Where I Came From, What Happened To Me, And Where I'm Going

Today, something happened to me while playing this game that over time I've come to actually enjoy (problems and all). As of a few moments ago, I finished my very first tenth and final ranked preliminaries and the only thing that I gathered from it was this: I know absolutely nothing about this game. I've played League for nearly two years now due to circumstances I couldn't control (I originally played Dota 2 but my old laptop died out and this new one can't function with it running for whatever reason) and I've learned absolutely nothing. At the same time, I've finally been exposed to the most toxic game of LoL that I've ever played in my entire time here. Granted that I played horribly, gave my lane opponent an advantage and it just got worse and worse no matter how hard I tried to not mess up, lag/fps drops aside I just straight up played terribly. And um yeah, people let me know.

It was honestly a very humiliating experience for me. I'm not sure if it was because of atmosphere that is ranked with stakes being higher than contributed to it (most likely) but being attacked in such a way by my teammates actually brought me to a point where I actually felt the competitiveness that I had stored for the match just die out. I watched as my mistakes led to other people's misfortune regardless of any contributing mistakes made on their part and every time a kill happened or an objective was taken I felt it deep down somewhere. We eventually surrendered, but not after two bouts of trying to make it work and myself being so incompetent that it just made everything an uphill battle. Even after muting the most aggressive of teammates, I couldn't ignore the part of me that agreed. It just felt slightly sickening. I've actually never experienced this kind of thing before my whole time playing mobas, it was almost surreal.

At the end of the match, I just stared at the wall of text that berated me and followed it up with the game's statistics. At the end of it, I left the lobby and stared at the screen. The only thing on my mind, which startled me as to how intense it was was to just win. It was the only thought in my mind to the point where I was just getting frustrated with the pollution of it. The one thing that I lacked when playing League of Legends in any semblance of actual competitiveness was the genuine motivation to win.

I finally found it.

I won't get it right overnight. I won't get it right in a week. I'll still struggle to get it right in nearly another year's time. All I know is this: I never want to feel like that ever again.

For what it's worth, my crucible finally happened. Never again.