It Took A League Player Exactly 3,439,140 Mouse Clicks To Reach Diamond

Diamond isn’t the highest level one can achieve when playing League of Legends’ fiercely competitive ranked mode. But it’s one of the highest. Anyone who climbs that high has to put in some serious work into League. More than three years and three million mouse-clicks’ worth, according to one player’s recent measurement.

Reddit user and League of Legends player r3as0n recently cracked Diamond V, the lowest of the five tiers that Riot uses to divide up each of the seven separate ranks in its ridiculous popular MOBA game. Diamond is currently the third highest rank in League — falling behind the top two “Master” and “Challenger” ranks — which means it’s a respectable level to achieve, even within the game’s competitive community. This exciting moment gave r3as0n a chance to reflect on his last three years playing eague n a uniquely granular way, since he’d been playing with the same mouse for that entire time and was able to keep track of the total number of times he’d clicked his mouse in-game.

“I use a Razor Naga MMO mouse for league of legends because i’m not a big fan of shift clicking + Ctrl clicking,” the ranked League player told Kotaku in an email this morning. “I like having the extra 12 buttons at my disposal for key-bindings.”

“I’m reluctant to say that the mouse is the MVP,” he added, “but i’ve had this mouse since 2010 and I’ve never had any issues with it.”

At the end of the successful qualifying game that placed r3as0n in Diamond V, he’d clocked in at exactly 3,439,140 mouse clicks. Besides just being a very large number, the mouse-click data is neat because it helps illustrate just how much people have to play a game like League of Legends — and for how long — in order to even scratch the surface of the upper-most echelons of the game’s competitive levels. It’s really only by playing game after game for months or years on end that many of League’s finer details — the specific time it takes for an ability to recharge, the distance one special ability fires, how far another sends your character backwards or forwards, depending on the situation — become so ingrained in a player’s muscle memory that exploiting them is second nature:

I guess that helps explain why so few League of Legends players will ever end up playing in Master or Challenger-level games, let alone professional ones.