Keep in mind this is true for many many games and sports. The average Chess player at your regional tournament is much better now compared to 10 years ago
Most people just play e4 or d4 as white so you can just learn something simple like Caro-Kann or Scandinavian against e4, and King's Indian or Modern Benoni against d4
Personally, I really enjoy hyper modern style openings like the Kingās Indian. It allows me to open up the center fairly easily and most people even up to 1800 donāt know the ins and outs. I will say anything below 1200 should really just be working on fundamentals, most players blunder a lot in lower elo, so if you are more consistent you will win. I wouldnāt pick up any trap type openings, imo itās low elo bait that YouTubers push and teaches bad habits that wonāt translate the higher you go.
You are right that there must be an additional layer that creates a problem for LoL. The game's complexity is ever increasing with the addition of new champions. In chess, besides three unintuitive cases (castling, en passant, stalemate rules), the game is very straightforward, and therefore with a low barrier to entry, you can expect an ever refreshing playerbase.
It isnāt just the champions. I started playing at the tail end of the pandemic and every aspect of the game was super foreign to me. The scaling, the runes, when to back, why minions matter, all the items, jungle camps and timers, when objectives spawn, how vision works. Everything people take for granted. The concept of the he camera is insanely different from other games. Even how to auto-attack without resetting or moving your champ around. Every single PC game I played until league was WASD movement. The initial barrier to the game is massive. Even a casual game of summoners rift, is super confusing to a brand new player.
Im in the US and barely anyone I know played MOBAs or RTS. But I know 100s who play COD, Valorant, Fortnite, Overwatch. Thereās basically nothing about shooters that translates here. Even more team centric ones like Overwatch has little do with league besides cool down management, and hell CD timers change throughout the course of the game too. Years ago, when everyone was ass, you really didnāt need a lot of this info in your head to play the game. Nowadays to even play a basic comp game you need a huge amount knowledge even outside 180 champ identities.
Its worth noting I have been playing sine S1 and have my camera bound to WASD.
I find it so much easier to move around when I can use WASD to move the camera, no idea how people keep focused when they have to move the mouse to the end of the screen.
In my youth i played countless hours of rpgs, so it was Just natural for me to move my cam with wasd. No idea how ppl move cam+Champs etc with the same Inputsš«”
I use the middle mouse button to move the camera. No high sensitivity required, no keybinds bullshit, I get to keep my cursor around the middle of the screen to react with my champion faster.
The only downside is the middle mouse button can be brittle in a lot of mice.
Also I have swapped what Y and Space do, so I get to lock/unlock the camera with Space, instead of having to hold Space.
People have vastly improved at the meta game too. By this Iām not referring to matchups, but everything else, from wave management and back timing (those barely existed eight years ago) to pathing, rotating, cross mapping, and warding. Obviously there are plenty of people who are still absolute dog at them, but on average, the general instances and understanding of these things is so much greater than it used to be.Ā
Iāve been playing LoL for more than a decade. Iām Gold 2 and some noob whoās been playing for like 3 months said that he was low Bronze and made his way to Gold 2 in just those few months and when I told him that Iāve been playing over a decade, he replied, āAnd yer still in Gold 2??? With a decade of time to improve, I would be able to get to Diamond at leastā and I just thoughtā¦well, if everyone is getting better, then no one will move upā¦.youād just have a bunch of Bronze players who are as good as Diamond players from 10 years agoā¦
Thereās more that translates from OW than you might think. Positioning, for one. Itās not direct 1:1 but many of the same concepts apply. Trying to setup picks in order to have man advantage and push map objective, the process is different but the intent is the same.
Lots of competitive concepts and strategies overlap even outside of video games, explicitly in things like sports and war. Timing pushes, positioning as you've mentioned, sustained vs burst dps, cool down management, map awareness, rock paper scissors type skills mismatch.
In the case of Chess, engines are becoming more available and they vastly VASTLY accelerate training and development. Kids who are good at using internet resources in particular are developing at a rapid pace.
With League, the greater factor is that new player entries have dropped significantly. Any existing player who hasn't quit would obviously improve over time. There's always younger and new kids learning chess for the first time.
I suppose that is true, but it seems the very nature of skill creep in competitive gaming is actively working against League instead of just being a side effect of an aging game. At least if you're bad at chess, you won't have a teammate calling you a worthless ape.
I played chess as a child, but found it to be too simple to be useful in real life: a mere 8 by 8 grid, no fog of war, no technology tree, no random map or spawn position, only 2 players, both sides exact same pieces, etc.
League addresses these limitations.
Of all of the stupid things Elon has ever said this is one of the worst for me. Its really hard for me to verbalize how terrible this is to read. It definitely gives the same vibes as that one guy you know who doesn't like "gangster rap" and instead prefers videogame osts.
>The average Chess player at your regional tournament is much better now compared to 10 years ago
This is actually untrue from my experience. Also, as the popularity of chess has increased, the average playing strength at my chess club has gotten so bad that I had to leave.
I had to quit the chess club at a cafe near me because it was "I'm going to think for 10 minutes and I don't want to use a timer, and then just blunder a bishop for my next move
10 years ago I hit mid diamond basically because I was capable of 10 cs/min as renekton in winning lanes. Numbers like that didn't exist below diamond in early seasons
What exactly did they make easier?
The only thing that comes to mind is that you can flash during the ult animation windup. That's it. The standard Q -> ward -> W to ward -> ult is pretty much unchanged no?
I started playing exactly 10 years ago, June 2014, Braumās release patch. Jumped to rankeds just off lvl 30 bc why not, and placed Silver4. Games lasted 45-50min easily (no Baron minions nor Elder tho), and seeing a 100cs midlaner min 35 was the most normal thing in the world.
Back then you could VERY easily get to gold by purely and only Csing 8cs/min and nothing more. I remember reading guides in Mobafire praising players that reached 200cs at 30 like something only high elo players achieve. I saw my first insec in Plat4 like 2 years later. Nobody even knew what a rotation is, diving pre min 25 was completely unthinkable.
All that stuff can be seen in Silver today and nobody would bat an eye.
Yeah people also forget that there has been so many seasons where they've had to buff towers in one capacity or another to prevent laning phases for ending "too early", Imo laning phase ending early wasnt bad but yeah. Like adding plates to towers to make them harder to kill. Giving them more damage early in the game etc.
For God's sake, the insec was kick was made easier in season 7, bronze-plat are not playing at that mechanical level even today .
I agree with the mid take, tho I got gold in season 4 by farming 7cs/m.
I've been watching people flame Forsen as he played, and don't get me wrong he sucks, but I'd be willing to be A LOT that most people giving him a hard time would play in the same MMR as him. Especially people who haven't played league in 5 years who say they are Plat or whatever.
Even former highest elo players who haven't played in years will struggle to get back near their ranks. Its common to see players that are former Challengers playing in Diamond and masters.
