i am so depressed about my MMR - ranked is basically a non-starter for me at this point.
by the very nature of the act, carrying involves high-risk, high-reward aggressiveness; nothing less than putting yourself in position to outplay opponents and then successfully doing so will allow you to consistently win when playing with lesser-skilled teammates and opponents. this also means supports are not a viable form of carrying; you can make big, big plays as a support, but you can’t win your team the game unless your teammates are already relatively competent
and yet i can’t get the barest minimum of follow-up when i’m single-handedly controlling the game on our end. i’ve been watching a few of the recent replays of my HL games, and while i’m pretty hard on myself (i groan every time i miss a hammerang as falstad), the recent games are just so blatantly idiotic that there’s no valid method one could take to win these games. i just came off a falstad game on BB where i led in siege, hero, xp, had fewest deaths and had 8 kills to thrall’s 9 (he also had 7 deaths, of course) - silver 2 players are utter fucking garbage. maybe i’m utter fucking garbage? why can i consistently outplay any individual opponent (this is extremely obvious in lane: i can get 1v1 takedowns in a solo lane at least once in most games) if i’m just as shitty as these fucks? if i’m not that shitty, what kind of herculean effort would be required to carry myself to an MMR where i don’t want to blow my brains out every time i watch my teammates individually wander around aimlessly into a 1v5 and then spam ping me because i didn’t suicide with them…
i’m just not sure anymore.
meanwhile, in unranked draft, i just pick artanis every game and absolutely dominate. i won a game last night with two AI players.
Ahhh, welcome to the world of ranked mobas. You will be broken
You have to have a really unhealthy mindset to not turn into a rager. Everything has to be your fault. You have to find a way to convince yourself that the abject feeder making constant suicide calls was not relevant to the outcome of the game, because at one point you missed a kill in lane that maybe you could have gotten.
The worst part is when I play with my brother he has that mindset to the extent where he’ll tell me off for forgetting to pre-shield as Tassadar one time in a game in which guy goes and dies solo 7 times
or try this one, scroll down, and click the “MMR Milestones”; this is my first moba. i was utter garbage when i started playing HL. and yet my MMR has consistently slowly inched upward and then a bad run undoes all of that progress and my MMR is as low as it’s ever been since it stabilized - this is absolutely not a good measurement of my skill, because i’m way, way, way the fuck better than i was in october of last year, and yet my MMR is on a downward trend overall. is this the true MMR hell? http://www.hotslogs.com/Player/Profile?PlayerID=4373809
i guess i’m just disgusted because it’s obviously got to be my fault if it’s that bad (???) (how could it not be?!). i don’t know anyone else i play with who is ranked this poorly, but as i hope @Ronnoc can attest, i’m not the burden to my team my MMR should indicate i would be.
i can’t even duo anymore because i have literally zero friends who are silver or even gold. this is maddening
what really broke me in league was the end of season 4. I had actually been improving in a way that I felt was sustainable, and I was mostly sticking to two characters. at the end of the season in league if you get gold or higher you get “victorious” skin for whatever champ they make it for. these skins suck. they always make them for boring champions. but I really wanted to hit gold at the end of the season, get that skin, and say “I got better.” literally the last day of the season, I’m one win away from gold. I queue up, get in game, go off. but we lose. queue up again, same thing. at this point I tilt, because I have to win 3 in a row now. I just keep playing. I don’t do amazing every game, how could I, but every single game my mid laner is like 0/6, 0/7, and the guy he feeds just camps my ass and we lose. I end up tilting so fucking hard that I’m flaming people in champ select because I know they’re going to feed. it was a disaster. I ended up losing 10 or 12 in a row, in one day, to drop two division on the final day of the season.
I played league in season 5 but never seriously. now it’s season 6 and I don’t play.
