Why do we fight?

Introduction

When you decide to play League of Legends, you sign up for a game about champions fighting each other. Riot has intentionally moved away from a lore explanation for the in-game battle, so the burden of responsibility to fight falls purely upon the player. Most of the time, this is a non-concern. Pressing buttons and winning contests of skill is fun! If you enjoy League, you probably enjoy at least some part of a fight. In fact, some people love fighting so much they only want to sit in a single lane and fight for 20 minutes straight. People are naturally drawn to fights because beating the other person or people is a great deal of fun.

However, even if fighting is fun, it is not immediately obvious why fighting may be valuable. The grand objective in League isn’t to rout the enemy, but destroy their nexus. Nowhere along that path do you have to fight anyone. Theoretically, a game could be won (and has been won) where you deal zero damage to enemy champions on your way to destroying the enemy nexus. At the same time, fighting can feel fraught with peril. Fights ask much of you: they ask you to process and act upon the game at a very fast pace. If you fail any of the skill tests, you are locked out of the game for upwards of a minute, losing out on opportunities while giving your killer(s) resources. The burden of execution of a fight feels high, and the risk feels great. At the same time, League has a million other skill tests that don’t involve champion combat. Wave management, map movements, vision, etc.—all of these indirectly but noticeably contribute to destroying the nexus, and they happen out of combat. Why, then, do we fight?

The enemy makes the game hard

Imagine, for a moment, you could read minds while playing League. You would have an incredible competitive advantage: being able to predict your opponent’s behavior is so powerful in a game with so many possible actions to take. Instead of needing to spend time guessing what your opponent might think or do, all you would need to worry about is crafting a perfect response. The game is greatly simplified. Without the constant variance of enemy input, all your plans work flawlessly just as you drew it up. Faker is unsure of how someone with such uninspiring hands is better than himself.

Fortunately for Faker’s legacy, we are not mind readers. League is a symmetric game, and both you and your opponent are regular humans. Your enemies want to destroy your nexus exactly as much as you want to destroy theirs. Any value they create for themselves is directly proportional value against for you. Furthermore, your enemies are allowed to be every bit as clever, skilled, and varied as you can be (or the complete opposite). It’s not that enemies are completely unpredictable, but more that the space of player behavior, both thought and action, has too many possibilities. There are too many feasible actions to take at any given moment: they can click any arbitrary spot, know any arbitrary piece of information, press buttons at any arbitrary timing, and literally anything they do directly affects your ability to destroy their nexus. The fundamental variance of human behavior complicates every idea you have in the game, and is core to why League is so difficult and dynamic.

Knowing or estimating what your opponent might do is a large advantage, so to get ahead of your opponents, you might try to read your opponent’s mind by constantly guessing their immediate behavior. Unfortunately, the guessing game is not free to play! You must allocate some of your mental stack to this task, and the costs scale with your opponent’s agency. Without some way of making the guesswork easier, the game can become overwhelmingly difficult, crowding out space for other thoughts like remembering to CS or track your own positioning. For the sake of winning the game, we want to make the guessing game—and the rest of the game as a consequence—easier by taking some guesswork out of the equation. Let’s instead ask a smaller question with more direct, useful information, one where the possibilities are more constrained.

Combat, unlike the broader problem space of destroying the nexus, has definite bounds and outcomes. Also unlike strategy and tactics, which can be ignored until the nexus explodes, combat cannot be ignored. You can drop waves, give objectives, cede vision, and still win the game—as long as you are alive, you are able to act in some manner. Not so for combat. Once someone is dead, they cannot influence the game with their inputs (let’s ignore communication, just like our allies). A player must react to a fight as soon as they enter it: no response means death, and death means no agency. The innate fear of death informs all player behavior. No one sees incoming lethal damage and continues to farm as if nothing had happened. If you fight someone, they will behave predictably, picking an option on the scale ranging from fully returning the favor to disengaging as quickly as possible. Even the prospect of a fight can influence people. If they think they will win, they might walk forward brazenly; if they think they will lose, they will cower meekly. A fight, including the possibility of one, will narrow player behavior and cause people to act more predictably.

This is League’s gameplay puzzle at its core. If we consider the main barrier of League to be the complexity of our opponents, and the main difficulty that they pose to be their adversarial, difficult-to-predict behavior, and combat to be the best way of influencing player behavior, then we must conclude that combat is our best solution to simplifying the game.

