f13.net

Since Riot's forums are terrible, how about you guys?

1. Flash, the free Get out of Fail card

Even by Riot's admission, flash is seriously dicking up the metagame and they are seriously contemplating its removal. Of course, they also wisely note that this isn't an easy thing to do, as many heroes are built around the its use, either for power usage or obligatory survival mechanisms. Galio, for instance — if you're playing him without flash, the high ELO players (correctly) assert, you're playing him wrong.

2. Ranged carries and homogenization

The high ELO bans are moving solidly towards being heavily biased towards the ranged carry or the AoE (or both): In the case of ranged carry, MF, kog'maw, twitch, etc. Each of these heroes is played more or less the same: three doran's blades, then work towards IE.

3. Impossible laners

The early to midgame gets pretty depressingly boring when, largely, you have heroes with manaless 'poke and heal' abilities and/or other things which make them essentially uncounterable in lane unless you are wildly better than them or in a more coordinated team.

4. Fancy new heroes render old heroes useless

When was the last time you saw an Alistair? Why is MF basically an unambiguously better Tristana? Does Soraka enjoy being worse than Sona in every way? Riot, in making these new heroes, sure enjoys fitting in a bunch of very varied and useful spells which have dual application (like passive + active, etc) to the point where they often have an old hero's skill mixed with a new skill for one skill point. Some heroes definitely have cause for complaint.

1.  Flash. 

tl;dr -  Kill it, Re-balance as necessary.  Make summoner spells less reactive and more team-based.

Expand the conversation to "Summoner Abilities".  I think they should all be changed to less immediate, team-based abilities that require thoughtful use (versus "oh shit!" use) and are best used when supporting your team (although they should have self benefit).  New spells should be added based upon the idea that they are 1) best used to support the team 2) work toward keeping the game moving and/or 3) help teams defend, coordinate and recover, 4) are best used in a coordinated way (rather than everyone blowing heal NOW!).  Change them from "I win!/I live!" buttons with long cool downs to buttons that help a team win in what would otherwise be a very close match up.

Keep
-Heal (change to an unique heal-over time buff to prevent stacking)
-Clarity (also change to a unique buff to mana regen.  change to effect nearby allied Champs, modify the summoner mastery that effects Clarity to do something else)
-Clairvoyance
-Teleport (change to teleport to Champion or building, modify it to provide armor and mr buff to the champ/building that you are teleporting to.  Yes, this cheeses a little onto Shen's ult)
-Revive (change to an activatable ability that reduces the cooldown of currently dead champions.  Can only be used while you are alive)
-Fortify
-Ghost (reduce the speed bump, make it an AoE based around the triggering Champ).
-Rally

Lose
-Flash
-Ignite
-Smite
-Exhaust (there's already plenty of cc in the game)

3. Impossible laners - agree this is a problem.

tl;dr - Get rid of energy, it's broken and not benefiting the game. Health-consuming champs are fine as long as they don't have a no cost/low cost way of regenerating health (especially early game) - such as Vlad.

Mundo and Mordenkaiser were done right - (especially early on) you have to be aware that using your abilities too much puts you in an uncomfortably weak state.

Vlad's Q is not right - a ranged health tap that has no cost and no opportunity cost.  It would be interesting if they could change it into a passive/active where the passive effect benefited W, while the active effect benefited E - forcing the player to make a choice about when to kick it off (i.e. activate it to boost E damage, or leave it passive to give W defensive oomph).  Maybe something as simple as a health regen passive and an AP boost active.  Change W's damage to be partially based upon the amount of health regen Vlad has (which would be new).  Passive effect is lost when the ability is on cool down.

Garen, Kennen, Akali, Shen - Did we really need energy?  Did we really need an attribute that isn't effected by any items or runes and has a short(ish) recharge time?  Really?  What is this adding to the game?  Next we'll be adding items and anti-energy champs.  These champs are fun to play, but I think they are broken from a strengths and weaknesses perspective.

Change Garen to a health consumer, everyone else goes mana. 

Given Garen's ability cooldowns, energy is largely pointless on him anyway - adding to him being a faceroll champ.  Reduce his cooldowns (and damage output).  Have ability activation place a buff similar to Kassadin's teleport buff - more effect, more cost.  Garen can do more damage by using his abilities more often, but he needs to watch his health.  Garen backed up by a healer could be scary.

Modify Kennen and Akali to have abilities that burn a percentage of their mana pool (rather than a fixed amount).  Introduce a coefficient onto the mana regen rate (givng most champs a coefficient of "1").  Give Akali and Kennen a higher mp5 coefficient (trying to keep the hyper play style.  Need to limit them a little in the early part of the game and keeping them from becoming too powerful with a large mana pool).  With small mana pools and activation costs that eat a percentage of their mana they would be more susceptible to something like Wits End, but get less benefit from something like the Archangel staff.

Maybe make Shen a hybrid - when his mana runs out, he starts burning health.

I never had a problem with flash in fact it is probably the only summoner skill that makes people engage each other, either in the hopes of an easy getaway or in the hopes of an overwhelming advantage. Imagine playing league of last hitting creeps till level 18, cause that's where top to mid level play will go.

The only range carry that changes up another wise pick beef to win metagame is kogmaw due to his uncanny ability to chew at anything the same way oldschool twitch used to.

Mf isn't better than trist, she is better than twitch, ashe, and tf. trist is actually one of the few old school range carries that can hang with the likes of kogmaw and mf.

