11 Reasons why YOU should NOT be playing ranked!!

Being the solo que player that I am, and that many of us are, I've run into so many things in game and que that are very frustrating and counter productive to winning and having a good game. So, I'm making a list of the main issues I encounter in ranked. If you notice you do one, or many of these things, please do ranked players a favor and just stop playing ranked until you improve. Now I am by no means an amazing player, currently I'm in B2, climbing from B5, but if anything that means I've seen the ugliest side of elo hell, and I'm becoming good enough to carry the team by myself (usually). Without further adieu, here are potential reason that YOU should not be playing ranked.

#1-You aren't able to play every single role. This is a huge one. Ranked is draft pick meaning that ultimately the people ahead of you in que get priority. The most common thing I run into is someone getting last pick and support is the only role left, so they troll pick and flame immediately and go Vayne jungle or something like that. Yes, I've had someone troll and actually go Vayne jungle before. Bottom like, if you want to play ranked you need to be able to play three champions in every single role, meaning you should be able to comfortably play at least fifteen champions. That's common courtesy. You will rarely get the exact role you want, so suck it up and don't flame cause you don't want to do the role that was forced upon you. If you like one given role play team builder for crying out loud that's what it was made for.

#2-You give up way too easy. Ranked is very competitive, and with the new patches rolling in now more than ever the game is very snowbally, meaning once behind it's not easy to come back. This is especially true with the AD carries that they buffed/reworked. However, you can ALWAYS come back around if you are willing to be patient and play smart. Obviously if you keep running straight into the enemy and dying a win will be unlikely. When I was learning Zed I would often end up 0-2 or 0-3 by 15-20 min but I would come back by stopping the behavior that was getting me killed. This can be true of ANY champ in ANY lane/role. Bottom line, if you want to give up and feed/flame the instant you start losing don't play ranked. If you want to always surrender because you don't want to try and win don't play ranked. I always vote no on surrenders, if I wanted to give up easy why the hell play ranked.

#2-You don't ward. In LoL vision is everything. The ability to know where your enemy is has a crucial role in winning games. Not only can you end up getting kills by catching them off guard but you can save your own lives by seeing incoming ganks. With the arrival of the preseason riot got rid of the sight ward and instead built in wards as a passive for many jungling and tanky items. Also, you can only place one vision/pink ward at a time. By the end of the game you should have placed at least 16-20 wards just by yourself, and that's for about a 40 minute game. I often see a lack of warding in the support role, which is exactly the opposite of what should be happening. Your teams support should have the most wards placed of anyone because they ought to have a sightstone. If you never ward I GUARANTEE you that you die way more often than you should. Ward more often, or don't play ranked. Also, if you want to know where you should ward most often there is a map guide of where the pro teams including LCS ward the most frequently. Just google it.

#3-You don't last hit creeps. This is a league fundamental that you should have known and understood by the time you reached summoner level 5. If you want to get gold you have to land the KILLING blow on a minion. You can auto attack minions to death but if you don't land that last hit it won't matter. If you want to win your lane then you need to have gold, preferably more gold than your laning opponent. That means that you HAVE to be good at last hitting, or you will almost always fall behind and lose your lane, unless you are against someone who is just as clueless as you are. Again there are a lot of guides on how much CS or creep score you should have at given points in the game but I follow the rule of aiming for 70 cs by the 10 minute mark. If I have more great, more gold for me. When I finish games with Zed I usually have more CS than anyone and it's usually around 280-300 cs. It's a very, very simple equation people. More cs=more gold=more items=stronger champion=greater chance of a win. If you cannot cs well, don't play ranked.

#4-You only play a few champions. This goes back to the first reason I listed but I wanted to bring it up because of how often I see this. If you only play 1-4 champions over and over again in ranked stop playing ranked. I'd hope that if those are the only champs you play you are really good with them, and finding champs that help carry you to higher elo is great, but that means you are still lacking the versatility that a TEAM player needs to have in order to have a cohesive team that is capable of working together, in que and in game. Also, much of the time that champions you want to spam are not a good match for your laning opponent. As much as I love Zed I never first pick him because he has way too many counters, such as Kayle and Lissandra. The best way to know who you are playing against is to play that champion. If you know that champion fairly well you are much more likely to win your lane because you understand the way he works, ie you can dodge skill shots or cc such as Morgana's Q/snare or Yasuo's Q/whirlwind.

