The Best Ranked Experience

As crazy as it sounds, I just had one of the best ranked game experiences ever, and it was in mid-silver solo queue.

EDIT: here is the detailed match history in case anyone is interested. http://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/NA1/1840424657/216842387?tab=stats

The game started out rough. I was top Irelia vs Jax, which is mostly a skill match-up I think, so I was feeling quite excited and positive. That positivity quickly turned into despair and self doubt when I died solo to him at level 3, the Jax managing to survive with less than 50 hp. Meanwhile our jungler was focusing bot and having a lot of successful ganks, getting Vayne fed, all good stuff, and mid was also winning, so I decided to just suck it up and try to play as safe as possible. Jax had other plans for me though, proceeding to solo kill me 3 more times in lane with no mercy. He had no jungle pressure, I wasn't lagging, I had no excuses whatsoever - I just kept getting outplayed and shit on, even trying to hide under my own tower.

By the time I was 0/4 I was starting to tilt ridiculously hard, eyes literally tearing up and wondering if my team would be better off if I just afk'd rather than continue feeding. But then, something miraculous happened. Our mid lane Yasuo, who was winning against Heimerdinger, politely offered to lane swap, saying that he might have an easier time dodging the Jax stun. Not a word about me feeding, nothing about how I should uninstall/get cancer/kill myself, just a genuine solution offered to benefit the whole team. Naturally I accepted and thanked him profusely, and shortly after that we started grouping, taking objectives and teamfighting.

This is where it all started turning around. Our Vayne had great mechanics and was already pretty fed, our Braum, Yasuo and Amumu's ults were all executed perfectly and wombo'd really well, and we all prioritized the right targets and peeled for our adc as needed. Next thing I know I've gone from 0/4/0 to unstoppable, and am just racking up assists as well. The game was pretty intense and at one point we even lost baron and a nexus turret, but my entire team stayed positive and went out of their way to be supportive, commending each other on nice ults or clutch escapes, etc. In the end I ended up going 13/7/23, a very respectable KDA if I do say so myself, and we won.

I babbled on in the post game lobby about how thankful I was for having such a great team, probably to the point of embarrassing myself a little bit, but I don't even care - hell, if I had the RP I would've gifted those beautiful bastards mystery skins or something.

Anyway, just wanted to share a really great, inspiring experience I had as a kind of reminder to not only remember the trolls, feeders and afks in our ranked games. There are actually some really fantastic people in the community and I feel blessed by the almighty Gromp Himself to have encountered them tonight.