Its pretty simple. Look at games like call of duty and how popular they are. You casually queue up with out needing to learn 140+ champs and all their interactions but its competitive.
True! I even think it is a good reflection of our society at large. Everybody wants everything at the same time without any downside, to not miss out. Knowing yourself, making decisions and focussing on your priorities seems to get harder and harder for people.
Isn't that the sole purpose of clash and flex queue? Also riot taking away any communication in a game with no voice comms is ludicrous all because of "toxicity" grow thicker skin, this is a hyper competitive game not club penguin.
Bro I have friends i love doing normals with. Lovely people. They are all hardstuck iron for eternity. Then I decompress and play solo q to climb since I'm one of two members in a group of 10 that actually like getting better. The idea that i would need my friends to magically get better to fully enjoy the game is the most toxic thing I've ever heard.
ngl. You guys are the first content creators for league I've found that didn't encourage me to quit the game before I got started. Been interested in league for years now but never tried to play, just enjoyed it from a far. A few months ago I tried to actually play and get into it and to say the least I was met by an overwhelmingly negative community of people calling the game shit and told me that I was wasting my time. Glad I found you guys because you actually don't just complain about the game, you try to help people understand it. This community needs more people like that.
@@lighting7508 a few months? Brother try a month. Literally the league community is by far the worst I have experienced. It's literally anti new players. I couldn’t get into the game even if I tried hard. People intentionally int, ping spam and overall treat teammates like a chore. I gave up because of the people not the game.
@@Dytanious Yep no matter how much these 2 say that csgo and other games are somehow more toxic. League by far is the most toxic multiplayer Ive ever played, in other games they will just flame you and still try to win. Not in league someone doesnt like a play they can just run it down on you or spam ping with 0 consequences gotta love it.
He admits flexQ is a meme that no one takes seriously yet he is arguing to remove the only queue people do take seriously in favor of flexQ... ???????????
It's very comical. He knows the majority of people respect soloq more, even himself is one of them as he admits that flexq is a meme. But he can't digest this reality so wants things to be altered for himself. Some people are so deep in the delusion pit that they make videos like this knowing that thousands of people are gonna watch it just so they might get a crumble of validation by some of those viewers.
As someone who coaches competitive youth basketball, I think it would be amazing to have something like solo queue. We spend so much time and money trying to find teams around our skill level to play, and for only a few dozen games a year. If our players could spend a chunk of time every off season playing with and against random people across the country at no cost or without any travel it would help them improve so much. People don't understand how amazing and convenient something like solo queue is for personal improvement. I do wonder if Curtis or Nathan would ever consider being on a structured team for some of the year to be helpful for league players as they are learning the game. If they had good coaches and teammates looking to improve. There are some kids in basketball who only ever play pick-up games and they can really struggle to transition to organized play even if they are very skilled because an organized team with a good coach can exploit weaknesses that might not usually be exploited. Do you think league might benefit from something like that as it develops or do you think it is just fundamentally different than traditional sports?
Wow what a cool and interesting idea, solo queue for traditional sports. I play soccer and there’s an amateur league where I live and I sign up to be a player in a pool of players to go play for teams if they don’t have enough players for a game. So I essentially end up being a solo queue soccer player for this amateur league and it is SUPER useful for improvement. You get a lot better at reading players and you’re never used to a certain play style with your team so you’re constantly thinking in a higher stress environment than when you’re comfortable with a team that you’ve played with for years and years. I’ve never thought about it like solo queue but that is exactly what it is 😂 what a great idea.
oh yeah. and since riot loves smurfs, get some NBA Players stomping them hard once a week and reply back how many of the kids still play after being humiliated several times.
I never thought I would enjoy a podcast about League, but MAN you guys are so well-informed and articulate that even when I jumped into a random point in the middle of the video that I couldn't help but watch the rest. Good stuff!
In the Drututt tournament, the last game was bascially this. A german pro team who've been scrimming for multiple years and even have agurin as jungle and noway as mid lane got stomped by a team of randomly selected challenger streamers
There's channels for valorant that do stuff like that or do lots of other experiments. My favorites are where they drop a hardstuck player who thinks they deserve a higher rank into a lobby of players of that rank (sometimes you'd be surprised, there was one time a guy actually held his own). If someone could organize a channel and community to do something like that for league it would be huge.
I play wild rift, and yes I can confirm getting rid of solo Q and letting people play in groups is the single worst thing you could possibly do to league. 30% of wild rifts player base is masters. EVERYONE gets boosted to masters its actually insane. the inflation is so bad they had to add a new rank above challenger because challenger is meaningless now
He even countered his own arguments. If flexqueue is a meme, which I agree it is kind of, that is mostly because it is NOT COMPETITIVE. Many dont care about their rank, people getting boosted constantly, skill differences are off the charts in games etc...Flexqueue is exactly what Soloqueue will become if you merge the two queues.
but why does merging the queus work for literally every other competitive game and not lol like that's what i don't get. Or at least i rarely hear complaints from say dota2 or valorant about that.
@@random1237 It depends on what you mean with "it works". In every game you allow groups that can communicate, form strategies or whatever to compete in the same ladder as solo queue you lose competetive integrity, as not everyone goes into the queue on an equal plainfield anymore. Now for the casual playerbase it might just work fine and make no difference, but for competetive persons that is a problem. As a rank reached means less if you can get carried, boosted to it. League actually acknowledged that fact exactly how I describe it by disabling duoqueue above masters. The higher you go on the ladder the more competetive integrity matters.
@@Return989 Personally i just think there's no point in trying to limit partying below diamond or something like i get it for higher ranks and other games disable 5 stacks for higher ranks too usually.
@@random1237people who min/max elo and abuse bugs/weird caviots to climb don't want in game skill to decide rank. These guys have already stated rank is a joke and they essentially claim "getting better" is the main goal of ranked. Problem is ranked is what rewards people and what people truly value. Lol rank IS a joke. I can't see much difference between my normals and ranked games.
If you want to play ranked with your friends just play flex lol. Solo queue is so important to make sure that everyone is on an even playing field and you can't queue alone and go vs a 5 man premade. Not everyone has friends to play with and those people will have a huge disadvantage in dynamic queue
the problem with that is flex is an absolute joke and impossible to balance, they should bring duo back to masters + shit is so stale and the ladder is inflated asf anyway
@@diversisle6739 I have played both queues extensively, I can garantee you that if you play with people your rank or in solo in flex you will get maybe 3 divisions above your soloQ rank and then get capped. People memeing flex as a joke haven't gone and tried to rank up. You end up hitting a wall at some point anyway. A tryharding emerald 4 in solo Q, Im getting humbled in Emerald 1 flex by soloQ diamond-master playing casually.
@@wochaoainigejiba1211 your level of play is your level of play, wheter it's soloQ or flex. I am simultaniously an Emerald 4 soloQ player and an Emerald 1 flex player. I don't get where flex being a joke becomes relevent until your hit high challenger where yeah... the level of play compared to high chall soloQ is much lower. Then again isn't that what those"casual competitive" players are looking for?
For real! No one likes getting that one player on their team who just wants to tee-hee-casual the whole match. Go play norms! Nothing wrong with norms, if that’s your thing.
I used to watch thescore esports a lot especially when I was a newer player, their "the story of..." player series is great and helped me learn more about the pros and the competitive scene. I havent watched them in probably a year or so and this video is exactly why, I noticed every single video about league was become more negative and more disconnected with how I (or we lol) view the game. This is definitely without a doubt a pretty bad take, solo q has to be one of the MOST misunderstood things about league
"I know everything about the game and it's this and that (...)" "Ok.. analyse this game for me" *3 min later "yep.. you sound exactly like all my hardstuck gold 4 clients.. drop the ego"
for people who sees obstacles to climbing as prevention mechanisms rather than clear actionable improvement mechanisms to progress, WOULD think ranked is the worse thing ever, everyone thinks they are higher ranked than their gameplay would reveal and rank them
Pretty classic hyperbolic doomerism clickbait by theScore Esports. I usually tune these kind of videos out pretty quick, but I know that most people don't or can't. Thank you for responding to it, to be a balancing force against that kind of content.
I would say that a full 5 man team of organized play is by far the most enjoyable experience in League. The practicing, the team based strategy, the scouting process, drafting strategy, etc. However, like any competitive environment you have to put individual work in. Solo queue is the workout room to prepare yourself to be the best player for a team environment. If that’s your goal. Solo queue will expose your growth opportunities and development needs to produce the best foundation for team based play. Playing strictly team based play may disguise your shortcomings in your game. Rather, solo queue exposes it. Even pro players grind out in Solo queue. Why? To experience emotional destruction? No. To refine their play. To prove their capacity of play.
Yeah but Riot removed Team Ladder Years ago .. and i rly have to question why. I know why .. because ppl these Days are to stupid to get along with 4 other People over a period of time.
What I learned is, teammates aren’t bad they’re just your skill level. Its really easy to make your teammates look bad based on the choices YOU choose to make. Good players know how to make their teammates lives easier making it actually more difficult for them to make mistakes and the way you do that is simply by tracking where your teammates and opponents are and knowing what your job is and executing fundamentals. Every solo queue game is meant to improve the skills necessary to be a teammate your team wants to have on your team.
that's what people hate about solo queue though. obviously if you're the same rank you're not good yourself, but it is legitimately infuriating at times to have to account for some of the disgusting behavior you find in low ranks. there are some players that do not deserve to win, but you still have to try and carry them regardless. your teammates can actually be bad and ignoring that is borderline delusional. personally i just mute all and try to improve things that are in my control, but it is an undeniable fact that there are oftentimes bad players on your team.
@@eebbaa5560 It's not possible for it to be perfectly consistent, though. Sometimes a player could be tired, or distracted, or upset. There are a lot of reasons why they would normally play better but aren't in a specific match.
@@HamsterPants522 i just don’t have sympathy for the players in my games. it’s all i can do to not actively hate them lol. most of the time i just ignore and move on
@@eebbaa5560 I have the opposite problem. When somebody is toxic or tilted, I try to help them to feel better, but none of them ever believe that I actually care about them, so it usually doesn't work. Sometimes, though, it does.
@eebbaa5560 be careful with that viewpoint. i guarantee you that if we looked at your gameplay, we would find countless problems with it as well, each one a good reason for us to be angry at and hate you. obviously, the correct response is not anger but empathy. if you find yourself getting this angry at your teammates, then i think you are putting too much value on your LP/rank and not enough on improvement.
Why does he think/know that ranked flex is a joke? Because it uses the same principles of letting you play with your friends? Isn't that funnily representative?
Reminds me of amateur competitive. I was on call once and everyone was talking about how we lost because we should have picked a different bot lane or communicated better. I wanted to tell them so badly, "we lost because our opponents were simply better players than us."
Before watching the TheScore video, I wanna point out that I actually think the opposite of what the description says: I think Riot should remove DUO queue, and let solo queue be truly solo (and of course, they should also remove solo queue from Flex, allowing only premades on that queue). The skills you need to climb alone are different from the ones you need to climb with premades, and as such they should have two separate ladders where you are only allowed to do one of them in each. That way, people that want to only play alone with no voice comms with a 100% focus on themselves can do that with no disadvantages, and people that want to play with premades with a bigger focus on verbal communication and familiarity with your teammates can also do that with no drawbacks Edit: 46:00 Curtis, people already did it. In multiple servers the Flex rank 1 player was like gold in soloqueue and had double the lp of the rank 2 in flex because they would queue with a group of 4 gm/chall players + the gold and would play as a group until the games started getting hard, then the 4 gm/chall players would go to new accounts and keep playing with that 1 player, but now in lower rated games because the 4 new accounts had bad mmr. They repeated this a lot of times, the rank 1 player was getting like 1 or 2 lp per win, but they had 90%+ winrates simply because abusing how there's no rank restrictions between premades (th-cam.com/video/OlhAzMkWBug/w-d-xo.html Video by Rav for context)
Riot themselves also want to remove Duo from Solo/Duo. They said in an article that the reason they hadn't yet is because they don't think Flex is good enough of an alternative (I tend to agree). So they are basically trying to figure out a better team queue system for premades such that it fulfills the needs of duo players enough to drop solo queue. Current Flex is a joke. It's not easy but it's a joke compared to solo queue. Hopefully by the end of next season, duo is removed. One of the best reasons to get to high rank in League is also that in Master+ you can't duo, making it a much fairer environment in that sense. Perhaps they could lower it to Diamond+ and thus encourage people to not duo as much in solo queue. Only time will tell.