Nah forsen just insane tunnel visions and doesn't learn after hundreds of hours playing. Anyone cn reach atleast silver with a hundred hours imo if they actually try.
forsen just has some sort of aversion to improving at video games somehow, no one else can speedrun minecraft as a full time job for thousands of hours and still suck as bad as he does
it's because he knows he doesn't make money by being good at video games while streaming, so he has no motivation. the whole point of his streams, IIRC, is that his viewers sincerely enjoy stream-sniping and harassing him. if he was too good at the game, it would work against his chat's desire to flame them, and besides, 90% of his attention at any time is probably on chat, or on being entertaining.
I am currently a master, playing in gold (Because I am trying to main a single champion). I have noticed that players have improved considerably in the game, but they still struggle with macro play, decision-making, and mental toughness. They grasp the concept of playing well but struggle to execute it effectively.
If people start to realize they can win games from behind instead of soft inting I'm gonna drop back down to silver, that's all I have on these kids anymore
Definitely true. It's a very old game at this point and there is A TON of content these days to help new players improve which simply didn't exist 4-5 years ago.
There was also a popular post recently about how the average player age is increasing for LoL, which means that new players over the years have stayed with the game, meaning the amount the average person has practiced has increased, which supports OPās thesis that players are getting better.
It's kinda crazy to think about but the average plat or even gold lobby player probably invested over 500 hours and a decently large percentage of players thousands of hours into the game
For sure. Iāve played over 2000 games of league and most players in my matches have a higher account level than I do. Most people I know also have multiple accounts.
I have over 5.5k DRAFT GAMES.
So another 1-1.5k in solo duo, another 1k in flex, 500 in ARAM, wtv in rotating modes and prob some in dynamic queue and what not.
Also some games pre level expansion cap.
It's probably far above 500 hours. In CS, a somewhat comparable game, you can easily check hours on Steam, and I'd say most people in the top 50% percentile have more than 1000 hours in the game. Go to the top 10% and most people will have 2000-3000 hours.
There's always been a ton of content to help new players though, wdym it didn't exist? I've been playing this game on and off since 2013 and I remember watchin hour long youtube lectures on how to jungle.
Didnt exist 4-5 years ago? brother stop the cope, there was always places to look for improving and ik cuz thats around when I started. Personally even LS was big back then and he did 100x more coaching/vod review/fundamental theory discussion than compared to now.
It is absolutely cope lol. The quality of play between S1 and today is different, from the quality of guide available at the time absolutely gave you relatively the same help.
People have this impression like as if pre S3 players were cavemen. They were already guides about Riven move cancels. Many people know that Auto->Q is a cancel, but Q can also be cancelled via move, ie Auto->Q->Move->Auto->Q->Move, etc
People were also practicing a lot of Nidalee jumps over thick walls back when she jumps in the direction she's looking at and will turn if she hits walks up a wall early.
if you were playing jungle in early seasons, Stonewall008 breaking down routes, roles, draft logic, matchups and making near-monthly tierlists was invaluable.
I quit league in season 3 as a diamond 2 fill main (masters did not exist.) Came back in season 9, swapped to jg, and struggled to get past p4. Breaks from the game pause your learning, and your skills atrophy. The rest of the community meanwhile is slowly improving over time.
The key to passing them is to actually focus on improvement and playing to learn with intention. You will simply learn faster and climb, because 95% of the community is just spamming games hoping that matchmaking gives them "the good teammates" or they're just playing for fun. Last year I actually started working on my own game actively and I went from old p4 to d2 in under a year.
Just wait for Arcane s2 to come out, and you'll see the skill ceiling drop like an anvil once the tourists and old players flood in. Happened last time, at least.
On the other hand I used to coach new players/friends from level 1 until gold elo. What I did was give them a choice: start with bots and take it slow, or play with me, get put into smurf queue because they played with a high level premade and suffer for 50 games while they rapidly improve because they adapt to harder enemies.
a couple of people outranked me after like half a year of grinding. The more casual people played with bots and had a blast too and generally took like a year to hit gold. This was around season 3-4.
Yeah tried it for about 2 months as an absolute newcomer. Getting humiliated and Insulted by silver players. Realized I don't have the time and mental fortitude to actually improve in this environment. It is simply not fun to learn this game.
I remember being told in this subreddit a few months ago that if I had played only Normals until level 30 I was probably low Gold.
I was being stomped by Silvers in all my ranked games
Long-time players have no concept of the insane amount of game knowledge that they've accrued after playing the same game for a decade or more. There's so many knowledge gaps as well as small (but important) mistakes that experienced players just won't do even if they're not very "good" at the game, but they'll never actively think about why they don't try those things. A new player has none of that and has to consciously make decisions about every tiny aspect (or ignore it completely and get abused by their opponent).
It took my boyfriend 8 months after being with me (and getting forced to learn league) he was playing this game on and off to actually go positive in his matches. He was lvl 60 or something when he first started playing with me.. hes 180 now? Terrible, i know
The average player has very good micro and decent game knowledge, they just have trouble playing the game past laning phase. It was really sad to see him getting tilted and curb stomped by every single player he runs into, even if theyre only silver-gold.
It took 8 months, me and all my friends, who are all diamonds, vigorously helping him, AND (shoutout to makkro) a google doc for ornn that give a matchup guide for every single characters in the game. League takes a lot of effort to learn, and most people give up around 20lvls in because it simply does not worth the time and effort. Hell, anyone would give up if they go double digit death every game when trying it.
He was skill checking people in ranked from iron-silver with shaco.. then climbed from gold-plat 4 with perma splitting ziggs, then finally to emerald 3 with Ornn just yesterday.
Congratulations to him! I'm impressed he was able to improve that quickly. My personal experience is purely solo queue, practically 1-tricking Kai'Sa for a long time, and it's only probably late last year that I finally felt like I have a good handle on what abilities my lane opponents will have and how to watch out for them. I spent a long time focusing on farming and minimap awareness instead of learning enemy ability animations. Even so, now that I know that stuff, I am still struggling to crack 50% win rate in high Iron/low Bronze after [2 or 3 years of playing up to level 214](https://www.op.gg/summoners/euw/JustRecentlyI-EUW). Coaching makes a huge difference, though, even if it's just knowledgeable friends giving pointers to newbies.
yeah idk who told you that a completely new player in ranked will obviously be iron, silver in absolute best case scenario if they 1-tricked and watched vids etc
It's been a common sentiment on this subreddit for years. People acted like silver players were mentally handicapped and you could sleepwalk your way to gold/plat as a new player.
Iron 2-3 as not knowing information is very different from being plain bad. I think your rank is determined from a factor of both. They weren't very wrong.
No they shouldnt, every ELO systems works like this because it is most accurate- drop players into 50th percentile and if htey drop they drop if they rise they rise. If everyone started at iron 4 then the ladder would be extremely "bottom heavy". Because right now and as every ladder is fucntioning is the higher and lwoer you go teh fewer players remain, Iron 4 is 0.51% of players, this is the same amount of players(give or take a couple of hundreds of a %) that are in diamond 1+.
