Hi! Exactly what the title says, but
"I feel background is fairly important for this
I normally don’t bring up tier for this kind of thing, but in this case it matters a lot for my case imo. However, advice from anywhere is appreciated, I’m definitely not in a position to be snooty
Last season I was helped most of the way duoque from Hotness to SA Gold with various people (Setbackss on a smurf and KidSafeShark, I owe you guys big time. ). However, after that I soloqued with mostly wins through a decent chunk of POA before putting down the game again to do other stuff. I’m currently floating between SA Silver and Gold. I never made it past that final game to hit POA again this season.
I improve the most in close games or ones in which I am the noob, I don’t improve much in games where we were going to lose regardless of what I did. I just… don’t get very many close/good games, and those that I do, I tend to lose too. I’m alternately decent or really bad depending which specific role I take with high tier players I party with.
Honestly, even though I improved and climbed a huge amount last season, I still feel like putting down VG for good, more so than when I was hard-stuck in Hotness. I guess these losses often weigh more heavily on me than a salt-fest. I see more of my own mistakes but I don’t get to correct them in a consequential manner, often enough. It’s hard to be able to improve when you literally can’t fountain fast enough, or your team outdrafts themselves, or your team grossly misunderstands their win condition, or your opponents get super fed.
To be clear - no, I’m not going to be salty or complain about matchmaking. Am I unhappy? Yes, but this isn’t the post to bring that crap up. I think the “matchmaking” issue is something else anyway.
So last season I found myself in soloque POA. It was pretty challenging for me, but I could also feel myself improving a lot.Some matches I was definitely the noob, but sometimes I could contribute. I was able to climb fairly well. If I was doing well I could and would be more aggressive with my team (or solo when reasonably safe). If I was behind, I focused on backing up my ally’s plays. Following other shotcallers made a huge difference in a number of games. So while in some games I was legitimately able to carry, I could salvage many others by just being easy to work with. Teamwork ftw!
This season has been a bit different though. There was a noticeable difference in quality of players I found even between this season’s high SA Gold and last season’s low POA. I’m not in an environment where at least half my games forced me to improve just to keep up. I now live in the world of Instalock CP Lorelai Laners. I wish I was kidding.
I am just not skilled enough to hard-carry “bad” matches in SA. I think I can legitimately say that I’m not normally the main reason our team loses. However, a loss is a loss, and if I am going to climb through SA again I need to be good enough to hard carry many matches despite ally mistakes, while minimizing my own. These are basically games where we don’t work as a team, etc… Losing Draft is a separate issue, though making up the difference ingame is not.
Of course, it would be remiss for me to ignore the matches which are “good” - cooperative, non toxic teammates. “Almost” everything works out except for 1-2 details here or there, which end up making us lose in the end. Many of these games I feel are fully within my grasp. They are usually much closer affairs. If anything, these upset me more than toxic matches because I know I could have made the difference but didn’t. Instead of being “good”, I could have been “great”.
Let me give you two examples of “good” matches -
1
The first example, was arguably decided purely by my snap decision to pick up Spellsword 3rd after a Sorrowblade and BP - there were quite a few fights where the crit would have secured kills, or enabled me to win trades. The energy was useless in retrospect. HOWEVER. I also know that if I was better at riding the edge - engaging when Taka dived 1v3, I would have had a much better shot at winning with some BP stacks under my belt. I didn’t when it was 2v3. We were actually winning early on and then we “as a team” got cocky and I played it too safe. So in this game I really didn’t maximize my damage enough and we ended up losing many fights when the enemy wisened up.
and
2
I normally roam in parties. Half my fountains hit the intended target. Which is an improvement for me, but not enough. NORMALLY my fountain doesn’t matter - either my ally was dead meat before I could save him, or we never need the fountain in the teamfight due to flow and whatnot. Admittedly, Baptiste forgot he was supposed to stop Koshka and not Saw. Baron decided that his A was more important than autoattacks, and his B was for maximizing damage and engaging, rather than escaping the Koshka.
However, again, I could have given us a drastically better chance. We were winning the early game, with 10 kills to 1 at one point. Ten our teamfighting fell apart, and I can only fix my own actions. Heck, I even used my Heal on the healthy carry one time in a panic. -_-
(TL;DR?) I guess the overall point is that I feel stuck. When playing with much better player, I’m either mostly flawless or largely useless. So I’m not likely to get a lot of games in there. At the same time, spamming ranked tryhard matches isn’t working either. In many, many matches, I can do most things right and we still lose, by a lot - my role is somewhat irrelevant in these. The feedback cycle of improvement is missing and easily squelched. I want to get past this but… I really don’t like imposing on other people for the most part IRL.
Idk if I will get any replies, but anything can help. To an extent I feel my problems stem from not having enough “decent” matches to get used to higher elo mechanics and such. .-.