#5-You don't understand trading/you're not good at it or BOTH. Trading in LoL is the act of trying to damage your lane opponent. In a GOOD trade, you are able to damage them more than they damage you, or optimistically they aren't able to damage you at all. Few people in ranked understand that you should never trade with your lane opponent unless you know that you will WIN that trade. I cannot even begin to count the times I see people go all in only to die. You have to be very smart about trades or you will lose. Their are two main keys to winning a trade. The first is you want to have either more creeps currently in your lane than your opponent or no creeps at all. Creeps do a lot more damage than you think, and the damage you take from them has a large influence on the trade. If you're opponent has more creeps than you don't go in unless you are 100% sure you can 0-100(game talk for smoking this fool) your enemy. The second key is positioning. Watch your enemies positioning extremely close. League is a very fast paced game and it's also one that punishes mistakes made in a split second. Maybe your enemy is pushed too far with few creeps, maybe he missed a skill shot ability that he heavily relies on to all in you, maybe he is close to the river which he doesn't have warded so it's a free kill for your jungler or another roaming lane. All of these are very possible and likely scenarios. Here is another important tip on basic laning. Every single time you damage your opponent his creeps that are in lane at that moment will direct their attention to you and attack you, as long as you are within their range( some champs like Zed or Xerath are able to poke far outside of creep range). Their is no exception to this, which means you need to be smart about attacking your enemy. If he isn't playing smart and is auto attacking you often to try and poke he will definitely lose that trade simply by the health he will lose from just your minions. I encounter this a lot when I take Fizz mid against a ranged AP carry like Xerath or Annie. They will harass and try to poke you down but ultimately they are hurting themselves.

#6- You have no map awareness. This goes hand in hand with warding, but vision is useless if you aren't paying attention to your minimap. The minimap is not there for show it is there so that you can see what is going on around the entire map while laning or jungling. Map awareness wins games. You should get into the habit of looking at your mini map every 2-4 seconds. As I mentioned before, due to the nature of league even one second of not paying attention can cause you to get caught in a gank and die. It's important to know what is going on in each lane all the time. Maybe you noticed the enemy mid laner is gone but your mid didn't call MIA so just for safety you retreat towards your turret. Suddenly the enemy mid laner comes through the jungle only to go back to mid because he can no longer kill you, meaning you just successfully avoided a gank. Again a very possible scenario. Pings are useful but are not used nearly as often as they should be(or sometimes too often if you have a troll on your team). Having good map awareness could also result in you noticing that the enemy top laner is super low on health and is going to try and all in your top laner, so you roam top real fast and pick up a kill or assist. Or perhaps you have dragon or baron warded and you notice they enemy only has one person going for dragon so you can likely steal it and pick up a kill. Another frequent situation I see in ranked is the enemy jungler will ward and camp at your junglers second buff, meaning the second buff that your jungler will kill be it the red or blue one. They ward it wait for your jungler to come to it, let him get damaged a lot by that monster, then dive in steal buff and pick up a kill. I cannot tell you how many times I've seen this, and my other team members don't even realize that the enemy is in our jungle so they don't come to help. A bad start like that can cripple a junglers early game. The point is, if you are not capable of being aware of all the lanes at once you should not be playing ranked.

#7-You constantly overextend and get punished/killed for it. I'm not going to explain this one a ton because it really should be a very simple concept. Overextending is the act of going too far out or too far into potential enemy territory which risks you getting ganked/killed. When you are in lane it's simply getting too close to your enemy turret when you have no business being pushed that far. All you need to do to at minimum, not lose your lane, is stay back closer to your turret, let your enemy push their creep wave closer to you, and last hit the minions to earn gold. It's that simple. Don't flame at your team or your jungler because you are literally running to your death all the time. It's not their fault it's yours.

#8-You don't understand lane control. A good player will be able to FREEZE his lane. What this means is that he does not auto attack the enemy creeps hardly ever, he simply last hits them to earn the gold. By doing this he is preventing his creep wave from pushing further down his lane and closer to the enemy turret. Why would you want to freeze your lane? Well for starters if you let him push his wave to your turret it's going to be much harder to last hit creeps and gain gold with your tower picking off many of the creeps, primarily the spell caster ones. Now lane control also means that you know when to let your enemy push their wave and when you need to push your own. Often times as Zed, because of his passive and ranged poke abilites, I can easily last hit all of their minions and force my own wave into their tower to zone them out of money. If they aren't in lane at all this act will zone them out of money and xp necessary for leveling up. If you are able to last hit minions without losing trades constantly, then by all means do it, be make sure you have wards out to ensure you won't get ganked. Another very important piece of advice. If you are wanting your jungler to gank your lane because you need help, make damn sure that you let your enemy push their wave towards you. As I've explained, by doing this you are making your enemy laner be out of position ie vulnerable to ganks. Do you have any idea how stupid you will sound when you are begging for a gank but you have your creep wave pushed all the way to your enemies tower?? Any jungler worth his salt will just laugh at you and avoid your lane like the plague if you constantly are pushed that far. If you are dumb enough to not understand why that is bad, it's because if your wave is pushed to your enemies tower, your enemy will more than likely be behind their wave, putting them directly under their own tower. So if you try and gank them under their tower it will almost certainly result in your jungler getting killed and feeding your lane opponent, which is exactly what you don't want. Point is, if you want a good gank, FORCE your enemy out of position. It's called BAITING. Make your enemy think that you got out of position when in reality your jungler is seconds away and will complete a successful gank. If you don't understand the concept of pushing and pulling your minion wave to serve your needs and that of your team, primarily your jungler, don't play ranked.

