Everyone wants to be ranked higher than they are. Bronze players want to be Silver, Silver players want to be Gold, Platinum players want to be Diamond and Master players want to be Challenger. But not everyone knows how or wants to actually improve; many players look at their ranking and think “I belong higher” or “I get bad teammates, I’m way better than everyone else at this MMR.” Such thinking is probably the biggest thing holding people back from improving, and improving is the only way to climb the ladder in the long run.

This list of things to think about and improve on is aimed at the lowest tier of ranked players in Bronze, but it can easily apply to higher tiers as well. Don’t take anything at face value, as no two players are the same, so what needs to be worked on varies greatly from case to case. Most of the list came from observing and discussing the game with some of my lower-ranked friends, and the results are the things that stood out as common points for low-Elo players to consider.

Recognize that there is a reason your rank is what it is. If you were in fact better than your current rank, you’d be climbing. If you are climbing, great! You still have lots of room to improve. No one is perfect (not even Faker, though he comes closest) and the worse you are, the more things you have that you can work on. A Master player only has so much they can do to improve because they only have so many holes in their game. A Bronze player probably needs to work on almost everything, which means that things to practice are much easier to find. The first step to getting better is recognizing that you do in fact need to get better, and that whatever you are doing currently is not going to get you to a better rank or you’d be on your way there already.

Nearly half of all ranked players are in Bronze.

Realize that, yes, all your teammates are also at your rank for a reason and, no, there’s nothing you can say or do to remedy that. If you’re in Bronze, the people you play with will also be Bronze, so it’s very likely that they will make mistakes. Your opponents are Bronze as well, though, and so if you get to the point where you are better than Bronze, your team has a huge advantage because you are the best player in the game! Until you get to that point, though, keep in mind that informing someone that they are bad doesn’t accomplish anything. The chance that anyone makes a huge improvement based off the advice of their teammates over the course of a single solo queue game is incredibly small. If they are able to improve that quickly, they probably won’t stay at their current rank for long. Flaming your teammates does nothing to help you get better at the game in the long run, and even if they do look at their mistakes and improve on their own it probably won’t affect your own skill at the game whatsoever.

Yes, it’s frustrating watching your teammates make silly mistakes that cost you the game, but the fact that you can recognize the mistakes is already a good thing. Similarly, if someone is flaming you, don’t be afraid to mute them. They probably aren’t going to type out some grand strategy that will change your life, so if they aren’t being constructive there’s no reason to continue listening to what they say. The next game you play you will likely have entirely different teammates, so don’t worry about what they think of you or really anything they are doing. If they do something you can learn from, take note, but don’t focus on the frustrating things they do because it won’t affect you even in the next game except to put you on tilt.

Play to improve over time, not to win individual games. That’s not to say don’t try to win! Of course you are trying to win every game and that is the long term goal. But the way you will consistently win more games is simply by being better at the game overall, and if all you care about is winning you won’t improve. Let’s say you find some great way to cheese the enemy jungler, and you do it every game and go on a big win streak. That’s nice and all, but if you’re only winning off that cheese and when the cheese stops working because it gets nerfed in a patch, your rank improves to where it doesn’t catch people off guard anymore, or the meta shifts and your cheese doesn’t work on the meta junglers, you’ll probably drop right back to where you were before, with no real net change in your ability. If you only play what’s strongest on each patch, you can climb a bit by just having a more powerful champion than the other team but once again, if the meta changes to things you can’t play well you’ll fall. Long term you need to find general skills and strategies to pick up and in so doing you’ll slowly improve. Whatever Elo you gain through actual hard work and practice will probably stick and you can truly say you belong in that higher place.

The graph of your MMR will probably look more like the first one than the fourth one, but that's usually a good thing.

Figure out what you are good at and not so good at. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses as a player, both in general and relative to the players around their rank. You might be more mechanically proficient, you might have better sense of where to be on the map and where the enemy team might be, or you might have better ideas of how to gain and maintain vision. League of Legends offers so many ways to express skill, and being awesome at any of them is enough to climb to the highest tiers. Most people aren’t awesome at any skill, and that’s fine. Simply being pretty good or even decent at one is enough to be better than the lowest ranks. Once you figure out your best attribute, honing that one is often all you need to get to possibly the next tier, and if you can improve your weaker traits too then you can reach even further heights. The two most basic areas to work on, and the easiest to learn, are mechanics and decision making.

