ibranana

how you can got Challenger in SoloQ ( LOL )

Mar 22nd, 2017
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  1. Introduction: I am Novacaine, previously known as "Demacia", a Season 4 & 5 Challenger Tier SoloQ player. I main Jungle and Support.
  2. I have rejected the memes of "carrying", "1v9", "big plays".
  3. I believe in teamwork and trust.
  4. I am going to teach you how to climb.
  5. I am not going to teach you what champions to pick.
  6. I am not going to teach you what items to build.
  7. I am not going to teach you how many wards you should buy and how you should place them.
  8. I am going to teach you how to change the only thing that matters in your climbing: Yourself.
  9. I suggest you to save this post for later until you're in a quiet room with nobody around, so you can read my post out loud, listen to yourself saying those words, and mentally focus on what you are saying.
  10. Let us begin.
  11. First, we'll begin with some things you need to know about the Ladder as a whole.
  12. The ladder works more or less this way: No matter how good or bad the people on the ladder are, there will always be approximately a third bronzes, 40% silvers, 15% golds, ~10% platiniums, ~5% diamonds, and <1% Master/Challenger.
  13. What does that mean for you?
  14. It means that your SoloQ rank depends on your level RELATIVELY to the playerbase's.
  15. And that, as long as new players level up to 30 at play their placement matches, and that older players leave the game, you WILL climb if you play regularly, even if you don't actually improve.
  16. So yes, without even knowing it, there are points in your favor.
  17. Now, I want you to accept this: There are THREE things ONLY that should matter to you when playing SoloQ:
  18. 1) There are two outcomes of a game: Victory and Defeat.
  19. 2) Victory raises my MMR, Defeat lowers it.
  20. 3) MMR is hidden and defines my LP gains/losses. Therefore, it is pointless for me to worry about my LPs.
  21. That's it. One of the keys to improve yourself is to IGNORE your LPs. And your promotion matches. And an eventual demotion if you lose the game. Do not play for LPs. Do not play for promotion matches. The only thing you should be looking for is to GAIN MMR. Because in the end, MMR is the only thing that matters in your climb. In a game, you should ONLY worry about ONE thing: To win. Because winning is the key to climbing.
  22. Quick followup on what "climbing" truly is.
  23. There are actually two steps to climb.
  24. 1) Reach the MMR you're worth at the moment.
  25. 2) Improving.
  26. And people tend to forget about the first step. Too often there are some of my IRL friends, or ingame contacts, that comes over and complains how he's forever stuck in silver and that he doesn't manage to improve. Quick check of the guy's profile. He played 50 ranked games and got a 75% winrate. (Okay, perhaps I'm exaggerating).
  27. Even the best players cannot win 100% of the games. Even with a winrate as modest as 55%, you're in a position where you climb. Perhaps slowly, but you do. At some point now you'll have to decide if you want to invest a lot of time in SoloQ, because you will have to. Take a quick look at the Challenger ladder. Pretty much everybody got several hundred of games played. Big news.
  28. So indeed, you'll have to play a lot to consistently climb.
  29. Now, once you'll reach a MMR spectrum on which you feel okay, but you're looking for more, THEN it'll be time for you to seek improvement.
  30. Now let's discuss some things about your teammates.
  31. Your teammates are four players that were chosen by the Matchmaking Algorithm to be matched with you, so that your team's MMR is more or less equal to the enemy team's.
  32. Your teammates are not your friends.
  33. But they are not your enemies.
  34. They are strangers that you share a game with.
  35. Their opinion of you doesn't matter.
  36. But your opinion of them doesn't matter either.
  37. You, as a single player, are playing to climb.
  38. You are not playing to make your team climb.
  39. I want you to focus well on the points above and compile it for a moment in your mind.
  40. Now, there are two positive (climbing-wise) attitudes that you can have towards your teammates:
  41. -Leader of the Pack: As said above, you play for YOUR OWN climbing. Not your teammates'. It is your duty to pave the way and fight for your own success. Your teammates will be incited to follow. But you will not ask them to, because they know that those who fall behind will fail. A Leader of the Pack does not discuss with the Pack. He leads. And that's all he does. He does not asks the Pack why it's moving slower, or is hungrier, or hunts less well than before. HE LEADS. And if the Pack dies, he goes alone, but forward.
  42. -Ant Worker: The Ant works. Does the Ant worry if the queen will be allright? He doesn't. Does he worry if their pit will be crushed? He doesn't. He works. And he does his work pretty damn well. And he assumes that the other ants will do their work as well. And if every damn ant in the world do their job well, we should be allright. Perhaps the ants in your pit will jump in a pool and drown. That happens. But if you're a good ant worker, you'll succeed eventually.
