Today marks the official start for League of Legends competitive Season Two. If, like me, you aren’t on a pro team or striving to become one, the launch is a bit anticlimactic. All except for the introduction of Ranked Teams.

With the arrival of Season Two, Riot has released the Ranked Team feature. Through the Summoner profile pane you can now create and join Ranked Teams, all of which will hold a separate ELO. It’s a nice feature for allowing players to get ranked with various groups of players at various skill levels. The teams come free-of-charge; all you need is an account with Summoner level 30.

Each Summoner can be a part of up to five teams, which seems generous. I know I definitely don’t play with enough people on a regular basis to get on five teams. It’s pretty nice to have the extra headroom, though. Riot also added a special “Ranked Team Draft” to the invite screen, making it somewhat easier to invite just the people from your team.

Along with Ranked Teams, Riot has put together a competitive minisite for all the competitive news. Check it out when you have a chance.

Will you be making a ranked team today?

I was worried this would happen. As the end of Season One drew to a close, I had a goal in mind: I wanted to get gold rating. There wasn’t really a personal reason, either. There was a reward; a reward that I wouldn’t use very much, but still, it was something I could point to and say, “I got that because I did X.”

It was a grind, too. I had to play a lot of games to hit gold. The grind pretty much killed any desire I had to play Lee Sin beyond the finish. I got incredibly close to the 1520 mark and then dropped ELO several times. But still, it was a goal. It was something to shoot for. It was a lot of fun.

Fast forward six weeks or so and I’m having a little trouble enjoying the game like I used to. There aren’t any in-game goals for me to strive for. I could try to rank up my solo queue ELO, but to what end? More ranking up? Not exactly a compelling sales pitch.

I know League can’t always be my number one game, but I do think there’s a lot more to be done to keep veteran players interested in the game. The Jarvan skin was a great idea – why not produce more skins that could be tied to certain achievements. Win 250/500/1000 ranked games, get a cool skin. Play 10 ranked games, get a one-time, one-day IP boost. These kind of things don’t cost a lot of money to put into the game and encourage more players to try more things. My assumption, which I suppose could be totally wrong, is that the more time players spend enjoying games, the more likely they are to spend on content.

Even if that assumption can’t be backed by data, it certainly breeds goodwill with the playerbase. Why not reward players for spending time with the game?

What are your thoughts? Are you still going strong with LoL or are other games starting to steal your attention. Has Dominion been enough to keep you coming back?

Five days ago I was totally content to stick with my silver ranked rating. I had silver in both 3v3 Team and 5v5 Solo, which meant I had a little extra leeway to try my hand at a gold rating. I thought it was impossible. I mean that. I’m not trying to say I did something amazing, just that I was so used to losing because of things outside my control. My teammates would feed or get caught way out of position or ignore teamfights. It’s a mess I usually avoid because the combination of trying to rank up and watching a team fall apart ends nowhere good.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, that I would like to get that Gold rating. There’s not really a reason. I don’t play Jarvan. I don’t post on the forums much, if at all, so the rewards don’t really hold anything for me. I think I was just happy to have a goal in the game, a benchmark with some sort of associated reward (more on this in a post later today). In a game that I thought would be a tough match, my team steamrolled to the final victory that put me over into gold.

Most of my wins happened because I focused on the following four things. They didn’t work in every game, but they were key to most of my victories. If you’re trying to rank up in Solo 5v5, these are four things that can help.

Planning in the Pre-Game Lobby

I know. I know this one is nearly impossible. I know this is extremely frustrating. I know. But try to keep your cool when you queue up. There are enough people shooting for rewards that most of them will try to cooperate. Some of them might even pick for you and trade. I started entering games and immediately saying what I do best – jungle/AP carry/AD carry. Those are my strengths and I know it. I play a decent support, but plenty of people are better than me, so I’m willing to let them take a shot.

Playing Aggressive Junglers

Ever since my Champ of the Week with Lee Sin I’ve been in love with the guy. He can come out of the jungle incredibly early with enough damage to snag a first blood or force the use of Flash from an opponent. If you want to rank up fast, play an aggressive jungler. From what I’ve seen, players above the 1300 mark mostly know what they should be doing, they just tend not to do it. They overextend. They don’t ward or they ward too little. They don’t know jungle routes well enough to CV you or know when you might be ganking.