@@SiMeGamer I don't think they want to. I know they wanted to, but there was a lot of backlash when they announced it (for obvious reasons, on average duo players would be a full rank lower if they had to play alone with their current skill level), and they never mentioned it ever again, so I doubt they are putting much work into fixing Flex queue
It's kinda funny cuz I play flex with a group of friends and one of them recently got into the game and is in iron in flex but honestly plays at like a silver level player these days. But he's stuck in iron because he just keeps playing with us and we're all emerald. It's gotten to the point where more and more of the group is starting to dip into Diamond because of lopsided matchmaking that puts us against Gold players, but some of these players hitting Diamond are barely able to break into the bottom of Emerald in solo queue if even. Flex queue is a joke.
This video really left me speechless and honestly disappointed man the message this sends from a channel that literally has esports in its name is so sad.
As someone that plays VALORANT as well, I have found that 5-stacking in competitive is worse than unrated because you meet a lot of boosters and mismatches in rank which leads to it just not being as fun.
There is a flex queue/normal queue to play with your friends. I don't understand why you can't have a ranked queue for people who would want ranked and normals for people that just want to play casually. It should be a completely different experience. It's like complaining you can't drive your Honda Civic in the F1, it's not supposed to be the same thing.
I used to have this midset when i first started league back in season 2 and it lasted until about season 9. I was a COD and GoW player for years gaining high leaderboard ranks, peaking in the top 100 on the team death match leaderboards in GoW. I just assumed when i started playing league that time alone would get me to the top. I only started to look at myself when I hit a wall in Gold 5/4 and was hardstuck there for years. I realised that time does not equal experience and I had to put in work. It was hard, I had to iron out my bad habits, review games, learn wave management, jungle tracking, mid game macro, pick a role and small champ pool and stick to it. Its taken another few years, but I've seen incremental changes year on year as I focus on the next concept. I'm currently sitting at Emerald 3 now and climbing (slowly), but I've fallen in love with the process and it's spilled into my every day life. League has taught me discipline and the ability to only compare myself to myself from yesterday. Hopefully this guy and others can learn these game changing views quicker than me with the help of your podcast. Keep up the good work!
Flex queue exists. It has this entire time. The guys entire video is debunked within the first 5 seconds. I don't know why people pretend that Flex queue doesn't exist, but it does. You can play ranked with 4 friends. It's there. It's an option. No one is stopping you.
The funny thing is that he said flexQ is a meme that no one takes seriously, so that's why he doesn't like it. Oh I wonder why no one takes it seriously.
I think its funny how you can look at the little tags it gives you on the right and the only 2 he has are "snowballs" and "surrenders" which makes me think hes 100% the player that either wins hard and has fun or loses and says the game is shit
i think an important thing to understand about league and team games in general is its important to accept other peoples mistakes the thing about this guy surrendering so many games really takes me back to a conversation i had with a friend that doesnt play league about how these people that want to surrender immediately the moment the game looks bad are not even que'ing to try to begin with but are just looking to get carried and make some elo that way expecting their teammates to handle everything for them and funnel them just because they are playing x role. i remember a game i had a couple years back where my team was losing we had an open nexus everyone died except my toplaner that was around 13 deaths and mostly not contributing much beforehand but we never flamed him and there was hardly any talking to begin with because everyone was trying, anyways we were all dead but we had stalled the game out so long to a point where my top finally reached their spike and 1v3'd the enemy team saving our base giving us enough time to respawn and win the game. and to people that are playing just to get carried its not like the rest of my team wasnt doing anything i was top damage we contested and stole every baron for 40 minutes until we eventually won. thats not even my only example of this, my point is its important to try every game and not focus on your teammates mistakes if your playing ranked and want to surrender every game because "my teammate did this" or whatever then i agree with nathan and curtis maybe ranked just isnt for you. also to that comment talking about how they cant get into league because its so toxic i actually can relate, i started playing around 2017 and i still remember all the times i got flamed but shaking it off and just kept going, i think league is extremely rough on new players and the biggest problem is its not like you can just tell a new player "well just dont play ranked" because normal games can get pretty heated as well and im saying this from experience (back when i had only been playing two weeks i wanted to try leona for the first time no not in bots but in a normal game against other players i think i went 0/15 and my teammates were afk in base cursing at me telling me to uninstall.). im plat currently but i think that if your playing ranked and are confident in your role and ability to play well you should go in settings, turn chat off, and move based on your teammates current positions and their pings it actually makes it much easier to focus on the game especially because you will never see that one teammate complaining so you wont get any tilt from that to begin with. anyways i think ill end this with my favorite league quote from a streamer, "You can lose games because of your teammates but you will never be stuck because of teammates that's just a bad player's excuse." -Ratirl
From the perspective of a fourth-year M.D student aiming for a residency in psychiatry it’s scary to see this level of projection and delusion getting praise and recognition. Not surprising, but scary. Love your podcast and I feel that what you preach and promote is baseline sublimation, therapy, and self-reflection for many people.
"playing soloq for fun is a waste of time...and will be a miserable experience" this is exactly how i feel about it. i felt this way when training bjj too. if you train like a hobbyist you just get smashed by all the guys who train for competition
Or one could just play it for fun, get placed in the appropriate skill bracket and keep playing the game in an honest fashion...these people who are trying to run from human nature are so funny to me. There are no real arguments against skills based matchmaking.
Why are you fighting profession BJJ artists as a hobbyist? And why are you miserable when you lose?? They're pros, why would they lose to a hobbyist? This is what people are missing with league's soloQ. The ranks actually mean something, so don't feel bad if you lose a game, they were just better.
I have a heavy fighting game background and i can tell you for certain that the ranked system will make or break the game. For Honor is a fighting game made by ubisoft that had an amazing launch but quickly the player base dropped it since it didn't even have a ranked mode. Think about that. A fighting game, a game specifically designed to be competitive did not have a ranked mode. I feel confident in saying that any complex pvp game that does not have a meaningful way to judge a players level of skill will feel incomplete.
It has ranked now and the mode is almost completely dead because 90% of the community doesn't care about fundamentals and just wants to spam aoe unblockables in dominion... literally the most smooth brained community I have ever seen, but I'll stop my rant there lmao
@@jimjimson6208 the game wasn't built to be competitive, dominion is the main game mode. its like cod, itcould be a comp game but most players like the casual arena shooter/silly fighting game.
You guys hit the nail on the head. I've always made the same exact point when talking to people about video games. Due to the physical nature of most sports, you find yourself region locked to a small subset of players. You don't get the raw experience of skill and talent that video games like league have. If I was to get good enough I could randomly start finding myself in matches with some of the best LOL players in the entire world. I find that absolutely incredible. No matter how good you are at basketball for example, there are a lot of "hoops" you have to jump through before you'd ever find yourself on a court with even near pro level players. As you guys said at any time I'm free to sit down and play with people that are exactly at my skill level almost globally which is an experience I don't think you get in a lot of athletic sports. This is one of the aspects of LOL that I've come to enjoy the most. I think people always like to shit on low elo and say how bad people are at the game. Maybe it's not that people suck, it's just that the game is hard, so hard in fact that most people will never be able to fully dedicate the time and effort necessary to master it. I think people should be more proud of their rank and realize that the sheer scale of the LOL ranked ladder is hundreds of times larger than any physical sport. If we use the basketball analogy again, you are literally playing games in the same ladder as Lebron James and Stephen Curry. Of course you don't measure up because these people are some of the greatest competitive players of all time. This isn't an excuse to not improve, but realize that the skill gap is far larger than most people realize. A lot of people are not delusional enough to think they could ever be on the same court as Lebron. Maybe understand that reaching challenger is not achievable if you also have other goals you are pursuing in life. Because the ladder is so large your rank probably shows greater mastery of the game than you realize. Be proud that you are able to achieve the rank that you are in and are pushing yourself beyond your natural understanding of the game it means more than you think.
Damn we couldve used a warning about SHOCKING levels of delusion in the video you covered. Really did the competitiveness a favour by breaking this one down
It's so clear that this guy feels like rank is meant to be a reward for playing and not a representation of your skill level. He's complaining about how much effort it takes to earn the same way people complain about cosmetics costing too much of the free currency to get without spending money.
I am a high emerald ADC main , but I am depressed they removed my "I want to freeze the wave" ping. I used that EVERY game, and losing it felt like losing a finger to me. Also, I would often ping their ult timer and then go in. Now I have to type out, hey, when your ult comes back up, I want to look for a fight. I am very sad+ mad they removed these pings. They REALLY hurt me.
Thank you for mentioning this guys, I noticed with their most recent video too that they only make negative content about league Like it's a popular thing to do and brings in more traction I find it a bit disgraceful of them They have so many positive videos about their beloved CSGO/2 and all their other shooters but they only use LoL as their scapegoat to be able to produce some sort of negative content for who knows what reason Their last normal video about league was 2 months ago; the story of baron nashor
When I got to league, I had to choose between support and jg since friend group had other roles mained, and my gameplay was literally to pick pantheon and get red buff and flash W on enemy midlaner's head every game. I am so glad those times are past now, but I was so turbo far away from actually learning the game at that time (season 7-8). Even though I was playing with my friends (flex or ranked duo) it was a miserable experience, since I did not undestand what I should even be doing in the games. Great ep once again guys!
exact same situation for me. i was forced into support because my friends already played everything else and i developed so many bad habits even after i started branching out to other roles. for starters, i had absolutely no idea how to lane or trade, much less farm, because all i did as support was pick things like leona/nami/blitzcrank and go for stuns into kills lol. landing skillshots was maybe the only thing i practiced as a support. i barely even learned anything about support while i played because all it was to me was helping adc get kills. i dropped wards randomly and didn't even roam. i also played a million different champions (by now i've played almost the whole roster at least once) and never built champion mastery, most likely because i didn't actually care about the support role or any of the champions enough to commit to learning them. when i finally started playing mid lane, i was horrible at farming (it took me a very long time to even begin to understand the importance of gold/exp) and had no idea how to trade or track jungle, etc. i had no conception of any of the fundamentals whatsoever. i've played league since right about the time they updated summoner's rift (i have some vague memories of playing before the map update) and i am only just now actually learning how to play the game. i've been playing on and off since maybe season 4 and i've never been higher than silver 2. of course, i've built up some narratives, but the most damaging thing so far has been a complete loss of confidence over years of playing and never gaining a semblance of competence as a player. even as recently as last split, i played 600 games with 80+ different champions and duo queued for a majority them. this split, i have 60 games, 40 of which are on one champion, but i have lost too much confidence in myself and interest in the game to be able to play more than a few games every two weeks. i'm afraid to commit myself to the process because i feel like it isn't enough to get me out of the hole that i've dug for myself. i wrote into the podcast maybe two months ago and i haven't gotten a reply from them, but my perspective has since changed and i feel as though i have different questions that i want to ask now. i think i'll write them again later today to amend my previous email and ask for some advice. all of this is to say, while casual league can be fun from time to time, i truly believe that it is a waste of time and a detriment to yourself if you commit too many hours to it, as i have. i played the game to avoid my real-life problems, and all i have to show for it is a deep sense of shame and regret for having wasted so much of my life on this game instead of developing myself as a player or in real life.
