If one were to look at my match history through my series for gold league, you will see some good champion KDA scores. This doesn't win games however.
Through my hilariously difficult time getting to a gold series one thing became clear. You must be lucky. No matter how well one plays a champion, there are ways for a team to throw a game.
How in the world does one 'carry themselves' into gold when in my experience, you in fact cannot win a game alone?
http://www.lolking.net/summoner/na/31611581
got to plat in 2 weeks on my smurf as you see I win most of my games even if my KDA is poor. This is because I can identify my win conditions and play to those, if my team cant win fights I split until I think we can or I look for opportunities to break off one person on the team and start a 4v5 in my teams favor. Sometimes the only way to win is to camp a bush and hope the enemy team walks into it. You have to give yourself every chance to win.
You can't win the game alone but if you play correctly you can make a huge difference my win rate is something like 75% which means I dont win every game, but I win enough of them to climb very quickly. Focus on improvement and climbing will happen naturally if you only focus on winning you are just going to get frustrated. The reason it feels like luck is because you are at your correct elo.
So... there's a lot of luck reaching any division, gold v for example, if your skill level is right around that division. So yeah, there are probably quite a few players in silver 1 that have skills similar to gold v players but have been unlucky so they're still silver 1.... But if your skill is gold 3 or higher, you'd get into gold v easy.
Edit: I have a friend who's just as good as I am, maybe a bit better... But he's stuck in gold 1 and i'm plat v because he gets shit on in his promo series. If he was better, he'd carry out. He's boosted 3 people from silver to gold v easily.
The only way to 'carry' a game is to completely and utterly destroy your lane opponent so badly that you can 1v2 him and the enemy jungler, when the jungler comes to camp you. That's when you truly won your lane (or when you can just kill him over and over and force him to leave it). Then assuming your team DID NOT feed as hard as YOU got fed yourself, by grouping, warding the jungles, warding objectives and destroying the enemy team in outplays and teamfights, and making sure you keep pinging, that's basically how you carry a game. And USUALLY you should be able to win these games more than your team throws (thus, if you destroyed your lane 90% of your games, you WILL gain elo).
Now, if you just go even lane or have a small advantage (CS, 1 kill ,etc), then no, you can't "hard carry"--you are going to be reliant on teamwork and getting people to cooperate and make smart plays. If they don't do that, then you had better hope the enemy team throws harder than you guys are. Or you lose.
There is no way to ensure you can carry your team 100%. The best ways, however, are to play extremely carry oriented champions (I.E. Yasuo, Vayne, etc.) as well as roam and try to give kills to your teammates. After that you can only hope your team has some knowledge of what they're doing.
http://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/NA1/1581753846/207710778
I did what I could to carry my team. I split, I picked off isolated carry targets and even cleared wards and scured every dragon and baron I possibly could. But somehow they blew an 18.3k gold lead.
The road to Gold, in my experience, is indeed paved in luck.
Thanks for your tips however Binxy
Ever notice how you never see diamond players with this mentality?
