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The current, extremely poor, state of soloQ

103percent·10/7/2014, 8:18:58 PM·25 votes·3,429 views

I got so tired of the feeders, the trolls, the afkers, the DCs, and the overall negativity of LoL that I had to take a 6 month break from it back last fall.

I've tried to give the game another chance the past few months; but there is just so much going against it. It's the most frustrating experience in existence, and watching streams of higher ELO players;** there is basically nothing to look forward to even in the "higher tiers" of competition** (where you would hope things would get better). More feeders (aka I only play 1 champ in 1 position), more afkers/ragers, more trolls, the constant server instability and DCers. Not to mention there are so many things that seem to be put in place (or not put in place) to just make playing this game for a bit of competitive fun the most frustrating experience of any online game I've played. Sure, when you're in a groove and having a good game and it's down to the wire and your team pulls off a well earned victory; it makes it all worth it. But I find that to be the case less and less these days. I've never been reported or warned for my behavior; but I can see myself getting more and more annoyed every day with the **** I have to put up with. Here's basically how it went:

  1. So I come back after 6 months (I quit after a 5-6 game loss streak due to ragers, trolls, DCs, feeders) to see I've dropped from Gold 1 to silver 2. Cool I'm not at the top of my game anyways because I've taken so much time off. I play some normals try to get back in the swing of things. Tried out my first ranked. Get matched with a bunch of gold 2 avg players. What?! If I'm going to get LP decayed, why the hell am I still getting matched with people at my previous MMR/ELO. Either I decay and I play people at my current ELO or I don't and I get to keep my old tier. It's the worst of both cases!

  2. So now I'm getting paired with people much higher than my current tier/division just so I can try to climb back into it.** Begin server DCs/outtages almost every day.** Constant server downtime, constant games ruined, constant issues. Most games seem to be a stomp for one team or the other (often because it's 4v5). I finally get to my silver 1 promo's. Now i have to win 3/4 games to get promoted to silver 1! That's a pretty absurd win streak, much higher than the 51-55% I'm supposed to be working towards to "supposedly" climb. Did I mention I'm still against gold tier players?

  3. Finally get to my gold 5 promo's on a big win streak. Lose 2 games in a row, lose the series. Get back to promo's, finally pass the absurd (though less absurd than 3/4) 4/6 games I have to win (pretty sure I got 1-2 of those games as easy passes because the enemy team had a DC).

  4. Now I'm back in gold. Eventually get to gold 4. Enter feeders/trolls/afkers/DCs. Back at gold 5. The teams I've been paired with in the past few days have been some of the worst teams I've gotten in a while. It's just a prime example of just how this game completely fails at match making, team building, and providing a competitive environment where matches are close and it's not a stomp one way or another. Just look at my recent match history. http://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-history/NA/38502245?matchType=2. ---------------------------------------- And let me preface this with the following: I am willing (and say so in champ select) to fill ANY position (I basically say "anything but mid pref" or just "fill") to try and get as many other players on champs and roles they are comfortable with to help prevent poor matchups and them being in an unfavorable position and feeding (for the "I only play 1 champ in 1 role" people). ----------------------------------------

ADC- 32:47 minute game. Loss. The game is going well enough; We get first blood. O wait, our Mid laner DCs. Jungle circles back around and gets us another kill because they blew everything on the first gank. Enemy Mid laner comes bot and picks up a kill because our mid has DCed. We have to give up dragon. Our Mid reconnects; for about 5 minutes. DCs again, have to give up more objectives and kills. Eventually lose the game because the deficit is too large because our Mid was AFKed too long (notice the 90cs at 32:47).

Support- 22:45 minute game. Loss. I ask the kat if they'd rather mid/support (mid is my worst position; but I can usually still just run tele, afk farm and try to make a tele play). They call mid. Give up first blood at 3:31 in a solo kill. Talk about how "rusty" they are (so they pick an all-in high risk/reward champ like kat). I basically bully the jinx and thresh out of lane (jinx has 125 cs in a 23 min game. The lucian has terrible positioning and regardless of the 4/2/2 (plus drag) lead he starts with, he constantly gets caught out and ends up 4/8/2. I place more wards than the entire enemy team and people are still getting caught out not looking at the map. I almost tie for 2nd most dmg on team (to champs). As support.

Jungle- 44:31 minute game. Win. Probably the only decent game I've had the past few days. I got us off to a decent start, their jungle did the same. Would have ended sooner but the twitch had terrible positioning and the gnar kept trying to force bad engages. Nearly a loss.

Support- 44:17 minute game. Loss. Hard to tell from the end game report, but we won our lane pretty early. Got to zone the corki off of a decent amount of cs. Couldn't get as many kills on him as I'd like but we did manage to kill their support a number of times. Mid picks Riven into kat; proceeds to feed 1v1 the whole game. To make matters worse, because of how bad they are getting beat mid, riven tries to come camp bot to get a few kills. The whole enemy team ends up collapsing and get basically an ace + dragon. Our team constantly forces poor fights, the wukong/riven can't seem to save any cc for kat ult (i'm busying trying to peel for the ADC) and we slowly just bleed out and die after a number of bad fights. Once again I place more wards than the entire enemy team.

