A lot of people have been complaining about the new Preseason 3 shop in League of Legends, claiming that it’s hard to use and impossible to find anything efficiently.

First of all, the glaring problem with the shop being difficult to navigate is just because people aren’t used to it. But, that’s not the point of this blog post – to me, regardless of how hard it is to find items in the new shop, I still actually like it. The screenshot below will explain why:

(Click to enlarge)

Yes, that is the recommended items section of the shop for Zyra, my main champion.

Using some software called LoLStudio, I was able to customize all of my recommended items and categories.

There were options available for the Season 2 shop to customize the recommended items as well, but you would only be able to select six items. In the new shop, you can literally have as many recommended items as you want.

So, I went ahead and customized it so every single item I would possibly ever consider purchasing on Zyra is right at my fingertips. No matter what role I’m playing or who my opponents are, I have everything I could possibly want (literally) a single screen away.

In ranked games where victories and defeats matter, and every split second counts, I recommend using this software to set custom recommended item builds for all the champions you regularly play competitively. Not only will it save you time, but it will help you stay focused on the game rather than having to struggle through navigating an unfamiliar shop every time you return to base.

Last week, I posted that I was having issues with my apartment’s Internet and I wasn’t able to stream or play League of Legends.

A few people questioned the degree to which this problem was affecting me, and most people thought that I was exaggerating when I said the connection dropped every 10-15 minutes.

I decided to share a little screenshot I took while I was playing League of Legends today. It will make more sense if you’re a LoL player – pay close attention to the top-right corner where it shows my ping.

(Click to enlarge)

Yes, that does, in fact, say that my ping is 10888.

That means that when I click on something, it takes almost 11 seconds for my character to respond to my input.

This is usually what happens when my Internet connection is “dropped” – it doesn’t fully disconnect, it just spikes up the ping to an abnormally high number.

This is actually worse than a regular disconnect, because with regular disconnects, the server notices that you’re gone and makes an attempt to port or walk your character back to base so you won’t die. In my situation, my character just stands there doing nothing, because for whatever reason, the server thinks I’m still connected but just experiencing high latency.

So, there is my proof that this is happening – if you look up my match history, you’ll see that I died over ten times in that particular game I played as Kayle, a majority of which were caused by these disconnects.

(Also, for the record, no, I do not usually take W first on Kayle, but I had to in that game because I needed it to get away from three enemies after getting caught in the jungle and not wanting to give away first blood. Yes, it did work, because I managed to get away with about 50 HP.)