It really does a lot of damage sometimes when you start out like that in a group and do running errands without a clue why you do it. I hope that you can get over that hurdle eventually, but also if you feel like your experience has been messed up so bad that it feels miserable to play, always remember that you can find other things than league to better yourself in, depending on what you like. Hard to give the right advice on a comment like this, but main point is that I hope you all the best as someone who has had similar experience starting out. Cheers mate.@@eebbaa5560
man im glad you got through that, not gonna lie thats also another problem with playing league with friends, everyone cant play the same role. I also had a similar experience to yours forced to play ashe adc and just ult down lane lmfaooo
@@eebbaa5560great post. would be nice to see curtis and nathan break it down and offer some remedies. i realize now that i replied to your other comment on this video. it sounds like your situation is much more complicated than i assumed. a couple years ago i was in a situation similar to yours. since you have so many years as a casual player, i think it is a big risk for you to play difficult roles like adc or mid. my recommendation for you is to play top lane, pick one champion, and go back to the basics. focus on the bare fundamentals. csing, getting to your powerspikes, and playing off of your and your opponent's cooldowns. forget your teammates. mute all. focus your lane, and focus on getting every cs that you can while valuing your life. having good farm and getting items is the best way to get consistently and reliably strong. learn to know when you are strong and weak (powerspikes), and play accordingly. group with your team post 20 minutes. you have many bad habits and invisible narratives to unlearn, so use this opportunity. if anything, you could create a new account for a fresh start. i dont mean this in terms of getting some sort of advantage. i only mean that it might help in separating you from your past; your old account may be tied to past people and past experiences, and sometimes it can help to get away from all that and just focus on the solo grind without worrying what others on your friends list might think.
@@burtReynolds3 i main mid i don’t really have a problem with playing it and i feel like it’s easier than top lane. i hate playing adc cuz it feels like coinflipping the game and i hate playing for late game. i also hate random supports. i suck at laning so every time i queue top it’s pretty much a free loss. idk any of the matchups and the only champion i can sort of play is aatrox. i already do most of the stuff you’re talking about otherwise i just don’t play enough games these days. i group sometimes but i also splitpush a lot since i play ekko. i’m not going to make a new account though. i feel like unless i can unfuck my account i’m never going to redeem myself. curtis and nathan always talk about how every player should experience getting an account unstuck to really feel their improvement and i want to experience that for myself, so i’m going to stick with my only account until i quit the game.
They literally have a queue for people that want to play ranked with their friends, its called FLEX... Wtf... If you hate soloq don't play it.. FLEX is a meme? So the only fix is to merge soloq and make all ranked a meme? Have you ever listened to voice comms of pro teams? The fights are so fast all they can do is shout the name of the champion they want to focus down.
I used to think communication in League was limited too but then I became a better player. We are all smart enough to know that communication exists in different forms verbal and nonverbal. You obviously can't talk in league but you have pings that provide a really concise and sufficient form of quick information. Pings should be enough to get you through the 10% of circumstances where you need to get a message across loudly. The other 90% of communication will be nonverbal and it's really every single player's duty to be watching and listening for those forms of communication. If you're 10 minutes into the game with no pings and you think your team is not effectively communicating then you are missing literally hundreds of nonverbal queues. You need to take note of what people are doing and how they are playing. Just because someone didn't ping or type in chat doesn't mean the evidence isn't there to for you to be completing a certain task at that moment. One example I have that happens almost every low elo game is jg obj is up but jg just died and top is afk farming. You are able to move to it with your support but you know you have little chance of winning the fight with no vision and down 2 players so you go farm a sidelane. Mid ignores the nonverbal queues hes receiving from all of his teammates goes to obj and dies to the 5 man. Was a ping really necessary? Arguably yes if it would prevent a death, but he already ignored 4 "pings" 1 from dead jg who physically can't be at obj, 1 from top who is splitting, and 2 from you and sup who are not rotating. These forms of communication are often far more subtle. One of the biggest forms of communication you need to be aware of is how your teammates are positioning. You can tell a lot by how your team is playing in your immediate vicinity. If they are standing back and letting the wave push, they clearly do not want to engage with the enemy. Maybe they have abilities on cd, maybe they are weak before a power spike, maybe they spotted enemy jg rotating, you don't know, but either way they are telling you I do not want to take this fight. If you ignore this and engage anyway, you could lose for any number of reasons, but don't be surprised that your teammate doesn't bail you out. Conversely if your teammate is playing aggressive, it's your job to support them or tell them to back off. You don't win games by having zero interaction so playing aggressive when you're strong is really important. If your teammate is poking, trading health, and baiting abilities they probably are looking for a kill in the near future. These are just some small ways that people are communicating even if it isn't literally spelled out for you. I think the best LOL players are the ones who can read their teammates nonverbal queues and develop a strategy that fits in line with what their teammates want to do. Nobody has ever won a game by completely ignoring their team. If they have, their team was probably doing their best to make and take space for them while they were unaware of that teamwork.
dimitri has never had a good track record of talking about league in good faith. i used to watch a lot of thescore when they did minidocs about different pro players, but since that well has mostly dried up and all they have left is esports news and complaining about the states of league, valorant AND cs (not to mention the puff pieces they've done for high-end peripherals like wooting), i haven't watched in a while. it's unfortunate to see this sort of video get posted on their channel, especially when 5 out of 7 videos surrounding it in their uploads ("S1mple Is Done With Valve", "The Most Broken Gun In Valorant is Ruining the Game", "This Has To Stop", "Valorant Is Too Easy", & "League Is F@*king Lonely") are similarly negative. it seems they rely pretty heavily on a target audience of the type of gamer who never stops talking about how much they hate the game they play every single day. these videos do well because the comments section becomes a sounding board for every anecdotal bad experience anyone has had with solo queue/game balance/toxicity which pushes the videos way more heavily than a video that gets a bunch of initial views and no comments.
The fundamental issue here is summed up when you said “what do you want?” If you want a competitive gaming experience, then solo q is perfect. If you don’t, then it’ll suck.
His view on ranked isn’t about competitive integrity, it’s about being given highest rank in any meaningless means necessary to validate & protect his ego
I feel like it’s really similar to soccer, several players playing together, in sync without being able to talk to each other with ease, yet they are all on the same page and can capitalize mistakes or opportunities and perform. I mean, of course they practice together and have that synergy from it, the point I’m heading to is that comms are not a key factor. Also this guy is so bitter, it saddens me that he feels the need to drag others to his misery, if league is not for you, just play other games.
Dynamic queue was horrible. I remember queueing as a solo into a 4 man group on my team. All they did was flame blame and report me. Shit was actual hell compared to solo queue
How delusional and out of touch with reality do you have to be to sign up for a competitive game and refer to the ranking as "just the rank"? WHAT ELSE IS THERE????
My immediate thought about 5 manning and coms comparing league to fps is the camera. In fps you cannot see what you’re teammates see but in league you have the constantly up mini map and literally the press of a f key see what they see. League doesn’t need coms because they are infinitely less efficient than the UI.
I really feel like these narratives about League of Legends are EXACTLY what is helping to increase the toxicity and make the game worse for everyone, which in turn feeds into the narratives, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy of self-sabotage. I too love this game, and I know it has its problems such as ancient spaghetti code and balance issues, but I still enjoy the mechanical depth, massive character pool, lore, world, visual style, and the competitive feel of League of Legends. Even if you're a one trick pony, you get matched up with a practically endless variety of opponents playing an endless combination of champions to fight against. I don't know how League of Legends got the bad reputation it has gotten, but enough is enough with it. I am not going to dismiss the problems with Riot as a company, of course not, and I am not going to just pretend the game is flawless, but League of Legends deserves better than people blaming eachother for losses and the unhealthy relationships they have with the game. Everyone is constantly screaming about how the game "ruined" their life, but why is that the case? I mean, why can't it just be fun like any other video game? People can choose to stop doing this and make League of Legends fun again! Thank you, Broken by Concept, for trying to push back against these toxic narratives. I did agree up to a point, where you started calling that guy a "snowflake" for wanting something "utopian"... for rightfully criticizing how awful people are acting. There is no reason for this behavior, even in real life competitive games such as sports. The slurs, the bigotry, the weird character attacks. This says a lot about the morality and character of the toxic people playing League of Legends or any competitive game, and as an empathetic person I genuinely worry about them and their mental health for acting like that over a FRICKIN' GAME. The world has enough problems without people treating eachother more like crap than ever before. Yeah, welcome to LoL, but it's actively making the game worse for everyone, especially for people who enjoy interacting with people online via chat. Yes, I have chat muted and will always have it muted, but not all of us want to play LoL like that. This is literally the only criticism I have of your video here, because it's otherwise on point. It's funny how he seems so nice for wanting the game to be "less toxic", but ended up being part of the problem. Self-fulfilling prophecy, as I said. Keep it up, this is a different and fresh way of tackling the toxicity problem in League of Legends!
That guy reminds me of call of duty players back when I was 14 who would get irrationally butthurt when losing a casual deathmatch let alone a competitive Search and Destroy, yikes.
this dude was so delusional. claming dota was the worst experience because it had two seperate queues... and him wanting to merge all into flex because "flex is a joke" smh
personal development is just a concept some people are oddly foreign to. a grown man just spent hours of his life to make a 11 min video explaining why he and his target audience deserves to be cuddled in a competitively natured video game. not sure if i should feel disappointed or just point and laugh tbh.
chat and pings are abused too much for them to be useful enough to risk tilting because of them has this been you before? it's been me: "i'll turn off chat, but keep pings on so we can communicate" missing missing missing missing missing missing missing sigh
I know team paradigm, i was the org manager. there is actually a lot to the story of gw2 pvp. long story short though, it was not a priority for the devs.
this game lowkey isn’t fun at all when you’re not playing for stakes. flex queue with 3+ people and things like clash are fun but i couldn’t play league like that forever. even when i used to duo we only played solo queue because there was literally no point in playing without fake points on the line.
Just had an interesting experience recently with the psyche that goes into building habits and reviewing. I have a noticeable psychological and slight physical reaction to trying to queue for another game after playing one instead of reviewing the game now (solo Q only as that's my habit; if it's flex or arams or w/e with friends I've compartmentalized those to not matter as much) I always review my games after I play them, albeit typically with a procrastination oriented delay like browing Reddit or YT for 5~20 mins, but recently I've picked up Briar and replays with her are bugged and will crash around the 10 min mark onwards (if you jump ahead in the replay past the crash point, it'll play like normal for a little but still crash). After realizing what was up after 3 or 4 games, on my most recent block with her I decided I'd just try to queue up for another game as there wouldn't be that much to take away from a replay with only the first 10 mins. Firstly, I realize how wrong that sounds when I type it out now lol. Just in the game I reviewed I can remember 3 separate points I could now clearly look over and improve on or clarify what happened (didn't respect enemy Top having shove and fogging, "wasted" Flash chasing a Pyke with no CDs or sums but was missing information due to lack of omnipresence abilities, figured out I can just farm my Red spawning Topside in 20s into Topside camps respawning instead of forcing a bad Drag just because I have "nothing else" to do on the map even though my ADC needed to reset). Secondly, it felt extremely wrong and honestly terrible to try click the queue up button again right after one game. I NEED to review my games now (which is awesome lol) even though I always procrastinate the actual review for a bit by 5~20 mins since they are mentally taxing to go through (especially after playing the match which itself was mentally taxing).
Hey, when listening to your podcast, the one about about feeling hopeless, when you mentioned Alois, an idea struch me, that if one wants to master the game, he must not one-trick only, but try to learn ALL other roles and playstyles, even if it were 10-20 games each, to get acustomed to them and learn to recognise the goals and fears of enemy players (and teammates in that sense) , it's like literal meaning of "knowing your enemy", and returning back to your onetrick later of course. At least this has help me immensly and i hope it may help someone else too.
Also the brutal reality of solo queue is what keeps you improving. You can either be in an echo chamber of the same circle of players who never call you out or you could go solo and get a good but toxic jgl who tells you why tf aren't you rotating to this play you dvmbass and then you think hmm... true, mb, should have rotated there
It's easy to string similar looking things together and point to it as a pattern that's proof of some unifying cause. "They removed this communication then this communication, proving they want zero communication", conveniently ignoring the time they tried to remove all chat and people protested until they gave it back. "Snowballs" + "Surrenders" tells you his story in 2 words. He goes 9/0 and he's on top of the world, or he goes 0/1 and he's saying GG FF15. Curtis's video about getting excited at wins makes a nice companion video to this.