They nerfed taric and soraka ability to support. Alistar has been nerfed to uselessness a long time ago. Sona works cause she hits hard like a normal caster and doesn't have to compromise between doing damage and being a support character. Taric has to tank, Alistar has to tank, soraka could go straight AP but she wouldn't hit as hard as sona despite having the better aoe. Another problem when compared to sona her regular heal doesn't heal herself when targeting a team mate, meaning that to survive being focused she has to abandoned her team to heal herself or get tank items, again sona can just go straight AP and keep herself and a teammate alive with some effective kiting. They nerfed soraka healing and guess what soraka is only good for healing.

I find that the power creep, as in new champs being introduced that are inherently better than the old champs, really shines during the laning phase. Most of the new champs are better laners, though riot has produced plenty of duds, like slain, urgot and plenty of champs that while hitting hard don't do much else like kennen and akali. Garen and Shen hasn't replaced rammus, amumu, or malphite. there just easier to use then those characters and not very complicated to build for. Back in the day new champs like Shaco and Udry would get pentakills.

I don't play ranked, so I don't know a whole lot about the crazy meta-game stuff. It does seem to me that with the exception of Swain, the new champs they have released since I started playing (a little before MF) are all ridiculously better than the champs already in the game. I know they do that to make them intruiging to people so they will pony up cash for the bundles the first week, but a little balance ahead of time would be nice.

I think the whole last-hit minion mechanic over-rewards champs with low cooldown ranged AoE damage (hi MF), and the item selection required for some champions to be really effective is expensive dis-proportionate to their income potential. I don't mind killing champs giving more money to people, but being in range of a dead minion (and doing damage to them) should reward you, not just the last hit. I do 90% of a wave of minions damage some times, but get 0% of the cash because someone else uses their short cooldown multi-target ability and snags them all.

Also, turrets need to be smarter. Getting tired of standing with the turret between me and some champs and them able to kill me without the turret shooting them because they have such long range. It is especially bad early in the game.

I like to get rid of the last hitting as well but "proportional damage" for gold gain would favor the aoe laners not decrease their advantage. I think the only real solution is to increase the gold giving passives to the support and tanks characters who can't farm creeps very well and don't get killing sprees like taric, soraka, alsitar etc.

The only champs that are inherently better then the ones that came before them are garen, mf, and kogmaw.

Also turrets are not cradles, you can die under them if someone is determined to get you. A lot of new players sit under their tower at 10 health expecting their tower to instant gib the tower diver as soon as he gets in range. Towers are road blocks to the nexus that's all. You think you die too often now? Wait till you get to the stage where the laning phase is 15 minutes of both sides tower hugging fearing that pushing the creep wave forward will invite a gank from the carry holding mid or the guy jungling.

When I am at 3/4 health, and the turret is between me and the other champ, they should not be able to get enough hits on me to kill me without ever being shot at by the turret.

I am not saying make turrets total safe havens, but when there is no risk at all of them being hit by a turret, that is a problem.

4. Fancy new heroes render old heroes useless

Unlike the LoL boards, I see no conspiracy here.  Riot's designers are just getting better (well, ok, Urgot says, "mostly better") at designing Champs that have abilities that complement each other.  Newer Champs tend to have abilities that lend themselves to combos rather than individual abilities that may or may not work together.  Newer Champs tend to have inherent passives that don't suck.  And newer Champs have abilities that can be use in different scenarios/modes - making them more interesting (although Jax's leap is a good example of an old-school champ having multi-mode abilities).

Sivir is one of the most obvious examples of an old-school style Champ.  Each of her abilities essentially exist in a vacuum.  Her passive is underwhelming in the extreme (increased dodge chance while moving), and has very little to do with any of her other abilities (if you are using the ult to run from an auto-attacking enemy... ok, they synergize for that brief period of time while they are auto-attacking you).  The sole skill you need to learn with Sivir is how to anticipate when someone is going to try to hit you with an ability.  Even that doesn't really reward skill properly - you get mana back if you successfully block.  How about instead you get a cool-down reduction on the shield?  This would allow you burst-defense at the cost of mana.  In the early game if your Sivir is just running wide-open on the boomerang / bouncing blades you won't have enough mana to support the shield.

LeBlanc is the most obvious example of a new-style champ.  Her ult is by definition a synergy with any of her abilities, and each of her abilities has a good reason to use as the ult (back-to-back chains is brutal).  Part of Q depends on using another ability.  Despite being pretty meh in the mid-to-late game, she is very fun to play.  Mirror Image isn't useless - a half a second of stealth, another half a second to figure out which is which, a second total may be all that is need to escape or kill.  I'm having more trouble with learning to use some restraint with her abilities, rather than figuring out what the combo scenarios were.

I'm sorry but that is an instance of being bad lolz.... the only two champs that could remotely do that solo is garen and trynadmere otherwise it takes 3 people to lolz gib you without a problem or two burst heavy casters. Either way this becomes less of a problem the longer you play since it doesn't sound like you have been playing very long.

Oh you are right Typhon sivir is one of the peeks of bad champ design. Like you said most people problem with new champions is that unlike old champions 75% of their skills are suppose to be used together instead of special circumstance.

They were not melee people killing me. But whatever o know-it-all.

It's supposed to auto-acquire as soon as a champ engages another champ in tower range.  There are a bunch of caveats and it seems a bit buggy.  Caveats like - is there another champ attacking someone already in range?  Was there a champ attacking someone (maybe you) and they moved off and now the tower isn't acquiring the champ that is now killing you?  Are there a bunch of enemy minions in range?  The towers aren't very bright.  You can really only count on them to work against you.  

