How to Set Goals for Your Amateur League of Legends Team

Ask most amateur teams what they're working on and you get the same answer: climb. Ask what that means for next week's scrim block and the answer gets vague fast.

"Climb" isn't a goal. It's a direction. It doesn't tell you what to practice on Tuesday, and it doesn't tell you three weeks from now whether anything actually changed. Win rate moves for a dozen reasons that have nothing to do with how well you're playing: a rough draft, a bad server, one bad night from your jungler. If climbing is the only thing you're tracking, you can't tell progress from noise.

Teams that actually improve don't set one big goal. They set a small number of specific ones, at two levels: what the team as a whole needs to fix, and what each player needs to work on. Here's how to do that properly.

Why "just climb" doesn't work as a goal

A goal needs three things to be useful: it has to be specific, it has to be something you can measure from your own games, and it has to point at something you can actually train.

"Climb" fails on all three. It's not specific: it doesn't say what to change. It's barely measurable on a short timeline: rank moves too slowly and too noisily week to week to tell you anything useful after a single scrim block. And it's not trainable: you can't run a practice block on "climbing." You can run one on closing out drakes, or on cutting deaths before 15 minutes.

The fix isn't to stop caring about rank. It's to stop using it as the only thing you track, and start setting goals underneath it: the specific habits and numbers that actually move rank, and that you can check after every session instead of every split.

Team goals vs. individual goals

Amateur teams that set goals well work at two levels, not one.

Team goals are about how the five of you play together. Things like objective control, early-game gold difference, or how consistently you close out games once you're ahead. These are shared. No single player can fix them alone, and no single player's stat line explains them.

Individual goals are about one player's own numbers: CS/min, vision score, deaths, kill participation, whatever is actually holding that player back. These are personal. They belong to the player, and they should be based on their own data, not a benchmark copied from a pro player three ranks above them.

The mistake most teams make is picking only one level. A team that only sets individual goals ends up with five players independently grinding CS/min while the team still loses every game where it's even at 20 minutes, because nobody owns the mid-game shotcalling. A team that only sets team goals gives players nothing concrete to do outside of scrims: "we need better teamfights" doesn't tell your support what to change in solo queue.

You need both. One goal for the team, one goal per player, reviewed on the same cadence.

What makes a good goal metric

Not every stat makes a good goal. Before you pick one, run it through three checks.

Is it something you can actually measure from your matches? Skip anything you'd have to eyeball from memory. "Better teamfighting" isn't measurable. Kill participation, deaths before 15 minutes, and gold diff @15 are. They come straight out of your match data, every game, without anyone having to remember or guess.

Is it a leading indicator, not just the scoreboard? Win rate is an outcome. It's the thing you're trying to move, not the thing you train. The goals that actually change outcomes sit one level below it: the habits that drive wins, not the result of them. A team stuck around even at 15 minutes but losing most close games probably has an objective-control problem, not a "just play better" problem. Find the leading number behind the result you want.

Is it set from your own baseline, not someone else's rank? A Gold team chasing a Diamond player's CS/min benchmark is setting itself up to feel like it's failing at a target that was never realistic. Pull your own current number first. The goal is to move it, not to match a number that belongs to a different bracket.

Two examples that check all three boxes:

• Team goal: Gold diff @15, currently -400 on average, with a target of even or better within three weeks. It's measurable every game, it's a leading indicator for who's actually winning the early game, and it's shared across the whole roster.
• Individual goal: A support's vision score per minute, currently below the team's own average, with a target to match the roster's median within a month. It's specific to one player, comes straight from their own recent games, and it's something they can train in solo queue between scrims.

How to set the goal itself

Once you've picked the metric, the process is the same whether it's a team goal or an individual one.

1. Pull the current number. Not from memory. Pull it from your last two to four weeks of games. This is your baseline, and it has to be real, not a guess.
2. Set a target that's a stretch, not a fantasy. Moving gold diff @15 from -400 to even is realistic in a few weeks. Moving it from -400 to +800 by next Tuesday is not. Pick a target close enough to feel earnable.
3. Give it a timeframe. Two to four weeks is usually the right window: long enough to filter out one bad night, short enough that the goal still means something when you check it.
4. Write down why it matters. One sentence. "Gold diff @15 because we keep losing games we're even in at 20 minutes." That sentence is what turns a number into something the team actually buys into, instead of a target nobody remembers agreeing to.
5. Check it on a fixed cadence. Weekly is the sweet spot: enough games to smooth out variance, tight enough to course-correct before the goal window closes.

Common mistakes teams make with goals

Setting too many at once. One team goal and one goal per player is plenty. A page of targets means nobody remembers what they're supposed to be working on this week.

Picking outcome goals instead of process goals. "Win more scrims" isn't a goal, it's the result you want. Find the number underneath it that you can actually train.

No baseline. A target only means something next to where you started. Without a number to compare against, "improve vision score" is just a wish.

Setting it once and never checking it again. A goal that isn't reviewed isn't a goal, it's a New Year's resolution. If you're not looking at it weekly, your weekly review is the place to fold it in.

Copying a benchmark that doesn't fit your rank. Your target should come from your own recent games, not a Challenger player's stat sheet. Move your own number, at your own pace.

From vague direction to something you can actually track

"Climb" is where every amateur team starts. It's not where the teams that actually improve stay.

The teams that turn effort into results replace it with a short list: one shared target for the five of you, one personal target for each player, both pulled from real recent data, both checked on the same weekly rhythm. That's the difference between hoping the rank moves and knowing exactly what has to change for it to.

VictoryView's Objectives feature builds this in directly. Set a team goal and an individual goal per player, pulled from your own match history, and the progress recalculates automatically every time new games come in: no spreadsheet, no manual tracking. You focus on the work. The number tells you if it's working.