So, at what point does a build/guide/champion become off-meta and when would it be worth giving it the "Off-Meta" tag? I am working on a Gwen guide and I am testing some builds, but they are still AP, and at some point I plan on looking into doing something with AD with her too. There is still normal Gwen things within the guide but I am curious nevertheless.

I noticed a grammar error with the line

I think you meant "You can only teach people things if you know it better than they do". Hope that helps!

Hello there, here is my unofficial review.

Credibility
I get your reasoning about being gold+ and all, but I still do not completely agree with it. I believe there are good players and good teachers of every rank, some just don't have the time to grind ranked games and some just prefer chill normal games. And every player has a different style and excels at different aspects of the game. We can almost always learn something from others, even though that person has a lower rank unless you are faker.

You state that having a high rank/high mastery doesn't automatically mean your guides will be great. I agree with that. But I would like to add that you could also say the opposite: just because you don't have the highest rank doesn't mean your guides might automatically be bad. IMO part of the charm of Mobafire is that everyone is welcome to create a guide. The low elo ones should just indirectly show they know what they are talking about through their guide, more than the high elo ones who can flex with rank/points.

Necessity
For the moment I personally prefer to write new guides when I feel there is a niche to fill. But what about being so passionate about a champion that you want to write a guide even though there are good ones out already? Different players, so different visions and different guides. Even if there are already multiple guides available, I'm from the opinion everyone should have a chance.

This is very personal for me. When I started writing my Maokai guide I was unranked and there were several high-quality guides on him out already. In hindsight I was crazy to try to compete against veteran Goliath and ex-pro player Wickd. But 4 contest wins later I think I can say it ultimately paid off, as long as you are willing to improve.

I know my opinion about these topics is rather controversial, so take it with a grain of salt and whether you do anything with it is completely up to you.

Minor detail: "...go ahead and tell the world that your secondary tree is the superior one."
Maybe add something like: "As long as you do so in a respectful way." Otherwise some poor moderators might have to clean up the mess.

What do you put in a guide?
I think of some extra topics to avoid. Some people put champion changes throughout patches in their guides, which is completely irrelevant. So no patch notes please. Another one is excessive self promotion. Of course you can link your stream and youtube, but don't put your non-LoL related Instagram or advertisement for your give-away in your guides.

Overall
I think this is a solid guide. It contains enough information about different subjects without being overly long. I can see this resource inspiring many upcoming authors.
Like you indicated already, I feel like there is something more to say, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I'll think about it some more.


Thanks for a great addition to the site again! Will pay extra attention to these topics when I fully reinvent my guides soon.

It’s obvious that this guide is already great, you’ve helped me plenty of times with my own guide issues just in general so thanks for creating this! :o

I think one thing you could mention under “going beyond” is that the authors could very well look at some vods of pro players playing their champion. If pro players do something different that the author doesn’t know that they could have done, they could apply that to the guide for example. If they’re not as familiar with their champion as they think they are, this can be a good start to get more information, thus leading to the author getting more experienced as well.

I would honestly just change “skin tier lists” to just “anything that has to do with skins” since there are so many different variations and all of them are still pretty pointless (unless used for formatting purposes). For the box you used to mention additional chapters (if you have the necessary ones), I would probably change out “Jungle Paths” to “Gameplay related to chosen role” or variations to that since jungle pathing is obviously specific to jungle whilst there are many different topics for all the other roles as well and it’d be hard to list those out too.

When you talk about common pitfalls, I would probably also mention something about a guide’s relevancy. The meta always changes and guides that doesn’t shift to it will always crumble. Of course off meta guides don't really go into this category hence the reason they’re off meta but I feel like this would be a good rule of thumb. Just keep the guide updated. If ADC + supp is the current meta today and then e.g. 4 weeks later it changes to APC + supp as the new meta, it’ll be relevant to make chapters talking about that and so forth.

Can’t really figure out any other topics you might have missed tbh so I’ll be ending it here. The guide is really good like I’ve already said and it explains so much about how you can think about making a guide, which is awesome.

Amazing :D You've been such a huge help with my guide and its great to see all your advice and tips in a guide itself.

Amazing guide, Sandra.

I absolutely love the minimalist visuals. It all looks so clean and easy to read, it's just a blessing for eyes. The guide is absolutely fed up with useful information and you really showed off how experienced guide writer you really are. I myself honestly have no idea what feedback I could give you on making this guide even better. Perhaps one short paragraph about right selection of fonts, to make sure it really fits the guide theme and it does support all characters you want in your guide? I myself already went into this font problematic twice and had to basically redo a lot of stuff to fix the issues... But I guess that's just me xD.

Either way thank you for this stunning addition to Mobafire Network. I super hard appreciate the fact that you highlighted my cheatsheet from the MF guide, that really means a lot to me. So yeah, well played on this guide it looks amazing, easy +1 and +rep, just take it all from me already :D

This guide is so helpful- I wish it existed when I created my guide haha. I'll be sure to use it when I hopefully create another guide in the future.

If you want a nice colour scheme but you're not sure what colours look good together, I suggest this website! I used it when I redid my MF guide in April :)

Good stuff! Even as a seasoned author here, there are still some things mentioned that I should improve upon. Good to be reminded of that sometimes.

Only complaint: Who says Prototype: Omnistone Pyke sucks? I'll show you its hidden power! :P