He's not quite telling the whole story, but in a way that's not that different from what you'd expect. The starting point is that you expect a baseline of performance for any professional player: they know what all the characters do, the layout of the map, etc etc.

From that point, some players are particularly well known for certain skills (much as in any other sport): Some guys are known for being preternaturally good at hitting tricky skills. Others are known for being really good at studying their opponents' style and routines, and capitalising on that knowledge.

When Faker says he's good at reading the flow of the game, he's saying he's good at answering questions like the following:

  - If my opponents are in the fog of war, where are they likely to be?
  - What should I do in response to that?

  - Are my allies in a position to help me if I engage this opponent?
  - Are _his_ allies in a position to help him?

  - If I do engage and kill the opponent, will I have to return to base to heal, or  will I make it relatively unhurt?
 - Are there any important map objectives that I will not be able to help with if I am sent back to lick my wounds?

 - If I split off from the rest of the team to go chase some map objective, what happens?
 - Can I gain that objective uncontested?
 - Will my opponents capitalise on the 4v5 and defeat my allies while I possibly gain the objective?
 - Will some of their guys try to prevent me from gaining that objective?
 - If they do, will I be able to escape?
 - Will my team be able to capitalise on the enemy's attempt to stop me and defeat the remaining opponents?

Interesting! What this basically boils down to is 'handling instinctively the right way'. It's hard to grasp for me, because there are so many factors in play and by watching LoL recordings it's sometimes impossible to tell what makes someone gaining an upper hand. Is it communication with the team, doing the right skill at the right moment, being at the right place or just pure luck?

Probably all of this together, which makes this even more intriguing. But I guess this comes natural after playing hundreds of hours?

To use a bit of jargon, what he's trying to say is that he has good "game sense". The counterpart is typically referred to as "mechanical skills".

To achieve pro-level in first place, you must already master most of the game.

This leaves the difference between pro-players being one or two specific things.

Faker in particular, what he meant in that phrase, in the game translates to: "I can see the future".

I used to play Dota (before LoL existed) with a guy with that particular hability, it was utterly annoying, the only way to win against him was to use all your other skills perfectly, because he was always several steps ahead of you and if you made a mistake, he would use it against you.

Example of a game against such players: he notices you are not on his minimap (MOBAs usually use standard RTS minimap), then he thinks a bit, and deduces where you went, suppose you are retreating after getting too damaged after a mistake, then he deduces that you are doing that, deduces where you will be, and deduces that he can get there before you, then he goes there, wait for you to pass while retreating, and kills you, then he helps his teammates that were fighting you to advance their position.

Compare that to a master player that DON'T do that: suppose the guy main skill is to always win 1vs1 fights. You are gone from the map.. the guy DOES notice, but he does not know where you went, so he waits until you return, he might still figure a way to draw you out and win a fight, but probably won't help his team much.

Yes, there are players that are really good at killing enemies, and rack very high individual scores, but that don't make their team win.

One of the things that's unique about MOBAs compared to first person shooters is that killing opponents doesn't necessarily translate into winning the game. It's a little more more complicated than this, but for the sake of simplification, the victory conditions in MOBAs are more like capture the flag. The goal of the game is to destroy the enemy's nexus, in the center of their base. Killing enemies makes it easier to take objectives and eventually the nexus, but strategic gameplay can also do the same thing.

One of the primary differences between high level players and beginners are decisions on when to fight. Beginners love to try to get kills, so they run around the map chasing enemies. This can get them short-term enjoyment, but is usually a poor strategic decision. Experienced players will concentrate more on acquiring resources and taking objectives, only fighting when it's strategic to do so. Since beginners are fighting all the time (and are less skilled), they'll end up having less resources and objectives than experienced players as the game progresses, snowballing the experienced players to victory.

While there's an element of mechanical skill involved in the fighting highlight reels (like the one you posted), there's an equal element of skill involved in getting a resource lead on your opponents so that your character is more powerful than theirs. Once you have that lead, fighting and securing victory is much easier. Conversely, if your character is weaker than your opponent's, it's usually a good idea to avoid fighting them until you can secure resources or objectives to even the odds.