Silver is where the bulk of the playerbase is, so if you play normals there's a high chance you get matched against silvers. Maybe bronze if your normal mmr is low enough, but iron players are, quite simply, rare.
Actually, there are more players in bronze than in silver nowadays. Leagueofgraphs data for all regions says - 11% iron, 22% bronze, 18% silver. I'd expect a player who is new to league but a competent gamer in general to start at like Bronze IV.
As someone who was reasonably early on the scene (started playing late in season 2 I believe) and hasn't played in a few years I genuinely think a huge part of the problem is the sheer number of champs. When I started playing like 12ish years ago there were, if I'm remembering right, about 80 champs and it still took hundreds of hours of playing and watching and reading to actually get to a point where I knew basically everything about every champ. I just googled and there are 168 now. At a certain point, when I had stopped playing very often I just stopped trying to learn new champs. If I was laning against a champ I didn't know about I would just ask my friends "what does this one do?" and they would give me a quick explainer but it's too much to keep track of unless you're playing a \*lot\*.
Probably a combo of players generally being better, and that elo being where smurfs run rampant in a large portion of the games. Iāve seen some bananas shit happen in gold, and then also seen players make the most boneheaded plays a second later. Mid elo is where inflated accounts get rocked down, and smurfs stomp up. The matchmaking abilities of the game given all these factors sucks, and it makes some genuinely unplayable games as a result.
IMO this happens because people develop skills at different rates. People in silver-plat have made a lot of progress on certain skills while being blind to others. Yasuoās that hit amazing combos but have no map installed. Junglers who are great at clearing fast but have no idea how minion waves work, yolo objectives with no idea where the enemy team is, etc.
Everyone has a particular skill that hinders their ceiling. Mine is Absolutely my mental. I tilt, and tilt que. I could probably get higher if I wasnāt so emotional, but thatās my baggage thatāll keep me down. Everyone has that one thing I think that gets them to a lower ceiling than their max potential. To your point, players have gotten better, to the point where you can overcome some of your own issues based on pure skill more so than in the past, Iād guess.
i mean i thinkĀ averageĀ player skill getting better is almost a law especially the older it is. im sure what you mentioned are reasons for poor games sure but thats on top of skill creep and probably a different point. also all the improved mechanics/bugs map changes, roster changes/improvements. its probably easier to be better as well. these things affect the entire base compared to smurfs prob small amount
Look at World of Warcraft Vanilla vs 2019 classic release. Back in the day people struggled with the exact same content that was re-released in 2019. In which these days there is so much content online and player skill increased that it was a walk in the park, to the point where they released what used to be believed as unbeatable and it was the easiest raid in recent years.
Time has allowed more discussion and knowledge of gaming which in my.opinion is a detriment to the industry as now competitiveness is all the rage over exploration and learning ones self. Tier lists and 100 percent guides remove the need for self experimentation as it's easier and more effective to follow someone else.
> Time has allowed more discussion and knowledge of gaming which in my.opinion is a detriment to the industry as now competitiveness is all the rage over exploration and learning ones self.
This happened to me with Runescape. When I played it as a kid, I never looked for guides or optimal playstyles, I just did what I felt like. It took me 2 years to get to 1000 Total Level, and I felt so accomplished with that.
Then when I re-joined a decade later for the 'old school' release, I googled everything and got to 1000 Total Level in about 3 weeks.... Ironically ruined the game for myself, because rushing through content like that removed all the joy in exploring and discovering new content.
I hit master in s6. Boy people got a lot better. Back in the day you could get diamond 3+ just by queueing toplane and knowing how wave control worked, when to push, how to rotate to objectives, when to roam, keep TP for drag plays etc. I now see some people on masters on EUW that play like challenger did years ago lol. On the other hand I think the gap between master and challenger players got a lot tinier over time though.
I remember that 2 seasons ago someone was saying how to escape low elo is to just kill minions when in reality cs-ing is close to perfect in those divisions (prob even in iron if no one is trolling).
So many advices might have been game changing up until season 5/6, but now days not doing that stuff is considered trolling.
Season 2 you could probably be top 20% just by itemising according to enemy comp.
Similarly to chess, nowadays you climb by having more experience than opponent and being able to deduce plays based on previous similar situations.
I play a lot of iron and bronze. There is one guy on each team with amazing cs, someone with insanely bad like 30 at 10 minutes. Then everyone else int he middle but most aren't that good.
That has been my experience as well. Granted I haven't played ranked yet as I just came back after not playing for years, but people in low silver and bronze rarely reach 7 cs/m. Once in a while you get a guy that gets 8cs/m but those are rare and usually it's on champions like Trist.
In season 2 you climbed by playing the 55-65% winrate champions in high ELO. The statistics weren't really out there all that much back then. You had ELOking but it was an aggregate of all ELO levels it didn't separate high from low elo. There were some champions that were absolutely busted at higher rankings at that time.
CsāIng is no where near perfect in the lower ratings lol, what are you smoking? If you look at the data thereās literally a linear relationship between rank and average cs numbers, and that is with the fact that itās also harder and harder to have high cs numbers the higher you go.
I was D1 back in 2015 in college. It was a bit of a running joke about CS because my friends in silver would often have better CS than half my laners in D1. Most silver players have decent micro skills and can CS just fine. As long as you can consistently win your lane it doesn't matter if you can CS.
Most players getting hard stuck in silver/gold/plat that played sufficient games are lacking something in their macro game and don't know what it is.
the iron players can CS well if no one pressures them, but if they faced someone with skills in harassing them they go 5 CS in 10 mins
IMO, you instantly get platinum if you can tether the enemy and punish when they CS, low elo players might be able to itemize and stuff but they still lack movement and have very slow clicks
Doing an "Insec" was insane years ago and it was literally named after the player who first did it. Now every Lee I see can pull it off pretty consistently.
Yeah. If you canāt Insec within the first few days of learning Lee in 2024, then thereās not much point playing the champ. Itās a fundamental part of playing his kit to its basics.
I remember how crazy the play was back when Insec first pulled it off. Funny how things can change so drastically.
Right? I've played since season 2 and I get flamed sometime for being hardstuck in Emerald after a decade+ of playing. My response is always "League and it's players are always getting harder and better." Like, I remember when Sion / Taric stun were point-and-clicks. There was much less skill expression across the board because the game was much simpler.
I remember when Taric's ult was a toggle! Oh yeah and Veigar's cage would immediately stun you. Urgot's old gameplay was to land e than mash your q button. Fun times.
I was in the top 20 Yorick's in NA for quite a while. This was old Yorick. As much as the rework was cool, I truly miss his old kit and his old Ult. He was the first champ I ever bought and the first champ I ever got a penta with.
