My first five ranked matches went surprisingly well. My teammates were (mostly) competent and I walked away 5-0, feeling good. Number six was a little rough.

I queued up with Everett and we jumped into a game. At the loading screen it looked a little ugly. We had a Gangplank, which I never trust anymore, and our teammates were struggling to keep up from level one. The enemy Fiddlesticks was completely dominating the game, up to 17 stacks on his Mejai’s at one point – it was bad.

We got lucky, though. Around level 12 their Taric started to chain-DC, giving us a chance to farm up and come back to win. I felt bad for the other guys, but we really did have a better late game team.

Number seven was my first loss, made all the more frustrating by unbearable lag. From what I’ve heard it’s only the ranked queue, but the lag is such that at times I would see two second delay from the time I clicked to the time I casted. The other team had it too, but they were much tankier than we were and could last through the lag spikes much better.

I wouldn’t care nearly as much about the lag if it weren’t in ranked play. Ranked matches are meant to provide a forum for players to show off their best skills and have a ranking that reflects those efforts. When you introduce massive server side lag, you pretty much negate the chances of that happening.