Hardcore Casual

My climb out of Silver was short and full of S rankings, which wasn’t that surprising (was in plat 4 prior to the reset) but still interesting, as it has been years since I was that low. Here are some takeaway thoughts that might help you climb as well.

First lets address ELO hell. ELO hell exists, but it isn’t any specific overall range, but rather its a personal range. Say for instance your skill level is Gold 3. ELO hell won’t exist for you in silver, because you are so much better than silver players that you will progress rather quickly. Your ELO hell will be Gold 4-5, where you are still better, but not so much better to really swing the odds heavily in your favor. Winning 51% of your games is still good, but its slow progress. What that means is you are going to need to play a lot of games (grind) to advance, which can feel like hell if you are overly focused on moving up the ranks (vs just playing to have fun and getting better while also advancing).

The key to ELO hell however is actually being realistic with your abilities. To return to the above example, maybe you THINK you are a Gold 3 player, but in reality are actually closer to Gold 5. In that case, your real ELO hell will be upper silver, and should you get into Gold, your progress will halt until you personally improve. Fully knowing your real skill level can be tough, especially as the meta changes and your preferred champs go up or down on the power scale.

Another key to move up is understanding the entire game, not just your champ. On my climb I saw a lot of players who had high mechanically skills (high CS), but lacked the overall awareness of the game that better players posses. They would be slow to rotate, or late to objectives, or didn’t know when to push a lane vs when to freeze it.

Worse still is if you don’t understand the importance of learning that part of the game. Say you play ADC, and you think that so long as you have a good CS score and solid KDA, you are doing well. Your so focus on those two things that you ignore the rest of the game, especially during laning. In your mind when the jungler doesn’t do well, or another lane ‘feeds’, its not your fault, because look at your CS/KDA, but that might be very wrong. If the jungler came to your lane but you didn’t set the gank up correctly, you wasted his time. It’s no loss to your personally (you still last hit your minions and didn’t die), but you put the jungler behind. Those mistakes can snowball a game, or at least reduce your chances of actually winning the game.

On the flip side, if you are far below where you should be, you can help to carry your team not just with personal performance on your champ, but by playing team captain. Tell the team when to hit certain objectives, when to push/freeze, or general items to buy. Since you are a better player, you watch the mini-map more, so use the pings to help another lane when you see a gank coming. You will be surprised how much this helps (sure, you will get people who ignore the advice, but that’s also why they are stuck in those ranks, so just do your best and you will move past them eventually), and again snowballs your game to a victory. LoL is designed to make it very hard for one champion to fully carry a game 1v5, but you can do a lot of other things to ‘carry’ and tip your win rate above 50%.

Finally, its important to understand that even if you are far above your current ranking (when I was Silver as a Plat player), you aren’t going to win every game. Hell, you might not even win your lane every time, either because of a bad matchup or because the other player is also a high ranker still moving up. All you can do is to understand how you can influence the game the most, both via personal play (be aggressive in lane, roam as often as possible, buy high risk/reward items) and team coordination. The climb will happen, but its important to understand that it still won’t be perfectly smooth.

The 2017 season for LoL has started, which means rank resets. Oddly enough, the new flex queue also got reset, after only being up for a few weeks.

My placement matches for solo/duo were a trip. My first three games were all fairly close and enjoyable, but losses. Then the next two were trolltastic losses, putting me at 0-5. At that point I decided to bust out Teemo, because if I’m going to start low, might as well have fun with it. However at that point the game was matching me with and against far lower players, so even though Teemo top is… Teemo top, I still dominated two out of the three games I played. Ultimately I finished 3-7, putting me in Silver 3. The difference in games between plat 4 and silver 3 is, well it might as well be a different game.

Now the question is; do I keep playing Teemo and practicing other champs as I grind up out of silver, or do I play Malz/Amumu and get myself out asap? I’m very tempted to do the former, especially because the season has just started and I certainly won’t be the only plat+ player down in rank thanks to placement series magic.

I’m also now even more curious to see where Aria and I place in the flex queue. So far we are at one win, one loss, but in that queue I was in gold 2 prior to the reset. Good times either way are ahead.

Riot adding a second, separate ranked ladder this season to League of Legends is an interesting development, especially because the new ladder allows for people to queue up with up to 4 others. Personally my wife and I use that ladder to play ranked games together, which is nice because it keeps our individual progress on the solo/duo ladder separate.

It’s been a season or two since I’ve really been serious about climbing ranks in LoL, where I topped out at just under diamond (if I remember correctly, I was in a promo or two to diamond, but was never able to complete one successfully). That doesn’t mean I don’t try to win every game I play, or that I completely stop caring about getting better. I’ve just accepted the reality that since I don’t track all patch changes or meta shifts, nor playing enough games to stay sharp with as many champions, my ability to climb is more limited, and right now it seems mid/lower plat is where I’m at.

My wife, also playing less, is at upper gold, though she did finish last season in plat. The skill gap isn’t huge, but it does exist, which previously made playing together in ranked games… not ideal for our marriage long-term. The old adage of ‘friends don’t let friends play ranked games together’ is all too true about LoL. But with a second queue, one we both treat as less important, that is no longer the case. We still try to win each game, and we don’t pick joke champs or ‘fun comps’, but where we rank isn’t really important, so immediately after a game we both move on win or lose. It’s actually pretty great.

What is also hilarious is that after her 10 placement games, my wife is in Silver V on that ladder (going 5/10. I’m in gold 2 after going 6/10). After some merciless teasing about being down with the mutants, and warning her about embracing her inner bronzy, another fun reality set in: When we queue up, we are playing with people generally below plat. Sometimes far below plat, which is… interesting. Having been in plat for years now, I’ve forgotten what it’s like to not have someone leash at the start of a game, or never roam from a lane, or to just generally have such poor mechanics or game fundamentals.

In that queue I play mid or jungle, so I’m less reliant on my team early (though having a gank go sideways because a teammate is far worse than you expect and doesn’t understand chaining CC is a pain), but my wife plays support, and it’s a wild ride. Because of the larger range of skill levels, and also because it’s still early in the season, game to game you never know if your adc is good, terrible, or average. You also don’t know if on the other side their two players are a duo with a diamond smurf, or two silver-level players still learning the game. This makes playing ‘correctly’ very hard. If you have a good adc vs a weaker two, you should play aggressive, but it takes some time to identify if that is indeed the case. Sometimes the adc seems competent, and completely freezes and botches things in a major engagement.

My wife is really good about keeping her cool and playing steady, and as she mostly plays Sona, it also means she can ‘babysit’ an adc well if they are bad, while also being able to play a more punishing style in a favorable matchup. When I play support (solo queue), it’s either with Braum or Leona, who unlike Sona are far more ‘all-in’ style champs. If my adc is good, we crush the lane. If they aren’t, it’s either a frustrating ‘do nothing’ lane, or the deaths pile up and things go south real fast.

Overall though I really like the new setup for ranked, and it’s working really well for us. We play one game a night when we can, and can easily step away without any blowback once the game is done. I’m also very curious to see where we shake out in terms of rank. If I had to guess, I’d say upper gold, but we will see.