Improve your decision making! Even though I said you can work on whatever you feel like your strengths are, everyone should try to make better decisions. Not only is it, in my opinion, the quickest and easiest way to get better at the game, it also can be done at the same time as any other skill. You can improve your farming while making better decisions. You can improve your kiting, your dueling, your team fighting, your objective control, your rotations or anything else you can think of while making better decisions. Decision making is part of every single thing you do in a game of League, from champ select to late game team fights. Did you pick yourself into a match-up you can’t play? You could have decided to pick a different champion. Did you take Courage of the Colossus on Nunu? You could have chosen a different keystone. Did you not watch the jungle entrance level 1 and your team got invaded? You could have chosen to play from the beginning of the game. Whether it’s deciding not to tower dive someone at level 2 or deciding to stop chasing the enemy Riven and taking a tower or Baron, or deciding to peel for your ADC instead of solo diving the enemy backline, there’s always decisions you are making and often there could be a better choice than the one you made. This applies to everyone; many decisions you make in League happen in less than a second and no one makes the perfect choice every time. The players who consistently win and do well are the ones who make the better decision more often than not. It’s possible to outplay your way out of a mistake you make, but it’s much easier to just not make the mistake in the first place.

Sometimes even professional teams make extraordinarily poor decisions.

To reiterate a point from the last part, the game begins in champ select. The most common advice people give to players that want to improve is to stick to a small pool of champions for your main role, perhaps from 3-5, and then one or two champs in off roles for when you don’t get to play your main role. You should be able to play every role somewhat competently because you never know when you might be autofilled, but focusing one role and a few champions for that role is one of the first things you should start doing. Knowing the ins and outs of a champion and its match-ups means you don’t need to focus on basics like combos, last hitting, or how safe you have to play. Instead, you can work on your decision making and overall game sense and improve at League of Legends, not improving at just playing Katarina.

After you’ve found a position that works for your playstyle and you’re comfortable in, find the role and champions that fit that role that are right for you. The lower ranked you are, the “easier” champions you should go for. If you’re Bronze or Silver, chances are you aren’t good enough at Yasuo or Riven to merit playing them in ranked. While mastering such high skillcap champions is rewarding, you’ll have to spend hundreds of games learning the intricacies of their mechanics, which is time you’re not learning how to play League. If you play Annie or Maokai instead, you can work on rotating or engaging instead of worrying about how you’re going to combo. By the time you improve enough to reach Platinum or Diamond using these straightforward champions, you’ll likely have learned enough to succeed on the harder champs too. Another thing to keep in mind is that being able to engage a fight is a huge deal at lower ranks. Champions like Malphite and Amumu have long been far stronger at low Elo than at higher levels because while there is lots of room to outplay them and take advantage of the things they’re missing, they also have huge “Go in NOW” flags on their engage tools that even the lowest level player will see. Often times low MMR games devolve into ARAM after lane phase, and having a big engage like an Amumu ult or an Annie Tibbers that is both easy to pull off and very visible will help you learn what are good times to initiate fights are and help your team to follow up on them.

A big "Go in now!" signal can really bring together team cohesion, especially in solo queue.

Once you’re in game, choosing builds is something that seems simple but makes a huge difference. In Bronze and Silver people build items that make no sense on their champion, or have long fallen out of the meta, or are just noob traps in general. The same goes for runes and masteries. Having optimal rune and mastery setups makes playing the game much easier. When I smurf in low Elo I see 2-3 people every game with the wrong keystone mastery, and then even more who build suboptimal items. Look at how high Elo players build their champions on websites or streams; they probably have a much better idea of what works than your average Silver player. Also, don’t be afraid to build items situationally. If the enemy team has 4 magic damage champions, you probably don’t need your Thornmail, for instance. You probably never need to build Ohmwrecker or Wit’s End. If everyone rushes Statikk Shiv on Vayne and runs Warlord’s Bloodlust, your Blade of the Ruined King with Fervor of Battle combination probably isn’t good anymore. Changing how you build your champion requires no mechanical skill but has just as big of an impact on how you play as your ability to make flashy outplays.

Finally, don’t give up! Don’t give up in game or out of game. Just because you’re not climbing immediately, it doesn’t mean you’re not improving. Being persistent with your practice is how you will get better in the long run. Also, nearly every game, especially at low ranks, is winnable. Unless the game is something ridiculous like 3v5 you can probably come back and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Low ranked players throw leads that look insurmountable all the time because they don’t know how to close out games. If your team is flaming and raging at each other, try to defuse the situation. Tell people to mute each other, remind them that the other team’s players are really bad, or set out a list of goals that will lead to victory. Saying something as simple as “All we need is to win one teamfight and rush down Baron and we’re back in the game” can placate even the saltiest teams. If the game is truly unwinnable, try to find some mechanic you can work on, or see how much CS you can get before the enemy team ends. If you look at every game as an opportunity to improve, you’ll find yourself climbing in no time.

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