That said, I think a part of it is due to us only remembering the cases where we get fucked (you get targeted by the tower the second you do anything, or the tower fails to target the enemy the entire time they are beating the crap out of you).

If you want to see a champ that proves to you that it works, roll up Swain, drop torment on a champ running to his tower, move into range of the tower - every single time it will immediately stop what it's doing and start fucking you up.

Ranged auto-attacks seem to draw less attention than spells, not sure why (or maybe it's just me imagining things) - possibly due to the champ dancing in and out of tower range confuses the tower.  Was it Kog Maw or Ms Fortune that burned you?

Edit: made sentences suck less

Was Nidalee and Lux. And they were standing closer than some of the minions being targetted by the tower. Both times there were no other champs anywhere around.

Towers do have a cooldown on their attack.  You can launch a spell or an attack and dance back out of range before the tower has time to shoot at you.  It will decide to hit a minion instead, rinse and repeat.  Not sure if that was the case, but it's the one way to do what you're describing that I'm aware of.

I've never encountered a tower actually bugging and continuing to auto attack minions while a champ that should have been tagged was in range.

Edit: some abilities also out range the tower.  Lux's laser, Nidalee's javelin Q, Kog'maw's spit artillery thing.  Others that I'm forgetting for the moment. 

I have.  Ran the dude around the tower (which is really all you can depend on - a physical obstruction) with him spell tagging me the whole way - he finally caught up to me when I got tangled in his minions that were on the tower and killed me, then ran off.  Tower never acquired.  That one I'm guessing was due to latency, but who really knows?  Pissed me right off, I'm guessing he laughed about it pretty good.

I wouldn't say that experience isn't common though.

Edit: experience ISN'T common

What i used to like to do was ryze was just wait just outside the range of the enemy tower and pop my combo on someone while cooling walking out. I do this twice and occasionally risk two shots by the tower for the harass. My policy has been to generally not fighting someone at my tower unless i'm baiting. If i have no intentions of fighting and i know they could potentially dive me i bug out. I've been killed 3 times while under my tower, once when running up to a tower just after a teammate just got dived for a kill. I deserved that death...


I recently discovered, like 5 minutes ago that 3 doran blade twitch is a bad idea. like 3/14 bad idea.

Kind of torn about this.  On the one hand, I use Flash constantly.  I've run Flash/Exhaust for probably the last hundred or so games I've played.  It really helps give a lot of flexibility in terms of strategy and survivability.  Without Flash, I can't really do much by myself, everything has to be with the group or I'll be screwed when five enemies jump out of the bush.  Flash isn't an instant win in these situations, it just nudges the difficulty from "guaranteed death" to "possible to escape if they don't chase well".  Without Flash, I'm stuck playing even more cautiously, taking even fewer risks, staying in the back of the blob, etc.

On the other hand, I do think it's so useful that I can't really play as well without it, and getting rid of it would free up a slot for ghost or ignite or something.  Dunno if that would make up for the loss in flexibility that removing Flash would cause.

The excuse of "some champions need Flash to be effective" seems stupid to me, though.  Mostly I see this for nuke/CC characters with no mobility like Galio and Nunu.  That's a champion design problem that should be addressed, not an issue with the spell.  And flash is just as big a problem for those champions (play against Nunu and estimate how many kills he'd get if people couldn't flash out of his ult) as it is a benifit to them.


Not sure what the problem is here.  Ranged carries all tend to get the same items?  Yeah, so do most of the AP carries I play, as do most of the tanks I play.  Ranged carries are unique in that they don't require much extra HP to be effective, and they don't require mana to be effective, so they can just focus on MOAR DEEPS and do well.  Not sure how you'd change that, or why you'd need to change that.  If they played the same, then I'd be a bit worried, but I don't know that they do, really.


Some champs lane better than others.  I don't know of any who are lethal deathbombs early and lategame.  If you're up against a Vlad or Kennen, play defensively and just try to keep behind your creep wave.  If they don't get kills early, their late game contribution (Vlad especially) is pretty meh.  Maybe I'm biased (Vlad and Kennen are probably my 2nd and 3rd most played) but they don't seem like unstoppable powerhouses unless you feed them.  Great for laning, rarely die, but when it's 5v5 they tend to be less influential than other carries.  I guess I don't have a problem with some champs being better at X than others as long as they have some other significant weakness.


Seems like selective memory to me.  I agree with Typhon that the newer champs are generally more specialized and older champs are more broad, but I don't think that makes them underpowerd.  Some of them hurt when Riot decides to across the board nerf, say, healing (since more of them had some kind of incidental "heals teammates" move, like Alistar), but they're by no means totally outclassed.  Corki, Amumu, Warwick, Janna, Annie, Ashe, Anivia, Rammus, and Taric are all fairly solid champs, while Lux and Swain (and maybe even LeBlanc post-nerf) are waving from the benches.

The problem with the impossible laners thing is where you have characters with 'poke and heal' mechanisms, or unambiguously superior harassment, to the extent that most high-elo players don't feel they can be countered by anyone but the same. The real issue with that, to me, isn't one of balance but more of how it can make laning unfuckingbelievably boring; a stretch of the game where you're not fighting against a lane opponent but rather you are resigned to suffering through it with little variation against someone who, mechanically, you can not defeat. Your only goal is to not fall so far behind that your opponent isn't stacked well enough to swing the mid to late game that dramatically. Riot, to their credit, acknowledges this issue and thinks they went a little too liberal especially in the case of heroes who don't have mana pools to worry about.