The Lethal Question

The idea that fighting simplifies the game manifests constantly throughout every game of League and at all levels of experience. Let’s take a look at one example of how fighting can streamline a complex moment, particularly in lane. Pretend for a moment you’re playing Sett into Urgot. You lost some HP earlier as Urgot pushed the wave into your tower, but now you hit level 4 just as your wave begins to push out. You’re a relatively new player—you have a general grasp of how to press Sett’s buttons and what Urgot can do, but you’re still learning the character and the game. You have a bunch of competing wants:

• I want to be alive
• I want to make as much money and experience as possible
• I want this Urgot to get out of my way

You have lots of information to hold for consideration:

• I have all my resources up, including summoners and a potion
• The wave is kinda near my tower
• Urgot has all of his resources and maybe will use all of them

It’s a scenario filled with incomplete information, without standout details to give you direction for how to play it out. The broad problem of “what should I do” asks you to utilize all available information, including all of Urgot’s possible actions, which just isn’t feasible at the moment. You want a question that is easier to pose, test, and answer: the ubiquitous lethal question of

Can I kill this guy?

The answer to this question is useful because it gives you strong direction for how you should play the next immediate moments out. If the answer is yes, then reap him and the rewards of undisturbed wave control. If the answer is “definitely not,” then you should be trying your best to change the situation so that it is no longer “definitely not,” so you can ask the question again on better footing (example idea: safely waiting until the next matched recalls where both of you are in base at roughly the same time). If the answer is “not right now, but i can push the situation towards yes,” then you should try to take those actions (example idea: take a short trade now conserving ignite and flash, and hope he pushes the next wave in so you can flash on him while he’s trying to crash the wave for the kill).

Notice how “yes” is the trivial case. If you can kill the enemy, you don’t need to account for their behavior since nothing they can do will affect the outcome. You’re allowed to do whatever you want in this situation since you have all the agency once your enemy is dead. It’s also easy to test in game: just try to kill the guy in front of you, assuming it’s possible. One way or another you’ll find out if your guess was correct, a moment of tangible feedback in a game where outcomes are often delayed and separated from causes. The other options require a bit more setup, speculation, and knowledge, and give you less actionable information. Still, compared to the complete lack of direction, non-lethal options give you a significant amount of direction for how to play the next bit of time. In any case, asking the lethal question simplifies a complicated situation greatly.

Threat as a repellant

Combat doesn’t need to result in a kill to create value. Let’s leave the land of mortals for a minute and take a look at Faker’s famous flash trade vs Chovy at Worlds 2024.

I don’t need to explain why this clip is so cool1I personally like IWDominate’s analysis of the situation here., but I can translate the events into the lens of this essay. At the beginning of the clip, Faker, playing Sylas, is put in a terrible situation. Chovy, on Ahri, has a ton of options open to him to progress the game: force Faker to take a poor recall, roam, solo kill him, keep him in lane for longer, call for jungle attention, and so on. All these options are available to him because Chovy has what he assumed was trivial lethal on Faker, heavily limiting his options. Faker, however, recognizes both that Chovy does not have trivial lethal and that if Faker expended all of his resources, he could threaten Chovy enough such that he could not progress the game. Faker executes this wildly impressive display of mechanics and decision-making, and he gets exactly what he wants: an Ahri that, for fear of being killed, lets a low HP Sylas crash the wave, and immeasurable aura.

It is unreasonable to assume that anyone reading this could ever emulate a play of this caliber, especially at a moment with so much on the line. However, what happened in the Faker vs. Chovy trade is a microcosm of the classic melee vs. ranged dynamic in lane2We’ll cover more about the ranged vs. melee laning matchup in another essay!. In a theoretical lane, the ranged champions should gain full control over the wave against any melee champion, no matter the matchup. Melee champions would never be able to touch the wave first without suffering punishment, letting the ranged champion do as they please. We don’t live in a whiteroom, though. All the way up to the pro level, melee champions get lane priority all the time. Champions like Akali and Sylas might not have superior range or waveclear compared to a ranged champion, but if/when they can threaten lethal or work towards lethal, it becomes significantly more dangerous for the ranged champion to contest them. They effectively remove the option of the opposing ranged champion mindlessly leveraging their range advantage for harass, and instead force the opponent to narrow their behavior to account for the possibility of death. Even beyond ranged vs. melee, the concept of threat as dissuasion applies. The higher your threat, the more predictable your opponent, and the easier your game.