Your mental is fine you just suck at league

Some people are clearly way too in their own head for their own good, specifically with sentiments along the lines of “It's not that I don't have the level, just that my mind isn't in the right state.” I’m picking on doaenel here because he seems well known and sort of the direction league content is going in, and for him this isn’t even a problem because it’s better content to go on a giant ragey loss streak and yell at the camera than to peter out in gm and meekly say yeah I’m not that good and hecarim isn’t that strong guess I didn’t play well enough for challenger. But I’d bet there are more of you who blame mental like this without getting thousands of views for it, and for those of you it’s bad.

First, you should be suspicious whenever league players absolve themselves of blame. Blaming your mental has a subtle advantage as an excuse in that it sounds like you’re taking accountability, but really you’re not admitting you’re bad at the video game. A common cope combo is to discount random variance when winning but blame it when losing, and the mental version of that is to say when winning it’s because you’re playing well, but when losing it’s because you mental boomed. “I hit challenger early season but now I’m stuck losers queue” doesn’t get you sympathy whereas “I hit challenger early season but now I’m my own worst enemy and my weird brain is dragging me down” does, so people learn to use the latter.

Second, even if your mental actually is preventing you from climbing, it’s because it’s stopping you from improving, not from winning games you’re already good enough to win. That thought that you are already good enough to win these games but are losing to the voices is what reeks of cope to me. If you want to say you’re not improving because of your mental and that’s why you’re not climbing then sure, fair enough. But then it’s mental—>improvement—>climb, not simply mental—>climb, and I think when people say their mental is the problem they typically mean they already play at a high enough level to climb, and that’s when mental is an excuse for bog standard lack of league of legends skill.

Third, your mental can only be so good, whereas you always have room to get better at league. If you look at the best players, like bobjenkins, isles, cupic, viper, etc., what separates them from you is not that they’re immune to tilt or have some sort of unbreakable iron mental, but that they’re really good at playing kennen or whatever. Streamers with a reputation for having a good mental tend to actually have a bad one, as anyone who seems to overcome a lot of frustrating teams is playing the exact same game as everyone else but struggling more. Instead, the typical player who focuses on the game itself rather than on mentality is who you want to be.

It sounds cooler to be someone with special abilities and talents but also special impediments and challenges to overcome than to be another mediocre NA league player. So even though people struggle with real problems, visible and invisible, I think it’s worth asking if that’s really why you lose league games, as opposed to simply missing your skillshots or gank timings or whatever.

An example of great attitude and sportsmanship: “Finished 2nd in the Dantes Race to chall. Gave it my 100% and just couldn't bring it home. Congrats to @pentaless1 and thank you to everyone who supported me. GGWP” Davemon didn’t blame losing to pentaless on the voices or tiredness or whatever, even though I’m sure some games he thought he played badly. Imo it takes bravery to admit you tried your best and lost, and that’s a character trait to build. Sometimes you give it 100% and lose, and that’s fine, rather than deny it all you can do is learn and improve (and ban nunu).

Roses vs Dandelions

People often disparage NA soloq, yet people often call for investment in NA talent. Where do pro players come from? Delivered by storks? But ok, presumably it’s different people flaming soloq and praising NA talent. Even so, why aren’t the two groups constantly jumping down each other’s throats? In particular, how are you allowed to say invest in NA talent without getting flamed to oblivion by NA soloq haters?

“Invest in NA talent” sounds good, but “pay Los Angeles cost of living for NA soloq players” is insane imo. Really it’s only imaginable in the context of venture capitalists saying here’s millions of dollars, please burn through this stack of bills as quickly and with as few results as possible.

Sorry, to be a bit charitable maybe you could say ok NA soloq in general sucks, but specific players like jojo or gryffinn are good and worth developing, and jojo needed his eg academy year to do so well in lcs. I’m not convinced jojo wouldn’t make lcs playing academy from his bedroom in Toronto, but sure I have no idea what goes into coaching a pro player or pro team. I really don’t know enough about pro play to say definitively that in person teams or 0 ping didn’t help NA players. Maybe it did!