Love the podcast guys but I think its a bit disingenuous to say that nobody knows how to use pings properly. I may be a low elo silver 1 player but I just started playing last year during worlds. There are plenty of instances in each and every game I play where I am constantly pinging information to my team - need vision/vision cleared, hold wave, pinging ult timers, pinging their flash pinging items to show we need grievous wounds or armor pen etc. im not the only one in my elo that does this, so to hear a high ranked player like you guys say “low elo players dont even know how to ping properly” its not entirely true. As you well know there is countless amounts of content from high elo players out there, countless videos and guides directed at low elo players trying to improve. And in-game communication through pings is one of those ways that help people develop a better in-game awareness, crucial for climbing the ladder. Love you guys and keep up the good work but I think you gravely underestimate lower elo players
Most of the pings they removed are pings that are hard to utilize for lower ranked players because they either miss that information due to limited focus capacity or because they don't know how to use that information. If you ping a death timer or an ultimate timer, it's often useless because people in lower ranks don't have enough patience to wait it out. I play in high Diamond and even there those types of pings were usually ignored. The ping for Smite cooldown has been ignored in so many games it's genuinely tough to count. It's extreme. And while I'm not happy with the changes (I use all the ally pings), I see the mostly positive value for the community at large (mainly the casuals). I hope they find a way to get those pings back and make them non-toxic (for example, having a ping cooldown on ally pings or a limit to spam pinging) but it's not really that big of a deal. Lower ranked players could play without pings and chat and learn how to play the game better and climb because most of their mistakes are not a matter of lack of communication. Their gameplay is worse and so they need to fix that first. I really hope Riot can do some changes to the pings but I agree with the overall positive direction this has lead to for the ultra majority of players (where pings were used mostly to harass and not be constructive - even in fairly high ranks).
@@SiMeGamer Bro when you mentioned the number of times smite cooldown pings have been ignored I literally saw 1000 images of dragon on low health flash before my eyes, its so true.
Bruh I was this guy, not even too long ago. I played since season 3 and my impression was that 5 stack was peak league, and the only way it should be played, solo was cancer. I didn’t realize how casual I was. I thought I was competitive but I was just a casual player through and through. I’ve finally decided to put my big boy pants on and take the game more seriously and its been a wildly different experience. Though what differentiates us is that i wasn’t outwardly toxic, only inwardly
I know an example of a bad teammate, the guy making the video. The guy flaming his ass of or soft inting is a bad teammate. People can have a poor performance without being a bad teammate in my opinion, as long as they keep trying to win and don't start flaming, soft inting or griefing in another way they are neutral or good teammates
I also think toxic players are a huge problem. But be that I mean players who abuse their teammates, not bad players. Of course all my teammates are bad - I'm bad as well, it makes sense I'd be paired with them! If I make a mistake and they spot it, I'm glad for the feedback actually. That doesn't have to take the form of racist slander though. Especially annoying is when people massively abuse you for stuff that wasn't even wrong because they themselves have no clue about the game. So yeah, toxicity is a problem, just don't abuse people in soloqueue. There is literally no reason to do so.
SoloQ and the ladder is what made me interested in league and it’s pro scene. Although that’s not much the case now in NA, the ranking system is a clear cut interesting system. Yes it has its issues (more so account buying now) it’s still a clear goal. I played valorant since closed beta and it’s not fun playing rank against 5 stacks now. That wasn’t much the case back then. Not as bad as league because league has so many moving pieces that a 5 stack can abuse even duo, but it’s just not it . SoloQ in league I really enjoy because I’m making plays based off the information provided for me and using fundamentals. Riot does need to fix flex, I think them making SoloQ only solo was the play, but they had to stop that idea. People don’t like playing flex because they rather play normals instead of it and possibly getting stomped by another 5 stack who could be certain higher ranks. It’s a cope for many. I also wouldn’t want voice comms because I’ve seen it with friends who have played the game for YEARS, I can say something that makes total sense, but they don’t understand why so they think it’s wrong. Imagine voice comms with randoms lol. All the information is on the map and with pings, if you can’t even listen to pings and a person on vision, then idk.
i always found it absolutely insane that you can five stack in valorant ranked. it's so funny how many boosted egirls there are in high ranks. idk how anyone is able to take valorant ranked seriously or even find the motivation to play the game as a solo. valorant is the last game that you should be able to five stack in ranked but somehow it's allowed lol.
@@eebbaa5560 rank doesn't matter, it is a made up number to encourage people to play more. who cares if some egirls got boosted. If you think you're more skilled, then you are. The only thing that matters in mmr, but mmr is hidden so its pointless to worry about it.
Comparing it to chess is very accurate. I'm an avid chess player and have spent time studying to improve, etc. Once I hit my desired elo in chess, I stopped studying, and guess what? I stopped getting better. My elo plateaued, and I was fine with that. I knew that in order to improve I'd have to deep dive more into the skills of chess, but I was happy with what I had accomplished. I'm sure one day I'll want to grow in chess again, but for now, I'm happy to be a "casual" player at my current level.
1:17:50 this guy is basically saying that he wants to play less games to reach a high rank. Does he even care about integrity? Or difficulty? If we wants to play less games without taking the time to learn the game, then what are we doing to the ranked system to decrease the amount of games needed to reach a high rank? I’ve got the answer: make it easier
I think that the very introduction of vocal communication would change would it means to “get better”. If in every instance play you add a unrivaled form of communication. Having complete total awareness of everything happening on the map is less important. Being able to call plays and take a leader role is a more desirable skill that is much easier to carry out too. You see it with fps gamers (like the kind this channel caters too) being a shot caller in CS is a very real role even in solo que
And that's why Internet is a dangerous place. People who know nothing about a given topic can spread their opinion like wildfire even though it's poopoo for the immense majority of what they say. This guy is a certified boosted enjoyer, on every game he plays it seems, and doesn't understand League is one of the rarest games out there that doesn't allow it and where the community is in majority against it. Can't address the topic if he fails to understand the premise... 😅
Sorry to be negative but theres something about demetri that annoys me. Always has L takes on league and CS but from what ive heard is low elo in both games.
well yeah but chess is also like the perfectly optimized competitive game lol. i do think league should have the same system (just raw points and ranked tiers based on how many points you have) but it’s harder to gauge in a team game. i will say that league mmr is decent in that adjusts how much lp you lose or gain in order to keep you in certain ranks. that’s a good design on paper but it is poorly implemented imo and can seem really artificial and unfair at times.
I have seen the TheScoreEsports video floating around for a while but never had the courage to watch it, feels better having you two with me. Makes it less draining
The problem with league being "hardcore" is that Riot doesn't go to that direction anymore. With the huge and constant removal of skill expression, elo inflation and general changes for new players, league is currently going in the opposite direction which is the casual one.
actually there is a cognitive dissonance imo. riot's balancing decisions are geared towards competitive gameplay, but their out of game decisions are trying to bring in new players, which leads to players feeling disillusioned by the fact that the game isn't properly catering to them as casuals, because it isn't a casual game. riot tries to cast a wide net with league of legends, but over the past few years this has ruined the game for both casual and competitive players because the company itself can't decide what it wants league of legends to be. i believe that league is at its core designed to be a competitive game, but since riot can't or won't commit to that ideal, the game is always in this purgatorial state of untapped potential.
@@eebbaa5560 Yes exactly. And that is the worst thing they could do actually. They are not helping new players in any meaningful way and on top of that they ruin the game for "veterans" or people that have been playing already for quite some time. You cannot do both and be succesful in both.
I have played both Valorant and Dota and while I do play ranked with friends, I share the sentiment that queing with friends is not a true reflection of your skill which is why personally if I'm grinding for a certain rank I don't consider that goal getting achieved if it wasn't solo queue. Example in Valorant my peak is technically gold if you check my tracker but I still consider myself a silver player because I haven't actually reached gold by myself.
"If people just tell you stuff, then how are you learning?" This is a big thing in maths education, would you rather students discover the correct idea or show them an example or the steps for the proof. A lot of people have this romantic idea about discovery and although it might be more pleasurable to discover things independently, but in practice just telling someone what they should be doing is the most effective way to obtain results. I think the real problem you're talking about (this might have been what you meant anyway) is that it's very beneficial to understand why you want to do certain things, as opposed to just learning that you do certain things. Not understanding why you should do something means that your understanding is far too specific to the situation in front of you, knowing why you should do something allows you to generalise things and perhaps behave effectively in similar situations too. At some point you will have to learn to think for yourself though, and having a constant voice in your ear telling you what to do and not why to do it, you're basically the guy in the Chinese room problem, translating Chinese via the steps, but never understanding Chinese. Waffle over, I had a bit of time this morning...
I feel like hardcore gaming and practicing and being deliberate with getting better really exploded on fortnite when they introduced creative, all of a sudden players are complaining about sweats and sbmm but they didn’t wanna spend the time in creative. That’s what all this reminds me of
Competition and striving for better ranks is what has kept my interest in League of Legends since season one, yes many of the champions and lore help reinforce the fun, but ultimately it's competing that gives satisfaction for myself. The only thing I will agree with from him is about Ranked 5v5 Flex being a joke, but not the way he thinks it is. If you're looking at the NA ladder for Flex queue you will see rank one has a nearly 90% win rate over 100+ games. There are some very blatant levels of win trading happening in this queue and for myself and others we find it's a joke because of that lack of integrity for the game there.
dude is the same type of person who says From Soft games need an easy mode but to the comms point that always seems to pop up in goofy rants like this: i played in a few online League tourneys years back, Teamspeak comms were required, and it was all 'soloQ' (as in always 5 strangers per team) voice comms don't do shit for communication or 'toxicity' in League, because it's still anonymous, and it doesn't help anyone understand the game any more than they do already i was in CoD/GoW lobbies as a teenager, voice comms have never been known to curb toxicity or improve gameplay quality. do they improve entertainment? absolutely. quality? absolutely fucking not. lmao although i will say, "ah yes, the reason i cant get challenger is because i don't have a 12 year old suburban kid screaming the N word at me while calling me a f*ggot!" is an extremely funny bit
People don't want to play unranked because it feels pointless. They want to play ranked because they want to be able to say that they're high rank... but they don't put in the work to be good so they never make it there... yet they will keep playing half ass because they don't want to admit that they're not good.
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A very satisfying response to a very silly video.
Very awesome to see you here
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im glad you have found this channel
Goats reply to goats 🔥
People want to "be competitive" but also want to play casually at the same time. I literally cannot fathom how they come to these takes lol
Its pretty simple. Look at games like call of duty and how popular they are. You casually queue up with out needing to learn 140+ champs and all their interactions but its competitive.
True! I even think it is a good reflection of our society at large. Everybody wants everything at the same time without any downside, to not miss out. Knowing yourself, making decisions and focussing on your priorities seems to get harder and harder for people.
Isn't that the sole purpose of clash and flex queue? Also riot taking away any communication in a game with no voice comms is ludicrous all because of "toxicity" grow thicker skin, this is a hyper competitive game not club penguin.
What they want is to reach the top ranks without even trying, and when they can't then its time to blame the game... very disrespectful 😔
@@thehallmonitor4515 cod games are casual period,there is no competition there
Bro I have friends i love doing normals with. Lovely people. They are all hardstuck iron for eternity. Then I decompress and play solo q to climb since I'm one of two members in a group of 10 that actually like getting better. The idea that i would need my friends to magically get better to fully enjoy the game is the most toxic thing I've ever heard.
fr dude I hop on with the boys run some arams run some norms smoke a bowl then head to bed. very relaxing if you have good mechanicw
Most toxic is crazy. Looks like someone's nerves are touched.
ngl. You guys are the first content creators for league I've found that didn't encourage me to quit the game before I got started. Been interested in league for years now but never tried to play, just enjoyed it from a far. A few months ago I tried to actually play and get into it and to say the least I was met by an overwhelmingly negative community of people calling the game shit and told me that I was wasting my time. Glad I found you guys because you actually don't just complain about the game, you try to help people understand it. This community needs more people like that.
well, the matchmaking is broken, it was always terrible, but since this summer, when promos went away, it is just unplayable.
Try focusing on yourself buddy@@derbestimmer1148
I know what you mean but it’s very addictive.. maybe in a few months you will see how easy it is to fall into a negativity spiral with this game 💀
@@lighting7508 a few months? Brother try a month. Literally the league community is by far the worst I have experienced. It's literally anti new players. I couldn’t get into the game even if I tried hard. People intentionally int, ping spam and overall treat teammates like a chore. I gave up because of the people not the game.
@@Dytanious Yep no matter how much these 2 say that csgo and other games are somehow more toxic. League by far is the most toxic multiplayer Ive ever played, in other games they will just flame you and still try to win. Not in league someone doesnt like a play they can just run it down on you or spam ping with 0 consequences gotta love it.
