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Promo hell...

Sonasaurous·4/2/2015, 8:48:14 PM·1 votes·923 views

Warning: I typed a novel. There's a tl;dr at the end.

So I’ve been playing League for about a year and a half, and I finally started my promos to satisfy the undying itch to know how bad of bronze I really am. I usually play with my silver friends and get my ass handed to me by my gold and plat friends, and they all figured I could probably be a low silver and encouraged me to try my promos. I figured since I play with silvers and the occasional gold in norms, I would be matched with other unranked players who were around my same skill level.

After 5 games of ranked, I decided to step back and go back to norms for a bit. Essentially, the first game I won because my team was just excellent. We were all on point with each other and the enemy team surrendered. Great first game of ranked, I thought. This was easy peasy. Though I was a little bit nervous and surprised at how hard the enemy ADC was focusing on poking me at the sacrifice of farm, so I wrote down that I should work on poking more between my farming.

My second game I lost. The other team simply outplayed us.

My third game, I won, but not because of bot, top, or jungle. Our mid laner was insane. I don’t remember her score, but that Annie was like 20/1 at one point. The Annie carry was real that game. What threw me off a little was that I was supporting a Kalista, which I don’t normally do, and the Kalista was not farming because the enemy was pressuring us and keeping us under turret. After we lost bot, we went to go push top successfully (and I noted that we took out two towers top lane and no one ever came to stop us…because they were all feeding Annie while ganging up on her). So that game was interesting…

My fourth game, I did just awful. I noticed the other lanes were also losing (the Annie and Kalista from my previous team was on the enemy team that game, so I think they were duo queuing…). But while I was having a really bad early game, the jungler was just toxic as hell (oh, so that’s what people mean when the toxicity in ranked in real :’D) and distracting me with ten thousand misleading pings (seriously, he kept pinging that he was on his way, targeting the enemy Fizz…and then he’d turn and go into the jungle…then ping all over again, this time coming from a different angle…just to go top. Like, seriously. Stop pinging.) So that game was just…I was bad, the communication was bad. It was just bad.

Then my fifth game, I finally decided to give up. I went top, and I was doing pretty good early game (top lane was just kind of at a standstill until mid lane ganked me—no MIA ping—and then we lost top turret in that one move). It was after I first died that I noticed bot lane was completely feeding, and by 15 minutes or so our ADC had 8 cs. 8. CS. So I typed in chat asking how he only had 8 cs, and he complained that he was pinging for help but no one was coming and support sucks and he can’t farm under pressure and I just died inside. We surrendered.

I don’t even want to continue playing my promos if I have to be matched with the very painfully obvious bronzies. I haven’t played with an ADC that couldn’t consistently farm (in norms) since maybe back when I first became lvl 30 like 6 or 7 months ago. Did my MMR just like reset or something for ranked? I feel like a lot of people playing their promos just aren’t ready yet, and its disheartening to me because I thought I was ready, but perhaps I’m not since I’m definitely not at the point where I can carry a losing team like that one magnificent Annie (I'm not saying I'm fantastic already, I might've mentioned in the first sentence how bad I am).

tl;dr: I guess my general questions are: 1) Do promo MMRs get better? D’: and 2) What can I do to improve myself so I’m better prepared for ranked?

2 Comments

hh the thinker4/2/2015, 9:58:58 PM1 votes

if you aren't ready, then you aren't. there is no rush for going into ranked. mmr for promos starts at about silver 5 or so and goe up if you win, down if you lose. since you won your first, game became harder for the next one.

what can you do to improve and be ready for ranked? well, you did good with taking note on poking more while also csing. basically, you spot what you need to work on and you practice. you take advantage and snowball it as much as you can without throwing it. not sure what you need to work on since I haven't seen you play of course, but if you were to record your games and re-watch every death and figure out how you can reduce them, and where you could have done more damage and got more kills, you should slowly improve.

try to get about 80 in the first 10 minutes of games, 160 to 200 by 20 minutes. don't have more than 5 deaths if you can help that, and try to reduce this even more so. play aggro when you can, without getting punished. this means if you don't see someone on the map, play careful.

check map more often. someone didn't call mia, but you also weren't checking map. the less you depend on your team, the more you will bring to the game (this doesn't mean completely ignore them of course (unless they are that bad), but don't depend on your team to call mia/drag/help with lane or anything else if you can help it).

that's just a few things, and again, if you don't feel ready for ranked or you don't enjoy it, you don't need to play it. good luck.

Nefarious Yordle4/2/2015, 11:56:37 PM1 votes

I think you are weighing too heavily on the environmental factors you will inevitably encounter in any elo - but more emphatically in the lower elo. First things first, I think you meant "provisionals" and not "promotions". But anyways, here's how they work.

Your normal MMR and ranked MMR are completely separated - they do not impact each other in any way. MMR - whether it is normal MMR, ranked soloQ MMR or team MMR - will always start out at 1200. Since Riot does not publish pretty much anything on the topic of matchmaking (instead it sometimes feels like they are trying to fool players with their visual layer of leagues and divisions placed on top of MMR and its subsequent matchmaking), I do not know the MMR gains and decreases relative to the amount of games you've played in a certain game type in which you have an MMR. I do know that the MMR you would get if you were to win all 10 of your provisionals results in you getting to gold 5. Usually this stuff does not change unless Riot specifically tells us it changed, so I'm going to assume "starting/resulting MMR for your provisionals" did not get "better" i.e. did not increase, if I may paraphrase your question.

Now, as to your second question, there's many answers to that one, all of them partially speculative, none of them entirely conclusive. One thing to note is that solo-lanes are easier to measure your true skill in compared to your current MMR's predicted skill, since you will either win or lose to your enemy laner with little outside influence. This however is only if you are too short-sighted to focus not on your laning partner but yourself, just like me. The second thing is that skill obviously increases over the amount of games you play (however some players do stagnate well before they hit Challenger), so improving can sometimes be as simple as taking a step back, enjoying the game and simply keeping on playing. The third thing is that infinite sum of tips, strategy and tricks related to the game that are partially practice and partially theory.

Let's just extract some random tips out of that infinite pool, for fun's sake: "Try to practice CS'ing in customs until you can get 100 CS by 10 minutes", "Communicate effectively, never flame or engage into arguments during a game", "Watch the competitive scene or probuilds.net to stay up-to-date with the meta in terms of picks and builds", "Watch the map every time you CS so that you will get used to becoming aware of where your enemy and allied jungler is", etc. etc.

Do note that nobody can tell you exactly what you're doing wrong, so you'll have to figure that out on your own. I do it by recording all my ranked games and keeping track to how often I 1. kill the enemy laner 1v1 2. get killed by the enemy laner 1v1" 3. "kill the enemy laner with a gank" 4. "get killed by the enemy laner with a gank". Even just watching how you played should usually trigger that "oh my god I can't believe how bad I am at this game" kind of response if your MMR is below 2500 and you are analytically open-minded.

TL;DR: 1) The skill level in your provisionals will not improve if you don't clearly break out of your initial 1200 MMR. If your "deserved" MMR is 1400, you are only expected to go 6/4 - with a really high uncertainty rate - and at that elo players are still bad. 2) Keep playing, read that pool of tips and advice - especially game analysis is a very concrete way of figuring out what you are doing wrong. 3) (heh.) Don't mind your teammates, ever. All that will stick in the long run throughout all of your games is your own performance. An AFK can sting, but even that will happen just as much to the enemy. Trust in the fact that if you out-perform your average opponent on a certain MMR, your MMR will rise relatively short-term.

Good luck!