I’ve been spending less time than usual in ranked games since crossing the 1500 marker for the second time. It’s that “second time” part that’s really important, because it took me a while to make my way back up after dropping as low as 1410ish. Prior to that point, I usually jumped into a new game shortly after losing. I had this sense that I could “erase” the last match by winning another. Unfortunately, we all know the game doesn’t work that way, and more often than not the losses pile up along with the frustration.

I’ve taken a different approach lately. When I lose a game I back off, let myself chill out from the loss before I queue again. It keeps the rage down a bit and even better, it gets me new teammates. I often feel like a losing team tends to lose when they get paired together because a demoralizing defeat just carries over into the next game.

Occasionally I’ll play a few in a row, but it’s usually on nights that I know I’ll be okay dropping 40-50 ELO, but for the most part, I’m sticking to a one and done schedule for losing. How do you handle your losses?

A couple weeks back I decided I was going to take a long break from Twisted Treeline. I like the map, but when I wasn’t playing in a full premade the huge variation in game quality was frustrating. One game my team would win in 18 minutes, the next my team would feed for 18 minutes. I assumed people just didn’t know the map and needed more time to learn.

I made my foray back into the winding woods yesterday and quickly remembered why I had quit. My first game had a feeding Nunu so we lost. The next I had the same Nunu on my team, and though we won (which took far too much “can we please group up” from my end) it was a long and arduous process. The next several games were leaver after leaver, feeder after feeder, save the one game in which I was paired with a duo that had beaten me the game before. I got one leaver who had 10% of his wins in leaves. There should be some pretty harsh penalties for that crap.

Despite my long losing streak from a few days back, I had turned things around. I was back up to 68 games above .500 and winning a decent mix. The TT experience took me down to 61 games but created an even bigger problem. My ELO has now dropped to the point that I’m playing with some seriously inexperienced players. My most recent game was host to a TF that was 0-6 at 15 minutes and a Jax that had 8 creep kills by 20 minutes. There is just no way I can possibly carry that game.

I’ll be spending my time in game over the next week or so trying to get my ELO back up in the hopes of playing with some decent teammates once again. It’s been a rough few days.