It’s no secret that I’m a big League of Legends fan. Love the game, enjoy the strategy and the competition. I watch YouTube videos, streams, the LCS and even participate in a Fantasy league. It’s permeated my life in ways that an MMO might permeate yours. Today, I took part in a game that utterly astounded me, and here my thought was that I had seen it all. This level of trolling and stupidity has been reported by many players I’m sure, but it’s typically easier to shrug off than this particular match up. First off, let’s go over what I’ve been doing in the game as of late.

The 5th season of the game started early this year. I played ranked in the past, but only during season 3. Last year I didn’t touch ranked, as I was mostly playing other things and only toying around with ARAM and Team Builder. I decided when this ranked season rolled around that I would dive into it again, though I didn’t jump in right away.

When I finally did my ten provisional games, I was placed in Bronze I. This didn’t offend me, as I had only placed in Bronze III a couple of seasons ago, and worked my way up to Silver from there. It was assumed that I was on easy street, that getting back to Silver wouldn’t take long at all. Oh how wrong I was.

I dropped from Bronze I to Bronze III rather rapidly early this year. From there, it was back up to Bronze I, and then back to Bronze II for quite some time. I rose and fell through the ranks over and over again, finally settling in Bronze II where I would stay for a time again. It wasn’t until I started to duo with a friend from my guild Obsidian that I finally got back to Bronze I.

There was a catch of course. He was already in Silver by the time we started to duo. Apparently you can only queue with someone who is only one tier ahead of you, and if they go beyond that, you’re assed out. My friend managed to help me get to towards the top of Bronze I, before he promoted to Gold V, and couldn’t offer his help anymore.

I took breaks here and there, but eventually got back into it pretty religiously. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve gotten into the promotional series to head into Silver V four times now. The promotional series to go between say Bronze II and Bronze I are only best of threes, so you only need two wins to move forward. To move up a tier, from Bronze to Silver, it’s a best of five, so you need three wins to get ahead.

The first series saw two immediate losses. Then two wins in a row, and I ended up staying in Bronze I after going 2-3 in the series. I still had the attitude that other people were bringing me down, and in some cases that was true, especially when a player disconnects or goes AFK. This happens more often than I would like, but there are still plenty of time when a team and I are so cohesive that everything goes right.

The next two series ended up coming down to two mistakes that I made, in pivotal games. I ended both of those series 2-3 as well, though I can’t remember the exact order. I just know that during one of the games in the first series that ended up being a loss, it came down to us needing one hit on their nexus, me being the last guy alive, and missing the opportunity to just dash away and get that last hit.

The same goes for the next series, but that one had quite a bit of toxicity thrown my way. I had called for ADC in champ select, and though another player was below me in the pick order, he insta-locked an ADC so I was forced to support. I play quite a bit of the support role, so I was ok with it, just irritated that the guy did that, and then turned out the be kind of bad at the role. We didn’t feed, but it didn’t go so well, especially when we were dived quite hard by multiple enemies. Our jungler who was playing Shyvanna was doing really well, and got fed early. By mid-game, our top, mid and ADC seemed lost as to what to do, so I started shotcalling. It was working well — we took out all of the towers and inhibitors in top and mid, but by that time the enemy team was respawning, so I called for retreat. Shyvanna decided to stick around, died, the rest of the team tried to help and died too, and I made it out alive. Shyvanna laid into me at that point, saying that I was a “pussy” and gave me grief for the rest of the game. On the next push, we managed to get both their nexus turrets down, and it was a replay of the game I mentioned before, where we needed one hit on their nexus to win, but we all died. They pushed into our base for the win. These things happen, but Shyvanna put all of the blame on me, and raged over and over. I’ve not had that treatment since my newbie days when I truly didn’t understand the game, so I can see why some people would want to avoid these types of games altogether.

However, I feel like I have a greater understanding of zones, objective control, and other facets of the game that people in my ELO might not normally have. For instance, we didn’t get a single dragon that whole game. It’s not just the jungler’s responsibility to maintain dragon control, but that is one of their primary focuses. It’s also not just the support’s job to ward, but she managed to rag on me for not having enough out, despite being at my max. Either way, just because you are fed and the rest of your team isn’t, doesn’t mean ragging on them will accomplish anything. Either way, that promo series ended the same, 2-3. I lost a couple games after that, then go to the point where I only needed one more win to get back into a series, which brings us to this last game I played:

The score lines aren’t really all that important here. Starting in champ select, I said I’d prefer ADC, and Vayne was first pick and said they wanted it. I was last pick so I ended up filling, and picked Lux mid. Jax was top, Alistar in the jungle, and Janna support. Not the best team comp, but it was at least more meta that the weird ass team the opposing force picked. They ended up with Talon mid, Aatrox top, Kalista ADC with Katarina support, and Master Yi in the jungle. First of all, fuck Katarina. I hate that champion more than any other.

So of course, the Katarina and Kalista lane gets fed, and after dying three times in like five minutes, Janna says she’s going AFK. Typical. I was doing fine in my lane, Talon wasn’t a challenge. Jax was losing his lane to Aatrox, citing ignite as the problem. It’s more likely, that neither lane knew how to play it safe. I didn’t die until both top and bottom’s outer towers were down, and roamers started coming to my lane. This is typical Bronze solo queue shit, and part of why I’m still stuck in this ELO Hell.

In all chat, Katarina keeps talking about how much of an asshole their Master Yi was, and that she felt that he deserved to lose. Jax is egging this on, and between the two of them, it’s decided that Katarina and Kalista will AFK. At this point, Janna comes back and starts to play, albeit still playing like a dumbass. The entire rest of the game, Kat and Kali toyed around with farming and spammed all chat. We were already at the point that we had all of our inhibitors down and it took the whole team to defend against the super minions. Yi, Aatrox and Talon would push in, we’d kill them, and defend. Eventually we were all level 18, had full or mostly full builds, and we were able to take a couple of dragons, barons and towers. They almost got to our base a few times, but we still fended them off. We pushed into their base, and got a nexus turret down before Katarina and Kalista came out of the fountain to harass, and ended killing all of us but Alistar. He still managed to fend off minions and Yi, while I came back up and helped finish them off. We all pushed into their base, killed Kat and Kali, and won the game.

The only positive I can take away from that game is the fact that I’m now back into a promo series to get into Silver. But I almost wish we would have just lost the game, because their behavior was atrocious.  I reported both the Katarina and the Kalista, stating:

By far the weirdest match I’ve ever been a part of. Kat and Kali managed to snowball their lane, but said Yi was an “asshole” so they sat afk and gave us tips on where everyone on the other team was. I enjoyed getting a win, but it wasn’t earned and this behavior breaks the game. Consider a ban.

The sad part is that all of them were at least Silver V, Kalista being Silver III. I was hoping getting out of Bronze would mean less of this shit, but apparently I was wrong. I still love the game but this was simply ridiculous. That’s all I have to say.

#leagueoflegends #ranked #pvp