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?

Earlier this week I was really excited to be playing ranked solo 5v5. I was making my way up the charts, thanks in part to good luck with teammates. My allies were cooperative and ready to coordinate, and chose teams that had a good mix of magic and physical damage, tankiness and crowd control. I made it from the high 1300s to 1530 in just a couple days. It was great.

That all changed at the start of the weekend. I played a few games for some Miss Fortune testing on Friday and it was loss after loss. Teammates weren’t paying attention, they were making bad champion choices, arguing about who would take middle, never bothering with dragon. I plummeted, all the way down to 1412 in something like seven straight losses, and I haven’t been able to pull myself back up.

I’ve pictured one of my most recent losses above. As you can see, my teammates were feeding early and often. Singed was 0-7 by the 18-minute mark. It wasn’t that he had a tough lane – he really didn’t – but he was running into fights he had no chance of living through. After engaging Warwick for a spell, I watched him start to run away at 200 hp just to go back in because Fling was off cooldown against a 500 hp Warwick. He died, of course, and it wasn’t the first time.

It’s strange how this game runs in streaks. I want to say that it points to a problem in the matchmaking system, but I don’t know if that’s accurate. I do think matchmaking needs to account for ELOs that drop dramatically in a short period of time. You don’t want to artificially inflate a player’s ELO so that he’s in a bracket he doesn’t belong in, but it’s also absurd that I can drop more than 100 ELO in a couple games, largely because of underskilled teammates. What if matchmaking tried to make you the lowest ELO player on a team if you lost, say, four games in a row. Losing that many games in a row is indicative of a problem with the MM system. Either a player who shouldn’t have been winning so many games was winning and he’s beyond his means, or a player is losing more games than he should, likely because the other team overmatches his own. I think the system should try to correct itself to better provide the service it’s designed to provide.

A couple months back I went on a massive losing streak. I dropped something like 23 games over the course of just a couple days. It was awful, and now it’s back.

I should say that there is a bright spot. Over the past two weeks or so I’ve been blowing through some wins, all the way from my typical 65 games or so above .500 to nearly 80. It was a great run. But today for some reason, I just can’t win. It’s not like I’m cutting it close either. We’re talking losses that are decided in the first five minutes of the game (I know some of you guys don’t believe that can happen, but when multiple turrets are down and you’re looking at a ten kill deficit, it’s over). In most cases I have teammates that are feeding rampantly, or choosing completely ridiculous comps. I’ve tried to dodge the worst of them, only to be paired with either the same players or see very similar comps.

I start to wonder if Riot doesn’t update the ELO system on a weekly basis instead of dynamically, so my ELO shifts to create these streaks. I know I’m not top ELO, but I’m close. In fact, on my higher win streaks I was getting paired with top ELO players regularly. I think because I’m a higher ELO, though, I tend to be the guy meant to “balance” my team. The other team will all be mid-high players, while my team tends to look like mostly mid players with me and maybe one mid-high ELO player. It’s a pretty raw deal, and usually ends with a loss for me. In one particularly bad TT game today I asked if my team was new to the map. My Jax had played TT precisely once.

I promise, guys, I’ll stop bitching about my extended losing streak soon. It’s actually starting to look like things might come around. I had a really nice string of games tonight, highlighted by an exciting Kennen victory in which I picked up a quada-kill. It was good times.

Bitching aside, I am curious what your experience has been lately. For a long while there, and I mean 150 games or so, it seemed like matchmaking was treating me just fine. I was getting the occasional player I thought was probably out of his league, but for the most part games were won or lost based on errors and poor judgement, not a complete lack of skill.

Lately, though, it’s been a wreck. I had my bout with seriously noob teammates who were still level 30, but my experience since has been punctuated by anomalies like a game earlier tonight in which my team’s Warwick had played just 33 games. As someone with approximately 1500 games under my belt, I was more than a little surprised. We dominated that game, pushed to nexus in 20 minutes legitimately, but it still made little sense considering my opponents were all level 30.

A good friend also reported a game on TT recently where he was matched against two level 1 characters, both of which had zero wins. Granted, they were a premade with a friend, but even then, should they be paired up against a guy I regularly play and win with? They were beaten soundly, 13-0 in 18 minutes. That’s hardly even fun for the winning team, much less the losing side.

So how have things been – average, good, or much worse than normal? I know my ELO is headed back in the right direction, but even the matches I’ve won have had their share of what I would call mid-tier/average players on both teams.

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.