To all the players "stuck" in bronze

S2C2Xd9KOy·8/17/2015, 10:44:41 AM·30 votes·38,115 views

[if you wanna skip past the bitching, skip past the box]

I hope you're ready to absolutely get your fucking carry pants on. I used to think that getting out of bronze was just a matter of having some skill and a good contribution to the team, maybe providing a tip or two along the way and doing a bit of basic shot calling. I was wrong. After playing a game a few games on my original account, that is in bronze because I used the account to learn the game, I have come to the realization that in order to get out of bronze you have to have absolutely incredible luck, you have to carry harder than you'd think possible, or you simply just don't play ranked.

The first game was okay. Picked Shyv jungle because I was bored, ended up doing pretty poorly 14/10/24 or something, but we ended up winning because of myself getting 7 solo dragons and I think 2 barons and pushing inhibs when my brain dead teammates were trying to fight an obvious lost fight, (then proceeding to bitch at me for not dying with them and actually getting objectives).

The second game wasnt awful, at least not for my time. My bot lane fed but I was playing Azir mid and got some decent kills ended up like 14/4/16 or something, so not too bad. The problem with this game though, is that the enemy team experienced what I was about toe experience the game after. They had a 1/11/0 Akali blaming everyone but themself. A miss fortune who was like 3/10/3 and just an overall feeding team that did nothing but type and complain about each other for being "Toxic". RIP.

The game I just played, that was more cancer then I could ever imagine, was an obvious defeat. Tried to dodge in champ select but I didnt realize that to dodge in ranked there were 2 "are you sure" style prompts, so I didnt get out in time, obviously. My botlane combo of Thresh-KogMaw both decided to take smite. There were absolutely countless times where the enemy jungler would show mid and start heading bot and as much as I pinged and typed, my bot lane just didnt care and died over and over and over again with absolutely no wards. My top lane Zed fed. My Yi jungle thought he was a God.

  • More feeding from bot lane -

There were multiple very, very obvious roams from mid to bot, and I pinged many, many times and our bot lane still stayed pushed up at half health, still with no vision... just giving some free kills.

Yi didnt care about dragon.

I was like 5/2 to start, they gave me some easy kills on my Azir... but then you guessed it...

-Bot Lane Fed Harder-

The sad part is, this isn't the only time this has happened. This is actually a majority of the games I've played on the account.

Another game we started 4v5 with our afk yasuo running to mid and giving up a free kill to Kat then leaving. I was 9/0 or something in the first 10 minutes on Irelia top. I asked Udyr to build tank because I was fed enough that I could easily build damage and 1v3 because I was so far ahead in every aspect. He ignored me and build devourer, because bronze Udyr's know best. I pushed towers, single handedly won team fights but eventually you can't 1v4 anymore because they become just strong enough to take you out after you kill 2 or 3 of them, then the rest of my team was absolutely braindead and couldn't kill the last 2. They didnt get dragons or barons, no towers, nothing. Finished that game like 21/3/14 or something, a defeat.

This seemed to happen every game when I originally made the account and its even still happening now that Im a much better player than them and can easily get fed, but you really underestimate how hard it is to climb when you get 16 a win and 20 a loss. Im really starting to think its not worth it.


I feel truly awful for the players stuck in bronze who actually maybe deserve like Silver or something, because by staying in bronze it screws their MMR for the reset next season and they're just gonna get stuck there again because for whatever reason people find it entertaining to troll in bronze and they think they're for whatever reason, better than everyone else.

Im not here to complain like a bitch that my original account is gonna be stuck in bronze for a while because I don't care that much, Im only typing out this post to share my experience of what Bronze is actually like and to literally say Sorry to players who are in bronze that actually care about climbing.

If you're hell bent on climbing, Id never recommend this usually, but get a duo partner that you can actually trust. It might make your teammates a little worse, but I mean you were probably gonna get terrible ones anyways.

