So you want to get better at League of Legends: is lolguides.com's Summoner School worth it?

League of Legends is the most popular video game in Asia. and maybe the most popular game in the world. That means there are millions of League players out there, and most of them are—let’s be honest—pretty bad.

So how do you get better? I started playing League of Legends a couple of months ago for work (we needed someone on the team who knew the game), but I quickly realized that it was also something I enjoyed doing. What I didn’t enjoy was the failure, the confusion, and the constant abuse from teammates that comes along with being a new player to the game. There’s a lot to learn about League, and even if you’ve been playing for years you’ve probably still got areas where you can improve.

So when the folks at lolguides.com offered me a chance to review their service, I was pretty curious. Normally, access to the Summoner School costs $67. That’s more than most games cost new (although not more than League of Legends costs if you start buying stuff). What did they have to offer that could be worth $67?

What is Summoner School?

The lolguides.com Summoner School is essentially just five very in-depth articles about how to get better at playing League of Legends. And when I say in-depth I do mean in depth; by my count the full course runs nearly 60,000 words. That’s approximately the same length as a short novel, and that’s not including the supplementary blog posts the courses link to (many of which are helpful) or the embedded videos that are used to illustrate some of the finer points of the game, which take time to watch.

The on-site interface lays the courses out using a faux school floor plan.

The school breaks down into five “courses” (articles):

• An introduction which covers the very basics and is by far the shortest section
• A section on pre-game that covers runes, masteries, summoner spells, and champion select.
• A section on in-game that focuses on the meta roles and the various aspects of the laning phase.
• A section on team-game that focuses on team fights and how to deal with your teammates.
• A section on postgame that’s about how to assess and improve your own performances, how to find advice and guidance, and where to find other good resources for learning.

It’s long enough that there’s no way to review every aspect in depth, but I do want to list a few of the objective things it has going for and against it before we move on to the rather more subjective assessment of how much it helped me and whether or not it’s worth it.

What it has going for it

• An emphasis on psychology. Even when you’re solo-queueing, LoL is a team game, but most guides out there pretty much ignore the game’s psychological aspects. Summoner School, in contrast, spends a lot of time on this, and has guidance both for how to handle your own emotions and how to handle all the frustrations caused by bad teammates. Riot’s own statistics show that positive, friendly players win more games, so this stuff is really important.
• An exhaustive glossary. For new players, LoL can be extremely intimidating because it basically has its own language. Having a glossary of all these words and abbreviations in one place makes things much simpler.

What it doesn’t

• Wall of text. Summoner School has some illustrations and a few embedded videos, but for the most part it’s all text. Well-organized, clearly-written text, but still text. 60,000 words is a lot to get through on a computer screen, and if you’re a visual or auditory learner who doesn’t learn as well from reading, you may struggle to get through it.
• No champion-specific info. Given the number of champions in LoL (117 and soon to be 118) and how long the courses already are, it’s understandable the courses don’t cover champion specifics. It’s still a bit disappointing there aren’t at least some quick tips for popular champions, but if you need champion-specific guides, solomid.net is a great free resource.

That said, what’s in the courses is probably less important than how much they can help you. So a more important question to answer is: after reading through the guide…