Tag: losses (Page 1 of 2)

      How do you respond to losing?

      September 30, 2010 /

      Defeat screen.

      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?

      Editorial, league of legends

      My luck has officially run out

      September 12, 2010 /

      failure

      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.

      Editorial, league of legends

      What’s the funniest insult you’ve seen or received?

      August 14, 2010 /

      Penny Arcade anonymity.

      There’s a funny thread in the forum right now, simply asking for the funniest insult you’ve seen or received. There are a few immediate classics inside, though my favorite has to be from Zileas. He says his funniest was the following:

      Your Mom is like a free to play game. You can unlock her with effort, but it’s a lot quicker just to pay $5.

      So what’s your funniest in-game insult? Though this doesn’t exactly qualify, one of the more hilarious things I’ve seen lately was a Vlad on my team who had taken mid and started to rage after a buddy I was playing with used Shen’s ult on a low health Ashe instead of the similarly low health Vlad. He started calling “gg,” threating to feed, and verbally abusing my friend for his use of Shen’s ult. At the time, Shen was 0/1/9 – pretty much a textbook definition of a solid tank – our team was up at least 10 kills and we were up on turrets. The other team surrendered at 26 minutes, but to read chat you’d think we had been losing since the five minute mark.

      league of legends

      LoL: The painful losing streak is back

      June 18, 2010 /

      League of Legends.

      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.

      league of legends

      LoL: Some losing streak stats

      April 20, 2010 /

      Defeat screen.It’s a lot of fun to go on big winning streaks in League of Legends. I’m sure it’s happened to most of you at some point. You know that feeling, where you just can’t seem to lose. You’re playing Katarina for the hell of it and going legendary, running AP Yi and somehow still pulling wins. It’s a great feeling, and I love writing about the stats in those crazy streaks.

      Then we have the losing streaks. They are the complete and total opposite of fun. They are unfun. They are joyless. They can be so painful they’ll make you take a break from the game for a week at a time. I’m in such a losing streak, and though I’m not giving up the game, I thought it would be cool to post some stats about my latest big losing streak.

      Let me start by saying that my teammates have not been holding up their end of the bargain. I know, everyone says that, but in most every game I’ve lost recently I’ve had a solid farm and in some cases a pretty decent score. Despite the facts, though, I’ve been losing a lot – I’m down from 75 games over .500 to just 64, all in the last four days. Like I said, it’s been rough. At one point I had lost eight in a row.

      Here’s the stat list on my most recent 10:
      Defeat: 0-3-0 Karthus
      Defeat: 4-5-5 Tristana
      Victory: 3-1-5 Tryndamere
      Defeat: 5-5-6 Twisted Fate
      Victory: 10-0-3 Kennen
      Defeat: 4-1-1 Ashe
      Defeat: 1-8-5 Soraka
      Defeat: 5-0-4 Nidalee
      Defeat: 0-1-0 Soraka
      Defeat: 3-3-2 Singed

      For the most part it’s not a bad spread of stats. Granted, that Soraka game was pathetic, but my deaths were situational, usually I was trying to save a teammate that had run off solo or attempting to get my team to commit (for some reason our Shen refused to taunt anyone unless he was directly on top of them). We were never grouped up so one person would get burnt and I would blow everything I had trying to keep that individual alive and have nothing left for the teamfights. It was a bad game.

      The thing that really bothers me about this particular streak of losses is that my team tended to lose the game in the laning phase, before anything could actually happen. I was either stuck mid watching both of my side lanes feed or standing in a lane next to someone to whom I was typing furiously, begging them to play more conservatively.

      Whatever the reasons, though, you have to take the good with the bad, especially if you’re going to solo queue. Here’s hoping things turn around soon.

      league of legends

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