45:30 "Flex queue is a joke, so it would be better if all of ranked was a joke so people can't ignore it."
Yeah i dont know how you can even say that without thinking about it even for a couple of seconds
He admits flexQ is a meme that no one takes seriously yet he is arguing to remove the only queue people do take seriously in favor of flexQ... ???????????
Cognitive dissonance 😂
It's very comical. He knows the majority of people respect soloq more, even himself is one of them as he admits that flexq is a meme. But he can't digest this reality so wants things to be altered for himself. Some people are so deep in the delusion pit that they make videos like this knowing that thousands of people are gonna watch it just so they might get a crumble of validation by some of those viewers.
As someone who coaches competitive youth basketball, I think it would be amazing to have something like solo queue. We spend so much time and money trying to find teams around our skill level to play, and for only a few dozen games a year. If our players could spend a chunk of time every off season playing with and against random people across the country at no cost or without any travel it would help them improve so much. People don't understand how amazing and convenient something like solo queue is for personal improvement.
I do wonder if Curtis or Nathan would ever consider being on a structured team for some of the year to be helpful for league players as they are learning the game. If they had good coaches and teammates looking to improve. There are some kids in basketball who only ever play pick-up games and they can really struggle to transition to organized play even if they are very skilled because an organized team with a good coach can exploit weaknesses that might not usually be exploited. Do you think league might benefit from something like that as it develops or do you think it is just fundamentally different than traditional sports?
Wow what a cool and interesting idea, solo queue for traditional sports. I play soccer and there’s an amateur league where I live and I sign up to be a player in a pool of players to go play for teams if they don’t have enough players for a game. So I essentially end up being a solo queue soccer player for this amateur league and it is SUPER useful for improvement. You get a lot better at reading players and you’re never used to a certain play style with your team so you’re constantly thinking in a higher stress environment than when you’re comfortable with a team that you’ve played with for years and years. I’ve never thought about it like solo queue but that is exactly what it is 😂 what a great idea.
oh yeah. and since riot loves smurfs, get some NBA Players stomping them hard once a week and reply back how many of the kids still play after being humiliated several times.
@@derbestimmer1148 😭😭👶👶
I never thought I would enjoy a podcast about League, but MAN you guys are so well-informed and articulate that even when I jumped into a random point in the middle of the video that I couldn't help but watch the rest. Good stuff!
woah what are you doin here big guy
@@azeva01 Giving positive feedback to high quality content.
I think your thought experiment about a full stack of masters players with comms vs high gm/chall without comms would make for some great content.
In the Drututt tournament, the last game was bascially this. A german pro team who've been scrimming for multiple years and even have agurin as jungle and noway as mid lane got stomped by a team of randomly selected challenger streamers
@@dom7595p They only lost one game though.
@@dom7595p Didn't the germans... win the tournament?
There's channels for valorant that do stuff like that or do lots of other experiments. My favorites are where they drop a hardstuck player who thinks they deserve a higher rank into a lobby of players of that rank (sometimes you'd be surprised, there was one time a guy actually held his own). If someone could organize a channel and community to do something like that for league it would be huge.
@jahcode6132 whats the video with the dude who held his own id like to see it.
I play wild rift, and yes I can confirm getting rid of solo Q and letting people play in groups is the single worst thing you could possibly do to league. 30% of wild rifts player base is masters. EVERYONE gets boosted to masters its actually insane. the inflation is so bad they had to add a new rank above challenger because challenger is meaningless now
They’ve recently changed this back to a more competitive system.
@@natsound5492 they changed what?
He even countered his own arguments. If flexqueue is a meme, which I agree it is kind of, that is mostly because it is NOT COMPETITIVE. Many dont care about their rank, people getting boosted constantly, skill differences are off the charts in games etc...Flexqueue is exactly what Soloqueue will become if you merge the two queues.
but why does merging the queus work for literally every other competitive game and not lol like that's what i don't get. Or at least i rarely hear complaints from say dota2 or valorant about that.
@@random1237 It depends on what you mean with "it works". In every game you allow groups that can communicate, form strategies or whatever to compete in the same ladder as solo queue you lose competetive integrity, as not everyone goes into the queue on an equal plainfield anymore. Now for the casual playerbase it might just work fine and make no difference, but for competetive persons that is a problem. As a rank reached means less if you can get carried, boosted to it. League actually acknowledged that fact exactly how I describe it by disabling duoqueue above masters. The higher you go on the ladder the more competetive integrity matters.
@@Return989 Personally i just think there's no point in trying to limit partying below diamond or something like i get it for higher ranks and other games disable 5 stacks for higher ranks too usually.
@@random1237people who min/max elo and abuse bugs/weird caviots to climb don't want in game skill to decide rank.
These guys have already stated rank is a joke and they essentially claim "getting better" is the main goal of ranked. Problem is ranked is what rewards people and what people truly value.
Lol rank IS a joke. I can't see much difference between my normals and ranked games.
@@Return989 You can always just pay someone to boost your account by themselves to like any rank
If you want to play ranked with your friends just play flex lol. Solo queue is so important to make sure that everyone is on an even playing field and you can't queue alone and go vs a 5 man premade. Not everyone has friends to play with and those people will have a huge disadvantage in dynamic queue
the problem with that is flex is an absolute joke and impossible to balance, they should bring duo back to masters + shit is so stale and the ladder is inflated asf anyway
@@diversisle6739 and if they merge them then solo q becomes the same joke flex is thats the whole point only reason solo q isnt a joke is cuz its SOLO
@@diversisle6739 I have played both queues extensively, I can garantee you that if you play with people your rank or in solo in flex you will get maybe 3 divisions above your soloQ rank and then get capped. People memeing flex as a joke haven't gone and tried to rank up. You end up hitting a wall at some point anyway. A tryharding emerald 4 in solo Q, Im getting humbled in Emerald 1 flex by soloQ diamond-master playing casually.
@@Shadame ya thats why its a joke.
@@wochaoainigejiba1211 your level of play is your level of play, wheter it's soloQ or flex. I am simultaniously an Emerald 4 soloQ player and an Emerald 1 flex player. I don't get where flex being a joke becomes relevent until your hit high challenger where yeah... the level of play compared to high chall soloQ is much lower. Then again isn't that what those"casual competitive" players are looking for?
if you dont like soloq just DONT PLAY IT. There is absolutely no problem of being a casual player, BUT LET ME PLAY MY RANKED GAMES.
For real! No one likes getting that one player on their team who just wants to tee-hee-casual the whole match. Go play norms! Nothing wrong with norms, if that’s your thing.
I used to watch thescore esports a lot especially when I was a newer player, their "the story of..." player series is great and helped me learn more about the pros and the competitive scene. I havent watched them in probably a year or so and this video is exactly why, I noticed every single video about league was become more negative and more disconnected with how I (or we lol) view the game. This is definitely without a doubt a pretty bad take, solo q has to be one of the MOST misunderstood things about league
They make vids that will get views
Litteraly just don't make this video and the world would be a better place, they should keep their shitty takes to themselves lmao
"I know everything about the game and it's this and that (...)"
"Ok.. analyse this game for me"
*3 min later
"yep.. you sound exactly like all my hardstuck gold 4 clients.. drop the ego"
for people who sees obstacles to climbing as prevention mechanisms rather than clear actionable improvement mechanisms to progress, WOULD think ranked is the worse thing ever, everyone thinks they are higher ranked than their gameplay would reveal and rank them
Pretty classic hyperbolic doomerism clickbait by theScore Esports. I usually tune these kind of videos out pretty quick, but I know that most people don't or can't. Thank you for responding to it, to be a balancing force against that kind of content.
they're just trying to capitalize off of the anti-hype train of league. the game is just popular to hate right now
amen
@@eebbaa5560always has been
I would say that a full 5 man team of organized play is by far the most enjoyable experience in League. The practicing, the team based strategy, the scouting process, drafting strategy, etc. However, like any competitive environment you have to put individual work in.
Solo queue is the workout room to prepare yourself to be the best player for a team environment. If that’s your goal. Solo queue will expose your growth opportunities and development needs to produce the best foundation for team based play. Playing strictly team based play may disguise your shortcomings in your game. Rather, solo queue exposes it.
Even pro players grind out in Solo queue. Why? To experience emotional destruction? No. To refine their play. To prove their capacity of play.
Yeah but Riot removed Team Ladder Years ago .. and i rly have to question why. I know why .. because ppl these Days are to stupid to get along with 4 other People over a period of time.
his whole argument was "I can't 5 stack and pub stomp the people without a 5 stack so ranked sucks"
What I learned is, teammates aren’t bad they’re just your skill level. Its really easy to make your teammates look bad based on the choices YOU choose to make. Good players know how to make their teammates lives easier making it actually more difficult for them to make mistakes and the way you do that is simply by tracking where your teammates and opponents are and knowing what your job is and executing fundamentals. Every solo queue game is meant to improve the skills necessary to be a teammate your team wants to have on your team.
that's what people hate about solo queue though. obviously if you're the same rank you're not good yourself, but it is legitimately infuriating at times to have to account for some of the disgusting behavior you find in low ranks. there are some players that do not deserve to win, but you still have to try and carry them regardless. your teammates can actually be bad and ignoring that is borderline delusional. personally i just mute all and try to improve things that are in my control, but it is an undeniable fact that there are oftentimes bad players on your team.
@@eebbaa5560 It's not possible for it to be perfectly consistent, though. Sometimes a player could be tired, or distracted, or upset. There are a lot of reasons why they would normally play better but aren't in a specific match.
@@HamsterPants522 i just don’t have sympathy for the players in my games. it’s all i can do to not actively hate them lol. most of the time i just ignore and move on
@@eebbaa5560 I have the opposite problem. When somebody is toxic or tilted, I try to help them to feel better, but none of them ever believe that I actually care about them, so it usually doesn't work. Sometimes, though, it does.
@eebbaa5560 be careful with that viewpoint. i guarantee you that if we looked at your gameplay, we would find countless problems with it as well, each one a good reason for us to be angry at and hate you. obviously, the correct response is not anger but empathy. if you find yourself getting this angry at your teammates, then i think you are putting too much value on your LP/rank and not enough on improvement.
Why does he think/know that ranked flex is a joke? Because it uses the same principles of letting you play with your friends? Isn't that funnily representative?
Reminds me of amateur competitive. I was on call once and everyone was talking about how we lost because we should have picked a different bot lane or communicated better. I wanted to tell them so badly, "we lost because our opponents were simply better players than us."
Before watching the TheScore video, I wanna point out that I actually think the opposite of what the description says: I think Riot should remove DUO queue, and let solo queue be truly solo (and of course, they should also remove solo queue from Flex, allowing only premades on that queue). The skills you need to climb alone are different from the ones you need to climb with premades, and as such they should have two separate ladders where you are only allowed to do one of them in each. That way, people that want to only play alone with no voice comms with a 100% focus on themselves can do that with no disadvantages, and people that want to play with premades with a bigger focus on verbal communication and familiarity with your teammates can also do that with no drawbacks
Edit: 46:00 Curtis, people already did it. In multiple servers the Flex rank 1 player was like gold in soloqueue and had double the lp of the rank 2 in flex because they would queue with a group of 4 gm/chall players + the gold and would play as a group until the games started getting hard, then the 4 gm/chall players would go to new accounts and keep playing with that 1 player, but now in lower rated games because the 4 new accounts had bad mmr. They repeated this a lot of times, the rank 1 player was getting like 1 or 2 lp per win, but they had 90%+ winrates simply because abusing how there's no rank restrictions between premades (th-cam.com/video/OlhAzMkWBug/w-d-xo.html Video by Rav for context)
Riot themselves also want to remove Duo from Solo/Duo. They said in an article that the reason they hadn't yet is because they don't think Flex is good enough of an alternative (I tend to agree). So they are basically trying to figure out a better team queue system for premades such that it fulfills the needs of duo players enough to drop solo queue. Current Flex is a joke. It's not easy but it's a joke compared to solo queue. Hopefully by the end of next season, duo is removed. One of the best reasons to get to high rank in League is also that in Master+ you can't duo, making it a much fairer environment in that sense. Perhaps they could lower it to Diamond+ and thus encourage people to not duo as much in solo queue. Only time will tell.