Aggressive junglers – Lee Sin, Udyr, Xin Zhao, Fiddle and even Nocturne – can come out of the jungle before level six with tools to secure a kill. If you can support your team with ganks, you can help them win the early game, even against champions like Singed and Mordekaiser, which can often win the game.

Buy an Oracle’s Elixir

Vision is everything. Being able to see and predict what the enemy team is doing makes your team’s job much easier. You’ll know where to gank, when an enemy is overextended, when they’re trying to secure dragon, and what sort of items they’re buying. Taking that advantage away from the enemy team is just as good as having it yourself, and often secures your own wards by preventing vision to the enemy of where your wards are placed. Buying an Oracle’s early in the game, especially with one of the aggressive junglers, can help you secure dragon, giving your team a healthy gold advantage along with the vision advantage.

It should go without saying that you’ll need to play a little safer than usual when you’re wearing an Oracle. Losing 400g early in the game won’t do you any good.

Baron as Early as Possible

There’s no way to deny this one simple fact: you won’t always have good teammates. Sometimes you’ll have bad ones. Sometimes you’ll have very bad ones. Those games are still winnable, but you need absolutely every single advantage you can get. Baron is a massive advantage, not just for the buff but for the gold it will provide your team. If you can organize all five of your teammates around Baron, he’s relatively easy to take down, even early in the game. You’ll want to do it when the enemy team is elsewhere, though. A contested Baron fight early in the game is almost always a sure death for the team trying to take Baron. If you can take Baron early, it could give your team the edge they need to beat a better skilled or better composed opponent.

Conclusion

It can be done. It will probably be frustrating. It will probably be slow going unless you get incredibly lucky on the teammate front. But seriously, it can be done. I climbed from the mid 1300s to the mid 1500s over the course of a couple weeks. It wasn’t the most fun I’ve had in the game, but it was cool to have a goal and try to find ways to reach that goal. Now I just might have to start playing some Jarvan or posting on the forums. You know, strut my stuff a little bit.

I’ve tried to avoid putting much stock in my ranked ELO in the past. While it is fun to try to climb the ranks, it can also be maddening, and I just don’t have that special sauce that helps people jump past the 1500 barrier and continue to climb. When I found out there were some summoner profile perks, though, I though it might be cool to try to snag at least a silver rating. As you can see in the picture above, I’ve managed to secure silver in both 3v3 and solo 5v5. Silver summoner profile frame, here I come.

Alright, it’s not that exciting. I would love to hit gold status, but that feels pretty much out of my grasp, if I’m honest. I’ve been stricken with the typical trolls and ragers in much of my solo experience lately, so I think I might just stick to silver.

I know some of you sitting pretty at gold status, ready to rock your fancy Jarvan skin. Anyone out there going for platinum? Any of you close to reaching one of the status benchmarks? If you haven’t heard, you can find out more about the different status levels on the official forums. You better start playing some ranked, though. Season One will be officially capped off at the next downtime.

In between my Vayne testing and the occasional Kog’Maw game, I’ve been keeping up with my quest to get the 76/76 ranked champion wins. There have been some tedious games and I’ve had more than one Ryze win snatched out from under me by leavers or sheer foolishness. After picking up my Karma win this afternoon, I’m up to 74/76 champion wins, with just Ryze and Vayne left on the list.

My hardest won victory has definitely been Jarvan. I know he’s strong but I just couldn’t seem to get him to work with my team comps. I’m not really sure what it was, but since I first made the post about this little challenge I had to try six times before I finally managed a win.

Here’s a look at the champion list I started with. The crossed out names have been accomplished and the number denotes the attempts made, including the victory game.

Alistar: 3
Eve: 1
Jarvan: 6
Karma: 3
Karthus: 1
Lee Sin: 3, but I fed hard in the win game. Totally got carried.
Maokai: 1
Rumble: 1
Ryze: 4
Soraka: 2
Vayne: 1

My one Vayne attempt was nothing short of infuriating. I was up against Soraka and Alistar, with Tryndamere, Kassadin, and Rumble to support them. It was utterly impossible to get a kill. At one point in the game – mind you we surrendered at like 23 minutes so this was early – I think I counted 17 turret hits on Alistar in a row. All the same, this has been a lot of fun, even with its frustrating moments.