I know HotS is a different game in that there is no gold and exp is team wide, but in league what I learned is that consistently playing better than the people in the game, or at least the people you play directly against (since league is more rigid in roles and you spend 15+ minutes in lane), is not enough. I got to a point at my elo where I would win my lane 90% of the time. as long as my support didn’t just walk forward and die over and over I was going to come out ahead of the enemy bot lane. I knew if one other person did well we would win (unless we completely threw, which absolutely happens and needs to be factored in). but I also learned that if no one else did well, we would lose. if you want to climb, being better than the people you’re playing against isn’t enough. you have to learn how to carry. you have to learn how to maximize the effect of the advantage you created. and that is what I wasn’t good at.
i really don’t tilt when i’m playing. i used to and then i’d get mad at my teammates and it never lead to anything productive. now if i start losing i just queue right back up and soldier on. it’s more like a slow, seeping depression that i will probably literally never play ranked with people near my own skill level in hots, and the salt in the wound is that i’m obviously just too inconsistent to carry even amongst the braindead talentless fucks i play with in every match
I have to say that going 3 and 3 on the day doesn’t feel good in this game. Like, I feel like that should be cool and OK to do in a game, but I end up feeling like I did awful.
It certainly doesn’t help that I get a penalty win or lose so losses mean more.
I’d complain a lot less if I could actually get Li Ming more than once in a while, but I guess I’d also win a lot more so
Haha, what even is Blizzard doing with Gul’Dan? ‘Let’s make a hero that trades health for mana and also can drain health and then also give him a crazy ult’
Curious about sexy lady Tyriel or whoever the heck that is
Angel lady was confirmed to be a support, so going off by what was shown in the preview video, she’s going to be a crazy CC-heavy damage-support. This is a thing I’m okay with, other than Blizzard not actually showing how she supports.
edit: oh lol, that Gul’Dan video has Slapathur action
I haven’t watched any play or anything, but I guess I don’t think the Jaina changes are as bad as everyone else seems to. I mean, other than making the ice lance build about the only viable one, but that’s what I always built anyways.
Third wave on blizz just makes me excited to play with some CC buddies.
I should probably just look some stuff up because I am finding it hard to even envision how the new Zag plays.
Be more aggressive, try to end games faster, get more kills. The shorter the game is, the more likely you are to win. Why? Because long games give the enemy team a chance to wipe your team and push core
Use hearthstone more. Yeah it sucks that mana refills so slowly in the Alter and then you have to mount all the way back. But guess what doesn’t suck? Having tons of HP and mana so you can make huge plays.
If you are super aggressive early game, those kills translate into one to five levels worth of XP lead. With that advantage you can win fights that are even more aggressive
Stop picking heroes that have a low winrate. There are like 53 heroes in this game. Only 14 are used per HL game. Most of the times you can get a strong hero. Use hotslogs advanced stats page to show you which heroes are strong at Bronze/Silver instead of strong across all ranks
Stop playing with heroes and with a style that relies on other teammates to win. A win is a win even if your team has way more deaths than the other team
Break the rules, cheat, be unfair. If you play fair you give your opponent a chance to beat you in a fair game. So make it an unfair game. Last pick and your team “needs” a warrior? Pick an assassin. The other team will “win” if they get this next Punisher? Destroy the core while they are busy fighting your team over the objective.
You can influence who your team picks by hovering heroes in draft and then changing them. True story, Diamond League game as an example. I saw a player hover Naz at the 5th slot and I wanted him to play Naz. But he was thinking about switching to a warrior since we didn’t have a warrior. I was at the 4th slot and I drafted at the same time as him. So I hovered Muradin until he locked in Naz, then I switched to Lunara. My team was mad because I tricked them into playing without a Warrior. But it was Black Heart’s Bay where I we would be better off with extra poke instead of a warrior. We won by like 4 levels and they never got a 10coin bombardment. I’m not saying this works 100% of the time, but I’m saying that there are sneaky things you can do to trick your teammates into playing better.
Get LOTS of kills. Bait the enemy team into making dumb attacks.
Imagine you’re ahead by two levels. The average silver player might say “now’s a good time to take our merc camp”. I would say “now’s a good time to invade their merc camp and force a fight”
play with heroes that allow you to do tons of damage but still get out alive
always keep one eye on the minimap so that you always have an informed idea about where your teammates are and where your enemies are
Try disabling allied chat so that you can’t type to strangers and they can’t type to you. See if you move up in Rank
Figure out which hero you win the most with then pick that hero for twenty games straight (no cheating and picking another hero). See if you move up in Rank
Notice that none of these tips involve giving commands or tips or advice to teammates. That is the worst thing you can do. Because people play worse when people give them advice, no matter how good the advice is