#9-You don't understand how to build the champions you play. One of the most annoying things I encounter in ranked is people having no what to buy for the champs they are playing. It's not difficult. There is also at least two great websites that can help you create awesome builds, which are lolking.net and mobafire.com. I personally use mobafire. Also important are masteries and runes. Having a solid rune page and mastery page will give you a huge boost no matter what role you are playing. Again if you don't understand what masteries to use or what runes to use on certain champs their is an infinite amount of guides out there made for that sole purpose. I don't have nearly the amount of rune pages that I want but I do have a mastery page for every single champion that I play, tweaked specifically for each and every champ. When you are in ranked you have to know how to build your champion. If you are an AD carry and the enemy team has a lot of armor you need to build damage and armor penetration. If you are an AP carry and they are building lots of magic resistance you need to buy AP and magic penetration. If you are an AD carry but the enemy team is not building armor build straight damage. If you are tanky support but the enemy team has little to no AP don't waste money on magic resistance items build straight health and armor. If you are nasus top going against a teemo obviously you are going to need to buy some magic resistance so you don't get poked to death. I could go on and on but point is if you don't understand how to counter build the enemy team and your lane opponent while still maintaining a build that suits your specific champion, you should not be playing ranked.

#10-You're a troll. If you ever find yourself going into a ranked game wanting to lose or wanting to be inflammatory and get your team all worked up, you should DEFINITELY NOT BE PLAYING RANKED. If fact, you shouldn't be playing league period if that's the case. Their are a lot of people that are not good enough to be playing ranked at that moment but that doesn't mean you need to be toxic and try and get your own team to lose. While league is meant for people of a wide age variety, if you want to act like a little kid do everyone a favor and do it somewhere else. Nobody cares if you just lost 12 games in a row so now you want to jungle Vayne and intentionally feed. That's not fair and not right. And yes I had someone on my team once go Vayne jungle and intentionally feed. She went 1-37. Not even kidding. B3 ranked game.

#11-You don't utilize bot mode/normals. Their is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of playing a bot game at level 30. I always play at least 4 intermediate bot matches with a new champion before I even play a normal game. Ranked play is not the time or place to be trying a new champion or even ones that you don't understand well. Why would you go into the most competitive game mode that exists in LoL playing a champion that you don't understand well? Honestly that's just a dick move. Don't do it. Team builder is an absolutely amazing game mode for learning new champions as well. You might very well get flamed at if you end up sucking but it's just a normal so your team will get over it as will you. I have about 50 games of Zed play under my belt but I still play a ton of match maker with him to improve my mechanics so that in ranked I know I can do better. It often forces you to have a mirror match and play against your own champion which is one of the absolute best ways to improve. Or maybe it will pit you against someone who counters you thereby forcing you to have better positioning and lane control. Point is their is no shame in practicing a champ many many times before taking him to ranked. That's what you should do without fail anytime you are trying a new champion or a champion that has a high skill cap like Zed, Lee Sin, Le Blanc, Azir, etc. Even RedMercy, a pro player, who is insanely good with Zed, admits to still needing to get better at handling Zed's mechanics. This dude has plays with Zed that I literally have to watch over and over again in order to understand what he did and how he did it.

These are the reasons why I believe sooooooo many people should not be playing ranked right now. This is not mean to be toxic whatsoever it's simply a statement of fact representing things I see time and time again in ranked. If you actually want to get better at League practice in matchmaker and normals and honestly, watch youtube videos of high ranking players streaking their games. You learn a ton of useful and good ranked habits by watching these people. If you are not that serious about league that's fine! Just stay out of ranked play. I could have added quite a bit more about bad habits I see in ranked daily but I think this covers most my bases. If you made it all the way through the read I appreciate you taking the time to do so.