It’s been nearly two months since the launch of Season One and, at the outset, I would never have thought I could pull this off. I finally broke the 1500 ELO barrier.

So far, there isn’t much to report. Players do seem to be marginally concerned about dragon, which is a nice change. I even convinced some teammates to take dragon before we went for the tower that had minions pushed right up on top of it. There are still plenty of inexperienced players, though. Yesterday I played a game in which our Fiddlesticks insisted he take middle, despite our having a Vladimir and maybe a Tristana if I remember correctly. It’s not that Fiddle is a terrible champion, but he’s a shadow of his former self and compared to many of the new characters, he’s a lackluster mid. That was also a game in which my teammate first-picked Master Yi (which the other team countered by taking 3 stuns and two exhausts). That game ended very poorly.

The really surprising part in all of it is that 1500 ELO and above represents the top 5 percent of players in solo queue. These are players who presumably outperform 95 percent of the other players in their queue. Am I delusional in thinking they should know better than to take Fiddle mid? Do I misunderstand my own skill? I think the reality is that all of these things point to the complicated nature of a team game with an individual rating system. At any ELO there will be a large number of players who have been misappropriated, for good or ill. Bad players get highly ranked and good players fester in ELO hell because their teams are either above average or below. It is nice to see that I’ve made my way up the rating list, though. There is some hope of improving your own rating.