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About a week ago Eric Benson – known variably as Edge Benson, Azerbaijan, or The Notorious E.J.B. – dropped a shot of the League installer into the group chat. The reaction was as though he had shown us a venomous snake or a troubling X-Ray from his doctor. Has he been bamboozled by Arcane? We can’t say it never happens.
It has a very specific dynamic that was always challenging for me, and I don’t just mean that it requires you to be good at it although you gotta be sorta good tbh. No, it’s that the role I typically play, Support, means something a little different here. Usually it means “make bar go up, or at least make bar go down slower.” Here, Support roles often initiate the violence which is not in my primary skillset.
It’s a timing thing. I can usually hide among my talented friends, as though they were tall reeds. But being the one who identifies and marks the transitions between game states is definitely not me. You have to be this tall to ride this ride. In Gears, that just means getting good at Gears. I don’t know where my ceiling is at in LoL but it is somewhere below the Earth.
The game takes a very long time to lose, and time is at a premium. That said, I don’t know. Maybe precisely because of the dynamics I’ve described, success in this game is such a powerful narcotic that I remember specific moments from it with utter clarity. I was a Leona main, so in that era I had plenty of opportunities to save the team with her Ult. Once, and I swear this is true, I saved a teammate hitting an enemy I couldn’t see through terrain with my Zenith Blade.
Man. You know what? I should fuckin’ install League.
(CW)TB out.