only burned us once. We only had once where the enemy had left Eve up as a trap and they had a cohesive plan against counter into it.
[01:21:48] Speaker D: And it was good. I remember that game.
[01:21:52] Speaker B: And that's. That's the other thing you can do in clash pick ban is if you are confident your team has a solid plan on how to deal with someone who mains a champion. You can leave it up as a trap. You better be fucking confident.
[01:22:06] Speaker C: Yeah, true.
[01:22:09] Speaker A: Well, I'd say I've found the best strategy for clash and that is to just lock in Lucian immediately and let your top laner play it. And you're going to win that whole tournament anyway. So it doesn't even matter because nobody's going to ban Lucian.
[01:22:26] Speaker B: I'm sorry, the William Shatner segue into the Lucian top was just hats off to you, sir.
All right, this has been episode 459 of the Forwards podcast. I've been Jack Soman for Crush, you, for Pillow Pet and for Mike of many names. Have a great night.
[01:22:48] Speaker A: Good night.
[01:22:50] Speaker C: Bye.
[01:22:50] Speaker D: Good night everybody.
[01:22:53] Speaker C: Thanks for listening to the Four Wards podcast. If you want to support the show directly, consider checking out our
[email protected] the Four Wards Podcast. And of course, send your questions to the Four Wards podcastmail.com so we can answer them live on the show. That's the Four Wards podcastmail.com.