The funny thing is, that this is not actually all that different from playing FPS. Know your map, time item respawns, use the right weapon depending on the environment, move to strategically better positions, retreat if necessary and aim as good as you can. Team matches like CTF, King of the hill, etc. also challenge you to act as a team player.

But it many ways LoL looks so much more difficult to me. Like playing Magic and an FPS at the same time. I'm already awed by the confusing user interface which looks so much more complex than most FPS, which more or less try to reduce the clutter to the bare minimum...

It's the way the spell is used in the game.

In short, there are two way you can use a spell in the game: you can click on the spell, then click on another character. Or you can click on a spell, then click on the direction you want the spell to be used, the spell then fly in that direction, hitting first character that it hit (this type of ability is called "skillshot").

The blue character has a jumpy ability that let him jump a short distance in a direction, during the jump, it can't be hit nor targeted by any ability. The player use the jump ability to dodge the first set of spell by the enemy team, then use an item to turn yellow (which allow him to avoid the second set of abilities, while waiting for the jumping ability to be ready again). Then he jump again to avoid the enemy team's spells, while killing them with other abilities. You can see the character switching direction momentarily while running to avoid skill by the other team.

The skill in that specific gif was: timing/ reaction to avoid spells with both spell usage and movement, correct sequence of spells were used (you can see the cooldown and usage of the 4 spells with their icon at the middle bottom of the screen, it wasn't bashing spells randomly).

MOBA like League of Legends is the middleground First-person-shooters and full-on strategy games like Starcraft. In first person shooters, reaction time is more important, in strategy games, you don't have to deal with sub-second reaction time, but your "action throughput" needs to be much higher since there are more things to be taken care of (multitasking and metagame knowledge). League of legends requires faster reaction time than strategy game, but more multitasking than first person shooters.

Ok, you won. I'm simply too old for this, I guess :)

I'm not even able to follow him doing all this after rewatching it again and again. Makes it even more impressive.

It is not a strategy you can simply use.

He can clearly utilize many champions at a skill level higher than most people. This includes many different areas like itemization, skill order (both learning and usage), positioning, movement, teamwork, etc.

While reading the flow of the game is a much more general level above that. It takes knowing all the champions of the match and what they are likely to do. It takes keeping track of what has happened and predicting what the enemy will do next. Most of all this gets multiplied massively if your team can influence the flow to your advantage.

As with most video games you can't really see the skill until you have played it yourself and know what it takes.

It is much easier to a 19 year old to be good at this game than to articulate why he is so good.

Mechanics are a big portion. That's the play making ability of using the right abilities at the right time and timing things so that you have the maximum impact. Faker's mechanics are very very sound. In the article they mention that this current meta isn't very good for him. It's because they have lessened the impact of assassins vs buffing tanks. The middle lane is often assassin and play making type characters, so the consistent impact he can have on a game isn't as great as it was in previous years.

After that it's like many other competitive activities. It comes down to decision making and seeing things before they happen. Great soccer players will tell you that they're plotting movement and spacing well ahead of what's actually in front of them.

Just a quick comment on the spamfest side of things. Disclaimer that I never got into LoL. I've found over the years playing most of the different MOBAs that when I come into a new one I find it nearly impossible to delineate what is happening in a many-player fight. It only comes after some time playing the game that I'm able to recognise this shade of light in this pattern means this spell is being used, etc. After a point it becomes quite clear what is going on and looks a lot less like a spamfest.

And that is the barrier of entry to MOBA eSports. Also the reason why LOL is the number one eSport is because it is the number on game in the world. Not only that but it is the biggest video game the world has seen.

> Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/37d6kw/fiz....

> For me this looks more like someone running around aimlessly, bashing some spells and getting lucky. Please explain.

A lot of strategy in fights is avoiding incoming damage. I will give you the play-by-play. First off, you need to know who is who so I've labelled everything in this image: http://i.imgur.com/alDwsQz.jpg

Some background, a major part of Fizz's kit that many players (including myself) find incredibly annoying is that he can use his E ability to dodge quite a bit of damage as well as deal a lot of damage. What makes the link you provided a good play is Fizz uses great timing of his ability to dodge damage as well as an active on item he's purchased to avoid damage that would likely have been enough to kill him twice over. Here's the play-by-play.