I just don’t like the narrative that there’s all this NA talent that would smurf if given the opportunity but is held back by, like, *infrastructure*. I play with these people, and I despise them! I mean some players are good, but some of them go top when we could win a drag fight, then I see them losing every academy game and cackle to myself when Riot is like yeah clearly we don’t have 16 x 5 = 80 amateur players worth housing in LA, time to gut the scene. Downfall, yummy.

The tank man was challenger in your region for 8 years straight! (<—not a good sign) Who exactly is NA talent? I feel like people have this nebulous idea of “NA talent” that could be developed to be as good KR/CN/EU talent (or better!), but very few concrete names in mind. As someone who actually played thousands of games with NA players, I’d happily in game anyone who praises NA talent without naming specific players.

Sorry again, to be more objective, ranked accounts:

NA - 1,605,916 KR - 3,837,212 EUW - 3,520,557 (EUNE - 1,646,775) CN - ??? untold millions

And that’s on top of ping, and the subjective description of most players with experience on multiple servers. There’s a sort of snowball too where pros think kr soloq is good so they play it so they think it’s good so they play it so they…

What you end up with is upcoming players in other regions that scare the shit out of incumbent pros and will make it given even a sliver of a chance, vs NA players that even given chance after chance just aren’t as good at league of legends, and perform about how you’d expect them to internationally. There’s no reason to expect more of NA players.

It’s roses vs dandelions, but people blame the gardeners…

Credit where it’s due though

Isles ran s13, it’s crazy as a support to lose to someone with more lp than you because you had the better team and still lost (this is also how I cope when I lose to gm supports), but I lost so many games to isles1 and to isles2 and to isles3. At first I was like he did nothing just got lucky adc or something, but it was so many losses to isles I couldn’t even cope, just had to eventually admit yeah isles gaps me hard every game. I also saw busio and vulcan playing a decent amount and I’d need insanely op enchanter items to even go even with them.

Pros and youtube used to be entertaining? I feel like when I started playing league I enjoyed league youtube videos, but either the videos suck now or my tastes changed. I haven’t enjoyed any youtube content in ages, except Riot’s music videos.

Pros are also super boring now. An advantage of paying them peanuts in the old days was you got personalities like qtpie streaming every day, and even beyond that growing their brand in a way I feel like pros don’t today.

Ofc a lot of non pro content creators are bad at league, but something like the dantes tournament where there are good challenger players who are also entertaining is the sweet spot for content for me. Any team with tarzaned and duoking I would watch religiously.

3 splits per season is insane for me

I don’t have the time for league I used to, so I’d probably quit no matter what Riot did, but 3 splits was the nail in the coffin. The cadence of a single big season over the year worked well for me. I liked a long november/december break for the holidays, and disliked the mmr reset forcing me to play games with/against worse players to get back to good games again. I can’t emphasize enough how games frustrate yet bore me after resets, maybe because on enchanter supports playing with/against worse players is not fun for me since even though you win 6/10 and gradually climb the enchanter fun comes less from styling on bad players and more from worshipping viper or someone really good on your team.

I could’ve tried cramming all the league into a single intense split, sitting out the other two. It sounds like a weird mix of fear of missing out and burnout to spend 2/3 of the year not playing league and 1/3 grinding hard. Personally I feel like the old system was very sane, and Riot switched because they saw months when people didn’t play much and, looking at the data, saw they could increase the number of hours played. I wonder if that will be true in the short term, but tire out the playerbase in the long term.

On the other hand, there’s a long tradition of players for whom league is no longer satisfying but a constraint to be satisfied blaming not wanting to play it anymore on Riot, when in reality the game is getting better every year (well, except too much damage). Maybe constant meaningful ranked games will be good, idk.

Coop vs AI

We ban scripters in waves with randomness to better detect them is such copium because these are challenger accounts you can detect with just your eyes that take forever to get banned like https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/Davidav1-NA1 and https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/kosmos-pnede. They’re obvious because usually good mechanics scale with good understanding of the game, because reacting instantly to an ability comes from anticipating it beforehand. So accounts with perfect mechanics but nonsensical decisions are clearly bots.