My attempt to get a ranked win with all 75 champions is going well, at least for what I expected. I’ve managed to pick up a few first-attempt wins, which feels really good. Karthus was a one shot, as were Eve and Rumble. I expected the latter two to be easy, but the Karthus win was a pleasant surprise.

Ryze and Alistar continue to give me trouble. I’ve had solid starts with both champions in several games, but my teammates just can’t find a way to work with another. It’s painful.

I also had one extremely frustrating game last night in which I was paired with an unranked Malphite, even though he hadn’t duo queued with anyone. You can see the teams in the screenshot above. My own team’s rankings, in order from top to bottom, is as follows:

1324
1321
1337
1320
Unranked

The enemy team, again from top to bottom, was:

1356
1353
1350
1376
1315

The last two players on the enemy team also duo queued together, which I’ve always seen as an advantage, especially when the two players are so close in ELO. This sort of thing just shouldn’t happen in the matchmaking system. Even if that unranked player was lying for some reason and actually did duo with another player, we were outmatched as far as ELO is concerned. I know ELO isn’t a very good gauge of player skill, but when a player is dumped into a match 120 points above his ELO, against higher-rated duo queue to boot, well, I expect about the outcome I got. He bought Ninja Tabi against a very limited physical team and “initiated” by ulting one of the enemy players at a time, most often Xin Zhao. It was a mess.

Like I said, though, this is going better than expected. I just lost another with Ryze, bringing my total attempts with him to three. We’ll see if I have more tim this afternoon to try again.

I often find myself short on things to do in League of Legends. I like a ton of champions so I’m constantly switching things up, trying new builds, playing silly comps. Even that gets old eventually, which is why I’d really like to see Riot flesh out its statistics sometime, oh, in the next millenium. In the meantime, I’m working with what I’ve got, which unfortunately means ranked stats.

Even the ranked stat system is pretty slim in terms of its usefulness. I still check up on my different champions here and there, though. For instance, I recently started loving Veigar, so I’ve been pulling him into ranked on occasion. I’m currently at an 80 percent win rate (4/5) with a KDA ratio of 5.8:1.

There is one stat I would really like to round out, for no reason other than I think it would be cool. I currently have ranked wins with 65 of the 75 champions in play. My hope is to get to 75, though that likely won’t happen before next week (especially if my games keep going the way they have been), so it will probably have to be 76/76 at the earliest. The current list of champions I have yet to win with is as follows:

Alistar
Eve (really thought I did this but apparently not)
Jarvan
Karma
Karthus
Lee Sin
Maokai
Rumble
Ryze
Soraka

It’s not a bad mix of champions, though they are mostly my least favorites. I like Ryze, but he doesn’t fit a lot of comps very well. Rumble, Jarvan, Karma, Maokai, Lee Sin, and Soraka are all champions I just flat out don’t enjoy playing, which leaves me Eve, Alistar, and Karthus. I thought I had an Alistar win coming today but my team just fell apart. Our Kassadin was 0-11 and yet blaming the rest of the team.

I know a lot of you guys don’t play ranked. For those that do, how many champs have you won with?

I make the distinction between night and day because night games are a very different animal. While daytime I usually expect someone on either team to know what they’re doing, nighttime that cannot be assumed. Late night games are this crazy hodgepodge of people playing toons they don’t know, crazy level one teamfights, complete and utter indifference to teammate requests for help, the same indifference toward map and buff control. I know, it sounds a lot like normal ranked games, and it is, just turned up about a hundred decibels and driving a ninety miles an hour toward a flaming brick wall. Heimer doesn’t get banned. Are you starting to see what I mean?

In a way it’s been a lot of fun. I stopped placing much stock in ranked queues a while ago, so it doesn’t bother me much that I’m seeing players go well into the double digits on kills again, or that games swing violently back and forth between one side’s advantage and the other’s. It’s been hectic in an enjoyable way.

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.