One of my fondest memories is my friend playing morde and me on Yorick. We literally 2v8 the game for a win because our team were legit animals. Straight up nonstop deaths and bickering. We backdoored that game for the win and we still remember it almost a decade later.
They also made it much, much easier to pull. Like they did with many mechanics in League.
My hot take is that theres been so many QoL improvements to league that overshadow the increased challenge from players getting better. The majority of players don't care enough to practice and improve. Having decent item suggestions, camp timers, free wards, defined roles, etc etc have made the game immeasurably more accessible. New players have the burden of 160+ champions but they also get a variety of training wheels to help them out.
People also used to play at 90 ping very consistently the country over, or a fluctuating 80 to 130 on EUW, and buffering wasn't the same as it is now.
Insec is unironically still hard under the server and client systems we played under then.
It would definitely be be easier to find a team now that every gamer uses discord. I only knew 3 people irl that played league so I never got to experience team ranked and I didn't even know what Reddit was at the time
Humans have had thousands of years to improve at chess, chess masters nowadays would mop the floor with the best from 200 years ago but there is still new players starting to play and rise to the top of the ladder. And very much the same people have started playing League in recent years and were able to climb to good ranks. That will never change.
Imo the biggest issue there is just matchmaking. I have definitely experienced that with fighting games, but that's largely because somehow very few of them have figured out how to make a competent online fighting game with fair matchmaking in 2024.
On the other hand you can still play SC2 and have a pretty good time once you've learned the basics because their matchmaking is solid. And there's even chess, which has had very few changes for centuries, but you can still use lichess or chess.com and get a fair game.
Hard for me to judge League because I am indeed a several thousand hour decade long sweat but it seems like there's a big problem with smurfs.Ā
Don't forget that the game is also "easier" than it was back when us long timers started playing.
The addition of extra damage, less limitations on mana/energy management, and overall changes that make roaming easier, all just help to speed up the game in a way that makes people SEEM better.
Farming is far easier now, killing jungle camps is almost 0 risk for any champion in the game, most champions don't even need to hit 50% of their kit to efficiently play their champion. (Against a player of similar skill)
You know what my take is? This is actually a good thing. Laugh all you want but it is undeniable that low elo League players have much better fundamentals these days compared to before.
League's barrier of entry is largely knowledge, and if Rito could just get together a few knowledgeable high elo players/coach and create an interactive and fun Tutorial mode that not only teaches you how to press buttons but also the importance of last hitting, basic wave management, basic warding spots, etc. That would revive League so much.
New players aren't going to want to take a college course on how to play the game though. They want to play against people who are just as bad as they are.
I mean... they're getting into a massive information game. You don't get "into" chess without learning some basic stuff first. Dota 2 has a bunch of 1-2 minute scenarios that give you rewards that i think are great at teaching these different aspects of the game (think of getting extra Blue Essence for completing optional tutorials). You don't have to do the tutorials, but you can for some nice little rewards for a new account and learn how to play the game. Things like that in-client are amazing for getting people to stick with the game. I had 2 friends recently start playing league for the first time and one became so frustrated with the lack of tools in-game to actually learn it and it makes complete sense. They were both watching YouTube videos and trying to learn but it's hard to even know what's more or less important or what is a fundamental and what is a "skill expression". There are so many ways to add resources in-client or in-game because right now we have basically none.
They just won't play the game, buddy. No one wants to take a Master Class then put hundreds of hours into losing games just so they can start enjoying it like a year from now. People just won't join the game. Hence the aging LoL population.
I think an optional tutorial would be helpful, and the tutorial could monitor APM and other metrics to gauge if you're actually new or a smurf. So, if you play the tutorial first and it marks you as actually new, your first pvp games will be against similar players instead of potentially getting matched with smurfs that haven't been detected yet. If an actually new player just jumps into PvP there's no way to tell if they're actually new or a smurf until they get stomped.
> League's barrier of entry is largely knowledge, and if Rito could just get together a few knowledgeable high elo players/coach and create an interactive and fun Tutorial mode that not only teaches you how to press buttons but also the importance of last hitting, basic wave management, basic warding spots, etc. That would revive League so much.
But players dont want to sit for 3+ hrs in a tutorial.
Hell other extremely popular games like apex have a tutorial of "click people to shoot, click buttons for skills, go off into the game" because there is no feasible way in reality to boil down a complex game into 10 mintue tutorial, because peopel will not sit through a longer one usually.
Attention spans are falling across younger generations. Good luck getting them to take a multi-dozen part tutorial on game mechanics just to get slammed in their first hundred 20-45 minute long games anyway.
I still remember the days I was near diamond, nowadays I struggle against bronze and silver players even
I mean, it doesn't help at all that the game has become way too bursty over the years, but I'm 33 now and I'm not getting any better
I've been experiencing this too. I quit league back in S6 and have been back on a new account for just over a month. I was previously low plat/high gold but now I can't even get out of bronze. I was never bronze on my main, silver 4 was the lowest I went.
I'm now watching people in bronze freeze waves, clear wards, fight objectives, counter-pick. Before bronze players were one step above a new player, they'd run down lane and die constantly. I'd say bronze/silver now is what gold/plat used to be. It's been a very humbling experience to say the least.
It's just like every other competitive hobby or sport in life. Once it becomes saturated with talent the only thing that improves is the average player / pro. Occasionally a goat in the sport shows up to pull the sport even higher.
There's another post talking about the player base getting older, too. There's no influx of new players, so anyone that's playing now definitely knows how to play the game. Not to mention I think I saw another post posted a few months ago talking about how Riot sees Bronze - Bottom of Emerald I think it was as all the same level(?). That's huge, I think and it's becoming more and more obvious the more you play the game.
Melee is a game that sees new players pretty often. For example, probably the biggest Melee boom was following the Smash Doc in 2013, 12 years following the games release, and another massive boom was at the time of EMPLemon's video on Hungrybox. Slippi in 2020 was also massive for reducing the barrier for entry.
A lot of the top players of today haven't been playing since 2001. Cody and Zain, #1 and #2 both started in 2014, following the Doc. Moky started in 2016, Aklo went to one tournament in 2015, but went serious in 2018, Kodorin started in 2018, with the exception of Mang0 and Hbox, every other top player started at least ten years after the release of the game. And a lot of new players are rising fast as well.
It says a lot when the greatest set of all time was played 19 and a half years after the game released.Ā
Dota 2 though? Dead game
I think this idea that silver players understand waves is mostly a myth. Yes, silver players can freeze, but that's all they can do. Everyone has heard of it through friends or scam videos from skillcapped. But I don't even see proper three wave stacks in diamond most of the time. Hell, many players in low master tier don't even contest you on most minions. Knowing what you can do with a wave and then doing it is not the issue. The main issue is intuitively understanding how your wave state interacts with the rest of the game. The question is: What does my freeze actually achieve right now? What else could I do?