Only one element of the problem. Though it's true that doran's cheese needs to be addressed (most likely solution is preventing stacking) the issue is about how ranged carry is disproportionately important to whether or not your team wins or loses the game, and this homogenizes teamfights and team composition some. I was really very interested to see, at high ELO, what heroes started getting banned more and more. Twitch, not Galio? Not Sona (pre nerf)? Really? Kog'Maw? Sheesh.


No, a trend. I don't claim it's universal (they have released a slew of league duds recently, but that's more due to the general weakness of Teh Magic), but when you start seeing heroes appear that cause other heroes to practically vanish, even two or three times, and you look at their abilities and see that they do everything that an old hero's ability did And More™ .. you should give it some thought.

Again, to Riot's credit, some of them have copped to this.

No. It's a wonderful idea. It's carried me to a lot of wins I didn't deserve, but now it's starting to appear on all the dpsers in all the games, so the comparative edge is lost. I'm playing against people who understand that the cost / mechanical bonus ratio is, essentially, unbeatable through the entire phase you're collecting/swapping.

but but i know there are better starting items...

I don't think three doran's blades count as 'starting items.' You obviously have gone back to the fountain to get more. As for what items are better for squishies like twitch: there are none.

The item grants you:

120 hitpoints, about 2/3 of what ruby crystal provides. 1/3 of what vampiric scepter provides 3/5ths of what longsword gives. Adding up those fractions of the costs of all those items gives you about 715 gold's worth of item. Since the blades are transitory items in the progression up to multiple high level items (after IE/razor), we add the sell value to that for about 933 gold. The combined value of a single blade is all provided for the investment loss of only about 220 gold.

The investment also remains completely fluid; you're not locked into reaching an obligatory three or more. If you're facerolling and you don't go back to the fountain for a while, you can skip one or two of them and go straight for the BF sword; if not, the extra durability the items provide you keep you nice and comfortable during the continued runup.

Therefore, you start seeing doran's blades (or shields) on all the squish. Multiples. Usually three.

I'll keep that in mind the next time I use a twitch to feed me.

I wonder if Riot cares about this?  It took me along time to start to value an item for what it could do for me now (and how efficient that item was), rather than what it could build toward.  Especially in the context that a single team fight win (and corresponding tower crush) could overcome any loss (due to selling Doran's items).

I don't think they should, but they do seem to tune things based up strats that the high-end players adopt/exploit.  I guess the thinking here is that if you are just casually following the game you might not know about buying highly efficient dead-end items as an early-game accelerator.  This would result in even more pub-stomping of uniformed scrubs (such as myself, especially a month or two ago), which could lead to said scrubs rage-quitting the game forever (and never buying anything from Riot ever again). 

In that context, I guess it makes sense that Riot should at least be watching the impact of this upon community.

Edit: last paragraph was so brief I'm pretty sure it made no sense (it was originally a sentence) .  I expanded upon it.

Dorans shield is the best bang for buck item. Dorans Sword is meh and Dorans Ring is ok with a bump to decent considering the meta. That has been the general consensus since the last time riot changed dorans sward. Actually i preferred the old dorans sword.

Your idea of the general consensus is probably not one that has observed high-ELO play recently?

Gotta give me some links sir.

Doran's Sword > Doran's Sword > Doran's Sword > Boots > BF Sword > Whatever is the mid carry build I'm seeing more and more and works well on pretty much any carry.  :uhrr:

I can't stand to not at least get brown boots before buying a second "real" item. But I am in semi-scrub land so I don't count heh.

Build whatever you are comfortable with, I personaly believe that knowing how to play your champ well and working with your matters more then your build.  I don't build Infinity Edge on Ashe for example but I still think I carry very well with her.  (Usually do Doran's Blade > BF Sword > Boots > Bloodthirster > Attack Speed Item, but will just buy brown boots before BF sword if I get pushed out of lane and have to back before I have the G.  More often then not if I can farm hard for a quick BF sword, I can back, Teleport into lane, arrow the opponent and immediatly get a kill.  Even if I don't get the kill I dominate the lane wtih so much early damage in most cases forcing them to react to me)

High level game link, i know the logic of getting 3 dorans than reselling them for better items, just not convinced it works against anyone who would otherwise be stuck in rank 1200 hell.

I usually finish out my boots (greaves, unless the CC is nasty that game) before the third sword. It all depends on if I'm going back to the fountain with 500, or I've scored a couple of mid ganks or successful harass and have the 950. But otherwise than that, yeah, that's exactly it. Straight from third sword to BF Sword is particularly nasty on Twitch, what with his high attack speed + S&P, but it just works for .. well, all of them.

I used to see it about one in three games. Now, it's most games. I watched two other dps carries get called nooblord for not doing it.

Oh how times change. I remember a few months back when people were called nooblord for doing it. I love the ARPG community. :oh_i_see:

People in scrubland still call people nooblords for doran's stacking. I used to do it occasionally on Tristana and people would always call me an idiot for doing it.

I can doran shield/ring amumu, cause its amumu... some champs don't need a lot of items to scale, trist, kog, mf, garen and amumu being one of the few.

