Thoughts on Silver Mentality and Climbing Tips

This is just a couple thoughts I've had about silver elo and a few tips on how to gain elo. TL:DR at the bottom

As a diamond player who frequently smurfs, enough so to decay on my main (yes you can hate me now), I have to say there's an interesting trend in silver that I've noticed. First and foremost, almost every game there are multiple people who have attitude problems. You know, that defeatist attitude where whenever anything goes wrong they'll start trashtalking or trying to surrender, etc. You'll even get afk's sometimes, and people get hurt over really the most miniscule problems. Honestly, to those of you like this, if you ever want to climb, this is the first thing to fix.

But that, causes the biggest issue I've found with lower elo and why so many people complain about how hard it is to carry. Combined with pretty bad decision making that is common at that elo, people don't know how to consciously decide to play in a way where they don't feed and just get carried by their team. I've noticed many people in silver have okay mechanics, but completely terrible decision making. As a result, games in silver especially are often incredibly one sided. I'll say it now, silver is harder to singleperson-hard-carry than gold and maybe even platinum just because in those games that it is the other team that has fed members, you have to be able to counter carry against people who have 10-20 kills. This relates to the recent thread I've seen where a diamond player admitted that silver was hard to carry. I remember looking at his account and noticing he was a support/tank main. Of course he'll still win like 75% of games because hes still a greatly contributing factor to winning, but you can't solocarry as a tank or support. In contrast, as a person who mains carry junglers and adc, I can win almost every game in silver, but even then some games take huge amounts of effort.

Ultimately, unlike what I believe most people focus on improving on in silver, which is mechanics, I believe that if you want to climb elo in silver, you should focus on decision making instead. General rules of thumb until you learn what are good decisions and bad are thing like, if you ever think that something is even slightly greedy, then don't do it. This especially applies to chasing kills. Sure you got that dude to 100 hp, but you're about to walk into an unwarded jungle or try to dive a tower when instead you could just shove minions into tower, gain maybe 150 gold and deny them 150 gold and get free tower damage that will let you kill it the next time this happens. The reality is the less fun option, which is the low risk medium-high reward one, is the one better for climbing elo. In addition, always write out in chat and tell your team that "we should take top tower" or " we should baron" (Yes remember baron is a thing). By making your team make the correct overall decisions, you can give your team thats otherwise evenly matched in mechanics diamond level decisions, which will help you win the game. Also do ward, because giving your team high elo level vision denies so many kills for the enemy team and lets you pick people off to get fed yourself. The other thing I'd recommend is to honestly just pretend everyone on your team is about to blow up and afk. You might really not be trying to downtalk the other guy by giving him advice, but to those people with attitude problems, any advances like that are just another reason for them to afk or even unintentionally get worse because he or she THINKS you're lecturing him or her and therefore gets angry/unhappy. People with bad mentalities are literally looking for an excuse or someone to blow steam off at, so anything can be seen as aggression. Furthermore, chances are people wont change that much within the span of a single game, so advice really has much higher risks than potential benefits. Anyway thats about all I had to say, but if anyone has any questions about climbing, I'd be happy to tell you what I think.

TL;DR: Attitude problems in silver combined with bad decision making makes silver games very one-sided since people don't know hot to not die over and over. Many silver mechanics are equivalent to those in any part of gold maybe low plat easily. Work on your own decision making more than mechanics and don't do anything that could potentially set your teammates off. I'm free for any questions about climbing if you guys have any.