This is the first installment of my “Psychology of Ranked” series, in which I combine the study of the human mind and your ranked experience. In this article I will be addressing the five stages of grief to draw parallels to League of Legends in order to help you get over these problems and get back to climbing. These stages are things League players often experience in their own ways and it gets in the way of personal improvement, so I will discuss what each is in the psychology world, the League world, an anecdote, and some tips to deal with it.

Things to Note

• While experiencing grief is quite common, everyone experiences it differently. You may experience one or more stages, you may experience them in any order, and you may experience one or more multiple times.
• This is not a guide to climb, it is a guide to your mindset and the mental obstacles you may encounter. I will not waste your time with things like “stay positive” and “just do your best,” as these are cliche and are not really going to help you.

The first stage of grief is denial. In traditional psychology and health studies, denial is our first contact with our grieving. It can help to ease us into this rollercoaster of emotions we are about to take. It is one of the hardest to deal with, but it is vital for our future success in getting over or coping with it. No matter what, you refuse to accept the circumstances that put you into this state of grief. For our case, it will be the inability to climb.

Every League of Legends player that has struggled to climb has dealt with this in some way or another. Thoughts like “I should be diamond, but I am only gold because I don’t play enough,” or “Wow, my teammates are really the only reason that I can’t climb. I am playing really well,” are examples of such denial. You are simply avoiding taking responsibility for your own problems by denying you have a problem in the first place. The first step to moving on is getting over this denial, and working forward. Full acceptance will not come until later, but small steps are important. Instead of the formerly made thoughts, consider thinking “There are plenty of diamond players with less game time than me, maybe I just need to try harder,” or “My team underperformed in that last game, but so did I. I need to work on things A, B, and C in order to improve.” Moving from the denial stage is typically a matter of setting your pride aside.

I started playing in Season One, and it was not until around Season Three that I started taking ranked more seriously, and even then, I could not seem to get out of silver. I was in total denial. Friends I introduced to the game were Gold and even Platinum after only a few months. “It’s just a fluke,” I thought. But no. They were better than me, and I needed to change my mentality. I had started getting over my denial by accepting that I was not as good as I thought I was.

The second stage of grief is anger. While denial can be the hardest to get over, Anger is one of the two most frightening. As scary as it is to be angry at a videogame, it happens. And if you are at the anger stage, League is more than just a game to you, as it is to millions of people. It is okay to be angry that you cannot climb. It is part of getting over your grief. It is hard to control this anger, but you need to try to some extent. Plenty of people get angry about their rank or that they cannot climb, but try at least to not let it influence your relationships with friends and family out of the game.

There is plenty for players to get angry about. Perhaps the ranked system itself. You despise dynamic queue and feel that going against large premades when you are solo puts you at a disadvantage, or you get picked on when there is a four-man premade on your team. Maybe your friends are too high of a rank to play with and you just want to play ranked with them, but you cannot seem to climb, so you get angry. Bad teammates, people taking your role, that support Nidalee that refuse to at least get a Sightstone in your promos. There is a lot you will get angry at. There is a difference between just being upset with a pick, and being genuinely angry at the game. You need to allow yourself to be angry, and once you have accepted how you feel, you can work out of it by addressing those issues and realizing how you can work on them. Talk to your team in champion select and explain why Urgot support may not be as good as dozens of other champions they could pick and hope they will communicate. Maybe the other player is angry too! Communication is key. Talk to your friends about your anger. Find more experienced players that may have been through it and see what they did. You are not alone.

I got to the anger stage late in season three and early season four when I was still silver and my friends were already in diamond. I was angry that they left me behind. I was angry that they were not trying to help me improve. I was angry I was simply not good at the game and felt like there was nothing I could do to improve, but I was wrong. There is always something you can do to improve. Anger is necessary, but you need to learn from it.

The third stage of grief is bargaining. While typical bargaining related to grief is after a tragedy, there are others forms of bargaining that can be taken in a more literal sense. After the loss of a loved one, some attempt to “bargain” with a higher power. “Please God, I’ll do anything if you bring her back,” and what not. While this particular method is ineffective, there are forms that can be somewhat beneficial. One such benefit in bargaining over a grievance is that sometimes when trying to pick what is you are bargaining over, you realize the source of the problem. An extreme case would be a person with cancer claiming he will never smoke again if the cancer goes away. He knows what he did wrong, and claims he will stop making the mistake if the issue will disappear now.