“Maybe they’re not scripting they’re just good” no they’re not they fking suck lol here’s my favorite example clip. I myself dodge ezreal Q because I’m good and know on seraphine you sit 2 screens away and throw double Q at the wave, and felt like this guy might have some sort of ez Q when in range script. It’s clean but it makes sense. Meanwhile ezreal walks into a tower shot, then to dodge seraphine E walks back into tower and takes another tower shot, losing 40% of his health bar. Even if you know the seraphine E is coming there, you don’t walk into the tower. The dumb play makes no sense, making the perfect dodge bizarre because again usually good movement comes from game knowledge. Also, at the very beginning he does a ridiculously perfect little stutter step around the second seraphine Q, just to walk into the tower. But whatever maybe vanguard will work better.

Internet janitors

My last summonerschool post got removed for “No Rants or Complaint Posts”, maybe because the tone wasn’t sufficiently calm, although I thought it was more constructive than some of the example posts I discussed. Idk, I might be needlessly antagonistic, but it was frustrating to see a lot of people going about learning league wrong, spend a few hours correcting them, then see my post removed.

I also saw Josuha “Jatt” Leesman do a "recap of the Semi-Final weekend and one of the most historic plays in league of legends history (with never before seen voice comms) as well as Narrative for Faker ahead of the World finals which a mod somehow decided was a non league related house tour and deleted, then was like lol ok I will just post interesting stuff on my own site.

That said there are definitely well meaning people on reddit. I now have more sympathy for allowing bad posts because with my own site I can see why you would regurgitate old content for the appearance of activity even if it isn’t truly original. I also was impressed by garentoplane’s work quickly planning and implementing ranked flairs on summonerschool. And it’s not like anyone deliberately sets out to remove good posts, but maybe once a community gets to a certain size mods feel rules need to be strictly enforced, or a few capricious mods are inevitable once you need a certain number of them.

Time for this site

In hindsight a problem with legendsofleague.gg was the time I’d spend fixing it I instead spent playing league. So a bit ago getting game data broke and I never fixed it or went back to the todo list. I do want to get it working again, if only because I dislike how other league sites are run, and fortunately not playing league anymore I’ll have free time to fix it.

Read this to get better at league

https://www.reddit.com/r/summonerschool/comments/171jy67/review_your_replay_for_simple_important_mistakes/ this is the process for improving: review your replays, looking for simple, important mistakes to fix those habits. There are 6 examples of how (not) to do it, although I’d hope most of the people reading legendsofleague don’t need to be told, like, please link account/replay when asking for help. But if you didn’t know that, it’s the first step.

This is the process I always did myself: watch replays, look for mistakes, write them down, look for patterns of mistakes, practice habits to prevent them.

I often see people ask what’s the difference between gm and chall, eg https://www.legendsofleague.gg/league/post/195/what%25E2%2580%2599s%2520the%2520difference%2520between%2520a%2520challenger%2520sona%2520vs%2520a%2520master%252Fgm%2520sona%253F/, and there’s no real answer — in the same way it depends on the player improving from silver to gold, it depends on the player improving from gm to challenger. But these were the habits I personally was trying to practice last season for challenger:

laning - avoid cc, space range keep hp, ward river, off map champ permanence, focus their champ engages warding - ward on edge of vision, yuumi with teammates, look enemies off vision/allies stuck on waves teamfights - stay behind team not in engage clump, moving to/during fight look own position, play champ objectives - after baron reset wait 5 retake vision, after win fight reset before they back on map

The thing about only looking at mistakes and generalizing from those is you might become too risk averse, since you’re only seeing the bad plays (eg “play safe, don’t die” is overly general, not super useful). So these were things I hoped would prevent specific mistakes I kept making. Also they were each for specific stages of the game, because you can’t hold 15 things to work on in mind simultaneously while playing league, so instead I had a .txt file where I could look and see for this stage of the game what should I work on.