@@SiMeGamer I don't think they want to. I know they wanted to, but there was a lot of backlash when they announced it (for obvious reasons, on average duo players would be a full rank lower if they had to play alone with their current skill level), and they never mentioned it ever again, so I doubt they are putting much work into fixing Flex queue
@@Pyrrha_Nikos well, I certainly hope that's not the case and that they are still looking for solutions. Removing duo would be amazing.
It's kinda funny cuz I play flex with a group of friends and one of them recently got into the game and is in iron in flex but honestly plays at like a silver level player these days. But he's stuck in iron because he just keeps playing with us and we're all emerald. It's gotten to the point where more and more of the group is starting to dip into Diamond because of lopsided matchmaking that puts us against Gold players, but some of these players hitting Diamond are barely able to break into the bottom of Emerald in solo queue if even.
Flex queue is a joke.
They removed it from masters+ what difference does duoq make in elos where people don't even know how to properly play the game?
This video really left me speechless and honestly disappointed man the message this sends from a channel that literally has esports in its name is so sad.
As someone that plays VALORANT as well, I have found that 5-stacking in competitive is worse than unrated because you meet a lot of boosters and mismatches in rank which leads to it just not being as fun.
There is a flex queue/normal queue to play with your friends. I don't understand why you can't have a ranked queue for people who would want ranked and normals for people that just want to play casually. It should be a completely different experience. It's like complaining you can't drive your Honda Civic in the F1, it's not supposed to be the same thing.
I used to have this midset when i first started league back in season 2 and it lasted until about season 9.
I was a COD and GoW player for years gaining high leaderboard ranks, peaking in the top 100 on the team death match leaderboards in GoW. I just assumed when i started playing league that time alone would get me to the top. I only started to look at myself when I hit a wall in Gold 5/4 and was hardstuck there for years. I realised that time does not equal experience and I had to put in work.
It was hard, I had to iron out my bad habits, review games, learn wave management, jungle tracking, mid game macro, pick a role and small champ pool and stick to it. Its taken another few years, but I've seen incremental changes year on year as I focus on the next concept. I'm currently sitting at Emerald 3 now and climbing (slowly), but I've fallen in love with the process and it's spilled into my every day life. League has taught me discipline and the ability to only compare myself to myself from yesterday. Hopefully this guy and others can learn these game changing views quicker than me with the help of your podcast. Keep up the good work!
Flex queue exists. It has this entire time. The guys entire video is debunked within the first 5 seconds. I don't know why people pretend that Flex queue doesn't exist, but it does. You can play ranked with 4 friends. It's there. It's an option. No one is stopping you.
The funny thing is that he said flexQ is a meme that no one takes seriously, so that's why he doesn't like it. Oh I wonder why no one takes it seriously.
I think its funny how you can look at the little tags it gives you on the right and the only 2 he has are "snowballs" and "surrenders" which makes me think hes 100% the player that either wins hard and has fun or loses and says the game is shit
i think an important thing to understand about league and team games in general is its important to accept other peoples mistakes the thing about this guy surrendering so many games really takes me back to a conversation i had with a friend that doesnt play league about how these people that want to surrender immediately the moment the game looks bad are not even que'ing to try to begin with but are just looking to get carried and make some elo that way expecting their teammates to handle everything for them and funnel them just because they are playing x role.
i remember a game i had a couple years back where my team was losing we had an open nexus everyone died except my toplaner that was around 13 deaths and mostly not contributing much beforehand but we never flamed him and there was hardly any talking to begin with because everyone was trying, anyways we were all dead but we had stalled the game out so long to a point where my top finally reached their spike and 1v3'd the enemy team saving our base giving us enough time to respawn and win the game. and to people that are playing just to get carried its not like the rest of my team wasnt doing anything i was top damage we contested and stole every baron for 40 minutes until we eventually won. thats not even my only example of this, my point is its important to try every game and not focus on your teammates mistakes if your playing ranked and want to surrender every game because "my teammate did this" or whatever then i agree with nathan and curtis maybe ranked just isnt for you.
also to that comment talking about how they cant get into league because its so toxic i actually can relate, i started playing around 2017 and i still remember all the times i got flamed but shaking it off and just kept going, i think league is extremely rough on new players and the biggest problem is its not like you can just tell a new player "well just dont play ranked" because normal games can get pretty heated as well and im saying this from experience (back when i had only been playing two weeks i wanted to try leona for the first time no not in bots but in a normal game against other players i think i went 0/15 and my teammates were afk in base cursing at me telling me to uninstall.).
im plat currently but i think that if your playing ranked and are confident in your role and ability to play well you should go in settings, turn chat off, and move based on your teammates current positions and their pings it actually makes it much easier to focus on the game especially because you will never see that one teammate complaining so you wont get any tilt from that to begin with.
anyways i think ill end this with my favorite league quote from a streamer,
"You can lose games because of your teammates but you will never be stuck because of teammates that's just a bad player's excuse."
-Ratirl
From the perspective of a fourth-year M.D student aiming for a residency in psychiatry it’s scary to see this level of projection and delusion getting praise and recognition. Not surprising, but scary. Love your podcast and I feel that what you preach and promote is baseline sublimation, therapy, and self-reflection for many people.
"playing soloq for fun is a waste of time...and will be a miserable experience" this is exactly how i feel about it. i felt this way when training bjj too. if you train like a hobbyist you just get smashed by all the guys who train for competition
i think the guy who made the video should have to post his opgg lmaop
@@kaelen9906 he did?
Or one could just play it for fun, get placed in the appropriate skill bracket and keep playing the game in an honest fashion...these people who are trying to run from human nature are so funny to me. There are no real arguments against skills based matchmaking.
Why are you fighting profession BJJ artists as a hobbyist? And why are you miserable when you lose?? They're pros, why would they lose to a hobbyist? This is what people are missing with league's soloQ. The ranks actually mean something, so don't feel bad if you lose a game, they were just better.
I have a heavy fighting game background and i can tell you for certain that the ranked system will make or break the game. For Honor is a fighting game made by ubisoft that had an amazing launch but quickly the player base dropped it since it didn't even have a ranked mode. Think about that. A fighting game, a game specifically designed to be competitive did not have a ranked mode. I feel confident in saying that any complex pvp game that does not have a meaningful way to judge a players level of skill will feel incomplete.
It has ranked now and the mode is almost completely dead because 90% of the community doesn't care about fundamentals and just wants to spam aoe unblockables in dominion... literally the most smooth brained community I have ever seen, but I'll stop my rant there lmao
@@jimjimson6208 the game wasn't built to be competitive, dominion is the main game mode.
its like cod, itcould be a comp game but most players like the casual arena shooter/silly fighting game.
I'm so happy my suggestion was taken up, great roast😂
You guys hit the nail on the head. I've always made the same exact point when talking to people about video games. Due to the physical nature of most sports, you find yourself region locked to a small subset of players. You don't get the raw experience of skill and talent that video games like league have. If I was to get good enough I could randomly start finding myself in matches with some of the best LOL players in the entire world. I find that absolutely incredible. No matter how good you are at basketball for example, there are a lot of "hoops" you have to jump through before you'd ever find yourself on a court with even near pro level players. As you guys said at any time I'm free to sit down and play with people that are exactly at my skill level almost globally which is an experience I don't think you get in a lot of athletic sports.
This is one of the aspects of LOL that I've come to enjoy the most. I think people always like to shit on low elo and say how bad people are at the game. Maybe it's not that people suck, it's just that the game is hard, so hard in fact that most people will never be able to fully dedicate the time and effort necessary to master it. I think people should be more proud of their rank and realize that the sheer scale of the LOL ranked ladder is hundreds of times larger than any physical sport. If we use the basketball analogy again, you are literally playing games in the same ladder as Lebron James and Stephen Curry. Of course you don't measure up because these people are some of the greatest competitive players of all time. This isn't an excuse to not improve, but realize that the skill gap is far larger than most people realize. A lot of people are not delusional enough to think they could ever be on the same court as Lebron. Maybe understand that reaching challenger is not achievable if you also have other goals you are pursuing in life.
Because the ladder is so large your rank probably shows greater mastery of the game than you realize. Be proud that you are able to achieve the rank that you are in and are pushing yourself beyond your natural understanding of the game it means more than you think.
GW2 isn't dead, it just received it's third expansion. Just wanted to clear up this misconception.
People say SoloQ is Broken By Concept but in reality They are Broken By Process 😏
Damn we couldve used a warning about SHOCKING levels of delusion in the video you covered. Really did the competitiveness a favour by breaking this one down
No flame to either side but dmitri looks like curtis' evil brother 😭
It's so clear that this guy feels like rank is meant to be a reward for playing and not a representation of your skill level. He's complaining about how much effort it takes to earn the same way people complain about cosmetics costing too much of the free currency to get without spending money.
I am a high emerald ADC main , but I am depressed they removed my "I want to freeze the wave" ping. I used that EVERY game, and losing it felt like losing a finger to me. Also, I would often ping their ult timer and then go in. Now I have to type out, hey, when your ult comes back up, I want to look for a fight. I am very sad+ mad they removed these pings. They REALLY hurt me.
Just ping the teammate off with danger ping
bro in season 2 I was making keyboard macros to type "MID MIA" everytime he ducked out of vision. Our current ping system is damn good
@@Rayonnant_styleyeah but no reason to take a step backwards because of some toxic people you can simply mute
Thank you for mentioning this guys, I noticed with their most recent video too that they only make negative content about league
Like it's a popular thing to do and brings in more traction I find it a bit disgraceful of them
They have so many positive videos about their beloved CSGO/2 and all their other shooters but they only use LoL as their scapegoat to be able to produce some sort of negative content for who knows what reason
Their last normal video about league was 2 months ago; the story of baron nashor
Dynamic queue was the absolute worst thing riot ever did. Even thinking about it now brings me rage.
When I got to league, I had to choose between support and jg since friend group had other roles mained, and my gameplay was literally to pick pantheon and get red buff and flash W on enemy midlaner's head every game. I am so glad those times are past now, but I was so turbo far away from actually learning the game at that time (season 7-8). Even though I was playing with my friends (flex or ranked duo) it was a miserable experience, since I did not undestand what I should even be doing in the games. Great ep once again guys!
exact same situation for me. i was forced into support because my friends already played everything else and i developed so many bad habits even after i started branching out to other roles. for starters, i had absolutely no idea how to lane or trade, much less farm, because all i did as support was pick things like leona/nami/blitzcrank and go for stuns into kills lol. landing skillshots was maybe the only thing i practiced as a support. i barely even learned anything about support while i played because all it was to me was helping adc get kills. i dropped wards randomly and didn't even roam. i also played a million different champions (by now i've played almost the whole roster at least once) and never built champion mastery, most likely because i didn't actually care about the support role or any of the champions enough to commit to learning them.
when i finally started playing mid lane, i was horrible at farming (it took me a very long time to even begin to understand the importance of gold/exp) and had no idea how to trade or track jungle, etc. i had no conception of any of the fundamentals whatsoever. i've played league since right about the time they updated summoner's rift (i have some vague memories of playing before the map update) and i am only just now actually learning how to play the game. i've been playing on and off since maybe season 4 and i've never been higher than silver 2. of course, i've built up some narratives, but the most damaging thing so far has been a complete loss of confidence over years of playing and never gaining a semblance of competence as a player. even as recently as last split, i played 600 games with 80+ different champions and duo queued for a majority them. this split, i have 60 games, 40 of which are on one champion, but i have lost too much confidence in myself and interest in the game to be able to play more than a few games every two weeks. i'm afraid to commit myself to the process because i feel like it isn't enough to get me out of the hole that i've dug for myself.
i wrote into the podcast maybe two months ago and i haven't gotten a reply from them, but my perspective has since changed and i feel as though i have different questions that i want to ask now. i think i'll write them again later today to amend my previous email and ask for some advice.
all of this is to say, while casual league can be fun from time to time, i truly believe that it is a waste of time and a detriment to yourself if you commit too many hours to it, as i have. i played the game to avoid my real-life problems, and all i have to show for it is a deep sense of shame and regret for having wasted so much of my life on this game instead of developing myself as a player or in real life.
