I finally did it! I conclusively proved that skill has nothing to do with getting out of Bronze!

So after many long struggles, I finally succeeded in one of my long-time goals- I not only managed to get out of Bronze playing NOTHING but support, but I also conclusively and definitively proved once and for all that, unless you're literally a Challenger-level player who can carry an entire team 1v5, then skill is NOTHING compared to team luck in getting out of Bronze! And I have the hard evidence to back it up: my match history!

So anyway, I literally just came off winning the last game in my promo series to get from Bronze I to Silver V. I'd made a commitment to myself that I was sick of giving a shit so I was just going to do whatever the fuck I liked, as best I could, and what I particularly like doing is playing weird-ass completely non-meta supports (partly because I literally don't trust ANYONE else in Bronze to be able to support right at all- if you want something done right etc). Now, the advice everyone gives to get out of Bronze is "pick a hard carry and carry your entire team every game", so obviously you'd expect me to be nesting somewhere around the bottom of Bronze V, but as you can see that is not the case! So here I am, blatantly defying ALL expectations of how to get out of Bronze Hell and getting away with it, because what I've said all along is true: unless you are by an insurmountable margin the best player in the entire game, how good you are is entirely secondary to how good your team is compared to your opponents' team.

If you need proof, my promo series makes an exciting microcosm of my entire experience, as it proved CONCLUSIVELY what I've always said: in the games where I actually tried, my efforts were completely squandered by noobs so terrible that they shouldn't even be allowed to play ranked, while in the 3 games where I didn't give a fuck and just picked whatever I wanted whether it was smart or not, I didn't necessarily do as well personally (although I was still relevant) but my team carried me to victory anyway. Let's break it down:

Game 1: Leona support

This was arguably the hardest of the three wins, and to be honest I didn't really think we were going to win early on (I was also playing a relatively non-troll support, although I don't personally consider Leona a good pick in her current state). My Leona support went 0/6/11, which is a pretty mediocre score in a 36-kill win, but I did manage to make a number of pivotal plays (most notably locking down the rampaging Yi in the late game with ALL of the CCs). But it didn't matter because the assassins (13/7/4 Yasuo and 11/4/6 Fizz with assistance from 8/6/6 Kha'Zix carried, feeding on the hapless Vayne (who had no peel) and clueless Nasus. I would like to give props to my Sona opponent for this one for doing her best, making it very hard for me to get vision control in the river to let Kha in for a gank, and more importantly actually being a support rather than a "support" (a 0-CS wannabe solo laner who buys straight AP). Just wasn't her game I suppose.

Game 2: Karma support

This is the game that most-strongly proves my entire point. The scores say it ALL. In a moment of weakness, I pick Karma for the AoE shields and speed boosts (as well as harass and kiting) to support our enthusiastic "tanks". The game was weird from the start, with the opponents running a troll double assassin kill lane bot instead of an ADC and a support (well, Ekko was pretending to be a "support" by getting Frost Queen's Claim), and Zed rather unsurprisingly picked up first blood off Miss Fortune despite my best efforts. However we recovered and some truly STERLING play saw us start to dominate, with myself in particular landing an EMBARRASSING number of kills. Once MF started snowballing the game SHOULD by all rights have been ours... except it was 3v7. Both Sejuani and Poppy were beyond godawful, feeding practically non-stop. In a game less than 40 minutes long, the two of them racked up 33 deaths between them and their decision making was literally suicidal, constantly throwing themselves into 1v3 or worse battles against opponents who were already far more fed than them (by them) and Poppy in particular making literally some of the worst Teleports I've ever seen in a game. The absolute nadir of the game came after we won a pretty decent teamfight in toplane and most of us recalled, except Sejuani who decided to stay and farm minions while on low HP. With Warwick respawned and undoubtedly heading up there, I typed "ww is coming", which Sejuani ignored. Then I typed "WARWICK IS COMING TO KILL YOU" which she also ignored. Then Warwick jumped on her and, rather than even ATTEMPT to get away, she tried to fight a full-HP and fed Warwick head-on while starting on less than half HP, with predictable results. With Corki coming online and myself throwing out MASSIVE shields and kiting to support MF's 1000-damage crits, we ALMOST managed to carry it despite the double millstones hanging around our necks, but the death knell came when the opponents started sniffing around Baron, MF was pinging us to be careful while she ran from base after respawning (Zed got her in an ambush) so of course Sejuani blundered right in there blindly, got hooked in by the ultra-fed Darius, and decided to engage on the entire enemy team rather than attempting to escape (getting me sucked in with her as I desperately attempted to save her- a futile act when the player in question decides they don't want to live). In the end, despite playing an absolute blinder of a game (both myself and MF got S-ranks, despite losing), all my efforts were for naught as top and jungle had both apparently decided that winning is overrated and they'd rather lose instead, wasting my time and effort. This game remains one of the best pieces of evidence I can find that it doesn't matter how good you are, a sufficiently awful player (or several of them) can still drag you down.