laning is when we’re sitting bot

avoid cc: I often lost sona or enchanters vs engage support lanes, especially hook supports, and looking at them it seemed like eating any cc ever is always a mistake, unless it’s obviously ok, but usually eating cc is losing, especially if you’re in range for the enemy adc to follow, though sometimes if you have a much stronger adc it’s winning

space range keep hp: sona q should just be a free q, you shouldn’t take trade in return for it, and often when low hp bad things happen (maybe more supp/adc skill than ppl like to admit is just hands diff good micro in lane/teamfights)

ward river: if winning lane, before pushing up and hitting their tower or poking under tower need to ward tri or river (no clue where exactly wards go in s14 but probably similar principle)

off map champ permanence: I was playing against a twitch at one point and realized I was going more aggressive when I didn’t see him because in my mind we were 2v1 or whatever, but when you don’t see champs on the map is exactly when you need to be careful. Even beyond twitch, when you don’t see champs on the map is when you need to worry they’re in a random bush, or they were mid so you tried to hit tower bot but now they’re coming back bot to gank, or whatever. Object permanence develops around ~7 months old

focus their champ engages: this one is kind of poorly written, it’s partially the same as avoid cc, like just make a list of their engages before the game (naut hook, zac e, mid roam, etc.), but also I think sometimes I was wasting abilities on engage supports with no abilities left, like their rakan who already used W in instead of their adc who does more in an extended fight

warding is sort of midgame when we’re all just running around the map, not fighting but looking for farm and objectives, and as the support for wards

ward on edge of vision: you have the area where you have vision and want to extend it step by step so you don’t die, staying where your champs control sort of goes with the next one

yuumi with teammates: in the same way yuumi is a free kill alone but safe on an ally, other enchanters are much safer with allies, and with an ally even if you die it’s more likely your team gets something in return. Also this warding phase of the game is where you might have multiple choices for lanes/champs you can go to, and if you’re not sure one choice that’s pretty useful in general on enchanter supports is to just follow around the champ on your team who’s doing the best/the most, because you’ll probably do a lot just by being with them

look enemies off vision/allies stuck on waves: when champs are farming they’re stuck not doing anything, often sitting in full vision, so they’re a lot less useful on your team or more dangerous on the enemy team. In the first case, I noticed I’d die trying to ward before my teammates are done farming. In the second, I noticed another sort of object permanence problem where the times I’d die warding were when enemies were off vision

teamfights are when we’re all grouped and fighting, and enchanters and especially sona are ok laning, worse at warding, but better in teamfights, so generally teamfights should be good

stay behind team not in engage clump: enchanter supports are pretty squishy and easy to one shot, so especially vs aoe engage abilities like malph R, hec R, ori R, rakan R, etc., it’s really bad if you get caught in the cc because 1) you’re squishy and die for free without getting anything off and 2) you’re your team’s disengage so if you’re cc chained and bursted you can’t stop the engage. If you’re not clumped they can still, like, solo malph R you (support detected!), but it goes from a probably great play to probably a bad play since now they’re spending big cds solely on you

moving to/during fight look own position: I saw a lot of my deaths were when teammates were fighting maybe a screen or two away so I was trying to move to the fight and stopped paying attention to my own position, then got caught and died to fiddlesticks or rengar or whatever. I think good players tend to go for you when you’re trying to move to a teamfight because it’s a good instinct to join a fight, but sort of forces you into dangerous positions, which is bad. So keep screen on self and be careful of fog or champs not showing while you walk to the fight

play champ: this is kinda useless sounding idk just do what your champ does in the fight

objectives is when after won the fight, I remember back in like season 3 montecristo talking about kills into objectives, now it’s 2023 (wait 2024! I wrote 2023 first lol). Anyways the point is to win the game here without throwing

after baron reset wait 5 retake vision: after everyone gets baron it’s really really bad for someone to die before you get your push set up, the buff only lasts so long so someone dying (and losing it) then making your team wait for them to respawn wastes a lot of your chance to win with baron. Also because you just took baron you may have lost vision on the rest of the map. So the enemy team has a window to look for a pick, I had this happen to me in a game recently and it turned our win into a loss. This goes with looking when your team is stuck on waves, because often after getting baron people will want to push sidelanes before grouping, which can put you in sketchy positions if you try to baron push too soon before they group.

after win fight reset before they back on map: I also had this cost 2 games recently, just in general after winning fights you take turrets, jungle camps, just in general greed as much as you can, but it’s bad to overstay because if they get back on the map while you need to reset you probably throw.

