Just some honest thoughts from a veteran scrub.

So I don't really know how to start this. Maybe a disclaimer that I am not even 100% sure what I want from this game or the community anymore? If I think of something appropriate as I type this out, I'll edit this to reflect it. Otherwise, I'm going to TRY (and probably fail) to organize my web of thoughts as they come to me. I have a problem of run-on sentences that has haunted me since middle school so please forgive those as I'm sure there will be more than a few by the time I'm done.

I can't remember when I started playing. End of Season 3? Middle of Season 4? I don't know, but it's somewhere along those lines. I was a typical, ignorant guy that didn't do heavy, in-depth research as to the expectations of what a MOBA community took for granted, I rushed placements as soon as I hit level 30, I used all my free refunds for the account on the most astoundingly wasteful of things, I had nowhere even remotely close to the amount of variety in my runes as I should have (though at least I did wait until I could fill out my free pages entirely before playing ranked, but it was still pretty dumb, obviously, without getting more pages and filling those out with more kinds). Even my roster was mostly filled with very mundane, linear and overall "simple" champions with kits that any decent player with experience can identify the inherent weaknesses of and exploit them. I can't even play Master Yi properly as I actually get very flustered by his kit and how it simply feels clunky at best and like I'm playing a tournament fighter on console with in-dechiperable button-mashing at its worst. I feel ashamed that I cannot maneuver what is touted as one of the most basic champions in the entire game. My brain just does not allow it. At least with Zed there's an excuse of my ineptitude because of managing the shadows and having to be able to time things on-the-fly with precision. Still, I'm a total noob lord with more than my fair share of the champion pool.

This is probably sounding quite familiar to a lot of you, either frustrated at people like me or you can relate to it yourself, right?

With that bit of background out of the way now, let's get into what inspired this post. Lately, I have become COMPLETELY disillusioned by the idea that I will ever be able to climb into an elo of which holds people who are even halfway as logical and knowledgable about the game, to care about performing well and understanding that you can't just mindlessly spam the same garbage and expect anywhere close to a 100% win rate.

In my placements from way back having started, I was most certainly Bronze V material. I was put into Silver 2 or 3, I forget, and these were people (at the time) that understood the little things. Counterpicking, warding areas of not just bushes but other key locations at very specific stages of the game, freezing lanes for both themselves as well as dead or teammates that were forced back via recall or death, swapped lanes if they were having trouble, encouraged build variety to promote strengths against unusual circumstances instead of blindly buying the exact same items every game no matter what, had basic mathematic skills to calculate distance time, measuring damage output and minimizing damage taken, cooldown timing, amongst a whole host of other things.

I believe, for the most part, that out of all of these sorts of things, that the single most important thing that these people knew what was priority #1, was proper gold management skills. This can be broken into two segments: proper CSing skills (last-hitting) and distributing kills evenly throughout the most effective members without starving those who needed some sort of income to at least present a reasonable measure of self-defence.

I long for these days back, knowing what I do now to apply to my younger self, before my inevitable drop to a horror pit of MMR so low that I can put a month of climbing from B5 to B4 and drop back to B5 in about 2 or 3 hours, repeat ad infinitum.

Of these gold disparity situations that occur almost every game now I experience, if we are not absolutely stomping the enemy team at every turn, I feel like my team goes well and out of their way to starve anyone they can for nothing more than personal glory hogging (even if they are full build yet still refuse to buy elixirs, if they even realize they exist as a thing).

Like I can be struggling all game to barely make 100 CS by the end of a 30-40 minute long game (which is quite, quite pathetic) because of people forcing fights early and often that never needed to occur so much salvaging had to be performed...then as soon as a huge wave is incoming to a turret, I'll use teleport to get there, thankful for the several hundred gold I can expect...only to have two or 3 teammates who were dicking around in midlane to all of a sudden stop pressuring the enemy, to take ALL OF IT away from me and then proceed to bitch me out for being a fail tank or whatever when I have less items than the enemy support.

Even worse, let's say I'm top lane, I'm holding my own, I don't need nor want any ganks but the jungler keeps forcing ganks that fail, feed the enemy (in the worse case scenario).......OR......succeed, take the kill credit AND 2 to 4 minion waves (or they die to our own minions because they can't last-hit to save their life), and not even help take enemy turret.

It's not a perfect example but I feel these sorts of situations are at least a reasonable start to illustrating why I feel very wronged and actively hate the so-called 'Mastery' system as it promotes only the most selfish of solo playstyles in a team game.

I think pretty much everything I can think of for any aspect of this game boils down to that I am frustrated that I have no friends to speak of to play with any level of consistency OR I am barred because they already exceeded the cap of tiers (so I can't play with gold or above) with people I don't know on their own schedules. This then leads to needing to rely on total strangers who may or may not have no intricate understanding of fundamental mechanics (as I'm around 900 or so MMR, chances are preeeeeeeeeeetty good they are just like me, only winning in short bursts of luck before being hammered back down.

