My Story

Hello my name is Alex Donahue and I’m a Diamond 3 League of Legends player that has been playing ranked since season 3. I was placed at the rank of bronze 1 at the beginning of season 3, and like many people I developed a very toxic attitude. I didn’t flame people in chat, but I felt I was much better than all the people in my games and that the only thing holding me back from climbing was bad luck on the teammates I was given. Now I realize how silly I was.

So after slowly climbing my way up the ladder I managed to get to gold before season 3 ended, but the grind was incredibly slow, and it was clear to me that I needed to change something in order for me to climb. The first thing that pops into my head is “Maybe I’m playing the wrong champions.” So I play with a few different picks and eventually in season 4 I get stuck at gold 3 and cannot climb for the life of me. I hovered around that elo for months, there was seemingly nothing that I could do in my head. This is when I discovered the secret of how to climb.I had grown tired of playing so many games in gold and I just didn't really care anymore. I started playing the game more for fun in ranked, and through this my eyes were opened. Through my more laid back attitude I stopped tunneling on the mistakes my team were making and noticing mine more often. Suddenly I hit gold 2, gold 1, and before you know it I’m breezing through plat into my diamond promos. This didn’t happen because of some op champ I picked up or luck, this was a simple mentality change I developed. I stopped playing the game to win, I started playing the game to improve.

The Right Mindset

Sometimes it’s hard, but sooner or later you have to admit that you are not better than your division, and once you do that losing becomes so much easier. Learning to take losses on the chin and improving from games to games is what truly makes you a better player. In some ways losing is actually better than winning. Stomping on players weaker than me never gets me better, I’m only flexing what I have, but when I face a better player that muscle rips and tears, but after the beating it grows back, stronger than ever. So take those losses, don't ever be afraid to lose, but do be afraid of being complacent. You should strive to learn new techniques and strategies when you play.

This is the part of the argument where someone comes along and says something like, “But Alex I always win lane but I can never win because all my other lanes are always feeding.” First off you’re lying to yourself, and second off you’re in luck because you just pointed out your flaw, pushing leads. If you are not winning most of your games you are making mistakes, you just have to open your eyes and look for them. If you really need anymore convincing look at the pro player Wildturtle. For a while Wildturtle managed to hold 4 accounts in challenger, that’s 4 accounts that he personally played through his placement matches and climbed all the way to challenger with. He never complained about teammates or looked for excuses because he didn’t have to, he simply dominated every single game because of his insane skill and game knowledge. He does every little tiny thing better than most people that play this game, and if you really want to climb you should strive to improve your overall game, because when you are significantly better than the people you play with the game becomes really easy.

Improvement

Now you can't just go into games and not think about what you're doing. You won't get any better just taking losses and not thinking about them. Take some time after each game and make an attempt to evaluate what went wrong. Maybe you die too often, maybe you are too far behind on cs and your opponent hits item spikes before you. You need to evaluate these things and then set some goals for what you will work on improving. Back when I was in gold I used to set a goal to hit 80 cs at 10 min. every game. I wouldn't harass my opponent, I wouldn't do anything aggressive, I would just make sure I got that cs. After I was confident I would get that every game I would then focus on warding at proper times, then poking and so on until I was really solid at everything. I can't tell you exactly what to do because everyone is different, so evaluating what you need to do personally is very important.

If you ever find yourself in a position where you don't know what you are doing wrong then don't hesitate to watch a pro player in your role and study exactly what he does. The beautiful thing about League of Legends is that you have hours upon hours of footage from professional players that is readily available through videos and streamed 24/7. In this sense there is no excuse to be ignorant on how to improve, all the information is out there waiting for you to grab it. Just make sure whoever you watch is also taking the game seriously, information from a troll isn't going to be the best even if they are high elo.

Conclusion

People try to make this game out to be rocket science when it really isn't. There isn't a shortcut champion or method that you can just pick up and dominate with. Like any other thing you do that is worthwhile it takes time and effort to get better. If you decide to put in the effort and the play the game to improve rather than blaming teammates for all your shortcomings, I can guarantee that you will become a much better player compared to performing the latter.

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