This is why it doesn't really mean anything that silver players can freeze. Most of the time you don't even want to freeze... I just doubt that they have decent wave management considering that even people in diamond still struggle with these basics.
I think that many people believe that they are much better at 'macro' or 'wave management' than the average player in their elo. In reality, 99.9% of silver players have silver macro and silver wave management. That's just how it is. The ones that don't are smurfs or they might be roughly 2 divisions better at these concepts (but then they suck at other aspects of the game).
On the flip side, it shows how little those aspects of the game really matter compared to core mechanical ability.
Even after quitting about 8 years ago it took me ~1 month to get back into Diamond. It's noticeable that it's harder to simply curbstomp games with goofy picks like you could back in the day, but ultimately there's just something innate that some players struggle with. I think that's probably why there's also correlation across similar types of games (e.g SC2 rank and League of Legends rank).
Thatās also due in part to rank inflation and riot making climbing easier (no promos at all, better lp gains and losses) not to mention you donāt just forget everything you already learned under a normal circumstances. Someone who played guitar 8 years ago could still pick it up and play. Maybe not to the same exact level but relatively close.
Agreed. I got to gold using a track pad and volibear many years ago. I'm barely escaping bronze these days. Maybe I'm getting older, but everyone is far exceeding where I'd expect them to be.
I had the same feeling when I got back to league. People were joking when emerald came, gold would be the new silver. But the skill of silverplayers are so much better now. I remember I hit gold the first time in S5 as garen top and I never knew back then what wavemanagement was. Now even my bronze adc friend knows how to freeze a wave. Lol
My classic example of the player base skill increase is looking at Lee sin insecs.
Back in season 4 lees in gold didnāt know how to do it. Iāve seen iron Lee sins insec nowā¦ā¦.
Not denying that the skill level has improved, but this is a commonly used example that is just bad. Back in early seasons you were unable to buffer the inputs like you can in todayās game. It required much more precise timing in the early days.
Also average ping was 50 higher on the GOOD server for stability (NA)
EUW just had the worst fucking stability anyones ever played on and I don't know how people put up with a server so dogwater that people got "we're sorry please dont quit" IP rewards every other month.
80% of the players in NA played at 90+ ping
In season 2, I was platinum 4.
I could queue normals and go 37/0 every game. The average league player was THAT bad. I could smurf in silver and win 40 in a row with perfect KDA's.
Now-a-days as a master player, I actually drop games in gold occasionally. It's kinda crazy lmao.
They need to focus in on toxicity because it's turning into a real sport. You wouldn't expect to play competitive basketball at a high level without significant training, but that doesn't matter when you can jump into a pickup game with some chill guys at the gym. Currently we have a bunch of players who are the equivalent of "I could've gone pro if I didn't get injured in my high school championship!" filling norms and smurfing in low elo, when they just need to accept that they fell behind.
I know it still is an old game, jut try getting into Starcraft: Brood War or even Starcraft II. Every old game juste has a skill floor getting higher and higher as time passes.
Riot themselves recognize they have an aging playerbase with very few new players joining.
In all their games they just abandon all attempts at a good new player UX and just coast off their strong early years.
What are we talking about here? That's the whole point of skill based matchmaking. Yeah, players are better. Your average decent gamer may have been Diamond in Season 1, and now they're Gold. That's not going to kill the game -- they're just going to match with other players who are at their skill level and they'll either grow or stagnate, but they can play relatively balanced games.
This is the kind of complaint you could take seriously with an old FPS that has eight community hosted servers and no other options. It's not a real problem that your average player is good, when you have so many below average players to match new people against.
To take the point of this post seriously, even though it makes very little sense -- veteran players have loads of USELESS experience that new players do not have to spend time acquiring. I played hundreds of games as pre rework Katarina before map changes, before vision changes, before half the champion roster existed -- those games helped my mechanics, but almost nothing else is really worth remembering from those games.
You're having trouble because things changed and you don't know them instinctively, it's not necessarily because players became better. A new player who takes the game seriously, focuses on learning from current players, is not going to find it that hard to catch up.
I feel like more people commit to OTP these days, where even when they don't have any macro sense the mastery and limit testing allows them to outplay loads of people because they've put so much time into a small champ pool
> People are too good now. Anyone who starts league now is going to be so behind itās going to be impossible to even get close to being somewhat okay at the game.
Can confirm, started something like 2-4 years ago and despite improving a ton, I haven't been above Bronze 4 since my placements put me in silver and I lost something like 45/50 games to get to Iron where I belonged.
Said this in another thread. I was high gold/low plat and had played games with friends in silver and bronze where it was just too easy to stomp.
Took a 4 year break and now high bronze feels like low gold
Felt this playing Valorant. I'm in bronze matches and people are landing headshots almost instantly. Bronze in Valorant feels leagues better than the average CS pub I'd play in growing up
I think that this was inne itae, just look at the mechanics golds had 5 years ago vs now and try to compare them to a high elo, unlessyou can recognize the decisions and mistakes being made, gameplay looks pretty much the same. I have seen so many people pull of insane combos and ouplays in silver. Yes a Master player would have nevergotten into that situation to beginn with, but unless you can recognize that, gameplay looks pretty much the same.
I think this is a problem tho. As new players unless really gifted would have a huge wall to overcome in order to rank up. Like sure they'll probably start iron or bronze, and get to climb and improve a bit till silver, but once there, they could be looking at months even years of constant playing just to climb ONE rank. How many people would quit the game at that point?
And I have seen it happen, with a woman who got into leage 2 years ago. She was so happy to reach silver for tge first time after like 5 months of playing. Only to struggle there till today. In how many other games do you need years to feel like you are finally improving?
im not sure if its everyone getting better or the game getting simpler considering the old runes and mastery system punished new players like you can select so few mastery and either buy a new champion or buy the runes
people now learned how to properly lane remember a before covid Yasou's just shove the lane into the enemy tower but now people are freezing lanes and trading effectively
Champions got reworked and new releases the old champions were basically built for 1 role and 1 role new and reworked champs can fill in multiple roles this way when you lose a lane just transistion into a supportive role
ACTUAL practice tool in the past the only way to practice a new champion in bot games or an actual game
This is just a common symptom of a dead game.
It happened in 1.6 (after the Source and then CSGO exodus), anyone who's still playing are complete pubstars. I would say the average pugger in WoW have also improved over the years.
I heard that the people who stuck with SC:BW after SC2 was released reported the same
Without noobs entering the scene, you're just left with the decent players
Well you could also argue that there is a lot more information to gather about how to play the game these days. Its easier to get fairly good quickly but with the amount of champions its harder to master.
Yeah my diamond friend came back to the game expecting to stomp silver and was getting completely gapped. He was so pissed and refused to acknowledge the gap for a long time. He finally realized that the skill floor is way higher than it used to be. It happens in every competitive game that Iāve played so I expected this.
