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’m moving in about a week so my days have become increasingly hectic and I’m starting to lose sleep. It’s not that I’m worried, there’s just a lot to think about so I end up awake fairly late at night twiddling my thumbs. The obvious solution? You guessed it.

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.

My first five ranked matches went surprisingly well. My teammates were (mostly) competent and I walked away 5-0, feeling good. Number six was a little rough.

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.