Escaping low elos

I have way too much time on my hands today. wrote this as a comment for someone else, and thought it was worth posting.

1: look at your team comp in champ select, and see what your team needs rather than coming into ranked with the intent of playing a specific champion. I can't tell you how many games I've lost because my team didn't have a tank, or the enemy team had way more cc than ours etc. basically just look to balance out your team comp with more cc, more tankiness, or decide whether your team has too much ad/ap and balance that out. The understanding of this can come from experience or watching pro sports where there's a lot of commentary about team comp, and you can pick up some useful bits of info.

2: keep your team playing. I've seen a lot of games lost because 1 bad thing happened or we were down a few kills, and everyone decided to surrender when a turnaround was still entirely possible. there's something strange about the psychology of ranked that makes people care way too much about whether they win or lose, but the moment something bad happens they surrender. Worse than that, a lot of people in lower elos don't identify what things are causing their entirely manageable problems, and when their limited understanding of what they should be doing isnt working they think the game is over because they don't know how to work around the enemy strategies/mechanics that are causing them problems. Finally, team comp has a huge role to play in when peoples power spikes, but since low elo players don't understand this they are not equipped to recognize whether they are actually losing or whether they have a more late game comp which should win later in the game. As long as you can keep the ball rolling a lot of the time the enemy bronze players will fumble it. Just remember that everything I just said about psychology and low elo players applies just as much to the enemy.

3: spread the wealth. If you consistently win your lane, but always seem to lose, one of the best things you can do is spread your advantage to other lanes. Of course, if you're the jungler you're doing this by definition, but the top, midlaner, and support can all leave their lane for brief periods in the early game to gank other lanes. If your minions are shoved/you can shove them to the enemy tower, do so, and then pop over to another lane to add some pressure. Even if you don't get the kill, doing a decent chunk of damage to an enemy can vastly change the power dynamics of that lane, or even lead to a kill down the road. More than that, showing up once or twice can completely change the strategy of the enemy, and force them to play very passively since they fear getting ganked.

4: play jungle. The jungler has the capacity to be the single biggest influence on the course of a game. They are critical in objective control, they can significantly change the outcome of the lanes they visit, and there is a jungle champ to fit any need. There are tanky jungle champs, AD assasins, AP assasins, high cc champs, anti-AD champs, basically the jungler can fill any need in a team comp. The jungler is even more important in bronze elo because low elo players are bad at vision mechanics, and aren't usually good at keeping an eye on the minimap even if they do ward. They have bad communication, don't keep track of you, and their supports are primarily unwilling participants forced into a role they don't play well. They don't understand lane freezing, or how to manage the positions of minion waves. Whichever champ is winning in low elo is likely to be pushed to the enemy tower with 0-1 wards in the river bush, and if you keep an eye on mid lane you can usually tell where the enemy ward is.

5: this is kindve an aside from the previous point, but if you really want to wreck the low elos get good at eve. Although she lacks hard cc, she has strong ganks that ruin the set understanding people have of vision management. Most people in low elos don't think to buy a pink ward unless they're the support. If they do, you basically just got some free gold/they lost gold and you can come back in 15-20 seconds anyway after they settle back into their lane patterns. Just think, your very existence is costing them money! beyond that, she can build any way she wants and be extremely powerful regardless. tanky, bruiser, ad, ap, anything. You don't have to even worry about the team comp really when you pick her, just build your items to fill whatever hole your comp has.