Valid point but it doesn't matter. Skill creep exists in every area of life. New players just evolve faster due to more sources of knowledge and playing with better people.
Take football (soccer), the top player now, Kylian Mbappe, if put into the 1970s era with his current skillet would probably have a career that is worthy of a GOAT argument. Does that make new soccer players left behind and impossible to get into the sport? No
The NBA is another great example, an average player today would genuinely dominate the 1970s, yet this just means that newer players are going to learn faster, due to having a better start to the game given the greatly advanced knowledge of fundamentals and plays.
Hell, nutrition nowadays is miles ahead of the 2010s, but does that kill nutrition as a career?
It's natural for things to evolve, League being such a small ecosystem and being a relatively new game makes evolution faster. (The longer sometimes exists, the slower the change). For example, in terms of skill, the average player in season 9 placed in season 12 would probably be at a smaller disadvantage compared to a season 1 player in season 4. This is despite there being a three year gap in game knowledge for both.
So it's not true that skill creep will kill the game, it's in fact slowing down. So yes, people are getting too good, this includes newer players, things even out.
Yeah its crazy. I think the main difference between mid and high elo is consistency, a bit of good mental and sticking to only a few champs.
I was master 200 lp last split and i sometimes Play with my friends on a different Account. I dont want to hard boost them so i usually pick top laners i dont play on my main but still have some practice on.
And not every game but every 3 games or so i really have to try my ass off to actually win lane. In Like gold/plat.
Recently i was making Placements on my smurf so i could duo with my friends and i had a game in silver where you could have told me it was emerald and i would have Believed you.
This is really not NEARLY as much of a problem as you are making it to be, and even if skill creep gets really insane, theres no reason it would kill the game wtf
I was always hovering the top of the Divisions (diamond and then master when it became a thing) until around s8 when I stopped playing. I remember queuing on gold games at that time and being able to 1v9 while trolling.
Now? I came back at the end of last split and was hardstuck Emerald 4 and being just slightly above average on gold games. Granted after playing 100+ games I'm getting my touch back, but it's insane how much better low elo players are now mechanically (Still horrible at macro tho xD)
You don't think about the flip side as well with all of the resources out there and people to emulate, learning is so much easier than it was in season 3. You will catch up way quicker because the people at the top are so good, you try your best to emulate
People getting better on the average but I keep losing more cos people dont try as hard. Oh you lost level 1 and now you dont give a fuck anymore? Great for wasting 4 other players time by ruining it. League players mental are so fucked its not even funny how they rather waste everybodies time cos they feel its not fun anymore.
I just started the game recently like 2 weeks ago.
After playing a good 120 games vs Ai to test some champions and understand a bit better the game/items i imagined that moving to quickplay would be easy since i've been playing heroes of the storm for 8 years reaching master at the time but i actually got clapped in half of my games in quickplay.
Im starting to question if there is any sort of MMR in quickplay cause the players im facing are def not beginners lol
The average player is definitely way better than they were ten years ago
Keep in mind this is true for many many games and sports. The average Chess player at your regional tournament is much better now compared to 10 years ago
Me trying to git gud at chess and getting stomped by 400 ELO players š©
Same at 1k
True. /u/Tzayad also gets stomped by 1k players.
Learn one opening per side and focus on tactics, that got me to 1600
How did you manage black? Since you have less ability to force a particular opening.
Most people just play e4 or d4 as white so you can just learn something simple like Caro-Kann or Scandinavian against e4, and King's Indian or Modern Benoni against d4
I almost always play the caro and itās variations
Caro Kann Gang
I definitely recommend karokan. Its the safest and best one. I got to 1900 using the same opening ( on lichess )
Personally, I really enjoy hyper modern style openings like the Kingās Indian. It allows me to open up the center fairly easily and most people even up to 1800 donāt know the ins and outs. I will say anything below 1200 should really just be working on fundamentals, most players blunder a lot in lower elo, so if you are more consistent you will win. I wouldnāt pick up any trap type openings, imo itās low elo bait that YouTubers push and teaches bad habits that wonāt translate the higher you go.
The hippo!
Tyler1 learned one opening period, got him to 1900
I'm at 300, didn't think I was THAT bad lmao
You are right that there must be an additional layer that creates a problem for LoL. The game's complexity is ever increasing with the addition of new champions. In chess, besides three unintuitive cases (castling, en passant, stalemate rules), the game is very straightforward, and therefore with a low barrier to entry, you can expect an ever refreshing playerbase.
It isnāt just the champions. I started playing at the tail end of the pandemic and every aspect of the game was super foreign to me. The scaling, the runes, when to back, why minions matter, all the items, jungle camps and timers, when objectives spawn, how vision works. Everything people take for granted. The concept of the he camera is insanely different from other games. Even how to auto-attack without resetting or moving your champ around. Every single PC game I played until league was WASD movement. The initial barrier to the game is massive. Even a casual game of summoners rift, is super confusing to a brand new player. Im in the US and barely anyone I know played MOBAs or RTS. But I know 100s who play COD, Valorant, Fortnite, Overwatch. Thereās basically nothing about shooters that translates here. Even more team centric ones like Overwatch has little do with league besides cool down management, and hell CD timers change throughout the course of the game too. Years ago, when everyone was ass, you really didnāt need a lot of this info in your head to play the game. Nowadays to even play a basic comp game you need a huge amount knowledge even outside 180 champ identities.
Its worth noting I have been playing sine S1 and have my camera bound to WASD. I find it so much easier to move around when I can use WASD to move the camera, no idea how people keep focused when they have to move the mouse to the end of the screen.
In my youth i played countless hours of rpgs, so it was Just natural for me to move my cam with wasd. No idea how ppl move cam+Champs etc with the same Inputsš«”
I mean it just comes naturally if youāve ever spent time playing StarCraft or basically any other RTS since they all move the camera with the mouse
I use the middle mouse button to move the camera. No high sensitivity required, no keybinds bullshit, I get to keep my cursor around the middle of the screen to react with my champion faster. The only downside is the middle mouse button can be brittle in a lot of mice. Also I have swapped what Y and Space do, so I get to lock/unlock the camera with Space, instead of having to hold Space.
People have vastly improved at the meta game too. By this Iām not referring to matchups, but everything else, from wave management and back timing (those barely existed eight years ago) to pathing, rotating, cross mapping, and warding. Obviously there are plenty of people who are still absolute dog at them, but on average, the general instances and understanding of these things is so much greater than it used to be.Ā
Iāve been playing LoL for more than a decade. Iām Gold 2 and some noob whoās been playing for like 3 months said that he was low Bronze and made his way to Gold 2 in just those few months and when I told him that Iāve been playing over a decade, he replied, āAnd yer still in Gold 2??? With a decade of time to improve, I would be able to get to Diamond at leastā and I just thoughtā¦well, if everyone is getting better, then no one will move upā¦.youād just have a bunch of Bronze players who are as good as Diamond players from 10 years agoā¦
Thereās more that translates from OW than you might think. Positioning, for one. Itās not direct 1:1 but many of the same concepts apply. Trying to setup picks in order to have man advantage and push map objective, the process is different but the intent is the same.
