Why I've stopped playing ranked.

Before I get blasted by everyone for saying ranked is rewarding once you get past >>Insert rank here<< know that I understand your viewpoint. However, ranked play seems to get increasingly toxic and increasingly feels more like a tedious chore than anything else.

Now, I'm only Silver 5 but I've been playing for quite a while. I know that I'm where I'm meant to be at my current skill level and I constantly try to improve on my mechanics on all of my champions, not just one. Lately though, I find myself doing less and less ranked play and more and more normals with people I've met throughout my years of playing video games. Not just leagues, but multiple other games. I've made friends all over that enjoy to play Leagues on our downtime. Many I've met from World of Warcraft, some from Minecraft, some from my days of Rust and DayZ. Others are friends I've made that just happen to play League of Legends over the course of my life.

Why that wall of text is relevant.

Now, the whole thing about my friends seems rather pointless when the thread is about why I've slowed down on how much I do ranked. But here's where it comes into play / relevance. I've been severely dialing back my amount of ranked games and having actual fun playing the game going into games with my friends and completely disregarding the meta and just having fun with our picks and playing for the sake of playing the game.

I can't get myself to do that in ranked. Anytime you want to try something people aren't accustomed to, it becomes an immediate downward spiral of toxicity and anger. It's just no longer fun for me to play ranked and try to climb the ladders. Sure, I could try and get my friends to do ranked 5's, but it's not as fun to play against people getting super, super into the game as they seem to just trash talk us for having fun playing the game and not winning.