There needs to be some way to fix bronze and make it an actual division for the players who care. If there were some sort of system that took a players average KDA and paired them with people of a similar average KDA, then the people who go 0/15 could all play together and the players who actually try could play together and potentially climb.

I will receive hate for this Im sure. People will say Im just too trash to carry bronze, but you have to understand that no matter how fed you get, you can't beat 4 other fed people.

Bronze is an absolutely broken division. Its really not fair that if a player is placed in Bronze 1 for example, that they're stuck there. The trolls aren't gonna make it to silver, but that probably means they're holding back the players who actually can climb.

161 Comments

phodi8/17/2015, 11:17:26 AM21 votes

like i suggested all games under diamond 1 should be a coin toss heads=win tails=lose

this saves a lot of time!

PapaGreg218/17/2015, 1:42:18 PM12 votes

Why would anybody want to leave bronze?

DartFeld8/17/2015, 5:19:20 PM4 votes

I got placed in silver 4, so I haven't lived the bronze life yet. But apparently I'm on my way there. I managed to climb/hover in silver 3/2 for quite a while. Now where am I? After about 4 days of playing and practically 0 wins... 0 lp in silver 5.

Yes, Ive had some bad games. I'll aknowledge I need to work on a few things. But so far it seems like my issue is my team making bad baron calls, trying to contest unsafe and unimportant dragons 3v5 (we've already got 4, the enemy has 1) even when I ping/tell them in chat, and they just generally do not having quick enough decision making on how to close out a game, take objectives, or defend properly. The most notable was when I went 10/5/25 as Braum... I was not the most fed on my team, either. That was the unimportant dragon call. They went in, got destroyed, and the enemy closed out the game because we were all dead, then. The last game I played, we were down all three inhibitors and two people were pushing lanes out blindly. No wards in the jungle at all. They'd push up to the enemy tier two turrets without vision, get collapsed on, and be dead for 75 seconds. We were able to defend for a long time, and won the team fights every time at 1 for 3, or 2 for 4. We got the enemy team down by 4 players, so they decide now's the time to rush their base and close it out. What they didn't consider, was that we still had to get through the nexus turrets and vayne was up in less than 20 seconds. Nobody even seemed to notice vayne when she ran out and killed everybody on my team. they just kept trying to hit the full Health nexus while vayne made very short work of everybody 1 by 1 (she'd started picking them off as they were getting the last nexus turret). So here I am sitting at 0 lp in silver 5, with many, many recent losses. And am probably on my way in to bronze.

I think I do fairly well at enabling my carries, seeing as I main supporting. Multiple times, my adc and I will just destroy lane. Why? I'd like to say because it's silver, and I'm able to take advantage of the bad positioning of my lane opponents. Getting grabbed by blitzcrank? Rarely an issue. I play Nami, and try to only leave myself open to grabs (yes, purposely) when their adc is sitting right next to them and we're ahead in terms of health. Why? I have the reflexes to shoot a bubble out as soon as he roots himself for the grab. How is this effective? Their adc is sitting right next to them, and doesn't react in time to get out of the bubble because they're concentrating on trying to kill the recently hooked Nami. So after I'm hooked, and they're both bubbled, I throw my W on their adc which bounces to me and heals me, and then hits blitz. I throw my E on my adc, and they clean up while I'm laughing.

Despite these types of early game advantages my team gets, there's always failure in the late game. And I'm aware that i am also part of the problem. I'll own up to that. It's just frustrating when I tell people that vayne is up, ping her, yet I'm still the only one trying to remove that threat while my team disappears one by one.

If I drop to bronze, I'm done supporting. I'll have to learn to carry hard in another position because I know that no matter how well Im capable of supporting, my adc more than likely won't understand the difference between me making an engage or a disengage and effectively throw every opportunity I give them to either get a kill (or just to survive) out the window.