Game 3: Cho'Gath support

After receiving a sharp and stinging reminder of why giving a fuck is a bad idea akin to tempting fate, I grabbed a trollish support that I'd been planning on playing sooner before an attack of the tryhards had made me pick Karma. With the changes made to Feast I wanted to see how tanky I could get him from the support position while using Rupture and Feral Scream to lock down the opponents. My 1/5/23 wasn't really anything special and I didn't get nearly as many stacks as I wanted, but it didn't matter because Vayne and Kayle carried MEGAhard. The game got off to an appalling start as Nunu lagged out while doing his red buff, causing it to reset after Vayne and I had finished the leash and headed to bot, forcing him to recall without doing it to heal. Then J4 invaded and killed him at level 1 before he'd even gotten a single camp, so it wasn't exactly looking very auspicious. Fortunately, as the score shows, Shit began Getting Real as Kayle and eventually Vayne went off like a claymore mine, carrying the other 3 of us with ridiculous ease. I'd consider this game the flip side of game 2: if game 2 proved that even a fantastic performance is meaningless when some of your teammates are bad enough, this one proves that you don't even NEED to be good if you can be carried. If this doesn't prove that luck with your teammates is more important than individual skill, I don't know what does.

Game 4: Miss Fortune support

Admittedly not my best game, but once again I succumbed to pressure and made a "smart" pick rather than the troll pick I'd wanted (I'd been planning on Caitlyn support, one of my favourites to combo with a Jhin ADC). Unfortunately this game the deadweight was toplane (again) as an early gank from Graves got Yasuo a VERY early first blood on Gangplank. (Graves, incidentally, was apparently a platinum smurf duo'd with Zyra, as our mid had played with them in his previous game and recognised them.) Unfortunately Gangplank apparently decided that "well now that Yasuo is snowballing on me, that means I'm not responsible for anything he does to me" and began merrily walking back to top, dying solo, walking back to top again and dying solo again. I even asked him whether he'd ever played against Yasuo before and he said he was a Yasuo main- immediately prompting me to ask him why, then, did he blind first pick Gangplank top when Yasuo was open? The rest of use were struggling to pull back from the deep, deep hole GP had left us in, but the useless bugger wouldn't even afk (he was literally doing us more harm than good) and continued his role as a gold vending machine for the opponents. Despite Karthus getting respectably fed in the chaos of the teamfights (as they had 5 squishies to fall prey to his Requiem) there was really nothing we could do to pull this 4v6 back and we got absolutely steamrolled, losing by more than 15k in 25 minutes to a Yasuo who effectively got to lane completely unopposed and a Graves jungle smurf who literally had no right to even be in the game.

Game 5: Anivia support

Thoroughly fed up with giving a shit, I went into the deciding game NOT resolved to do my best to win my series, but determined to play something trolly. I saw "oh, enemy jungler has picked Hecarim" and defaulted to my usual pick for irritating Flashless junglers, Anivia. Against a Lucian/Nidalee botlane this is an inarguably terrible pick and I knew for a fact I was opening myself up for an ass-kicking if my opponents were any good. Fortunately, the results speak for themselves. 29 kills to 3 in less than 23 minutes with a gold lead of 17.8k before the enemy surrendered, as Orianna and Jarvan went utterly mental on the shell-shocked opposition and myself and MF carefully but steadily beat the crap out of our lane opponents. The highlight was probably at about 12 and a half minutes, when I was clearing a control ward out of the lane brush in bot and Nidalee landed a spear on me while she was at low HP. She tried to Pounce in to kill me and I promptly Q'd her in the face, hit her with E and killed her, just like that (despite having only barely picked up Frostfang)! So what we had here was ANOTHER game where I picked a trolly support champ and it simply didn't matter because my team was inestimably better overall than the opponents' team. I mean yes, MF and I played well, but all three of the solo players went totally nuts on the opposition. My 3/0/2 Anivia was practically an afterthought (although as planned, I thoroughly annoyed Hecarim with all the kiting and impassable terrain I brought).

So here I am in Silver, at long last. I'm proud, I'm happy, but do I believe I earned it through hard work, serious effort and doing my best? Ha! Don't be absurd! I know FULL WELL that I got her by being lucky enough to get enough good teammates (and bad opponents) to outweigh the bad teammates (and good opponents) I got along the way! If I'd been tryharding then I would have probably stuck to Braum, Lulu, Soraka and Janna every game until I rotted away from boredom, but I decided fuck that, I'd experiment with things like J4 support (HIGHLY successful, only lost one game when I was expected to support an absolutely abysmal Vayne), Vi support (VERY successful, never lost I don't think) and Teemo support (also very successful, particularly when the enemy ADC steps on a random shroom in the jungle and loses 50% of their HP). While I always played every game to the best of my ability after picking, doing my utmost to make even the trolliest of champion work like a real tactical pick, I wasn't doing the best thing for every game at every opportunity, yet I still got away with it!

So with that, I rest my case. Having finally reached Silver despite putting in NO real serious effort, I believe I have once and for all proven that, in the putrid depths of Bronze, how good you are is unquestionably secondary to how good on average your teammates are and how bad your opponents are. And the best thing is, all the usual dismissals of my argument ("u mad cuz u bad" etc) can't be used here because I've already succeeded! I'm OUT of Bronze! And I'm not claiming I did it because I was really good (I mean I AM quite a good support, but I've never considered myself better than Gold-level at best, I'm merely competent and am not at ALL a carry), I myself am saying I lucked into getting carried (for the record I did almost all of it myself, without duos). And how are you going to argue against that? "No, your luck didn't really matter, you really are that good"? That'd be a first!

Now, on to prove that it's possible to get from Silver to Gold playing nothing but troll supports!