How to get to gold.

I decayed from silver I(in promos for gold) after my son was born and I took 8months off playing all games. Upon my return I was lucky enough to be in good old bronze 5. I play mostly bot lane support/adc and jungle. I am not even close to being a diamond player but my skill level lies some where in the gold range. I figured getting out of bronze would be easy. I was very very wrong.

The truth of low elo bronze is their is no hell. The hell comes from the fact that RNG (random number generator) exists. The MMR system attempts to match you against teams of even playing field but has an issue with making things truly "fair". You just have to keep playing and keep your fingers crossed and hope you get fewer terrible players / afkers / trolls on your team than the enemy. I had my share of teemo jungle, support shen, double jungle, ADC annie/lulu, top sona ect. ect, but through all those losses you will eventually win. It took 4x promo attempts to finally get out of bronze. That right there is "ELO HELL".

That is it, that is the secret to escape bronze. Keep playing and pray to the RNG gods that your team is not full of fail and you will eventually get out if you are not a baddie yourself. It took about 100 wins to finally get out because of the large number of losses that was out of my control. You cannot do anything about a 1-11 top lissandra or a 2-17 duo bot lane. You either play out the game and hope for the best or you surrender and try again.

A couple suggestions:

#1. Mute your team and enemy team upon entry into the game. Most of the players in bronze are little annoying shi#s anyways so just mute them and play the game as if it were an RPG. This helped out a lot because you are not looking at chat or chatting yourself. I've died raging at others because I was typing. Just mute them and play the game you know how to play.

#2. It does not matter which role/lane you play. I found that the games I lost it did not matter where I was as feeders will feed regardless. Always try to get one of the two roles you are best at and stick with 2-3 champs in those 2 roles. I played mostly support and had a KDA of 6:1 with 60% + win rate (sona, janna, nami). If I did not support I went man mode with graves ADC with a KDA of 5:1 at a 72% win rate and I also jungled hecarim, elise, and amumu. Support is the hardest role to carry out of bronze with but I did it so can you.

#3. Nexus > Inhibs > turrets > baron > dragon > kills. You win the game when the nexus blows up. You do that by taking turrets and inhibs. Do not chase for kills. Taking down that turret will benefit your team 5x more than you getting that one kill or not getting the kill and instead getting jumped by the enemy team because you chased him to their nexus.

#4. Unless your duo buddy is a pub stomping god just solo Q. I won many more games solo than duo. Even my buddy who is diamond 5 could not carry me out. He is diamond and could not carry hard enough to win bronze games as match making would put the players on our team against other players of higher skill level and they would get stomped in lane. That is how match making works. They expect the duo queue to fully carry the team.

#5. Just keep playing. Even if you don't win you will get better with each game played and that alone may be worth the loss. You learned something from that game and you can adjust the next time you play that lane / match up and not make the same mistakes again. Pro players have 1,000's of games played each season. Your few hundred games is no where near that level of play. However, if you continue to play you will get better with each game. If you want to improve at ranked play you must play ranked games. Normals and aram's are for fun not for getting better at the game.

#6. Just focus on your lane. You cannot control the actions of others. If that mid/top is feeding just ignore it and continue to play at a high level of play. If you can help them by all means help them but you cannot lose your to help others. I have been able to make up for bad early games of others by never giving up myself when my team was 0-6 at ten minutes into the game. Your team may have better team fight ability and late game champs (nasus, fed hecarim, ori/malph/amumu). "Don't stop believing"

#7. If you notice the jungler not timing objectives do it yourself. When you see the enemy take dragon or maybe invaded your jungle and took your blue, note that in chat and make sure you tell your team when it will be back up. If you do this and the enemy does not you have an advantage of warding the area to contest it next time it spawns. It does not matter which lane you are in you should be doing this every single game. Make sure to turn on your time stamps as it makes this much easier. Timers are: Baron 7min, dragon 6 min and red/blue 5 min respawns. You can time stamp in chat even if you have muted the toxic players on your team.

#8. "Ping everything"- Literally ping enemies missing even when they are missing from another lane and you happen to see it, ping when you see the jungle regardless of where you see them, ping a warning and let your teammates know. Ping when you see your teammates about to engage a 4v5 or other dumb sh#t you know they are about to do. Ping for assistance with a turret, dragon, baron or even when you want help pushing your lane before backing. PING EVERYTHING to the point where your teammates are probably going to get really annoyed. Dori said it best "just keep swimming" (2yr old son FTW

• update: I am now silver 2 and still climbing. Once you get out of bronze the same suggestions still apply. I get trolled by gold 5's now instead of Silver 5's and they still intentionally feed/throw games. I still get the AFK/feeders/noobs that have no idea what taking objectives even mean. You just have to keep going and work on your own mechanics and always be thinking during the game about what you can do yourself to help "you" win.

*update: I am now gold 5 on two accounts and players still feed, rage quit, afk, and DC. You deal with all of this and keep swimming.

If anyone that reads this thread would like me to look at their lolking and offer up some friendly advice I would be glad to, or if you just want to ask any general questions.

You can add me in game or just reply to this thread.

I will be streaming my climb to plat and my ranked 5's teams games at www.twitch.tv/arihm

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe".

-Carl Sagan