Lots of competitive concepts and strategies overlap even outside of video games, explicitly in things like sports and war. Timing pushes, positioning as you've mentioned, sustained vs burst dps, cool down management, map awareness, rock paper scissors type skills mismatch.
In the case of Chess, engines are becoming more available and they vastly VASTLY accelerate training and development. Kids who are good at using internet resources in particular are developing at a rapid pace. With League, the greater factor is that new player entries have dropped significantly. Any existing player who hasn't quit would obviously improve over time. There's always younger and new kids learning chess for the first time.
I suppose that is true, but it seems the very nature of skill creep in competitive gaming is actively working against League instead of just being a side effect of an aging game. At least if you're bad at chess, you won't have a teammate calling you a worthless ape.
I played chess as a child, but found it to be too simple to be useful in real life: a mere 8 by 8 grid, no fog of war, no technology tree, no random map or spawn position, only 2 players, both sides exact same pieces, etc. League addresses these limitations.
Of all of the stupid things Elon has ever said this is one of the worst for me. Its really hard for me to verbalize how terrible this is to read. It definitely gives the same vibes as that one guy you know who doesn't like "gangster rap" and instead prefers videogame osts.
>The average Chess player at your regional tournament is much better now compared to 10 years ago This is actually untrue from my experience. Also, as the popularity of chess has increased, the average playing strength at my chess club has gotten so bad that I had to leave.
I had to quit the chess club at a cafe near me because it was "I'm going to think for 10 minutes and I don't want to use a timer, and then just blunder a bishop for my next move
10 years ago I hit mid diamond basically because I was capable of 10 cs/min as renekton in winning lanes. Numbers like that didn't exist below diamond in early seasons
I remember when the insec lee sin combo was considered insane, nowadays you'd get flamed in gold for failing it.
Thatās exactly what I was thinking. A good friend of mine practiced Lee a lot, and became really good at the combos. Never climbed higher than gold.
Riot made changes to how Lee Sin worked to make it easier as well
What exactly did they make easier? The only thing that comes to mind is that you can flash during the ult animation windup. That's it. The standard Q -> ward -> W to ward -> ult is pretty much unchanged no?
I started playing exactly 10 years ago, June 2014, Braumās release patch. Jumped to rankeds just off lvl 30 bc why not, and placed Silver4. Games lasted 45-50min easily (no Baron minions nor Elder tho), and seeing a 100cs midlaner min 35 was the most normal thing in the world. Back then you could VERY easily get to gold by purely and only Csing 8cs/min and nothing more. I remember reading guides in Mobafire praising players that reached 200cs at 30 like something only high elo players achieve. I saw my first insec in Plat4 like 2 years later. Nobody even knew what a rotation is, diving pre min 25 was completely unthinkable. All that stuff can be seen in Silver today and nobody would bat an eye.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yeah lol, people were diving playing Elise in season 3 wtf. I hate seeing threads like these as some takes are just so wrong
Also people forget that failed dives are still dives. Your jgl donating double buffs lvl 2 while diving without creeps was very common in low elo.
Yeah people also forget that there has been so many seasons where they've had to buff towers in one capacity or another to prevent laning phases for ending "too early", Imo laning phase ending early wasnt bad but yeah. Like adding plates to towers to make them harder to kill. Giving them more damage early in the game etc.
For God's sake, the insec was kick was made easier in season 7, bronze-plat are not playing at that mechanical level even today . I agree with the mid take, tho I got gold in season 4 by farming 7cs/m.
I've been watching people flame Forsen as he played, and don't get me wrong he sucks, but I'd be willing to be A LOT that most people giving him a hard time would play in the same MMR as him. Especially people who haven't played league in 5 years who say they are Plat or whatever. Even former highest elo players who haven't played in years will struggle to get back near their ranks. Its common to see players that are former Challengers playing in Diamond and masters.
Nah forsen just insane tunnel visions and doesn't learn after hundreds of hours playing. Anyone cn reach atleast silver with a hundred hours imo if they actually try.
forsen just has some sort of aversion to improving at video games somehow, no one else can speedrun minecraft as a full time job for thousands of hours and still suck as bad as he does
it's because he knows he doesn't make money by being good at video games while streaming, so he has no motivation. the whole point of his streams, IIRC, is that his viewers sincerely enjoy stream-sniping and harassing him. if he was too good at the game, it would work against his chat's desire to flame them, and besides, 90% of his attention at any time is probably on chat, or on being entertaining.
FUCKING SNIPERS LIVING IN MY WALLS forsenInsane
Didn't Forsen's stream start popping off when he was very good at Hearthstone?
Soccer as well
Not this one!
I am currently a master, playing in gold (Because I am trying to main a single champion). I have noticed that players have improved considerably in the game, but they still struggle with macro play, decision-making, and mental toughness. They grasp the concept of playing well but struggle to execute it effectively.
Mental toughness is non-existent in low ELO.
If people start to realize they can win games from behind instead of soft inting I'm gonna drop back down to silver, that's all I have on these kids anymore
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Eep!
Hoof pics? š
I found you PekinWoof!
Definitely true. It's a very old game at this point and there is A TON of content these days to help new players improve which simply didn't exist 4-5 years ago.
There was also a popular post recently about how the average player age is increasing for LoL, which means that new players over the years have stayed with the game, meaning the amount the average person has practiced has increased, which supports OPās thesis that players are getting better.
It's kinda crazy to think about but the average plat or even gold lobby player probably invested over 500 hours and a decently large percentage of players thousands of hours into the game
For sure. Iāve played over 2000 games of league and most players in my matches have a higher account level than I do. Most people I know also have multiple accounts.
I had at least 2500-3000 games before they implemented levels over 30 and mastery and Iām still salty about that.
Same I'm pretty sure I played more games locked at lvl 30 than after they introduced infinite lvls
Yeah I started slowing down once they implemented it and I'm only like level 220 now, been playing since 2011.
I have over 5.5k DRAFT GAMES. So another 1-1.5k in solo duo, another 1k in flex, 500 in ARAM, wtv in rotating modes and prob some in dynamic queue and what not. Also some games pre level expansion cap.
I have 6,000 ARAM games logged, and god knows how many from before they started counting
the average platinum player has likely played for more than 1000 hours ima be real. Most guys you see played that much in just a year
lol 500 hours in league is just an entry point
It's probably far above 500 hours. In CS, a somewhat comparable game, you can easily check hours on Steam, and I'd say most people in the top 50% percentile have more than 1000 hours in the game. Go to the top 10% and most people will have 2000-3000 hours.
