Scrim etiquette – League of Legends

Have you ever wanted to get involved in a League of Legends scrim, but you aren’t too sure what the proper process is?

Zach ‘imadeaypto’ Thomas, Trainee Technician and Esports Manager at Godalming College, takes a look at the process for setting up a League of Legends scrim, and the proper etiquette for these matches.

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What is a scrim?

Serving the purpose of simulating a competitive match for a chosen game, a scrim provides the perfect environment for your team to hone their individual and collective skills. Instead of throwing your team into a public match where the opposing team may be disorganised – resulting in a match that may give an inaccurate result of your team’s capabilities, scrims will consist of two teams of equal organisation and skill that have agreed to play against one another purely for improvement.

You will take these opportunities to identify the pros and cons of your team, where they are most strong and where some more work needs to be put in. This information will be apparent as you progress throughout the match but one of the best ways to tell your team’s weaknesses is doing a VOD review – watching back over the replay of the match to analyse your performance.

It’s important to note that winning is not the objective of the scrim. The true victory in a scrim is your team being able to take something away from it and develop themselves.

Finally, have a plan going into the scrim! Perhaps there’s a new meta team composition that’s tearing up the rift so you could decide to play champions that counter it. Maybe your top laner and jungler need to work on their coordination together so you agree with your bot lane that your jungler will be playing for topside in the first game. There will be many different situations and compositions to work on so encourage your team to discuss.

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Organising a scrim:

Now that we understand what a scrim is, how do we go about organising one for League of Legends? Firstly, we will need to find another team to engage with. We’d recommend looking on Discord as they are host to a variety of Esports communities. If you’re a Student Champs team, the British Esports Student Champs server is a great place to start!

Keep your League scrim searching posts clear and easy to understand. We suggest considering one of the following format examples:

LFS / GM – Challenger / 20:00 GMT / BO3

LFS / Platinum 3-1 / 03.02.22 / 2 games

LFS / EU / 3 games / Diamond 1 – Master / Now

Ensure the post you make is accurate as possible:

• Scrim partners need to know how capable your team is. Being as precise as possible with your team’s skill rating will help them gauge if playing against you will be beneficial for you both.
  
• Ensure your team can make the time you have listed for a scrim. Being late or having to repeatedly cancel scrims that were agreed upon can be very frustrating for the opposition and give your team a negative reputation.
  
• If the community you are posting in contains teams worldwide, specify what region you play in. Matching with teams in NA when you are EU based can cause conflicting time schedules and result in higher ping when playing.
  
• When you’ve found and agreed on a scrim, cross out or delete your post so others do not think you are still searching for one.

When you agree to scrim another League of Legends team, there are a few more details that should be exchanged in a DM. This typically includes who will be hosting the match and the Riot ID of your Captain. Many teams will also provide each other with their team’s OP.gg – a website dedicated to displaying player’s match history and performance, however this is not a necessary step and should be agreed upon in the DM.

Thankfully, hosting a lobby for League of Legends is a very simple process. If you are the designated host, ensure the following settings are enabled:

• Map: Summoner’s Rift.
• Game type: Tournament Draft.
• Allow spectators: Typically, this will be enabled to ‘Lobby Only’ so that coaches on either side can watch the match, however you should check in DMs if the opposing team is comfortable to have spectators present.
• Password: This can be set to anything, communicate it over DM to the other team.

Ensure that you set up the lobby in advance to the discussed start time. Provide notice as early as possible if your team will be delayed in setting up or joining the lobby.

Finally, the team that your members are a part of in the lobby will dictate what side of the map they are on. Team 1 are blue side whereas Team 2 is red side. Check with your scrim partner how you will decide what side you are playing on. A good way of doing this is a coinflip to determine who is on what side for the first match and then alternate sides for every match after.

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During the draft phase:

All players are now in the lobby and the draft phase has begun. What should you be doing?

• Keep to the plan you had in mind. Pick champions based around it so you can practice it.
  
• If a third-party drafting tool, like prodraft.com, is used and one of your team accidentally locks in an incorrect or banned champion, leave the lobby and immediately notify the opposing team of the incident. Have your team member that left the lobby join back as soon as possible and draft your team exactly as chosen in the third-party drafting tool.

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During the scrim:

The match has now begun, and the players are in-game. Keep the following in mind:

• Minimise the use of in-game chat features for necessary use only and ensure it is professional and polite.

• If any issues arise during the match which needs the game to be paused, type ‘/pause’ in chat. Immediately after pausing the game, notify the opposing team of why and how long you need to be paused for, e.g. “5 minute pause needed, X disconnected.” Notify the opposition when you are ready to resume. A simple “Ready?” or “r?” will be suitable. If they are, type ‘/resume’ in chat and a countdown will begin to the resuming of the match.

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After the scrim:

The scrim has now finished. To make sure you maximise the most out of you scrim experience, consider the following:

• If you like, type ‘gg’ or ‘gg wp’ to show your respect to the opposing team.
  
• Discuss with your team how they felt about the match and where they think they did well or where they could do better.
  
• Agree on a time to do a VOD review of the matches so you can perform a review of your performance. Note that League of Legends has in-game replay feature, however they expire every patch cycle, so ensure they are recorded or saved.

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Want to know more about doing scrims for different esports titles? We have a few different guides available in Overwatch 2, Rocket League, and VALORANT that run through how to setup the scrim, and the best practice for the games.

For more information about the British Esports Student Champs, check out the Champs hub on the British Esports website.