A Toplane Diamond Player's Ranked Frustration
TL;DR: Matchmaking feels so underrewarding and rubberbanding that it feels like improvement means little to nothing when it should feel like something is happening.
Hey boards, I figured i'd take my time to write out my feelings of how ranked is to me. I've been playing since the end of December 2013, and this game has meant so much for me. I started doing ranked around Season 4. Right now I currently sit 50% winrate D4 on a very huge cold streak with almost 200 played (been in diamond for about 130 of those games, figuratively guessing). The cold streak combined with whats been going on has culminated into a thing I can't keep under for so long.
Ranked in Diamond 4 feels absolutely terrible, and without a duo seems almost impossible to climb out of no matter what.
Yes, this is how I currently feel. I did call for ranked in the upper ladder to be reset and that did happen. But for this entire season and last season, i've gotten nowhere in terms of climbing. Should I have duoed? Maybe, but in my own opinion it feels like a cop out. If I were to reach lets say, Grandmaster by duoing with someone, sure i'd feel happy that i'm getting closer to my goal but it would also feel like that I also didn't climb with my own strengths and weaknesses and improved.
Shouldn't I be feeling that I need to still improve? Yes, but with the quality of matches i've gotten more times than not its teamplay stuff I can't change or improve on, not solely my personal skill. I could play a match, win toplane, try to affect the game, and still lose because one lane didn't want to improve and try to play better, and that lane would cancel out my influence. Its not a one time occurring thing, this has been occurring constantly in my matches.
I want to improve, but it just feels like all my efforts go to waste if i'm not playing something broken or flavor of the patch for toplane.
This is the worst part and the reason why I haven't gotten anywhere past D4/D5 in the last two season. With the plethora of champions in the game you cant really play all of them and be good at all of them, so you choose a subset amount to practice and get good at, trying to master them. S6 S7 consisted of me playing Ornn, Maokai, Cho and Darius for S7, Lucian, Varus, Jhin and Ezreal for S6. I played those champs regularly before using them in ranked. S8 S9 on the other hand was absolutely different. S8 went from my pool in S7 to just Darius then both old and new Aatrox, Sion, and Swain by the halfway point with adc sprinkled here and there.
This season ended up worse. During preseason my pool went from s8 pool to only Aatrox. Soon after the gutting, one tricking Sylas. Now he's being nerfed over and over and with each nerf takes more influence away. As it stands currently, im practically playing try to play counter with more times than not being able to counterpick. All those hours of effort (especially Sylas and old Aatrox) trying to learn and master these champs, and for what? Nothing because I don't like nor play Riven and Jax?
Closing Remarks.
Just what more can I do to free myself from this eternal neverending cycle of when I have a good game or try to have one, one of the other lanes has to make everything worse? I have bad games and I know when I do but sometimes some of my bad scorelines don't reflect what truly happened in the match. It just seems like with all the shifting around of the meta for the past two seasons, it feels like personal improvement and versatility gets shoved to the wayside until D3+, where that determines if you can get to Masters and onward. I keep trying to adapt, but with things remaining as they are, it wont matter how much I adapt until I play and solely play the flavors of the month (which I rarely have practiced for) that are broken or close to broken. How much of that is truly personal skill?