Mid- 20:53 minute game. Win. Playing my worst position. I know I'm against an ahri so I play a tanky/ap brusier who I know will get me through the laning phase just fine. I get a good TP gank bot to turn around an otherwise bad situation and we ride the momentum to an easy victory. All lanes win, christmas came early.

Jungle- 35:42 minute game. Loss. Get the legendary "duo bot" in champ select. Help top get an early kill. Mid gets a kill in a 1v2. Thinking things might actually turn up this time (regardless of the troll bot lane they pick up). The bot lane performs pretty poor. After giving top the early advantage he proceeds to immediately start feeding and getting way behind in cs. Our ADC constantly gets killed, and our support refuses to buy a sight stone/wards. In fact I place the most wards on the team; and the "support" doesn't buy a single pink all game. Mid refuses to group and instead of going to drag to help secure it he goes top to pick up some farm. The dragon gets turned around and it only goes downhill from there. No vision, no teamwork.

Jungle- 31:19 minute game. Win. Honestly can't remember this game (probably because we won). Looking at the report it seemed to start in our favor, and then just get more in our favor. Once again I place the most wards out of anyone on the team; as jungle.

Support- 34:25 minute game. Loss. Honestly, looking at the report I'm surprised we were ever in the lead; because it sure never felt like it. We had a terrible team comp (soraka mid!?) with absolutely no damage (which I point out in champ select to which the jungle goes "sure I'll get a dmg jungle" and picks nunu).** Top dies 3 times in 8 minutes. With double escape masteries.** Enemy top gets fed and proceeds to roam around the map helping win all the rest of the lanes. Mid is completely useless the whole game.

Support- 24:47 minute game. Loss. We get stomped. My ADC is so bad I actually do more damage to champs than he does. Nough said.

ADC- 27:48 minute game. Win. Another one of those rare easy wins. Enemy team gets out to a small lead early, but we win the team fights and snowball the game. I basically had to do nothing.

Support- 39:16 minute game. Loss. Pretty back and forth game. The problem was the mid fizz. He refused to communicate, played all the teamfights poorly, and overall was just a real ass. His excuse? This was just his smurf and he wanted to try out fizz so he didn't care about how he played or if we won. "Normal" draft didn't give him the "proper experience" so he didn't want to play a few test games before just going into ranked and ruining our game for us.

This doesn't even cover the number of times I've had to dodge in champ select because of the complete trolls I get. People that refuse to communicate and then lock in a champ at the last second (usually trying to take the role that someone had already asked for and had shown a champion for while we waited for the person who refused to communicate to pick their champ). The people that whine and moan about every matchup and how X lane is going to feed; or how they refuse to play anything but Y lane. And honestly I could go on and on. This is the current poor state of soloQ. And honestly I'm tired of it. I've got my gold tier rewards for this season so I'm probably just going to take another 6 month break (now that decay no longer effects gold) and then see if anything has changed when I come back. Probably not. Probably still won't have east coast servers. Probably still will have constant server issues (#MoMoneyMoProblems should be the official hash-tag of the riot server team). Probably still will have to deal with toxic players both in champ select and in-game. Probably still will have completely lopsided matches with players that just don't look like they deserve to be where they are at. Probably still will get a feeder or an afk or a troll in every other game. Probably will get fed up with it again and take another 6 month break.

And a large cookie for anyone who managed to make it to the end of this post.

tl;dr fuck soloQ

#elohell #qq #bronzethings #vent

42 Comments

The Storm Dragon10/7/2014, 8:22:26 PM10 votes

I've said this a billion times. Remove MMR for ranked. It's not needed.

You should only play with people of your rank, then one rank lower if you're about to be demoted or one rank higher if you're about to be promoted. If people duo, then assign people to the other team of the same rank make both teams even.

Suddenly people who are meant to be lower lose more than they win, and people who are meant to be higher win more than they lose. If you're just going to match people based on MMR without any regard for their actual rank, then you're just trying to artificially force a 50% win rate on people without caring if they can actually advance or not.

Hanakotoba10/7/2014, 10:51:00 PM4 votes

I dont' understand why people always complain about the ranked system, it's fine the way it is. If you're stuck at your current ELO, you belong there, simple as that. And before you all complain about luck, I carried 4v5s before, I've gotten smurf accounts from silver to gold 5 within 2 days with a ~90% win rate, guess what? I had ragers, d/cs, afks, trolls, etc in my games, but i still won them.

tl;dr Complaining about how your team, w/e sucks? You suck as well, and you belong there.

Vegas Dad10/7/2014, 11:27:55 PM2 votes

welcome to league. The ranking system is just aweful for 85% of the people who are not the very top or very bottom. Too many loopholes to get people to the wrong rating. Brother playing account, being boosted via duo q. sucking bad but just being on the winning team.

There simply is too much noise, and no emphasis on your individual performance, so if you win and are 16/4/7 and your teamate is 1/9/3 you both get the same reward which is where alot of the noise comes from.

Rueian10/8/2014, 6:08:13 AM2 votes

I am sick of people not talking, not making calls, not warding, not grouping, going bot when baron needs to be contested, and all the other stupid stuff that everyone in every game seems to do.