It really does a lot of damage sometimes when you start out like that in a group and do running errands without a clue why you do it. I hope that you can get over that hurdle eventually, but also if you feel like your experience has been messed up so bad that it feels miserable to play, always remember that you can find other things than league to better yourself in, depending on what you like. Hard to give the right advice on a comment like this, but main point is that I hope you all the best as someone who has had similar experience starting out. Cheers mate.@@eebbaa5560
man im glad you got through that, not gonna lie thats also another problem with playing league with friends, everyone cant play the same role. I also had a similar experience to yours forced to play ashe adc and just ult down lane lmfaooo
@@eebbaa5560great post. would be nice to see curtis and nathan break it down and offer some remedies. i realize now that i replied to your other comment on this video. it sounds like your situation is much more complicated than i assumed. a couple years ago i was in a situation similar to yours.
since you have so many years as a casual player, i think it is a big risk for you to play difficult roles like adc or mid. my recommendation for you is to play top lane, pick one champion, and go back to the basics. focus on the bare fundamentals. csing, getting to your powerspikes, and playing off of your and your opponent's cooldowns. forget your teammates. mute all. focus your lane, and focus on getting every cs that you can while valuing your life. having good farm and getting items is the best way to get consistently and reliably strong. learn to know when you are strong and weak (powerspikes), and play accordingly. group with your team post 20 minutes.
you have many bad habits and invisible narratives to unlearn, so use this opportunity. if anything, you could create a new account for a fresh start. i dont mean this in terms of getting some sort of advantage. i only mean that it might help in separating you from your past; your old account may be tied to past people and past experiences, and sometimes it can help to get away from all that and just focus on the solo grind without worrying what others on your friends list might think.
@@burtReynolds3 i main mid i don’t really have a problem with playing it and i feel like it’s easier than top lane. i hate playing adc cuz it feels like coinflipping the game and i hate playing for late game. i also hate random supports. i suck at laning so every time i queue top it’s pretty much a free loss. idk any of the matchups and the only champion i can sort of play is aatrox. i already do most of the stuff you’re talking about otherwise i just don’t play enough games these days. i group sometimes but i also splitpush a lot since i play ekko. i’m not going to make a new account though. i feel like unless i can unfuck my account i’m never going to redeem myself. curtis and nathan always talk about how every player should experience getting an account unstuck to really feel their improvement and i want to experience that for myself, so i’m going to stick with my only account until i quit the game.
They literally have a queue for people that want to play ranked with their friends, its called FLEX... Wtf... If you hate soloq don't play it.. FLEX is a meme? So the only fix is to merge soloq and make all ranked a meme? Have you ever listened to voice comms of pro teams? The fights are so fast all they can do is shout the name of the champion they want to focus down.
I used to think communication in League was limited too but then I became a better player. We are all smart enough to know that communication exists in different forms verbal and nonverbal. You obviously can't talk in league but you have pings that provide a really concise and sufficient form of quick information. Pings should be enough to get you through the 10% of circumstances where you need to get a message across loudly. The other 90% of communication will be nonverbal and it's really every single player's duty to be watching and listening for those forms of communication.
If you're 10 minutes into the game with no pings and you think your team is not effectively communicating then you are missing literally hundreds of nonverbal queues. You need to take note of what people are doing and how they are playing. Just because someone didn't ping or type in chat doesn't mean the evidence isn't there to for you to be completing a certain task at that moment. One example I have that happens almost every low elo game is jg obj is up but jg just died and top is afk farming. You are able to move to it with your support but you know you have little chance of winning the fight with no vision and down 2 players so you go farm a sidelane. Mid ignores the nonverbal queues hes receiving from all of his teammates goes to obj and dies to the 5 man. Was a ping really necessary? Arguably yes if it would prevent a death, but he already ignored 4 "pings" 1 from dead jg who physically can't be at obj, 1 from top who is splitting, and 2 from you and sup who are not rotating.
These forms of communication are often far more subtle. One of the biggest forms of communication you need to be aware of is how your teammates are positioning. You can tell a lot by how your team is playing in your immediate vicinity. If they are standing back and letting the wave push, they clearly do not want to engage with the enemy. Maybe they have abilities on cd, maybe they are weak before a power spike, maybe they spotted enemy jg rotating, you don't know, but either way they are telling you I do not want to take this fight. If you ignore this and engage anyway, you could lose for any number of reasons, but don't be surprised that your teammate doesn't bail you out. Conversely if your teammate is playing aggressive, it's your job to support them or tell them to back off. You don't win games by having zero interaction so playing aggressive when you're strong is really important. If your teammate is poking, trading health, and baiting abilities they probably are looking for a kill in the near future. These are just some small ways that people are communicating even if it isn't literally spelled out for you. I think the best LOL players are the ones who can read their teammates nonverbal queues and develop a strategy that fits in line with what their teammates want to do. Nobody has ever won a game by completely ignoring their team. If they have, their team was probably doing their best to make and take space for them while they were unaware of that teamwork.
dimitri has never had a good track record of talking about league in good faith. i used to watch a lot of thescore when they did minidocs about different pro players, but since that well has mostly dried up and all they have left is esports news and complaining about the states of league, valorant AND cs (not to mention the puff pieces they've done for high-end peripherals like wooting), i haven't watched in a while. it's unfortunate to see this sort of video get posted on their channel, especially when 5 out of 7 videos surrounding it in their uploads ("S1mple Is Done With Valve", "The Most Broken Gun In Valorant is Ruining the Game", "This Has To Stop", "Valorant Is Too Easy", & "League Is F@*king Lonely") are similarly negative. it seems they rely pretty heavily on a target audience of the type of gamer who never stops talking about how much they hate the game they play every single day. these videos do well because the comments section becomes a sounding board for every anecdotal bad experience anyone has had with solo queue/game balance/toxicity which pushes the videos way more heavily than a video that gets a bunch of initial views and no comments.
The fundamental issue here is summed up when you said “what do you want?” If you want a competitive gaming experience, then solo q is perfect. If you don’t, then it’ll suck.
His view on ranked isn’t about competitive integrity, it’s about being given highest rank in any meaningless means necessary to validate & protect his ego
I feel like it’s really similar to soccer, several players playing together, in sync without being able to talk to each other with ease, yet they are all on the same page and can capitalize mistakes or opportunities and perform. I mean, of course they practice together and have that synergy from it, the point I’m heading to is that comms are not a key factor. Also this guy is so bitter, it saddens me that he feels the need to drag others to his misery, if league is not for you, just play other games.
That guys whole vibe is a trigger warning damn
Dynamic queue was horrible. I remember queueing as a solo into a 4 man group on my team. All they did was flame blame and report me. Shit was actual hell compared to solo queue
How delusional and out of touch with reality do you have to be to sign up for a competitive game and refer to the ranking as "just the rank"? WHAT ELSE IS THERE????
My immediate thought about 5 manning and coms comparing league to fps is the camera. In fps you cannot see what you’re teammates see but in league you have the constantly up mini map and literally the press of a f key see what they see. League doesn’t need coms because they are infinitely less efficient than the UI.
I really feel like these narratives about League of Legends are EXACTLY what is helping to increase the toxicity and make the game worse for everyone, which in turn feeds into the narratives, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy of self-sabotage. I too love this game, and I know it has its problems such as ancient spaghetti code and balance issues, but I still enjoy the mechanical depth, massive character pool, lore, world, visual style, and the competitive feel of League of Legends.
Even if you're a one trick pony, you get matched up with a practically endless variety of opponents playing an endless combination of champions to fight against. I don't know how League of Legends got the bad reputation it has gotten, but enough is enough with it. I am not going to dismiss the problems with Riot as a company, of course not, and I am not going to just pretend the game is flawless, but League of Legends deserves better than people blaming eachother for losses and the unhealthy relationships they have with the game.
Everyone is constantly screaming about how the game "ruined" their life, but why is that the case? I mean, why can't it just be fun like any other video game? People can choose to stop doing this and make League of Legends fun again! Thank you, Broken by Concept, for trying to push back against these toxic narratives.
I did agree up to a point, where you started calling that guy a "snowflake" for wanting something "utopian"... for rightfully criticizing how awful people are acting. There is no reason for this behavior, even in real life competitive games such as sports. The slurs, the bigotry, the weird character attacks. This says a lot about the morality and character of the toxic people playing League of Legends or any competitive game, and as an empathetic person I genuinely worry about them and their mental health for acting like that over a FRICKIN' GAME. The world has enough problems without people treating eachother more like crap than ever before. Yeah, welcome to LoL, but it's actively making the game worse for everyone, especially for people who enjoy interacting with people online via chat. Yes, I have chat muted and will always have it muted, but not all of us want to play LoL like that. This is literally the only criticism I have of your video here, because it's otherwise on point.
It's funny how he seems so nice for wanting the game to be "less toxic", but ended up being part of the problem. Self-fulfilling prophecy, as I said. Keep it up, this is a different and fresh way of tackling the toxicity problem in League of Legends!
That guy reminds me of call of duty players back when I was 14 who would get irrationally butthurt when losing a casual deathmatch let alone a competitive Search and Destroy, yikes.
I would argue. Eliminate the ability to play duo in Ranked for all levels. I think this would actually improve the low ELO experience.
this dude was so delusional. claming dota was the worst experience because it had two seperate queues... and him wanting to merge all into flex because "flex is a joke" smh
personal development is just a concept some people are oddly foreign to. a grown man just spent hours of his life to make a 11 min video explaining why he and his target audience deserves to be cuddled in a competitively natured video game. not sure if i should feel disappointed or just point and laugh tbh.
chat and pings are abused too much for them to be useful enough to risk tilting because of them
has this been you before? it's been me:
"i'll turn off chat, but keep pings on so we can communicate"
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I know team paradigm, i was the org manager. there is actually a lot to the story of gw2 pvp. long story short though, it was not a priority for the devs.
FYI per the 52min mark: In 2011 I competed in a SC2 tournament and the grand prize was 1 hour coaching session with a GM
this game lowkey isn’t fun at all when you’re not playing for stakes. flex queue with 3+ people and things like clash are fun but i couldn’t play league like that forever. even when i used to duo we only played solo queue because there was literally no point in playing without fake points on the line.
Invite this guy and some pro on the podcast to discuss it. Would love it
Just had an interesting experience recently with the psyche that goes into building habits and reviewing. I have a noticeable psychological and slight physical reaction to trying to queue for another game after playing one instead of reviewing the game now (solo Q only as that's my habit; if it's flex or arams or w/e with friends I've compartmentalized those to not matter as much)
I always review my games after I play them, albeit typically with a procrastination oriented delay like browing Reddit or YT for 5~20 mins, but recently I've picked up Briar and replays with her are bugged and will crash around the 10 min mark onwards (if you jump ahead in the replay past the crash point, it'll play like normal for a little but still crash).
After realizing what was up after 3 or 4 games, on my most recent block with her I decided I'd just try to queue up for another game as there wouldn't be that much to take away from a replay with only the first 10 mins. Firstly, I realize how wrong that sounds when I type it out now lol.
Just in the game I reviewed I can remember 3 separate points I could now clearly look over and improve on or clarify what happened (didn't respect enemy Top having shove and fogging, "wasted" Flash chasing a Pyke with no CDs or sums but was missing information due to lack of omnipresence abilities, figured out I can just farm my Red spawning Topside in 20s into Topside camps respawning instead of forcing a bad Drag just because I have "nothing else" to do on the map even though my ADC needed to reset).
Secondly, it felt extremely wrong and honestly terrible to try click the queue up button again right after one game. I NEED to review my games now (which is awesome lol) even though I always procrastinate the actual review for a bit by 5~20 mins since they are mentally taxing to go through (especially after playing the match which itself was mentally taxing).
Also its funny he mentions rss, considering 5 stacks being in solo q have ruined comp in that gam
In my opinion a team of Emerald 1 players who practice together for 3 years would lose to a random team of silvers with ONE GM player.
Without comms
As someone part of a team of Emerald 1 flex queue players, we absolutely would.
Hey, when listening to your podcast, the one about about feeling hopeless, when you mentioned Alois, an idea struch me, that if one wants to master the game, he must not one-trick only, but try to learn ALL other roles and playstyles, even if it were 10-20 games each, to get acustomed to them and learn to recognise the goals and fears of enemy players (and teammates in that sense) , it's like literal meaning of "knowing your enemy", and returning back to your onetrick later of course. At least this has help me immensly and i hope it may help someone else too.