Watch any game on this page. (http://www.own3d.tv/user/clgame) I would guess that 90-98% of them will feature all physical ranged carries buying 1-3 doran's blades, some kind of boots, followed by IE. Sometimes with a mid-cost item before the IE, but not usually.

 Point taken (http://www.own3d.tv/user/clgame#/watch/40242), though the MF was pretty bad and gargas was a lozly choice (yeah i know gargas is pretty effective in his own right but still  :awesome_for_real: ). Actually couldn't watch the game to the end in one sitting, pretty boring really. Having seen top level (been a while since i played at that level honestly), mid level, and scrub level, the difference in ability is so small its laughable how "eportish" riot wants league to be rofl. The key difference between Mid level to Top level seem to be last hitting purposely clearing your own jungle.

Lolz at not one but two failed baron attempts...top level play indeed  :drill:

Really?  I see a world of difference watching a "top level" game vs. just some random scrubs stream.  Better positioning, better champion picks, better laning combos, better dps focus, more dragons, earlier barons, better gank setups etc. etc. Maybe I'm crazy I guess.

Well league is more like this.

Top level --> mid level ----> scrub level. Which translates to Top level ---------------------------> scrub level. What does a scrub needs to learn? How to pick champs, how to pick who to lane with, how to team fight, how to not feed shaco and warwick? Once you ween most scrubs from wondering off for no reason they become mid level players or alternatively you can teach them to last hit and not actively push a lane and watch them act like mid level players until the late game. Why do you think people complain about elo hell? Fact is most people are barely above scrub level or just at the fringes of entering top level play but lack the dedicated team. Unless your in that category, the fringe category, your probably going to be treated like a scrub level player just a few feet from the bottom of the barrel as far as league match maker and rank system is concerned. Compare to say SC2 where a Diamond league is on another dimension to a gold league player and godlike to a silver league player and lovecraftean horror demon to a bronze league.

The funniest moment in the match i just saw was the two attempts at early baron. Truly a lolz worthy moment.

Today alone I fought kog'maws, twitches, miss fortunes, ashes, corkis, kennens, and even xin zhaos who stacked blades, and fought alongside others who have done the same. Secret's totally outta the bag now 8)

So I got stuck playing MF in a game yesterday (ranked and pvp.net decided to not accept my request to switch characters with someone else so we both has the wrong masteries and runes).  Her ult seems just bad now, the cone is SO small afer the nerf.  Unless someone was stunned in it they just take one step ti either side and they aren't taking damage.

Also I keep seeing mid Ashe players who are leveling the slow first...did someone make a forum post that people are copying or something?  I can see the reasoning behind it be I'm not yet convinced its better then the extra damage from volley.

Ashe mid taking the slow first is becoming, from what I've seen, the generally accepted method of harass... The reason being that it makes it a LOT easier for your jungler to come gank mid.  Volley doesn't help the gank, the slow does...so early game, if you have a fairly coordinated team, it's better to have the slow over the increased dmg.  If you don't have a jungler, or your team isn't really well organized, then you want to go for volley first for sure.  The main problem is, people go for the slow even when they don't have the team to support it...those are bad Ashes. :)

Given what you just said, I'd take slow regardless of whether or not my jungler/team had a clue just for the psychological advantage (if I played Ashe).

Well yeah, the main problem is if your opponent gets wind of the fact you don't have team backup, at least early game they can just charge and eat you since you don't have the volley dmg backing up the slow.  It's cases like that were you probably want volley instead to just straight harass.

That's basicly what happenend in my game, from level 1 Ashe was super agressive and trying to make me run with frost arrow on.  But if I just stand and fight autoattack + double up crushed autoattack + nothing.  Its as you said, like Panth mid, people playing it without knowing why its supposed to be good.

I just recently had a bit of a League of Legends epiphany.

After having what is basically a .500 record for my entire League of Legends career since beta just playing various champs decently well, I've realized in the last few days that if you just pick a main (Jax in my case) and play him really well, your record starts to magically improve.

Here I always just chalked it up to circumstances which were primarily out of my control. If I wasn't "bad" or feeding left and right, I was good enough to win. It sure seems as though that's not actually the case.

This is probably obvious to others, but it just never occurred to me that me actually playing at a higher level on the same teams could actually mean the difference between winning and losing a lot of the time. Even if I wasn't bad before, it makes a big difference.

Maybe I spoke a little too soon. After winning 10 straight and something like 16 out of 20, I've lost 2 in a row in pretty spectacular fashion.  :ye_gods:

Just because you win a bunch in a row doesn't mean you can't lose a few in a row.

LoL's matchmaking system loves to break streaks. Win that many in a row and you'll find yourself a 'compensator' on a bad team.

I'm very well aware of this from personal experience. A few months back, I had a friend come and stay a couple of days. We did some LAN games and some LoL. He hadn't played in a while so he was pretty rusty. Even so, we did the arranged team thing with just us two and it was a complete and total failure all around. I bet we played something like 20 games over the two days we were hanging out. We lost 18 of them. At one point, we lost 16 straight.

It's just now taken me til the last few days to even climb back up to a .500 record from that weekend.

The wow matchmaking system in solo queue pretty much wants you to be .500. You can get ahead of the curve but eventually it starts sticking you in teams with people having 100+ leaves and you wind up 3v5 and lose. Hell I had an 9 game win streak and then my next game we had only 2 people non afk and the game after that everybody on the team but me had 12 plus deaths before level 10.

