Preranked Experience

So I just finished my 10th Prerank game.

I ranked at Silver IV, .. not terrible, but I'm actually a little surprised I ranked that well, considering I won 4 and lost 6.

I feel like I am terrible in PVP. I have played for a while, but mostly bot games. I have pretty good knowledge of champions, I actually have a massive champion pool. (to date, I only have 11 champions that I do not own.) So as far as champion knowledge, mechanics, builds (generally) and some general gameplay habits, .. I would consider myself decent.

What I really lack is knowledge of how players actually handle PVP situations. I also have some pretty poor habits that I really just need to work on, such as warding, item prioritization (such as wards), lock screen on vs off ( I tend to swap between the two often, but I still use lock more than I should.) knowing when to engage and when to leave, knowing when to try and help and when to abandon a teammate who is too deep. ... but all of those really come with experience and practice.

For all but my first preranked match I decided to go with the support role. My theory was that I have a partner who I can try to help and sort of lean on for when I make mistakes. If they know what they are doing, I should not hurt them unless I have bad positioning and end up feeding, which sadly, did happen. Maybe a bit of a lame strategy, but I figured if I got carried to A rank as a starting point, I can start to worry about how getting better.

One thing that I was very annoyed by, and the honest reason for this post, is that people are terrible at trying to communicate any sort of strategy. I am sure this really has a lot to do with the elo I'm in. It seemed preranked matches had a lot more unranked, and for the most part, silver players. I'm betting that solid strategies tend to come with high gold and up.

Now, for an example of what I mean about strategies, I was first to pick. Nobody on my team had any champions hovered other than the ADC, and if I recall correctly they had Jinx hovered. I figured that was no problem. Being less skilled, I should probably go for a safer champion. Tank support sounds good. so I had hovered Alistar during the ban phase to give my team an indication to what I was going for. Then, the rest of my team picks poke, poke, poke, and poke champions. ... Maybe I am completely wrong about this, but to my knowledge, Alistar is probably one of the worst supports for a full poke composition. Maybe with another hard engage tank, or at least a fighter that can engage with me, it could work, but that was not the case. If I had any sort of indication that was the plan I could have picked someone else. Even a Braum would have been better I think.

So, of course we lost that game, and of course I got blamed. .. fml