Linna Excel8/17/2015, 5:34:05 PM4 votes

The thing about bronze is while there are plenty of opportunities for good players to shine and carry their team, there are just as many opportunites for their teams to drag them under. Generally the better players can carry and get out, but if you are one of those people who are kind of good but aren't exactly the type to carry consistently, you are screwed.

Cosnirak8/17/2015, 9:04:17 PM4 votes

"Stuck in bronze" is very real, no matter how many diamond+ people who sailed through it say otherwise. The key to getting out is to main champions who can carry harder. You can't main tanks and supports and carry your way out of bronze. You can't just win lane and do well and focus on objectives. You have to win the 1v3 fights, solo dragon, and solo the inhibs too. It's not fair, it's not reasonable, but it's how you get out of bronze.

I just got to silver 2 today. 1st game of my promos we had an instalock who pissed off the other guy in his pick rotation with that so the second guy locks in the same role and takes clarity and clairvoyance and they both end up feeding hard and losing us the game. 2nd game mostly normal, not a big deal. 3rd game our support Blitz feeds super hard, our top gives up and we have multiple surrender votes with 3 yeses. I keep trucking, our Yi jg gets sated eventually, our adc gets enough kills with her ult (Jinx), and I keep making sure we actually win the team fights and take objectives. We won while still down 11 kills. Silver 2 is mine and well earned.

Silver is way better than bronze, but yeah you still get idiots and asshats of all sorts. Just gotta shrug off the losses and keep carrying your ass off. That skin from gold will be mine and if you're good enough, carry hard enough, and get just a little lucky, it can be yours too.

Saixos8/17/2015, 1:42:03 PM3 votes

The absolute best suggestion that I've heard regarding this is to make the bronze division require being in the top 80% of players to reach. That is, if you lose enough placements that the game ranks you in the bottom 20% or so, you're not placed at all and need to redo placements after a week or two or so.

I agree that it can be incredibly frustrating dealing with uncooperative teammates, when doing my placements I was often matched with 150-200 wins players as someone with over 800, and whether or not it was possible to win depended only whether I'd have a single teammate who didn't do poorly. I can only imagine how much worse it would get in bronze.

EDIT: Oh, and also, put your bitching in quotes.

Like this

That way it's easier to skip past c:

Gimilee8/17/2015, 3:29:59 PM3 votes

Hi guys. Im a Bronze 5 for life guy, and I do care about climbing.

My experience in bronze has been quite a journey.

For the first few days, I was in s2. I did alright with slightly above a 50/50 w/l rate, nothing to be proud of, but not bad.

I began to duo with a friend from school, this was about 1 1/2 years ago. He was stuck in bronze and I wanted to help him out.

I began to decline steadily, losing because of AFK, Trolls, ETC.

I pulled out at B2, figured i could get back up real quick.

I was wrong.

Now, 1 year later, I am still stuck in b5.

Let me discuss my phases:

Phase 1: Blamed everything on everyone else. (never toxic though)

Phase 2: After reading from some "pro climbers" Blamed everything on myself.

Phase 3: Learned how to upgrade wards and get cs. (Still a bronze noob so my stats were still horrible in cs and warding.)

Phase 4: Played only Jax, actually won like 80 percent of the time, got to B2 promos. Carried every game. Then i lost promos and idfk wut happened, fell bak all the way.

Phase 4: Tryed to change my attitude to constructive criticism and trusting my teammates.

Phase 5: The pinging phase. Everyone ignored me.

Phase 6: Mid Yi phase: met some guy with a 33/3 w/l with Yi and a 2/55 w/l with Olaf. It was crazy, I think he was a smurf that trolled with olaf and recked with Yi. I studied his ways and went over his items countless times. I began to mid Yi, first in normals, then in ranked. I got to like 15/3 w/l with 2 losses being jg, and I was SUPER happy. I was finally getting out of bronze. Then when i hit b4 every single person on the opposing teams built thornmail cus apparently Faker did some shit like this and recked so ever1 was scared. Fell back to b5.