You’re describing Tyler1 😂
Also the brutal reality of solo queue is what keeps you improving. You can either be in an echo chamber of the same circle of players who never call you out or you could go solo and get a good but toxic jgl who tells you why tf aren't you rotating to this play you dvmbass and then you think hmm... true, mb, should have rotated there
It's easy to string similar looking things together and point to it as a pattern that's proof of some unifying cause. "They removed this communication then this communication, proving they want zero communication", conveniently ignoring the time they tried to remove all chat and people protested until they gave it back.
"Snowballs" + "Surrenders" tells you his story in 2 words. He goes 9/0 and he's on top of the world, or he goes 0/1 and he's saying GG FF15. Curtis's video about getting excited at wins makes a nice companion video to this.
Love the podcast guys but I think its a bit disingenuous to say that nobody knows how to use pings properly.
I may be a low elo silver 1 player but I just started playing last year during worlds. There are plenty of instances in each and every game I play where I am constantly pinging information to my team - need vision/vision cleared, hold wave, pinging ult timers, pinging their flash pinging items to show we need grievous wounds or armor pen etc. im not the only one in my elo that does this, so to hear a high ranked player like you guys say “low elo players dont even know how to ping properly” its not entirely true. As you well know there is countless amounts of content from high elo players out there, countless videos and guides directed at low elo players trying to improve. And in-game communication through pings is one of those ways that help people develop a better in-game awareness, crucial for climbing the ladder. Love you guys and keep up the good work but I think you gravely underestimate lower elo players
I think you drastically overestimate the accuracy of what you're pinging
Most of the pings they removed are pings that are hard to utilize for lower ranked players because they either miss that information due to limited focus capacity or because they don't know how to use that information. If you ping a death timer or an ultimate timer, it's often useless because people in lower ranks don't have enough patience to wait it out.
I play in high Diamond and even there those types of pings were usually ignored. The ping for Smite cooldown has been ignored in so many games it's genuinely tough to count. It's extreme. And while I'm not happy with the changes (I use all the ally pings), I see the mostly positive value for the community at large (mainly the casuals). I hope they find a way to get those pings back and make them non-toxic (for example, having a ping cooldown on ally pings or a limit to spam pinging) but it's not really that big of a deal.
Lower ranked players could play without pings and chat and learn how to play the game better and climb because most of their mistakes are not a matter of lack of communication. Their gameplay is worse and so they need to fix that first. I really hope Riot can do some changes to the pings but I agree with the overall positive direction this has lead to for the ultra majority of players (where pings were used mostly to harass and not be constructive - even in fairly high ranks).
@@SiMeGamer Bro when you mentioned the number of times smite cooldown pings have been ignored I literally saw 1000 images of dragon on low health flash before my eyes, its so true.
my brain sort of exploded when I realized this is just the same guy copy pasted 3 times over
Bruh I was this guy, not even too long ago. I played since season 3 and my impression was that 5 stack was peak league, and the only way it should be played, solo was cancer.
I didn’t realize how casual I was. I thought I was competitive but I was just a casual player through and through. I’ve finally decided to put my big boy pants on and take the game more seriously and its been a wildly different experience.
Though what differentiates us is that i wasn’t outwardly toxic, only inwardly
I know an example of a bad teammate, the guy making the video. The guy flaming his ass of or soft inting is a bad teammate.
People can have a poor performance without being a bad teammate in my opinion, as long as they keep trying to win and don't start flaming, soft inting or griefing in another way they are neutral or good teammates
I also think toxic players are a huge problem. But be that I mean players who abuse their teammates, not bad players. Of course all my teammates are bad - I'm bad as well, it makes sense I'd be paired with them!
If I make a mistake and they spot it, I'm glad for the feedback actually. That doesn't have to take the form of racist slander though. Especially annoying is when people massively abuse you for stuff that wasn't even wrong because they themselves have no clue about the game.
So yeah, toxicity is a problem, just don't abuse people in soloqueue. There is literally no reason to do so.
SoloQ and the ladder is what made me interested in league and it’s pro scene. Although that’s not much the case now in NA, the ranking system is a clear cut interesting system.
Yes it has its issues (more so account buying now) it’s still a clear goal. I played valorant since closed beta and it’s not fun playing rank against 5 stacks now. That wasn’t much the case back then. Not as bad as league because league has so many moving pieces that a 5 stack can abuse even duo, but it’s just not it . SoloQ in league I really enjoy because I’m making plays based off the information provided for me and using fundamentals.
Riot does need to fix flex, I think them making SoloQ only solo was the play, but they had to stop that idea. People don’t like playing flex because they rather play normals instead of it and possibly getting stomped by another 5 stack who could be certain higher ranks. It’s a cope for many.
I also wouldn’t want voice comms because I’ve seen it with friends who have played the game for YEARS, I can say something that makes total sense, but they don’t understand why so they think it’s wrong. Imagine voice comms with randoms lol. All the information is on the map and with pings, if you can’t even listen to pings and a person on vision, then idk.
i always found it absolutely insane that you can five stack in valorant ranked. it's so funny how many boosted egirls there are in high ranks. idk how anyone is able to take valorant ranked seriously or even find the motivation to play the game as a solo. valorant is the last game that you should be able to five stack in ranked but somehow it's allowed lol.
@@eebbaa5560 rank doesn't matter, it is a made up number to encourage people to play more. who cares if some egirls got boosted. If you think you're more skilled, then you are.
The only thing that matters in mmr, but mmr is hidden so its pointless to worry about it.
Just wanted to say that Guild Wars 2 is very much alive as a game.
Comparing it to chess is very accurate. I'm an avid chess player and have spent time studying to improve, etc. Once I hit my desired elo in chess, I stopped studying, and guess what? I stopped getting better. My elo plateaued, and I was fine with that. I knew that in order to improve I'd have to deep dive more into the skills of chess, but I was happy with what I had accomplished. I'm sure one day I'll want to grow in chess again, but for now, I'm happy to be a "casual" player at my current level.
1:17:50 this guy is basically saying that he wants to play less games to reach a high rank. Does he even care about integrity? Or difficulty? If we wants to play less games without taking the time to learn the game, then what are we doing to the ranked system to decrease the amount of games needed to reach a high rank? I’ve got the answer: make it easier
the part about 60% wr max is ultimate copium. Everyone knows about the 90% wr rengar d4 accounts
I think that the very introduction of vocal communication would change would it means to “get better”. If in every instance play you add a unrivaled form of communication. Having complete total awareness of everything happening on the map is less important. Being able to call plays and take a leader role is a more desirable skill that is much easier to carry out too. You see it with fps gamers (like the kind this channel caters too) being a shot caller in CS is a very real role even in solo que
Fighting games have had coaches for an extremely long time. League is just so massive that it's the most common game people find their first coach
And that's why Internet is a dangerous place.
People who know nothing about a given topic can spread their opinion like wildfire even though it's poopoo for the immense majority of what they say.
This guy is a certified boosted enjoyer, on every game he plays it seems, and doesn't understand League is one of the rarest games out there that doesn't allow it and where the community is in majority against it.
Can't address the topic if he fails to understand the premise...
😅
Sorry to be negative but theres something about demetri that annoys me. Always has L takes on league and CS but from what ive heard is low elo in both games.
"League has the best rank system of any game" How about chess? Just straight Elo rating would be better than the current "ranks"
well yeah but chess is also like the perfectly optimized competitive game lol.
i do think league should have the same system (just raw points and ranked tiers based on how many points you have) but it’s harder to gauge in a team game.
i will say that league mmr is decent in that adjusts how much lp you lose or gain in order to keep you in certain ranks. that’s a good design on paper but it is poorly implemented imo and can seem really artificial and unfair at times.
Guildwars 2 isn't "dead". PVP isn't there but name an MMO with a quality playerbase in PVP....
I have seen the TheScoreEsports video floating around for a while but never had the courage to watch it, feels better having you two with me. Makes it less draining
The problem with league being "hardcore" is that Riot doesn't go to that direction anymore.
With the huge and constant removal of skill expression, elo inflation and general changes for new players, league is currently going in the opposite direction which is the casual one.
actually there is a cognitive dissonance imo. riot's balancing decisions are geared towards competitive gameplay, but their out of game decisions are trying to bring in new players, which leads to players feeling disillusioned by the fact that the game isn't properly catering to them as casuals, because it isn't a casual game. riot tries to cast a wide net with league of legends, but over the past few years this has ruined the game for both casual and competitive players because the company itself can't decide what it wants league of legends to be. i believe that league is at its core designed to be a competitive game, but since riot can't or won't commit to that ideal, the game is always in this purgatorial state of untapped potential.
@@eebbaa5560 Yes exactly. And that is the worst thing they could do actually. They are not helping new players in any meaningful way and on top of that they ruin the game for "veterans" or people that have been playing already for quite some time. You cannot do both and be succesful in both.
I have played both Valorant and Dota and while I do play ranked with friends, I share the sentiment that queing with friends is not a true reflection of your skill which is why personally if I'm grinding for a certain rank I don't consider that goal getting achieved if it wasn't solo queue. Example in Valorant my peak is technically gold if you check my tracker but I still consider myself a silver player because I haven't actually reached gold by myself.
im so glad i wasnt the only one that thought that guys take on solo queue was incredibly absurd
"If people just tell you stuff, then how are you learning?" This is a big thing in maths education, would you rather students discover the correct idea or show them an example or the steps for the proof. A lot of people have this romantic idea about discovery and although it might be more pleasurable to discover things independently, but in practice just telling someone what they should be doing is the most effective way to obtain results.
I think the real problem you're talking about (this might have been what you meant anyway) is that it's very beneficial to understand why you want to do certain things, as opposed to just learning that you do certain things. Not understanding why you should do something means that your understanding is far too specific to the situation in front of you, knowing why you should do something allows you to generalise things and perhaps behave effectively in similar situations too.
At some point you will have to learn to think for yourself though, and having a constant voice in your ear telling you what to do and not why to do it, you're basically the guy in the Chinese room problem, translating Chinese via the steps, but never understanding Chinese.
Waffle over, I had a bit of time this morning...
31:23
I feel like hardcore gaming and practicing and being deliberate with getting better really exploded on fortnite when they introduced creative, all of a sudden players are complaining about sweats and sbmm but they didn’t wanna spend the time in creative. That’s what all this reminds me of
baffled by people who constantly complain about bad/toxic teammates. there are other games you guys can play, you don't have to like league
Competition and striving for better ranks is what has kept my interest in League of Legends since season one, yes many of the champions and lore help reinforce the fun, but ultimately it's competing that gives satisfaction for myself.
The only thing I will agree with from him is about Ranked 5v5 Flex being a joke, but not the way he thinks it is. If you're looking at the NA ladder for Flex queue you will see rank one has a nearly 90% win rate over 100+ games. There are some very blatant levels of win trading happening in this queue and for myself and others we find it's a joke because of that lack of integrity for the game there.
I'm so glad you covered this and that I am not alone in my disagreement with that video.
dude is the same type of person who says From Soft games need an easy mode
but to the comms point that always seems to pop up in goofy rants like this: i played in a few online League tourneys years back, Teamspeak comms were required, and it was all 'soloQ' (as in always 5 strangers per team)
voice comms don't do shit for communication or 'toxicity' in League, because it's still anonymous, and it doesn't help anyone understand the game any more than they do already
i was in CoD/GoW lobbies as a teenager, voice comms have never been known to curb toxicity or improve gameplay quality. do they improve entertainment? absolutely. quality? absolutely fucking not. lmao
although i will say, "ah yes, the reason i cant get challenger is because i don't have a 12 year old suburban kid screaming the N word at me while calling me a f*ggot!" is an extremely funny bit
Every discussion about competitive gaming reminds me how much I miss Battlerite.
At 7:30 are we saying the entire game is dead? I'd strongly disagree it's consistently a top 3-5 player base usually behind FF14, WoW, and maybe OSRS
While I could argue that solo q can be better optimised, I agree with you guys on this one. Solo q is what makes league good.
People don't want to play unranked because it feels pointless. They want to play ranked because they want to be able to say that they're high rank... but they don't put in the work to be good so they never make it there... yet they will keep playing half ass because they don't want to admit that they're not good.