mid elo – Fearless Gamer

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.

Evelynn. I feel like I owe you guys an explanation. I made a passing mention of Eve the other day along with some malicious comments and I figure it’s time I come clean. The people I regularly play with know just how much I hate Eve and the reason why, and I think it’s only fair you do too.

First, a little history. I came to LoL from DotA, so I had a pretty good understanding of the game’s basic mechanics. The only thing to learn, really, was the champions. I started off with Kassadin and Master Yi, but after seeing what Twisted Fate would do to a game I saved my IP until I could buy him. He was dominant, but again, I was coming from such a similar game that it was easy for me to maximize his potential.

Then I met Twitch. It was pretty clear that he was this game’s Rikimaru, only stronger because he was ranged and had the ability to hit multiple toons and then nuke. Prior to his nerfs he stayed strong through most of the ELO brackets. Then I met Eve. She seemed strong at first – she got stealth, had good nuking potential, and seemed to break everyone but the strongest toons. Luckily, the LoL designers implemented a consumable even better than gem – Oracle’s Elixir. I bought one early when I laned against an Eve and presto, she was almost completely nullified. It wasn’t quite the same for Twitch because he’s ranged, has an AOE slow, and can still blow up an entire team.

Don’t get me wrong, Eve is great at the lower ELOs. People rarely play to counter one another so she can run around legendary as often as she pleases. That’s actually a bad thing, though, because it pigeonholes players into toons that have limited viability as the player improves and it discourages new players from playing the game because they get stomped by one toon with seemingly no recourse.

What Eve really needs is a complete remake, an overhaul that makes her fun both to play and play against. The last time anyone from Riot commented on her they said Eve was at the bottom of the priority list precisely because she does so well at low ELO. Honestly, that seems like a terrible reason to keep a toon around. Give newer players a chance to get better rather than getting stomped by a truly uninteresting toon.

Tag: mid elo

Finally hit 1500 ELO

LoL: My Eve explanation

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