League-of-legends – Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite Cannot update League of Legends Fix

League of Legends' Free-to-Play model allows gamers, paying or not, to enjoy all of the core gaming experience.

So every element that actually makes a difference in the gameplay can be acquired for free (champions & runes). There are more than 60 champions in the game and they are locked for you when you create an account; you buy a champion for a given price with in-game money (IP - Influence Points) earned by playing the game, or you spend Riot Points. Runes give you a small boost in-game, and can only be bought with IP.

Riot Points (RP - acquired spending real money) are used for:

• Boosting Summoner Experience/IP gain per game (summoner level cap is 30)
• Buying champions
• Skins (cosmetics)
• Changing your Summoner Name (more cosmetic, basically)
• Others (Bundles, Extra Rune Pages, etc.)

In short, not spending money means you will take longer to unlock all features (which are not required for having fun with the game), you will not have skins, and your Summoner Name is fixed.

Map Awareness

Riot has garnered some pretty effective videos with their Video Tutorial contest (Links posted below). As a beginner, you want to primarily focus on making sure you don't get ambushed by the other team (called a "gank"). While some of this involves Map Awareness, you also need to learn to not overextend, as well as keeping an eye on the enemies you're fighting in your lane. If you cannot see one or both of the enemies in your lane, let your teammates know!

Last Hitting

Killing minions and enemy players nets you gold to buy items. However, if you don't land the killing blow on an enemy minion, you will get ZERO gold, even if you've done most of the damage to it.

The faster you kill enemy minions, the faster the minions reach the enemy tower, which will make quick work of all non-cannon minions. It's better to keep the minion fights as close to the middle as you can; you only need to finish off the minion to get gold from it -- see if you can limit yourself to only attacking minions when you will kill them!

Tower Aggro

The enemy towers are dangerous. They have lots of health, armor, and a powerful attack that can quickly decimate low-level heroes. It's important, then, to know how the turret picks its target.

Enemy towers will always target allied minions first, switching to champions only if there are no longer any allied minions around. The exception to this is if you deal damage to an enemy champion, in which case the tower will immediately switch to the damaging champion, shooting at them until they die or move out of range.

Let me repeat that: If you deal damage to an enemy champion within range of the tower, it will immediately start shooting at you: You do not want this. Be very careful when attacking the enemy at their own tower.

Recommended Viewing

Four of these videos are a result of the Valoran Video Contest held by Riot Games, and are quick, 1-minute videos touching on just the basics (which seems exactly what you're looking for). The fifth video is made by Shurelia, an employee of Riot Games, and goes much more in-depth into what "Zoning" is, and how to take advantage of it.