I shouldn't be losing games because some idiot decides he wants to run his face into bot lane 24/7

Fiorinol10/8/2014, 10:41:23 AM1 votes

http://www.reddit.com/r/summonerschool/comments/2ias04/gold_v_is_depressing/

I made this post a few days ago on the Summoners School subreddit. I swear Gold V is one of the most frustrating places to be in League. I managed to make it to Gold IV, and after a streak of games, I got stomped back to Gold V 0LP.

I made it to Silver I playing almost exclusively support. Lulu/Nami/Leona. Then I started picking up Ahri again. It was easy to singlehandedly carry games in Silver playing support, but playing with Gold V players is a whole other story. I never manage to be in sync with my ADC, and I typically end up with no advantage mid game having to deal with fed jungle/mid/top laner assassins. It's essentially like trying to win playing Ahri with no gold. You cannot do anything if your ADC is a deadbeat.

I've been trying to play a lot of Gnar top lately to have fun, since there seems to be nothing I can do at the moment to get out of Gold V, I might as well try to improve my play. Even then, Gold V players are convinced that going Gnar full tank will solve their problems (Else they report you), the problems being that some of them position and teamfight like Bronze V players, like they don't care. And it's often just one key player on your team.

Solo Q is really broken right now. People give up at the drop of a hat and start going on tilt extremely easily.

Feathermane10/8/2014, 11:11:32 AM1 votes

Everyone complaining about ranked matchmaking is a certified jackass with an "I am a great player, everyone else is trash" attitude. kthx

D1rtFarmer10/8/2014, 11:43:20 AM1 votes

Has alot to do with this UNBALANCED Ping rate honestly

YvieZileanOddly10/8/2014, 12:19:16 PM1 votes

Only problen I have with ranked is the promo system. Winning 3/4 games is pretty frustrating if your trying to climb slowly

JevelFaithful10/8/2014, 2:05:41 PM1 votes

I've tried to give the game another chance the past few months; but there is just so much going against it. It's the most frustrating experience in existence, and watching streams of higher ELO players;** there is basically nothing to look forward to even in the "higher tiers" of competition** (where you would hope things would get better).

Yep. In the end, it's always the same game : someone is always going to have a bad game, some one is always going to not like something in your build, someone is always going to not like histeam. The only way out? It's a team game, so grab a team (or 3-4 players and play together as a team).

I heard dota has the same thing btw. I'm not sure if it will be worst in a less standard game like Awesomenauts or Heroes of the storm.

DayVGaming10/8/2014, 4:22:35 PM1 votes

The main problem is just that none of you realize that YOU are the idiots you're bitching about

Izento10/8/2014, 9:21:53 PM1 votes

There's one large thing I don't agree with; solo queue doesn't improve when you get higher elo. It most certainly does.

The one thing that is taken out largely with higher elo is DCs. Usually people who are higher rank have less DCs and AFKs. You still have the ragers (more I think), trolls and feeders, but DCs/AFKs are one less thing to worry about.

I've noticed a big change from going to Silver to Platinum when it comes to DCs and AFKs. I was Googling around and couldn't find any statistics to back up lower elo has more leavers/afks than higher elo, but as you can see with the link provided below, there is a correlation of ping vs elo (which will then equate to DCs vs elo).

http://www.elophant.com/league-of-legends/charts/tier?region=na&period=month

oh you wanna die10/8/2014, 10:42:06 PM1 votes

wow, i read so much and got to a point where you said kat was an all skill champ, i quit reading then, i agreed with everything up until that point, now your a pos.

on a srs note, yeah the servers are bad.

PL5510/8/2014, 11:26:21 PM1 votes

The entire LoL community is so messed up I'm thinking about giving up on this game after playing for 9 months. Right now, I don't play ranked anymore since everyone there is so frustrating to deal with, either they intentionally feed or harass the people that aren't feeding on purpose. It isn't even that good in normals. I remember trying out Orianna for the first time a few weeks ago and got hated on for "feeding" and just totally ganged up on. I wasn't even that bad, I went 1/2/1 in lane not the best but not feeding.

SummonerSquid10/9/2014, 1:43:38 PM1 votes

It can be frustrating, but manageable. If you're just playing for fun, I wouldn't bother with ranked matches. Focus on your own input and learn to improve based on that - not based on your team's performance.

Pandemic Punch10/7/2014, 8:23:46 PM1 votes

You got it good.

Nocalpsycho10/7/2014, 8:26:43 PM1 votes

look at this shit http://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-history/NA/32258382?matchType=2&map=1

RagnarokChu10/8/2014, 5:40:36 AM1 votes

Despite contrary belief if you want to fix solo queue, find other 4 people and play 5v5s like how the game is "supposed to be played".

There is only so much riot can do for toxic people, ragers, afkers, and people with shitty internet that DC.

At some point it's a people issue then riot at all.

No matter what magical format or change you have to the "ranked system", the system itself isn't the present issue on why stuff like this happens. It's the people, there is no system I can put in to change the people outside of banning them or removing them from rank or a failsafe measure for people with shitty internet.