I play in two major groups. Sometimes, they include bads. I am either playing on Team Bads and Team No Bads. Sometimes, Team All Bads. But really, it comes down to even just one bad! Any one single bad player makes it Team Bads. If I played with Team Bads 100% of the time, I would never, ever, ever, ever have a .500 ratio. I can crush and compensate as much as I want, but LoL's dynamic keeps you from having the true single faceraper that could seal the deal like in DotA & HoN, except in very rare instances (one time leading to a game in which I got 50 kills). It comes down to team fights. And if it's an even match or you are behind and you have to play it safe and wait for them to overextend and capitalize on this + pushed forward creep lanes, one bad gets everyone killed.

On Team No Bads we would have these wonderful, wonderful wonderful games where the five-mans would be pacing around each other in heated skirmishes, but nobody would extend or engage until we had an opportunity we could solidly capitalize upon. I would realize that we just went five minutes where the only reason why we didn't get curbstomped is because we didn't have a single bad. One bad on the team means that they DID get caught out in the open or they DID just go wander off to kill wolves even though mid was getting pushed or they DID overextend and waste their ult cause they totally thought they could sneak tactics out and watch this guys I know you said back to the tower but I am overwhelmed by the temptation to make a passing stab at galio for .000005% of his health to show him who is boss and oh shit now permastunning is happening and oh shit oh shit oops well we're dead.

I keep wanting to pretend I have never read this thread.

Evidence #1.
For WCG Riot used the elo system to seed 64 teams 1-64 in a single elim tournament (think March Madness), of the final 16, 13 were from seeds 1-16, the final four were 1-4.  Their system at the top is essentially flawless.

Evidence #2.
No good player has ever posted a thread saying that they couldn't take a friend's account or a smurf out of low ranked with ease.  Several threads have been posted by people who have done just that in a very small number of games.  This seriously calls into question the idea that every game of low elo ranked involves so many intentional feeders, griefers and afk'ers from the absolute start that the outcome is assured.

An example of scrub think:
You don't give your jungler sight at river (you are mid, or top on blue or bot on purple) even though you could and he gets ganked while starting at blue buff and ragequits.  You recount that game as we had a leaver and we were doomed MM hates me and wants me to be at .500 but reality is if you played better jungler doesn't die so free and doesn't ragequit 2min into the game.

In normal que your 5man rating and your Solo rating is one in the same. Of course no one at the top of the bracket complains about getting their new account to the top, whats so hard about getting invited to the same 5man that carried you up the ranks in the first place. The "scrubs" in this game are the people who solo que more than 50% of their games. There is no skill or secret to solo que, its not the ragers and the leavers that make it so, its just that your just as likely to que up with a bad player as you are a good player regardless of how many wins you get in the row. The best I've managed is several 3 game win streaks ended by one loss. However despite having this pattern several times, I am just as likely to que with bad players in solo que as if my elo hasn't changed at all. Despite several wins I'm just as likely to have to find a way to carry a team of master yi, warwick, garen and shaco as a guy who has a match record of straight loses.

This is simple because League prevents you from vetting bad players and bad teams in general when solo queing. The pro's NEVER have to worry about shaco, master yi and warwick on the same team because they play the game exclusively as a 5man. The pugs, the solo quers, are stuck in a coin toss every time they select solo que by the nature of the game. Right now no matter how good you are you are stuck at .500 if you solo que most games. I know a friend whose rating was once at the 1600 in rank que with a .550 win rate. Number of games ridiculously small and didn't play a ranked solo que since achieving that rank. This was at the beginning of the very beginning of the ranked season. I caught the rank season a month later and only managed to get 1400 before dropping down to 1300 then 1200 then 1300 and now at the bottom of 1200.

What damaged the system is the punishing of que dodging, especially in ranked. Which ironically was a much heavier punishment when i return to league a month after the rank season started. Solo quers need a way to vet teams, something that que dodging allowed. Without que dodging the bad players don't get sifted to the bottom, they simply stay within the general populace depressing the whole system. That and there is no real encouragement to get better at the game. Being bad at the game doesn't filter you to the bottom of the barrel, in fact it places you with players better than you are, and they have no choice but to carry you.

Hoax I'd generally agree with you, your skills matter, but Sam is correct too. In my last 5 games I've had a Sion who called "tank" decide to stay behind the whole team even when we tried to get behind him( or boldly ran away to farm wolves while we were trying to hold a tower), a jungle Warwick who didn't come out of the jungle for most of the game, and a Pantheon that was really excited about his ult and would jump on the other team while we were half way across the map. Repeatedly. 18 deaths worth.

The two games where my teammates didn't use their foreheads to play we won easily. The other 3 were desperate fights that were effectively 4 v 5 at best.  

So yes you can be awesome as can be and it will affect your ELO but there is an astounding number of chodes in the 1200's and it is really a crap shoot as to whether you are going to get Captain Soup Pot for a teammate or if the other team will.

You are both wrong.

DL is just retarded, they don't only 5-man or they wouldn't be ranked well in the solo queue where you can only duo.  Also every disprove ELO Hell thread has been solo queue elo boosting only and all have reported easy success.

You can win with retards. Its a valid argument that sometimes in order to win you don't need to hard carry so much as psychologically coddle teammates.  Sometimes you need to bail out your teammate doing poorly by switching lanes or ganking his lane or putting up the ward he is too stupid to use.  That is a valid critique but its a far cry from MM determines if I win or lose.

Scrub mentality will stop you from getting better at the game and it will stop you from gaining elo in ranked or normal solo duo or 5-man.