Educators are frauds

You may have noticed that I was never really sure what to say for people looking to improve, and the things I myself had to improve on were very basic (eg object permanence, you should actually be more careful of twitch when you don’t see him). Given that I’ve been challenger for 8 years, I don’t think it’s that I don’t understand how to play and improve at league (but you only play janna! Ok sure riven takes much longer to learn, but that doesn’t mean you can’t explain her in 15 minutes, and regardless I see people acting like support is complicated), but rather that I maintain the proper level of epistemic humility, and people who give more complicated or composed sounding advice are overconfident that it has any basis in or bearing on the actual game.

Specifically content or coaching that takes hours or wades theoretical territory seems like bullshit to me. Not that there’s anything wrong with jabbering on as a fun exercise if you enjoy talking about league or listening — clearly I myself cannot accuse others of being too long winded, verbose, overly wordy, or prone to prattling on — but for the purpose of getting better at league, most content a (maybe pretentious) waste of time. (The difference is I fully admit you’re wasting your time by reading this)

People often say wow this video or post or whatever made me learn this champ or whatever. Sure, maybe. But hey, give yourself some credit, maybe as a talented, motivated gamer you would’ve done something similar anyways. I really believe that under the scrutiny of dividing people into two groups and having only one consume whatever content, literally the only thing that would show any different results between groups is reviewing their replays.

Enchanters

Janna: w has longer range now but still isn’t great poke against ranged champs, maybe her roaming is better now although I was never great at roaming, that’s why I like sona — you can (and should) just sit bot and q them Milio: good with strong carries into engage, I was going free boots to rush shurelya’s/sofw/ardent because all he does is hold items, his downside is not much skill expression so if you queue at 1000 lp and get 500 lp avg teammates hard to carry Nami: really fun when ahead because e/w add big dmg burst and you can run around killing people, but her peel is terrible so it’s way too easy to die, she has no panic button for when rengar or whatever jumps you Sona: never listen to one tricks describing their champ, one tricks are all delusional and lack experience of the game overall to compare to, idk sona is fun

Champ Select

In general I go sona vs poke and janna vs engage. I’d rather play sona vs whatever though so blind sona, the only really bad matchups are janna vs poke which are probably fine if you can roam but miserable 2v2. Also the difficult engage lanes are blitz/pyke/naut which janna is a bit better vs but not that good; if you play a melee tank support that’s probably better there. Sometimes vs rell/leona/rakan I’d rather just go sona because she has more range to poke and janna q doesn’t stop much.

Control Ward 0

Sona pov: they step into your bush, say ta, eat your pink

Todo: S14 items

No clue right now haven’t looked, but will read the patch notes eventually. I did see cupic doing double support item seraphine 0.0

Todo: investigate CCP

Any site where you comment on specific league players would quickly degenerate if you allowed speech that harms people, so it won’t be here, but I may write up the wintraders somewhere at some point, if only because they annoyed me when I wasn’t sure if I’d finish above the cutoff.

Oatmeal & chocolate chips

Imo oatmeal is really underrated and much better than cereal because cereal is typically overpriced and unhealthy. Oatmeal and chocolate chips are a great breakfast combo. Both are shelf stable so you can purchase both in bulk, saving you time, which you can spend playing league of legends.

I know I'm literally going to be the most RANDOM random possible, but I'm gonna miss stalking your match history. I actually got a little emotional reading this. Quick story, you got me in trouble with my "coach" for a dinky club team I was on. I didn't buy pinks for an entire day tournament and got lectured like crazy over it.

Much love man, good luck with whatever you're doing going forward

Wow that was so well written, and super fun to read. Thanks for the advice. Reviewing replays really is the key to improving. Its what helped me. In all honesty, I stopped reviewing my replays after I hit GM. Thanks for the wake up call. I thought I was good, but I'm not. Time to go review more replays :) !

o7

The Tank Man, I really appreciate this post and talking with you through this website. Your attitude in solo queue is genuinely impressive and I admire your humility and determination to always wanting to improve (I also really appreciate all the tips you gave about how to play the game!!). I hope you can still keep in touch with the people here, and I wish you the best in your upcoming adventures!

Have you thought about making this post a youtube video of some sort? I'm pretty sure I found out about you cause of a youtube video you made about ardent being broken when it ended up being giga busted that whole year. Youtube just generally has way more reach so, if you care about that sort of thing, it would be great for that.

good post.