  43. (I am personally an Ant Worker, although I play Leader of the Pack when smurfing)
  44. A small point about communication with your teammates:
  45. 1) Nobody will take you seriously if you try to shotcall or whatever and can't properly speak out clearly in English. (or whatever is the official language in your server). It might seem unsignificant but I do believe that a good level in English pairs well with climbing. Trust me as someone who has climbed from the bottom to the top and smurfed a lot: Elo often correlates with good level in English. Now perhaps there is no cause-consequence links between... But who knows.
  46. 2) Don't flame. Okay, hold it here. "Not again those holier-than-thou Dontbetoxicbepositiveeverybodyishappy". I'm not. I've been toxic beyond your imagination. I've seen some chat logs from DarkWinJax (nota: The guy who supposedly has the most toxic record in League history) and honestly I wasn't impressed. I've earned hundreds of chat restricts. But I've improved since. And since I improved my behavior, I started to significantly win more. EVEN if you can type without spoiling your focus. EVEN if you play exactly the same no matter if you're typing or not. EVEN if you are playing at your top no matter what. Your teammates are strangers. If you cross a stranger in the street and he starts insulting you, you move on. You don't get mad at him, you don't start feeling bad, even if he tells you to kill yourself. He's a fool. You don't talk with fools. And if you insult strangers in the street, you're a fool yourself.
  47. The proper answer to flame is to mute and move on. Remove the mute a few minutes later if you feel like it. Do NOT start quarrels. You got 5 ennemies on the other team so you might as well not get some in your own team. You need to be absolutely serene in your games. Complete serenity. The only reaction you should have when somebody flames it a slight movement of your eyes towards the chat log, a slight sigh, pressing tab and peacefully hovering towards the* mute *button and pressing it.
  48. The only feeling you should have in a SoloQ game ever is your desire to win. Feel no anger. Feel no pain. Feel no fury. You are a mountain of peace and quiet. You are ABOVE those people.
  49. Let's move back a bit about teammates. Something you need to learn and understand is that LoL is an open game. By that, I mean that we all have different ways to play the game, we have different views on how to win the game, and we have different ideas of tactics to try and win it. Some players are aggressive, some are passive. Some want to teamfight, some will want to splitpush, some will want to do an inhibitor while you want to do Baron, and it will ALWAYS be like this in SoloQ. And you will have to learn to deal with it.
  50. Being able to deal with your teammates is a whole part of SoloQ.
  51. Let's say you're the jungler. You just won a teamfight and you got the choice to do an inhibitor or Baron. Your adc rushes straight to a lane and starts pushing, while the rest of your team heads towards Baron. What choice do you make? Personally I'd follow the adc. If he refuses to change his mind, we'll lack reliable DPS to take down Baron. Also, I, as a player, value inhibitors a lot. Perhaps the rest of my team does not. Perhaps they will get angry. Perhaps they will try to do Baron anyway and die to it. And it's okay. Perhaps if you joined them for Baron, the outcome would have been better... Or worse. Who knows? Why worry? The only thing that matters here is that you made a clear choice, weighed the pros and cons, quickly, and made a decision. The decision being bad or good doesn't matter. You will learn to make the good decisions with experience and time.
  52. Now, some rough truths. Not everybody is meant to be good at this game. And that's the case for every game. And for *everything in life. *Perhaps you somehow can't wrap your mind around the game.
  53. My sister is a world-class Chess champion. I suck at Chess. Badly. My sister sucks at pretty much every fast-paced videogame. Badly. And we're both absolutely ok with this. We all have different minds, we're all more or less smart, fast or intellectually agile. Perhaps no matter how hard you'll try, you won't manage to break higher than a given division. And it's absolutely okay.
  54. And it's important to accept this. Because every single player has a weakness. And your weakness can absolutely be that you have a hard time following up mentally. Some other players have even greater weaknesses.
  55. And it's important to know your weaknesses because you need to play around it. One of my weaknesses is that I am too greedy when trying to remove pink wards or sweep for vision. But I work on it and keep it in my mind that I need to think twice before going in for vision.
  56. Likewise, one of the keys to victory is to know how to find your opponent's weaknesses and to exploit them. For instance, common example. You gank a lane, get something out of it. The enemy laner whines in all chat. Bingo. This guy snaps under jungle pressure. If you got any opportunity in the rest of the game, gank him hard and strong.
  57. That's just an example. At higher elos it becomes even more subtle because you play with the same people quite often, so you get to learn to know how they play and what they hate - but that's not what the post is about.
  58. So uh, that's it, I think. That's already a load of stuff that I wanted to get through.
  59. ... Thanks for reading if you did read it all! All this post took me a while to write over several months, listing my thoughts.
  60. TL;DR: Please read it all it's very interesting.
  61.  
  62. Visit : http://cut-urls.com/OmcwU0t6
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