Just because you did your best and performed well does not equate a win.

Unfortunately this was a hard lesson for me to learn.

You can practice and master as many champions and strategies as you want but at the end of the day there are still 9 uncontrollable variables in your games that you have little sway over. Sometimes this will be i your favour and other times it makes you want to rip your hair out.

League is competitive, while Riot may be on a recent trend of trying to turn it into some gaming version of Facebook, it still is a tense and often stressful environment. People play to win. Wining is fun. Any other ideal, while nice, is not true. This is reinforced by the benefits of wining games such as extra IP, lp gain, and chances at the all to rare hex tech rewards. True, the incentives to win are necessary otherwise trolls and such would increase and more people would be likely to not give it their all in games.

Regrettably this leads to instances such as myself where wining is the only desirable outcome. I play league to succeed and I'm often frustrated when we lose and even more so when said loss is despite, what I view as, a good performance by myself or another player.

We've all said or experienced win-lane lose-game. It's a frustrating feeling and often leaves you helpless or at least feeling it. You can get an early tower and deny the opposing Diana farm in mid lane, roam bot often, but it still does nothing to stave off the Tryndamere that's racking up solo kills slowly over time. Late game comes and we lose.

I was, for lack of better words, tilted and stark-raving mad. I used all the old sayings "tryndamere is bs, crits are dumb, how is this fair," etc.

Well this obviously didn't help improve my mood or feelings about the game the way the opposing Tryndamere responded really struck a chord with me:

"I was just doing my job man, I'm sorry it made the game not fun for you. Better luck next time."

And that was it, no "U mad bro" or "Toxic". or any other taunt or down talking

He simply apologized for beating us thoroughly and that really gave me pause for thought. I said, "thanks" and nothing more.

Here was a player who I want to be like. He was just doing the same thing I was trying to do every game. Doing his best to win with the champion and team he had. This time, he won. Next time, I may win. League has a lot of nonsense in it but the fact that this opposing Tryndamere was nice enough to not only offer my condolences on my loss but also be gracious with his win was really inspiring.

At the end of the day, someone will lose and someone will win. Every great Victory for you means another player is currently suffering/beaten badly. I'm sure in the game I refereed to the Diana wasn't happy most of landing phase whereas I was enjoying myself then. While wining is nice and losing generally isn't Im going to try and remember this from now on. That everyone should/is trying their best and though you may achieve that it doesn't mean you deserve a win. Be proud of maintaing good farm, or wining lane, maybe even that one cool play that got you a double kill. You KDA may not mean much if you still lose but try and take comfort in that you have done well even if your teammates or enemies decisions made it null.

tldr; You can't win them all even if you do your best and remember every time you're happy there's likely someone on the other team who's miserable. Be nice and don't chase the win.