EPTSo a lot of a people have been whining recently. A lot more than usual. This is because elo has reset and everyone's rushing to play placement matches because they are excited to reach new heights. Now, technically nobody should get excited at all. However despite people never bringing it up, I get the feeling people still sort of believe in "elo hell". Or maybe they think they need to "grind" to gain ladder standing, so when it resets you get a chance to jump high without "grinding" through, thus being able to gain a standing worthy of your "true skill".
The result is the same as what always happens: people lose more games than they had hoped, they get a lower standing and then consequently come to complain about their feeders and trolls and leavers and clutter up the forum in yet most posts I have to skip.
So I thought I'd go 0-10 in my placement matches. Now, you might be thinking: "Teut what would that accomplish?" or "Teut why do you think grapes are the best part of a fruit salad?" or "Fuck you Teut I'm reporting you to Riot" or "Teut why are you writing in the third person?".
So the initial plan was; get to as low an MMR as possible, and work back to Diamond 1. Pre-reset I was around 30-50 points Diamond 1. I wasn't "full tryhard" in those games but certainly put some effort in. If I drop to a low elo I can work back up again and give my thoughts and hopefully convince people a bit more that individual skill is the deciding factor in nearly all your games.
The first part of this is how do we lose 10 games in a row? I don't want to troll, feed, or afk in all these games, because it would get me banned and I don't really want to screw up peoples games. So, why don't I lose games in a way that also gives useful information?
So to lose games, I'm just going to play badly. Not intentionally. Not playing any more badly than I might if I played hungry or tired both of which leaves me somewhat apathetic. All I need to do is play the game normally but not specifically trying to win. Nothing I don't do when I'm playing tired/hungry or whatever. The rules are:
-Lose the games
-No trolling, afking, feeding, or flaming teammates.
-Play champs you already have at least 20-30+ ranked games with.
So how do we get into the bad/toxic player mindset? How do we BECOME Shayuki?
-I listened to standup hours (mostly Louis CK's stuff) while playing. Most people listen to music while playing, but I stopped that years ago so I don't have a playlist, they are both equally bad. The idea is to have your brain into autopilot mode as much as possible. Any forward thinking or analysis is not welcome here.
-I duo q'd with friends who are toxic players when I could. About half my games were duo q. Toxic players are great because when they aren't trying to lose they still can play really badly because they always blame everything on teammates when things go wrong.
-Because I can't use the "my teammates were at fault" mindset, because I would have to selectively start paying attention, I just tried to duplicate it. I played really selfishly.That means lots of CSing. That means lots of "split pushing". That means building aggressively so that you can "carry your teammates". It also means paying no attention to objectives, rarely joining your teammates, trying to steal kills actively. Running away when low in teamfights or not being brave and engaging in general because if "you are dead you can't carry".
The games this mindset generated were interesting. The most common complains that whiners and bad players come to me with are "I always win my lane and have 200 cs by X minutes" "My teammates always throw" "What can I do when my bot lane goes 0/x" "I was 12/2 and someone got caught and they got baron and inhib".
-High CS levels. Because you play selfishly and against bad players, getting 300+ CS is a common occurance.
-VERY High kill:assist ratios: Normally in my games I get a range 1:1 to 3:1 assist:kill ratio. In these games because you play so selfishly I'm getting whack scores like a loss with 16/2/3.
-Teammates getting caught/"throwing". Because you are mostly on your own, your teammates wander around aimlessly. They reflexively try to group and push but since you are never there, they end up not knowing what to do. People get caught often, or 4v5 fights start, where people start trickling in from both teams, but you keep farming stone golems and don't pay attention so they end up 4v5.
-Comebacks: Because you aren't paying attention to objectives and both teams position, it's very easy for one team to make plays while you're being irrelevant farming, and they can get a baron and inhib off it and turn the game around completely. It's the main source of your losses when you get lower on MMR because of how much you stomp bad players even without trying in lane.
-Teamfight losing: Because you are playing based on your own gains in teamfights and not based on what's the best the team can do, you often play too passively in fights as a melee and you do worse in teamfights than you should. This helps the comeback factor.
Here's how the games went:
Game 1: Renekton not in my history, but Akali was pretty good since my MMR is decent at this point, and managed to help make a comeback to win the game for her team when I lost slightly and it snowballed. Note: Renekton was requested in champ select, so it kinda breaks the rules a bit on my picking phase but listening to your teammates in pick phase is a good thing to do if you want to lose games.
Game 2: Garen 9/9/3. MMR still pretty high so I was losing at first but then somehow beat this Renekton. Eventually got ganked and died a lot but traded 1 for 1. Our team was behind so fortunately I didn't manage to make a big enough difference in teamfights.
Game 3: Garen 16/2/3. Went a weird build that started as BC Atmas into Sunfire ended up being IE Atmas LW PD Warmogs. Eventually some people got caught and after a long game they managed a comeback.
Game 4: Jax 0/1/0. Lost lane to some Renekton. Marten got 2 people to AFK so a quick surrender.
Game 5: WIN Lee sin: 1/1/11. I made the mistake cause I wasn't thinking, it ended up working out badly because I got a level 3 kill bot lane with a gank because the MMR was dropping too fast and they didn't ward at all. I maxed W first and did random things for most of the game and we still won thanks to a snowballing bot lane despite me being terrible at lee sin.
Game 6: Caitlyn 5/9/13. Our leona was pretty good and communicated well with the jungler so I got an early triple kill cleaning up. Thankfully my AD is really bad so when I'm not even trying to play well it's easy to lose the game.
Game 7: WIN Garen 9/2/3. Unfortunately my team did too much work early, our jungler in particular and they pushed early so we won pretty fast.
Game 8: Xin 1/3/5. I was worred at first because they did risky ganks and I got some kills, but fortunately, our Ahri got frustrated with my lack of map presence and ended up overcommitting, especially when I was farming top 10 seconds before dragon ( I didn't pay attention as planned) so she got caught when I was walking down, and then they managed to snowball it into a baron and an inhib and they won off that comeback. I got flamed for the first time this game but it was standard "jungler didn't gank enough".
Game 9: WIN Jax. Somehow I picked jax into renekton to counter myself and I still went 6/0 and drew and killed jungler attention. If renekton wasn't so bad at playing passively and olaf ignored him and tried to help his team they might win, but the distraction let me team get ahead so they got slightly ahead in every teamfight and then won.
Game 10: Xin: 5/4/1. Thankfully both top and bottom lane lost so even though I got a lot of easy kills we still lose fairly fast.
With a score of 3-7, I unfortunately only managed to get to plat 3. But at least it's quite a few divisions from Diamond 1.
The next step is to start playing to improve and playing to win from now, so I'll try to update LoL replay and document all my ranked games from now on and see how my winrate is.
Special thanks to: martenv and borked clock (aka broken watch aka kitkats) for helping to me intentionally unintentionally lose games.