Seems fairly similar to me...?  I mean, you're basically conceding that MM makes it harder to win in the first sentence there, which is what "MM is making me lose" is essentially saying.  I mean, sure, it's not impossible to win if your teammates are bad, and a lot of people tend to ignore their own mistakes, but if you take two fairly even teams (which is what MM does) but one of the teams gets stuck with a player who is a little worse, the team which is at a disadvantage is usually going to lose.

This "stop thinking like a scrub" thing is an entirely parallel discussion.  I can examine my faults and the mistakes I make without making the bizarre claim that the performance of my team has no impact on the outcome of a team based game.

"I lost because my team sucked." is just an excuse to not look at yourself and what you could of done better to win the game.  It's a problem I've guilty of very often myself.  Right up with the excuse "OMG, I got ganked because of no MIA!" when someone has been out of lane for 3 minutes and you were too lazy to watch your mini map.  If you tank sucks at initiating, figure out how to do it youself, if your carry keeps dying figure out how to protect them etc. etc. etc...

Yes you occasionaly get the AFK, or intentional feeder and you are just done, but most games you should be trying to support your bad team-mates and winning the game rather then just giving up as soon as you see your jungle Mundo die to wraith camp.

That doesn't make it untrue, is the point I was trying to get across.  The claim that "we lost because MM paired us up with a noob who fed for five minutes" and the claim that "you won't get better if you blame your team for your losses" are not contradictory.  It's possible to notice your mistakes while at the same time noticing that you're winning/losing because it's a 4v5 game.

I'm not saying "It's all their fault" or anything, but there are a fair number of matches where the major factor in a defeat was because of something done by another player (as well as several where it was, in fact, from me).  "You need to believe X in order to get better at this game" is a different claim from "X is false."

Hurf durf "scrub mentality"  :oh_i_see:

I've never given up because of crappy teammates, and I have never not analyzed my play after a game. Nonetheless if your team sucks, you will lose. That's a fact; not scrub mentality. If you try to switch lanes with a person and they will not switch there is nothing you can do about that. If your jungler opts to never help his team in a meaningful way there is nothing you can do about that. If your team will not form a lane partnership that will be successful there is nothing you can do about that. If your teammates refuse to gather up to defend an inhibitor tower and instead farm random lanes, there is nothing you can do about it.
Shockingly enough, being a team game, the team actually is important.

The problem is that the first sign of someone being bad, they are the whipping boy the whole game. Yi overextended? "gg feeder yi" if he gets hit with a first blood.

People are fickle - it takes a remarkably low amount of loss for people to throw their hands up in despair. Dunno what you can do about that facet of human condition, other than try your best to carry them through their apathy.

Its not a fact. You are full of fucking shit.  The elo is pretty remarkably accurate if your team sucks so do you and so does the other team, elo is not so wildly inaccurate in the vast majority of games, especially in ranked.  The thing is scrubs are often unconsciously just waiting for a sign from god telling them if they have the sucky team that is destined to lose.  Many games are decided in the first 10 minutes because so many scrub players are ready to give up if the lane match up is difficult or if one player on their team doesn't do things the way they think they should let alone if somebody dies twice early or if their lane partner gets them killed or does something they feel is incredibly stupid.  If one player make a mistake and then one or two teammates seeing that mistake decide they have a shit teammate who is going to make them lose then bam the game is over but not because the first guy fucked up but because the two scrubs were just waiting to be excused from responsibility for whatever happens in the rest of the game.

Every game where you start poorly and then salvage your game by farming back into contention, avoiding some champ that is getting you for free or just by switching to a sacrificial protect a carry who has the farm to win fights role proves that bad teammates (when you start poorly you are the bad teammate) don't lose games by themselves.  I played a game with Nasus last night where I was 0/3/1 by the time I got to level 11, my team hated me because I wasn't even trying to get into fights, I was trying to maintain superior farm and stay out of fights as I had noticed our Irelia and troll where overextending and initiating poorly so I was going to need to hit carry status to win that game.  The game winning 5v5 I killed their primary carry, went down to 20% life, hunted down their Irelia who had finished off one of our guys in the jungle, killed her, got my hp back, waded back into the fight and finished off the rest of their team.

For 30min of that game I was the bad teammate I'm sure in several of those other 4 guy's minds.  In the end I was the most dominant force in the game by a fairly wide margin despite the slow start.  If one or two of them had just given up on the game, or started talking shit to me (there were some harsh words in team chat at several points but it didn't get out of hand) or afk'd or fed a kill or done anything scrubby the game could not have been won as in the end it was on a razor edge.

What's your point, here?  You claim that ELO is super accurate and that if you lose, it's because you personally suck and has nothing to do with your teammates... then you give an example in which you EXPLICITLY STATE that despite playing well and dominating the endgame, you still would have lost if one of your teammates had DCed.  These seem contradictory to me.

The only credibility the solo rank system has is if there is rank decay which there isn't. Currently there are plenty of people who have high rank and barely play a game after the achieved it. That or reset the solo que rankings more often.

Someone being AFK/intentional feeding and playing with bad team mates are not really the same thing, it's two different discussions.

That's something a scrub would say. Hoax could make up for an intentional feeder.

I'm not even sure what the fuck you are ranting about Hoax. Yes, "scrubs" give up and lose games. People who are decent try to figure out a way to get their shit together and contribute to the team. You should get a Nobel for that astute observation.

