The thing I hate about snowball metas

Well... besides the snowballs. Is you really get punished for being a mid & late game player. I get it... if you can hard stomp your lane you should be able to carry the game or at least highly increase your chances to. But..... I really dislike that mentality. Because I feel it really makes players short sighted. My biggest revelation a couple seasons ago (not sure why it took so long) was realizing I could only control myself and since I first ranked to gold player support I was able to focus more on what was going on around me all game than that just hard stomping my lane. Because in reality, I have never and will never be a great mechanical player or hell even a good LoL player. But what I finally realized last season that stayed constant for me all year was there is a lot more to the game than just the laning phase.

So I used my continued knowledge and learned some other roles + applied what I learned to mid & late game and had a lot of success last season. Mostly in the jungle, but honestly it didn't really matter what lane. I stopped looking at the scoreboard most the time because it seemed really irrelevant since there are so many games thrown in low elo. But I feel now I can no longer just completely ignore the scoreboard. Players getting a bunch of kills in lane does lead to snowballing and it has become very apparent to me this season that this is the current trend. So yes, this does favor players who hard stomp their lanes consistently. The problem there at least in low elo is this.

Since there are so many players in low elo we are all bad at some things and better at others. There generally is a reason someone is a certain rank whether they good at one role, one champ, mechanically good, have good game knowledge, etc. The higher you rank up obviously players are going to need to be good at more than just a few of these things. But in low elo, especially silver people are still learning and generally are much better at some things than others. Even higher elo players have said they have seen some mechanically good players in silver, they just severely lack game knowledge. I see so many assassin mids lately who get fed but I know they will throw late game. And honestly they almost always do. However, this season its harder to punish them for it compared to last season where I never worried about them late game because I knew they would be pretty useless. And this is because in metas where you can snowball, mechanical players really benefit because they generally play champs that can snowball once ahead. The problem with this is these players then rank up in that meta without learning more about the game overall. Which to me is unfortunate because the higher you go up the ladder you expect players to start having more overall knowledge of the game.

Now in hindsight is this a huge deal? Probably not. I guess I am just salty because I like playing close competitive games regardless of ranks and also like punishing players who think their good because they get a couple early kills on or . I still get to punish them, just not as much as last season :(.

But this has also shown me I have lost a step and really need to work on my laning. I just been getting abused in lane a lot since I started playing again. For now I am still working on figuring out jungle. Think I got it figured out now at least for silver elo I just dislike feeling pressured to gank so much more than last season because fear of the snowball if I don't. Not that ganking is bad but.... I like getting some xp & farm too. But hey... I am low elo player so obviously I still don't know a lot about jungling. Just miss feeling like the game would reach mid & late game so even if your team was behind you had a chance. But now it feels like a lot of games one team has such a large advantage over another by mid game its a lot harder to come back than in the previous season.