Phase 7: Now: Steadily getting worse, I just am in a rut and I have accepted my bronze self. My cs suks, my warding suks, Im trying to grasp rotations but I cant cus my teammates dont know wut a group is. Ive seen it all, splitpushing sorakas to supp rengars.

FML. Im always trying to learn new things. I am currently working on rune pages, as I only have 2. Im always ready and eager to accept new ideas. Please help me if you can.

Sniper 08/17/2015, 5:21:42 PM2 votes

I'm "stuck" in silver. :C

I've learned that if you're gonna climb it's gonna happen eventually. I went on a two day winning streak. Well one of the games was most likely my fault considering how grumpy I was. I had won lane really hard and it was kinda shitty to have the opposing riven still come back against my team. I could have sat in lane and babysat the whole game I guess lol. The prior game we had a yas mid feed before I could make any attempts to roam. He was constantly running solo. Our yi soon began to follow suit. I was relatively calm that game. Probably shouldn't have played the game right after that.

Yas as an example is a champ that needs a team comp around him in order to properly thrive late game. DON'T PLAY HIM in bronze unless you know your team comp is gonna support you. I've made this mistake when I was bronze. Also, just because you're against a counter doesn't mean all is lost. That's just a mentality that you need to get over. Counters are much more crucial in 5's anyways. Yeah sure some champions are hard counters to others. Some champs are super unfun to play against cough morde cough. You can't let yourself tilt just because you're at a disadvantage.

TL;DR It's your fault you're in your elo. Just because the minority of your games are due to teammates doesn't mean you're stuck because of that. You're the one that decides to play on tilt. You're the one that decides to pick a champ that doesn't actually synergize with the team. You're the one playing a champ where you probably can't play them. You're the one that doesn't learn from your mistakes.

Advice: Find a champ you can play well and one that brings a lot to the team. Champs like Jarvan are really good at helping to snowball games. High cc, high zone potential tanks. You're generally lacking tanks in the bronze elo because everyone is out for blood. They wanna take the champ they can "1v5" with that is omg bbq op.

Lugg8/18/2015, 3:15:09 AM2 votes

The soft resets at the start of a season are complete bullshit. There is no other way to put it. If you don't belong in tier you are in, you will drop. There is zero reason for Riot to drop anyone at the start of a new season. MMR is what should be reset each season.

ymır8/18/2015, 4:17:50 PM2 votes

I'm currently in Bronze IV with 6 LP and at this point I don't wanna play ranked anymore. I always do good in normals, and when i'm having a good day in Normal's i do ranked, and lose. I just gave up now. I don't wanna play ranked anymore, because i accepted I suck and at this rate It's only gonna get harder for me to improve.

I'm afraid of getting demoted to Bronze V probably because all of my friends will probably laugh at me.

I've read and watched guides on how to climb, how to make it out of bronze, and etc. but at the end of the day I'm just scared to play ranked, and in all of the guides they say stuff along the lines of "analyze your mistakes." Well, I'm one of those people who cant figure out where they went wrong or what happened.

My friend who was placed in Bronze 1 recently won 2 out of 10 of his placements and i won 0 out of my 10 placements and was placed in Bronze 3. I actually duoed with him during his placements and I actually just think I brought him down. He says hes gonna climb this weekend and I said I could duo with him, but I could tell in his voice that he didn't wanna duo with me.

Last night I thought about climbing with Katarina, and if it is I'm gonna start making a rune page for her.

All I ask for is some help. I know I deserve Bronze atm and I need to improve.

DeynaTaggerung8/17/2015, 5:06:55 PM2 votes

No you can't win 4v1, but you aren't giving your teammates enough credit. If you're willing to help your team get back in the game after they've lost their lane you'd be surprised how many "trash" players step up and do something cool.

