LOL teaches Impulse Control

Still playing and enjoying League of Legends (LOL, to those who play). I'm actually getting better at it too. AFter you learn to play the particular strengths of your guy, you have to learn the hard lesson all LOLers must learn: impulse control.

There will come a time, often in fact, when you have a bad guy down to about one bar or less of health.  You're in pursuit and you know you can take him out, but he's heading toward his tower. Now comes the  moment of decision. If you're not tanky, do you dare pursue into the tower. Do you... tower dive? A tower can kill you. Fast.

90% of the time the answer is no, a$$hat. But it's sooooo tempting that most of us try it, at first as a noob who is clueless, and later as she-who-should-know-better-but-can't-resist-the-urge-to-pwn-he-who-is-almost-dead, sooo almost dead you can already taste the kill.

You see, in LOL, it's about your stats. People report their skill as kill/deaths/assists, or in the case of my last game as a mid-laning Rumble: 7/2/6. That's pretty good. Sure Tryndamere has 21/5/6 but everyone knows Tryndamere is a KS face roll killer: that is, a kill-stealing (lands the final blow even though you mostly damaged the bad guy), face-roller (easy to play, keep hitting that one key). There are a few of those sorts of toons: Teemo, Darius, Draven, and others. At any rate, most people pooh pooh the stats on those guys.

So people want kills. Only the support guys are happy with a high assist stat. The rest of us see it as victimized by a kill stealer. We hate that. We want kills! But we also don't want deaths. When you die you "feed" the bad guys; they get gold from killing you and they can use it to buy items that boost their potency. When you kill them you get more gold to boost your potency. Kill is good. Death is bad.

So back to impulse control... you learn, eventually, after dying way too much, feeding the bad guys, and embarrassingly reported as killed by a tower, you learn to back off. Even though you think you can land that final hit. Use your ulti (ultimate, last acquired but most devastating move) if it's ranged; toss up an ignite and hope for the best, but do NOT tower dive, young grasshopper. Learn patience and impulse control.

And here's the summary of my last game...11/0/2