Got to Gold yesterday. Are you hard stuck Iron, Bronze or Silver and want to get out? Here's how.
https://na.op.gg/summoner/userName=vbniya
I recently managed to succeed in getting to Gold and wanted to share my thoughts on how to get there if you're hard stuck in the lower ranks, particularly Bronze and Silver. Also, this is actually the second time I've gotten to gold.
https://lan.op.gg/summoner/userName=xelniya
I got the above account to Gold near the start of this season. I even made a post about it. However, it felt a bit hollow because for one, I did it on another server and not the server I considered my home server and secondly, I never screwed up the MMR on that account so my LP gains remained quite high during that climb. Even now if I were to play a game on that account and win, I'd get something between 21 and 25 LP. It's very easy to climb under such circumstances. In essence, the account was already pretty much in Gold elo from the get-go.
But what about an account that got hard stuck and fucked it's MMR? What about someone who is hard stuck Bronze gaining 15 LP per win and losing 20 per loss. Is it possible to climb to Silver and higher? The answer is yes. The NA account spent some time in low Bronze with bad MMR and I still managed to climb to Gold. Let me tell you how.
I've thought a bit about what I was gonna write and I really want to avoid the cookie cutter advice that we've all heard over and over again. I'm talking about the typical advice given to people wanting to get out of Bronze or Silver. Things like getting wards, farming, map awareness etc. We've all heard it, tried it, won a couple games only lose like 6 in a row and then complain that the advice is bullshit. Then we fall back on our usual complaints about feeders, matchmaking and the whole host of nonsense we use to justify why we can't climb.
Now it's not that the advice is bad. On the contrary, it is very important but it lacks the proper context. Higher elo players love to tell us that we need to ward more, farm better, take objectives, yadda yadda yadda and we can get out of Bronze or Silver easy. It's not actually that simple. This stuff is essential but it's part of a much larger puzzle that these high elo advice-givers seem to ignore. So lets get into it.
Firstly, it's extremely important to realize that climbing SoloQ is as much about luck as it is about skill. You will not climb the ladder if you do not take into account that there is a luck factor at play that determines whether you win or lose a particular match. There is no way on Earth you can ever know if your mid laner will afk 5 minutes into the game and never come back. You cannot know before a match that your bot lane will go 0-12 in the first 15 minutes. No one can predict these things and they will happen and you will lose games because of it. And we cannot ignore that this kind of shit will carry a lot of weight towards the outcome of a particular match and we have no control whatsoever over this. So what can we do?
Well here it is boys. The only thing you should be focused on in any ranked match is trying improve the chances of your team winning. There is no technique or strategy that can guarantee you a win. If 3 of your team mates go afk 10 minutes into a match there isn't a single thing you can do to win it. It is extremely important that you understand this. The only thing you can really influence is the odds of your team winning. That is the only thing you can control. Going back to the cookie cutter advice that I was talking about earlier, well that is where it fits. Learning to farm better, take objectives and ward effectively all improve the odds for your team to win but don't expect it to guarantee a win. If your mid laner is feeding and your bot lane is slightly losing, getting 200 CS at 19 minutes gives you far better odds of carrying them than if you had 80 CS.
However, warding, farming, objectives are not the only thing you should be thinking about when considering how to improve your team's odds. There is another huge thing that no one in Bronze or Silver does that I know will probably help a lot more than anything else. It is not feeding. This is the single biggest reason many people are hard stuck in Bronze and Silver. Learning how to not feed by far the biggest thing that will help you climb the lower ranks. In whatever role you main, you should NEVER EVER come out of the lane phase with a score like 0-4. Now there is no way you can realistically never go 0-4 in lane but it is very realistic for you to only fail this hard like 1 in 10 games. If every 3rd game you are going 0-4 or 2-9 or 1-11 then something is seriously wrong with how you are playing. You should not be feeding this hard so often and I guarantee you it is one of the main reasons you are stuck in Bronze/Silver. And before you think about improving anything else about your play, fix this.
If you think I'm joking about just how big this is consider my LAN account. All I did every single ranked game on that account was basically afk under tower every match. I did everything in my power every single one of those games not to feed or even die a single time in lane. Of course I did die a couple times in a few games but almost never did I go 0-4 or anything worse in lane. I didn't try to carry or get super fed or anything fancy, I just focused on not feeding, every single game and just like that, I climbed to Gold on that account. Now that worked because I was gaining a lot of LP so I could coast on random chance and by not feeding I tipped the odds in my favor over the course of several games. My team always had a potential of 4 feeders vs a potential of 5 feeders on the enemy team. So the odds of my team winning was always something like 60%. However, if your LP gains are low, this will be a very slow way to climb, not to mention that it's boring as fuck. But this is essentially how you beat SoloQ. You manipulate the odds.
The thing about feeding is that every death drastically lowers your team's chance of winning. I mean think about it. How many games have you had where you're really feeling yourself. You're in bot lane, stomping the enemy AD carry. You go 6-0 on Kai'Sa. You're feeling great, ready to hard carry the scrubs on your team. Then your first team fight after lane phase ends, you get instagibbed by the 10-1 enemy Zed. You try and try but every skirmish, Zed just removes you instantly from the game and the enemy team including their 0-4 Jhin cleans up the rest of your team. Think about how easily you would have carried if your mid didn't feed the Zed. Your mid laner just threw away an easy win by feeding the Zed. You must NEVER be that mid laner. Try your best to never be that guy. That alone can give you some elo.
Aside from not feeding, lets say you add laning skills like knowing how to manage waves and how to trade properly. You add proper macro play, positioning, team fighting. All of these things go towards improving your chances of winning. The reason TF Blade can go 40-0 from Bronze to Platinum is because his skill is so high that the odds of his teams winning in these elos is close to 100%. But here's the nice part, you don't have to be that good. You just need to improve the odds enough so that over the course of multiple games you win more than you lose. If your personal mix of skills gives your team a 55% chance of winning that is more than enough to get to Gold and perhaps even higher.
So this is what I recommend you do. Pick one champ or 4 at most. Get really comfortable on them. Learn all their match-ups. Learn not to feed on them and learn how to play them effectively from lane phase to team fights. If you can manage an over 50% win rate on these champs over more than 40 games then play only those champs in ranked. Do not pick some shit where you have like a 30% win rate. Try to avoid doing that. Only pick the champs that give your team the highest odds of winning owing to your ability to perform on these champs. Remember, SoloQ is about odds. You should always be doing whatever you can to improve the odds. And remember that not every game will be won. It's ok to surrender if a game is too far gone and don't play on tilt.
Anyways, that's it. Good luck.
EDIT:
I posted this with the intention of helping out anyone trying to get to at least Gold. A few commenters were a bit rude and some, outright disrespectful. It's my fault. I've disregarded the clear knowledge that the majority of posters on these boards are extremely childish and petty. In hindsight, a post like this belongs on a higher quality forum such as Reddit. As such I will not be responding to anymore comments. However, I will leave this here since Google caches these things and anyone my post can help may find it through a Google search. It works, I stand by it. If you don't agree or feel the need to berate me for nothing more than a desire to help then I honestly do not care and I certainly will not respond to you.
If in the future I feel to need to make posts trying to help others with anything I've learned, it will not be posted here. I'll put it on Reddit instead if I must post it somewhere. So this is the last post of this nature I will be making here.
And to the people that do find some useful advice or understanding in there, I'm glad you did. It was my intention. If not, I apologize. No one is perfect.
Anyways, Good luck to you all.