Miror B8/17/2015, 10:17:45 PM1 votes

Yeah, I'm a pretty new player (just started in june), and I'm probably going to avoid ranked for the rest of my time in this game. In team builder/draft, I was pretty badass (would use unorthodox things like mid shen, support heimerdinger, and top lane shaco) to great success, and the people in that mode seemed so much nicer/understanding (had opponents actually friend me in those games/give honors as the sets I used made them apparently learn quite a bit). Ranked has been the complete opposite of that experience, to the point of being entirely unbearable. I won 9 of my 10 placement games, and was immediately put in silver-1 (having the same experience I had in team builder in those matches). After that, I lost 26 STRAIGHT GAMES because of people either going entirely afk, people trolling on purpose, or people intentionally feeding due to not understanding the matchups. I can understand how some people might find it rewarding to get out of bronze/silver and move into the other ranks. For me though, it was more of an eye opener onto the other side of the coin and how disastrously immature/bothersome the community can be. Heimerdinger

T RexHasTinyArms8/17/2015, 10:49:42 PM1 votes

So I may be totally off on this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing your first account that isn't bronze is low silver maybe? I don't have a smurf in my opinion, but I have a second account from leveling up w/ a friend when they joined the game. I placed both my accounts in bronze at the beginning of the season bc I was pretty bad and out of practice after not playing for 4-6 months. I worked and focused on learning and improving and got this account up to gold V. I was in promos for gold IV once or twice, but started to get burnt out on the champ I was maining so I switched accounts to level up and get end of season rewards while practicing.

The difference I noticed in my skill from when I did placements was huge. I played stuff I am not used to or good at and did okay, not holding my team back but also not carrying. When I switched over to stuff that I played at low gold level I crushed and won like 80-90% of my games. The skill difference of teams at gold V compared to bronze III or bronze II is huge and it was pretty easy to climb. I'm silver II on that account now and my win rate has dropped much closer to like 55-60%. The difference between gold V and silver I/II isn't as big, and sometimes it's just about grinding enough games, or can come down to if you're playing tired/frustrated/otherwise off your game.

That's the thing though, to get to higher levels you have two main options. First, you can play at a level significantly higher than your current division and have a big influence on your games. When I was up for gold IV promos I played a decent amount of gold III and gold II players because winning consistently raised my MMR to play against people who made balanced opponents. The second option is to play a large amount of games and grind out the small advantage you have to prove you're slightly better than your division. To me it sounds like you're having issue w/ the later. You have good mechanics and win lane, but you don't have as strong a map awareness maybe or practice roaming that a high silver/low gold mid lane would be expected to have. As a result you win your lane hard, but don't influence the map and your team as much as a higher elo player likely would, and it takes grinding out lots of games to get games where the teams are matched evenly except for you and you can turn your lead into a win because people got through lane phase w/out your help.

SadBoyRhymes8/17/2015, 12:15:10 PM1 votes

The Trick is to switch accounts to LAN, redo placements, get to silver 3 by literally just playing the game, then switch back to NA. My friend did that a couple weeks ago and he was stuck in bronze 5 for like 3 months here.

Trash MammaI8/17/2015, 12:49:24 PM1 votes

I disagree, I was in bronze when I started ranked last season and found moving into silver to be cake. The people in bronze are somewhat near fresh level 30's that jumped into ranked. If you know even a decent amount of the game you can easily carry simply because you're ahead of the game.

Now SILVER that's some rough shit, i've struggled getting to silver 1-2 range. Personally, I don't care to get higher than gold. I've dodged my promos into gold purposely losing it multiple times just to be sure I hover in the range of 1-2 so I can get myself to gold when I see who gets the victorious skin at the end of the year.

Back on topic though it's honestly not hard in bronze silver was a headache but eventually you begin to learn how to carry because a lot of people are the same in the elo. I play ranked to keep myself in good shape to play a serious match. Once I get that insanely good start I just goof off and try to win but do it having fun. I don't want to be in some lame high elo.

Bronze is rough but Silver is 10x worse. People in bronze don't have the ego like in silver because they know they're the worst of the worst. They don't get cocky (most anyway) it's more so can you get yourself out or not