Seventeen years. Wow.
Once we hit October; that's how long this game will have been kicking, sporting one of the highest concurrent playerbases to boot. League of Legends sports around 130 million monthly players and the last World Championship in 2025 had 6.7 million active viewers. Why though? Let anyone with a passing understanding of League, know that you play this game. They will typically look at you with sad knowing eyes wondering what happened to you that could so completely send you down the wrong path. League must certainly have the worst reputation among its peers (games with player counts in the millions that have been going for more than a decade). People say it's toxic, repetitive and a cash grab. In spite of all that, still going strong. It very likely is all of those things but I am still one of the people who play it.
I started my league career back in season 5 right after the first big visual update. As far as I can tell, broad strokes, the game has not changed all that much. Each season adds a bit of flavour, sometimes the changes stick and become part of the base game. Sometimes the change only lasts a single season, but the core gameplay has largely stayed the same. I peaked during season 7 at Silver 1 losing my promotion matches to rank up three times in a row. But I had the most potential to go far in the 2022 season with solid win rates on my main champions. Unfortunately that year, I stubbornly tries to make The champ Riven work for me. And I ended up with such a bad win rate with her, that it trashed my chances, and I more or less stopped "seriously playing" until this year.
If you have never played a MOBA before, it will be basically impossible for me to explain the rules and gameplay loop within the confines of an internet article. I am sorry, but you are going to have to take my word for a few things. The basic rundown, to the best of my abilities, is to imagine you are playing a fighting game and an RTS game at the same time. As well as moving strategically as a team to gain resources and a position advantage, faster than your opponents. If that sounds a bit complicated, it really is. Just in order to unlock the ranked mode, you need to reach level 30 which will take an average player between 100-150 hours to complete. Most players will argue you need around 500 to play ranked and actually contribute to winning matches. League does have a handful of modes outside of the core normal and ranked experience, and at least one of those modes sees a great deal of traffic, but I have never been particularly interested in them. I suppose I'll break the game modes down here.
There is the core experience; the main map, Summoner's Rift. As I said earlier it came out in season 5 and has gone through a dozen or so iterations. You can play normal or ranked here, depending on your goals for the game. You take turns banning and selecting which "champion" or character you want, and then try to best your opponent in one of Summoner's Rift's three lanes. Then there is ARAM, which stands for "all random all mid", a chaotic game mode where it plays out like it sounds. You play as random characters and run down one lane 5v5. Funnily enough I mostly hear the term ARAM a disparaging remark in my games, when one or both teams are not playing to a particular strategy and just "running it down mid".
The new hotness is the new classic mode that recently launched at the end of July. It effectively resets the game back to season 3 before I had even heard of the game. I have been having a blast experiencing what the game was like with only the original champions to select from and the old nostalgic audio and visuals. The in-game presentation is definitely updated in terms of polish, but everything looks chunkier and more cartoony, and the old splash art for the champs is kind of hilarious. I hope they take it even further and release other champs from their heydays. The best part so far has been the positivity in chat; people are actually talking to each other again, happily sharing their silly builds and strategies from the olden days. Playful trash talk - instead of hate speech - was a nice change of pace. Clearly Riot games are willing to put in some work to keep things fresh and fun for its players seventeen years later, but to be honest, I probably wont play much more of classic mode. I've simply put too much into learning the main ranked experience to want to spend much of my time anywhere else, but every once in a while to blow off steam, classic is a nice change of pace.
We've come a long way lol
I am repeating myself here but the game is complicated. There are 173 playable characters each with 5 unique abilities, and you better know them all or you will get demolished. Again, this is not going to be a tutorial, but you need to be competent at dueling, skirmishing, last hitting, tempo, objectives, vision, and match ups. MATCH UPS! There are over TEN THOUSAND 1v1 matchups and if you factor in all the unique team comps that you could potentially get, the matchups go in to the billions or quadrillions. Now, obviously those numbers go down significantly when you consider the most commonly played champs, and that many champs serve more or less the same role. But I am just trying to illustrate to you just how much data you need swimming around in your brain. Data that is entirely useless to you except for the 40 minutes that you spend trying to annihilate the enemy team. It's essentially the sunk cost fallacy playing out. I have spent somewhere in the ballpark of 2500 hours and you couldn't pay me to do that again for any other game. Sunk cost wouldn't be enough on its own however, to explain the explosive popularity and continued longevity of this game. But let us keep that level of required investment fresh in our minds, because it is the root of everything, good or bad.
But it's fun. Like, really fun, and immensely satisfying to so thoroughly thrash someone with that game knowledge, that investment we've spent on the game. Personally I identify myself more as a single player, narrative focused gamer, and yet; there is nothing like being the sole reason you win a 40 minute plus game of League of Legends. When a combination of your tactics, skill, and communication comes together and you get one of those rare, hard fought victories. How could I ever let that go? I don't think anything else in my life gives me that same feeling. On the flipside however, is when you take a catastrophic L and there is no way to shift the blame. You really thought you knew how to manage playing against someone better than you, but you keep dying and digging your team a bigger and bigger hole. That. Is. Tough. For every match history that makes you look like the goat. There are also sections that you would prefer not to show anyone. Those brutal losses, the lows, the valleys. They really do validate the highs. Knowing just how wrong it can go makes it feel that much sweeter when you are getting pentakills, farming compliments and playing out of your mind.
It doesn't get better than this
Considering all I have put into the game, my drive to reach greater heights, and the promise of new varied content, it's unlikely that I will be uninstalling any time soon. League of Legends has grown into a behemoth, but I think its sitting at just about its greatest point. The game is fun and fast paced and I hope it grows to be even bigger, with how much Riot has invested in not only the core game but the surrounding lore and spin offs.
Let's see where we are in another seventeen years.