A Message To The Salty

Or more specifically, a message to those of you who say in post game chat that you only got beaten because your lane opponent is broken or unbalanced, or played like a coward, won because of ganks and so on and so forth. I have a valuable lesson to share that you need to learn if you're looking to improve and start winning.

Just about an hour ago from this post, I lost hard on my main for the first time in 2 weeks. And as a result of losing my winning streak, I fell back to rage and making up excuses as to why I lost. But now that I've calmed down, I'm analyzing what went wrong. I replay events in my head where I've made mistakes and died and figuring out what I could've done better to come out on top. I stopped thinking of what my team should've done and focused on what my mistakes were and my mistakes alone. Did my team throw a bit by giving the midlaner a free triple? Sure. Was it the reason I died to solo kills over and over? No, that's entirely on me. Looking back, I see choices I made that would make no sense to do. For example, my opponent was a Jayce who ran back into the brush so I could never fight him without engaging in melee range. What idiotic moves did I do? I fell for the trap and got destroyed. I hard pushed the lane even when I was aware he could safely farm with his range stance. I would walk alongside the minions and get blasted along with them by his sped up Q. All these mistakes are juvenile and so simple to avoid but when playing with a mindset that says you're perfect and the other guy is just OP, you're not going to win. You're just going to get tilted and lose even harder. Take it from me. This loss was a good hard knock back to earth and to remind myself that even if I win over and over, I can still lose to someone if I don't make the right decisions. I'm not perfect, I'm not even high elo. I should be eager to learn and explore what is new and what is right for me as a player.

So keep at it, you runts. One loss should mean one more lesson to learn. Not one more reason to hate the game you're addicted to playing.

Love,