1. Yasuo dashes to fizz. This removes a lot of fizz's health. One more like that and Fizz would likely die. 2. Fizz uses his E ability to just barely dodge incoming damage from Leblanc (he cannot take damage while on top of the trident). 3. After taking some damage from Zed, Fizz uses the active ability on his Zhonya's Hourglass (item slot 2) which disables actions on his part (puts him in stasis) and makes him untargetable and immune to damage for a short period of time. It also turns his character model gold. This is great timing on his part, as it avoids a lot of incoming damage from Vi and Yasuo. The tornado from Yasuo would have knocked fizz up in the air (a sort of temporary stun) and allowed Yasuo to perform his ultimate ability (which allows him to deal a huge amount of damage to a target in the air). Another great part about the zhonyas is it gets him a little closer to his abilities coming off cooldown (notably his E, which again allows him to avoid more damage as well as deal quite a bit of damage when he lands). 4. As soon as zhonyas stasis ends, fizz uses his q ability to dash towards Leblanc and finish her. 5. Fizz places his ultimate (R ability) on Vi, which slows her and eventually deals a large amount of damage in an area to her and Yasuo. He times this with his E to avoid damage from Vi and Yasuo and then deal enough damage to kill Yasuo. He uses a basic attack (empowered by an item he's purchased) to finish Vi. 6. Finally, he dashes towards Zed with his Q ability to kill him.

Thanks a lot for this in-depth analysis! It looks so unlikely to me that someone could pull something of like this intentionally...

But maybe that's my 30+ year old brain getting rusty ;)

If you're more into FPS, maybe look at SMITE (3rd person view)? Or come and join me and play Awesomenauts (2D MOBA) for a more gentle (and friendly..) introduction to the genre.

That's straight out of Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

> when to fight and when not to fight

He's not being humble, there's just more to this than you might think.

For some context for the following, League of Legends is split between top, mid, jungle and bottom lanes (where there are two people).

So say you stumble into a fight situation that's 2v3 against you in the bottom lane, do you fight or try to run? Well, maybe you should run. But if you look at the map and you're close to your jungler, you can rely on them turning the fight. What about your summoner spells (utility spells with long cooldowns), are they up while your opponents' are down? What champions are you two playing, do you have a lot of Crowd Control, are you easy to kill, are you reliant on your Ultimate (a powerful skill, usually helping to define a character, usually on a long cooldown)? Is that Ultimate up?

What about neutral monsters, which grant bonuses? Is their own jungler likely to be up top getting red buff? Does it look like other enemy team members are also coming down to get Dragon (which used to give gold, but now gives team-wide buffs)?

What about how you've been doing so far in the game? Are you 'fed' (well-equipped/high-level) or not? Are they 'fed'? If they are, have they been spending on the right equipment to take you out?

All of this and much more goes into one, very simple, fight or flight decision that doesn't occur in FPS games. Decision-making is probably the biggest, most important skill for League of Legends, and that's why Faker talks about his decision-making strength in this way. That said, he's ignoring skills such as last-hitting and landing skillshots, probably because they come naturally to him. That's why he's able to say "regardless of which champion I play". A less mechanically-skilled player would have to stick to easier champions, such as Annie, but they could still do very very well with the right decision-making skills.

Essentially, there is a relatively low skill ceiling for mechanical skills (a combination of "don't stand in the fire" from WoW, being able to land your skillshots, and being able to quickly do basic arithmetic) and a very high ceiling for decision-making ability. In FPS games, the reverse is true.

> For me this looks more like someone running around aimlessly, bashing some spells and getting lucky. Please explain.

You are basically correct. This is a moderately skilled player with a character built around pure damage and avoiding damage trampling less skilled players who haven't accounted for the fact that he can dodge their abilities and damage, and have probably built their equipment wrong. In general a match at higher skill levels wouldn't have lasted so long and there wouldn't be so many kills.

He could have died here, though, he's not just bashing some spells. When he goes up in the air, he's able to dodge attacks. When he turns golden, he's invincible due to an item he has, but he can't move. He's helped by the fact that they waste their spells during times when he's invincible, which is pretty lucky (but you can count on it in the lower leagues). It's the fact that his enemies are running around aimlessly and bashing their spells that lets him survive, actually.