About
At the beginning of 2017, I (Chelsea) decided to learn League of Legends in secret in order to surprise my boyfriend for our anniversary. Over the course of 6 months, I learned more than I ever thought possible – about the game, about myself, and about my boyfriend.
This is the blog that I created to chronicle my journey so that my boyfriend could follow it later.
The original intro:
My name is Chelsea and I’m a 24-year-old woman living in Toronto with her boyfriend. I live a pretty dull existence most of the time, but I have been known to randomly jump into unexpected hobbies. Over the past couple of years I’ve taken up rock climbing, ballet barre, and the ukulele, among other things, and managed to become Pretty Okay at them.
Now, I’m making my next mission League of Legends.
I do not play video games. Scratch that – I CAN NOT play video games. In high school, for some reason I was friends with a bunch of nerdy gamers, and they literally would not allow me to touch their controllers. I was only allowed to play if we were playing Burnout (which I called Boom Crash), because the objective of the game is to cause as much destruction as possible, which I am FANTASTIC at.
Games give me anxiety, and I freak out under pressure. Once, in an extremely rare moment of charity, a friend was allowing me to take a turn playing Zelda: Twilight Princess. She instructed me to avoid the water or else I would die, and I immediately turned around and walked straight into the water.*
These are the kinds of things I do on a regular basis.
So WHY ON EARTH would I start with an extremely complex and high pressure game like League of Legends?
Well, my boyfriend loves it. Like, LOOOOOVES it. Like, it’s the only thing he talks about, reads about, watches videos about, 95% of the time. He eats, sleeps and breathes LOL. Even though he’s been playing for years, when he has downtime he studies it.
I believe that if he wanted to, he could have a future career doing something involving this game. That kind of passion can not be ignored. But even if he just wants to keep it a hobby (after all, I am very familiar with how turning something you love into your job can quickly ruin it), I still want to support him in doing anything that he wants to do (unless it’s bad for him, obviously).
But he expressed to me that instead of encouraging him, as I would like to, he feels discouraged by me because I don’t want him playing games when I’m around. This is still true, only because I want us to spend time together, but the last thing I want him to feel is discouraged.
To solve this, and as a sign of my undying love, I decided that I would learn to play. I asked him to teach me once before and he seemed really happy about it, but let’s face it, that is an awful lot of work for him, and time that he’d probably rather spend playing himself.
So I decided I’d teach myself in secret, but document my journey here so that he can read about it later and laugh. And also so that he wouldn’t feel like he was left out of this process.
Initially, my goal was “to be good enough to make it through a game only dying a couple of times”, but I soon realized that was not specific enough, so here are my goals now:
- Reach Level 30 (the highest level)
- Be good enough to get through the majority of PvP games dying no more than 5 times and with a ratio of higher kills/assists than deaths, playing against other level 30 players
- Become highly competent in the support role
- Be able to play every role if needed
I began this project at the beginning of 2017, and all of this should be accomplished by June 26th. That’s our anniversary.
I can’t think of a better gift to give him.
*Since beginning this project, my boyfriend and I actually started playing some Gamecube games together, including this one, and having now beaten the game, I didn’t see any situation in which that would have happened. So I think I’m remembering wrong. But the point is, she told me not to do a thing, and then I did that thing anyway.
**I decided to make this blog public on the off-chance that someone read it and might be able to offer me some help, to help motivate me and to make it easier to write (since I am used to writing public blog posts).
***note, I am aware that the image that was on this page is for some reason broken, but the description of it is just too funny so I decided to just leave it like that. I can confirm that the original photo DID in fact include 2 people, people smiling, glasses, and people standing.
Results
These were the results of the project as of the “deadline”, which was our anniversary on June 26, 2017.
Goals:
- Reach Level 30 (the highest level)
- Be good enough to get through the majority of PvP games dying no more than 5 times and with a ratio of higher kills/assists than deaths, playing against other level 30 players
- Become highly competent in the support role
- Be able to play every role if needed
Level: 30
Games played: 359.5
Hours: 220
Days: 69
% of Level 30 PvP games that met goal: 55%
Primary role: Support
Secondary role: Mid
Champions owned:
Ahri
Akali
Amumu
Anivia
Annie
Ashe
Evelynn
Garen
Janna
Kayle
Lux
Maokai
Morgana
Nasus
Sivir
Sona
Soraka
Tristana
Veigar
Warwick
leagueoflove.ca 