Alright master of all things LoL, let me hear how you would deal with the following situation and you can show the us scrubs how high ELO people handle things. You are Sivir. Your MF runs out in front of Amummu to try to initiate a team fight and proceeds to get grabbed by Blitz and eaten. SHe does this repeatedly. She is 0/12/3 by halfway through the game. Whatcha gonna do?

CALL FUCKING GHOSTBUSTERS THAT'S WHAT...

wut, wrong answer?

FUCK, I'll go derail a different thread.

Here's the thing Hoax...you, in the case you're presenting, are in fact, NOT the bad teammate.  You are in fact a good player/teammate that happened to get caught in bad positions and/or gangbanged.  You then took that information, and adjusted playstyle to account for it, and by the end, carried.

That's not being a bad teammate, that's being a good teammate.

Take your situation, and instead of adjusting in lane, going for superior farm, and avoiding fights, you continued to do exactly what you had been doing the whole time.

THAT would be, being a bad teammate, and there comes a breaking point where if the enemy team gets fed enough, and enters team fights with an effective 4v5 because you're totally useless, you will likely lose the game unless the matchmaking is SPOT on.  In some games, sure, it is, but in the vast majority outside the highest bracket levels, it's not.  Thus resulting in a game where you lose horribly because you have said bad teammate who fed repeatedly.

Whatever. Stay free. If you want to see things as not your fault your gonna see things as not your fault.  The elo system works, the MM works.  It can't work 100% of the time (afk's, people who dont like team comp so decide to grief etc) but I'm pretty damn sure we all deserve the rank we have and no matter how many scenarios or excuses you come up with that say it isn't so.


You guys miss the point.  In fighting sports there is a notion that sometimes one guy can tell their opponent is just looking for a way out as they feel beaten.  I think that compares well to what I'm talking about here.  If you have this scrub mentality where your loses aren't your fault because every game you play at the same skill level and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose so it must be outside your control then you are going to end up looking for that way out when the game starts to go poorly.  The stronger your belief that MM decides your fate ahead of the game the more it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.  Why try hard if MM has decided its your turn to lose right?

I'm done here though, people want to think its not their fault when they lose, whatever helps you sleep at night.

If you can actually answer what both Prospero and I have presented as use-cases where a bad teammate does in fact, cause you to lose, then we will actually listen to what you have to say...but for now all I hear is WAH WAH WAH YOU GUYS ARGUE TOO GOOD I'M GONNA GO PICK ON SOME INTERNET WEENIES ELSEWHERE.

The genre is massively team-oriented, and there are cases where no matter how good/bad you play, the game is lost by an unbelievably bad player and it really DOESN'T have anything to do with how you personally play.  Yes, the MM works PRETTY darn well (better at higher levels of ELO for sure), no one is arguing that point.  The MM doesn't work when it does what it occasionally does, which is grab a REALLY low ELO player that's in the pool to balance out some higher level ELO players against a team of mid-level ELO players.  That really low ELO player can occasionally feed, be out of position, and not help the team enough that they cause a loss.

Our assertion is that you're wrong that thinking you're losing because of a bad teammate is scrub mentality.  It's just not in a game like this.  But like you said, whatever helps you sleep at night dude. :)

I've been playing this game since beta when runes were free and you had to use the rune combiner to get the runes you like. I have to say this game is not serious business, losing to most people is a matter of coin toss as oppose to individual skill. The problem is that the better you get the more your loses are due to coin toss and less your opponents actually beating you. Because one player can cost the game it creates a negative feedback loop that literally tears a team apart in the first 5 minutes of the game, not even counting the rage at champ select. League is not serious business if you solo que that is just plain fact.

Yeah, I don't think that this whole scrub-mentality-theory is as encompassing as you need it to be for the underlying theory to hold water! Especially considering aforementioned scrubs — especially in the ragequitter example — are exactly the sort of bads which can render it so that your entire game is dicked.

All of these style of games suffer that fate. I can always tell when our team is going to win because of a single player on the enemy team. I then go about ensuring this, maximally, for my benefit. Because I like IP. The less of a chance I give the other players to be able to compensate, the better.

I have decided not to play on weekends anymore. I am no high level pro or anything, but on weekends I get constantly teamed with mouth-breathers who think they are mega-pro while they do super stupid shit all game long and blame me for "not healing them" when they dove into a 3v1 with half health.

Turn this to your advantage! I think the best way to maximize the mouthbreather factor in your favor is to duo queue ranked on the weekdays, and then five-man normal games on the weekends against disjointed teams.

Then, always be sure your team has a couple of noob-eaters (ah, remember the good old days with Bloodseeker in DotA?) and/or globals, so that you can stack the deck against the enemy team once you isolate a weak player. We're a bit ruthless about it right now, but since the goal right now is to farm IP as fast as possible for complete rune pages (which takes a fuckton of time), yes, we're absolutely going to turn scrubs into experience pinatas.

They're nerfing the locket and randuins.  Also nerfing Olaf, Udy and some other tanky DPS.  A bit bummed they're focusing on the chars that I like to play.  Hopefully Sion doesn't take it on the chin too much.

Thread (links to Morello's first post): http://www.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=4560979#post4560979 (http://www.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=4560979#post4560979)

if what he's saying is true, locket is getting stabbed pretty heavy.

Well, it's absolutely something they should do, but I'm afraid about how this will effect balance circumstantial to champs who need it not to be overpowered, but to be tolerably powered.

if they nerf an item they should at least pretend its still viable by lowering its cost in gold lolz.