In League of Legends, the bargaining I usually witness is often along the lines of “I know I could get to rank ‘X’ if I could just get out of rank ‘Y’, so please carry/boost me to rank ‘Z’. A bronze player claiming he could get gold if only he could bypass higher bronze to get to silver is a more common mentality than some may realize. There are also those who do look towards a deity of some sort to deal with their rank problems. “God just help me with these next few games so I can get to my promos. That’s all I need,” is an example of this. The effectiveness is up to you to decide, but it is generally accepted that it is up to your performance, not a higher power’s, to carry you. Bargaining is the stage that is least related to League of Legends, but there are always cases in which it occurs.

I personally never experienced the bargaining stage. There were a few instances of asking higher ranked friends to carry me in games, but aside from normal duo-queue partners, I was typically denied and told to earn my rank, which I appreciated in the long run. With the dynamic queue system, it is easier to play with friends and get carried using teamwork, but this is not a form of bargaining.

The fourth stage of grief is depression. It is heartbreaking to see how many League players actually experience somewhat serious depression due to their inability to climb. While bargaining is a look at the past, depression is a look at the present. Feelings of depression include hopelessness, sadness, emptiness, and an overall feeling of defeat. This depression caused by grieving is not the same as the mental illness, and should not be confused as such.

Depression in League of Legends is usually the point in which one considers quitting the game. It is not uncommon to take a break, and it is actually quite advisable. In extreme cases, you want to never play again. Perhaps you stop talking to your friends because of it. The feeling of crushing defeat that you are bad at the game and cannot get better, so why even try floods your mind. Depression is horrific. League should be a place where you have fun and escape reality and battle on the fields of Runeterra and ignore everything else. It should not be the cause of anguish. If you do begin grieving your inability to climb, this may be a necessary step to improve.

While I never personally experienced depression because of League of Legends, I have a close friend who has, and I was actually the person he came to with his problems. He had a rough life out of game, and League was his escape. He thought he was a great player, always blamed his teammates, and was actually getting worse at the game. After a year or so of being in Bronze he finally made it to silver, only to get demoted and rapidly decline again. Because League of Legends became his life, this depression was far more impactful than on most others. He dropped out of school and stopped talking to his friends because of his real world depression and committed himself to the game as a form of solace, only to be emotionally crushed there too. He threatened to quit multiple times, but as strong as his addiction was, he never really could, only to continue to spiral him in this endless cycle of grief. I will spare the darker details, but he did improve emotionally and is doing quite well now. His advice would be to talk it out with friends. Communication is the best solution for depression. The ideal way to fix the problem is take a break from the game, talk about it with your friends, and then go back to the game with a fresh mindset and work on personal improvements. Because he did this, he was able to make it to the final stage of grief that everyone who enters it should be striving for.

The fifth and final stage of grief is acceptance. This is the stage that makes it all worth it. The pain, the sorrow, and the anger all comes to an end and you realize what you have been fighting was not in vain. A common misconception is that acceptance is becoming okay or alright with the problem. While this can be part of it, the real acceptance is knowing that the problem is there and starting to deal with it.

This is where the fun starts. Look back at your struggles and realize why they happened. You were in denial that you were bad, and felt it was not your fault. Realize you are not as good as you thought, and work to improve. You were angry at your teammates. Realize that while they may not always be great, there is always something you can do whether it is communication to work as a team or carrying by yourself (I know that is easier said than done). You were bargaining for shortcuts or to just become better out of the blue. Work on it. Analyze what you need to fix and fix it. You were depressed and wanted to give up. You didn’t, otherwise you would have never gotten to the acceptance stage. That is a triumph in and of itself.

This was my breakthrough moment. I finally accepted that I didn’t deserve to be a higher rank than where I was. I looked at why this was the case. My map awareness was atrocious, I never communicated with my team, I just played whatever I felt like, and I did not take ranked seriously. So I buckled down. I focused more on my team's movements, started contributing to team decision making, I picked a role and focused on a few champions, and I decided that if I want to be able to queue up with my diamond friends, I needed to get to at least platinum, and I reached that goal last year, and it has made playing a more enjoyable experience. I dealt with this grief and other issues, but was able to clear my head to improve, and you can too. While you cannot always jump to the acceptance stage and work on improving, know that if you work on your problems, you can reach it eventually.

I hope you enjoyed this look at the Psychology of Ranked. If you have any questions or want someone to talk to about these issues, feel free to contact me as I am always available, my contact information is on my bio page. As always thank you for reading, let me know how to improve my articles, and keep an eye out for my future content.

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