This makes me salty. This makes me want to rage and not even want to attempt to put forth any semblance of effort into my games just to spite the people around me that rubs off on them the same way others have done so towards me and that's not okay, at all, in the slightest. Misery loves company and all that jazz.

At such low elo, all we are at the end of the day, are a bunch of anxiety-driven, rabid animals scrapping it out for a small morsel of self-satisfaction that dissipates before we even know what we can do with it. I don't like this feeling. I feel totally helpless and this game, even when played on a competitive level like ranked, should at least resemble some form of fun.

At least in normals, I actually have a fair chance of running into people who know what's what. Am I an expert who deserves (X) rank? Hell no! I have a lot to understand about what mini-metas (for lack of a better term) each division and how high or low in said divisions, exist and what I can expect to maximize my chances. But seeing as at this rate of succumbing to a deplorable emotional state because I can't climb because of the sheer NUMBER of factors overwhelming me all at once, every single game just about, I'll never even get the chance to dissect them and work towards any meaningful progress.

Maybe I'm overanalyzing things. Or maybe the game has, in actuality, become much simpler than it was in the past and I simply have yet to realize it, continuing to overestimate what all goes into climbing these days. If I'm not wrong, however, it is a very depressing time to play.

I've been trolled so hard so many times that I have, in turn, trolled right back in a few moments of weakness. I'm only human and my mental and emotional limits can only take so much abuse. Sometimes I've trolled in the name of (arguably) good, demonstrating that if you piss your team off in a very precise way, you can manipulate not just them, but rather your primary target, the enemy, to willingly give up an otherwise free win for them so your own team can just continue mopping up until they carry you to an undeserved victory.

I think the only reason I don't want to start another account is just the bittersweet goodbyes I would need to give to around $900 dollars (insert obligatory Canuck-buck joke here) on skins and several years of lost time gathering almost every single tier 3 rune in the game. Also, I'm currently 16 champs short of a full roster. That's a fair sum to just walk away from. I can understand why some people feel compelled to buy boosts. I would never share my account willingly with anyone but if I had the excess funds to do so, I would totally pay to play with people smurfing to raise me out of my current hell-hole to where people actually give a crap about how their performance reflects on the rest of the team.

.....damn. I had to take a break from writing this and now I've lost my place. Well, anyway, I hope someone, somewhere, can at least try to see how it feels from the perspective of a self-proclaimed "veteran scrub". I am sure I had much more to say on the matter but as I speak while I type, my throat is sore, my thoughts are muddied more than usual, and I'm just plain exhausted right now.

If anyone can direct me to a source or person/people who can help people like myself who feel like they squandered their enthusiastic, legit, 'newbie' experience in favour of rushing things until they spiralled well beyond their control...it'd be appreciated. Years of spending my time amongst random people who go into each and every game expecting, DEMANDING they have a 100% win rate regardless of their detrimental actions to achieving that, has made me very cold and bitter.

As time passed on, I feel as though I'm getting worse and worse at the game, even though I've done nothing BUT learn more about the game. It also doesn't help that I continued playing at the end of Season 5 when I could have left well enough alone and spared my MMR from several hundred points going down the drain and was still maintaining Silver. Too many people all thought, "I'm not getting gold this season so I'm going to troll and afk through every single game I'm in to drag down as many people as I can with me" and I just happened to be stupid enough to keep trying, regardless of these people.

I went from Silver 3 to Bronze 5 in the final two days before cutoff. For some reason lolking thinks I have a silver border. Not sure why.

All the things that consume me and fill me with contempt and hatred have made my knowledge for nothing. When I feel like I'm the only one on my team who cares to pay attention to all the little things that make up the fundamentals of the game, it's increasingly difficult to have any faith whatsoever that I can use it to my advantage. This is what makes it so difficult for me to so much as even watch high level players, whether they be on pre-formed teams or not: they have the basics down pat while I'm surrounded by those who just go out of their way to showcase just how YOLO it is down at my level. To watch others succeed or, at least, perform on a competent scale, is something of a pipe dream I'll never know again ever since I first hit level 30 on this account years ago.

I'm Bronze V with no LP to speak of for what must be the 30th or 40th time and I don't see any glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. I think it's a dead end unless I get people who actually strive to play better. Who WANT to learn more, who KNOW they know almost nothing, and are not under some false impression that they somehow don't need to do anything differently.

I'm so low in the system, however, that finding anyone is basically a statistical improbability that compares to being attacked by a shark, being struck by lightning, or winning the lottery. It's the same thing in most other aspects of life: you can't get anywhere if you don't know anyone and are not in a position of circumstances where anyone you meet is of the company you wish to keep.

All this dynamic queue nonsense that's the popular thing to rage about these days? In LoL standards, that's considered a first-world problem by comparison. It is a total NON-issue this low in elo as anyone grouping together where I am are just a few people who just so happened to have a good game together and disband after a few matches because they don't have any real synergy with one another, not using voice chat, and most certainly not setting specific times aside each day of play to exploit the flaw in the system.

Just saying.