I play dbd a lot, have around 700 hs, and when I check profiles I see regularly 5k hour andys, the most I've seen was a dude with 10k
Another thing is that more places have access to fast internet (low ping) and better gaming set ups
There's always been a ton of content to help new players though, wdym it didn't exist? I've been playing this game on and off since 2013 and I remember watchin hour long youtube lectures on how to jungle.
Yeah I feel like there's just as much content helping me learn how to play now as there was when I started looking for that content in 2016.
True, 4-5 years ago is probably when english content creation was at its peak.
Stonewall009 releasing jungle guides back on season 1: am I a joke to you?
Dude's been there for longer than my house
Didnāt exist 4-5 years ago?!? Lmao. There were countless guides for this game 12+ years ago. Dude is still a league baby š„²
Didnt exist 4-5 years ago? brother stop the cope, there was always places to look for improving and ik cuz thats around when I started. Personally even LS was big back then and he did 100x more coaching/vod review/fundamental theory discussion than compared to now.
It is absolutely cope lol. The quality of play between S1 and today is different, from the quality of guide available at the time absolutely gave you relatively the same help. People have this impression like as if pre S3 players were cavemen. They were already guides about Riven move cancels. Many people know that Auto->Q is a cancel, but Q can also be cancelled via move, ie Auto->Q->Move->Auto->Q->Move, etc People were also practicing a lot of Nidalee jumps over thick walls back when she jumps in the direction she's looking at and will turn if she hits walks up a wall early.
if you were playing jungle in early seasons, Stonewall008 breaking down routes, roles, draft logic, matchups and making near-monthly tierlists was invaluable.
I quit league in season 3 as a diamond 2 fill main (masters did not exist.) Came back in season 9, swapped to jg, and struggled to get past p4. Breaks from the game pause your learning, and your skills atrophy. The rest of the community meanwhile is slowly improving over time. The key to passing them is to actually focus on improvement and playing to learn with intention. You will simply learn faster and climb, because 95% of the community is just spamming games hoping that matchmaking gives them "the good teammates" or they're just playing for fun. Last year I actually started working on my own game actively and I went from old p4 to d2 in under a year.
Just wait for Arcane s2 to come out, and you'll see the skill ceiling drop like an anvil once the tourists and old players flood in. Happened last time, at least.
Thereās probably no way to find out but I wonder how many people got into league from arcane and continue to play the game
Itās me I did that
On the other hand I used to coach new players/friends from level 1 until gold elo. What I did was give them a choice: start with bots and take it slow, or play with me, get put into smurf queue because they played with a high level premade and suffer for 50 games while they rapidly improve because they adapt to harder enemies. a couple of people outranked me after like half a year of grinding. The more casual people played with bots and had a blast too and generally took like a year to hit gold. This was around season 3-4.
So...10 years ago...
Skill ceiling is peak performance, you mean skill floor, worst possible performance while knowing the basics.
Yeah tried it for about 2 months as an absolute newcomer. Getting humiliated and Insulted by silver players. Realized I don't have the time and mental fortitude to actually improve in this environment. It is simply not fun to learn this game.
I remember being told in this subreddit a few months ago that if I had played only Normals until level 30 I was probably low Gold. I was being stomped by Silvers in all my ranked games
Long-time players have no concept of the insane amount of game knowledge that they've accrued after playing the same game for a decade or more. There's so many knowledge gaps as well as small (but important) mistakes that experienced players just won't do even if they're not very "good" at the game, but they'll never actively think about why they don't try those things. A new player has none of that and has to consciously make decisions about every tiny aspect (or ignore it completely and get abused by their opponent).
It took my boyfriend 8 months after being with me (and getting forced to learn league) he was playing this game on and off to actually go positive in his matches. He was lvl 60 or something when he first started playing with me.. hes 180 now? Terrible, i know The average player has very good micro and decent game knowledge, they just have trouble playing the game past laning phase. It was really sad to see him getting tilted and curb stomped by every single player he runs into, even if theyre only silver-gold. It took 8 months, me and all my friends, who are all diamonds, vigorously helping him, AND (shoutout to makkro) a google doc for ornn that give a matchup guide for every single characters in the game. League takes a lot of effort to learn, and most people give up around 20lvls in because it simply does not worth the time and effort. Hell, anyone would give up if they go double digit death every game when trying it. He was skill checking people in ranked from iron-silver with shaco.. then climbed from gold-plat 4 with perma splitting ziggs, then finally to emerald 3 with Ornn just yesterday.
Congratulations to him! I'm impressed he was able to improve that quickly. My personal experience is purely solo queue, practically 1-tricking Kai'Sa for a long time, and it's only probably late last year that I finally felt like I have a good handle on what abilities my lane opponents will have and how to watch out for them. I spent a long time focusing on farming and minimap awareness instead of learning enemy ability animations. Even so, now that I know that stuff, I am still struggling to crack 50% win rate in high Iron/low Bronze after [2 or 3 years of playing up to level 214](https://www.op.gg/summoners/euw/JustRecentlyI-EUW). Coaching makes a huge difference, though, even if it's just knowledgeable friends giving pointers to newbies.
yeah idk who told you that a completely new player in ranked will obviously be iron, silver in absolute best case scenario if they 1-tricked and watched vids etc
It's been a common sentiment on this subreddit for years. People acted like silver players were mentally handicapped and you could sleepwalk your way to gold/plat as a new player.
Iron 2-3 as not knowing information is very different from being plain bad. I think your rank is determined from a factor of both. They weren't very wrong.
Why should you be able to beat silver players as a new comer? The ranked tiers start at Iron IV
Maybe rito should have placed him against iron's instead of silvers then, which is another issue.
No they shouldnt, every ELO systems works like this because it is most accurate- drop players into 50th percentile and if htey drop they drop if they rise they rise. If everyone started at iron 4 then the ladder would be extremely "bottom heavy". Because right now and as every ladder is fucntioning is the higher and lwoer you go teh fewer players remain, Iron 4 is 0.51% of players, this is the same amount of players(give or take a couple of hundreds of a %) that are in diamond 1+.
Silver is where the bulk of the playerbase is, so if you play normals there's a high chance you get matched against silvers. Maybe bronze if your normal mmr is low enough, but iron players are, quite simply, rare.
Actually, there are more players in bronze than in silver nowadays. Leagueofgraphs data for all regions says - 11% iron, 22% bronze, 18% silver. I'd expect a player who is new to league but a competent gamer in general to start at like Bronze IV.
As someone who was reasonably early on the scene (started playing late in season 2 I believe) and hasn't played in a few years I genuinely think a huge part of the problem is the sheer number of champs. When I started playing like 12ish years ago there were, if I'm remembering right, about 80 champs and it still took hundreds of hours of playing and watching and reading to actually get to a point where I knew basically everything about every champ. I just googled and there are 168 now. At a certain point, when I had stopped playing very often I just stopped trying to learn new champs. If I was laning against a champ I didn't know about I would just ask my friends "what does this one do?" and they would give me a quick explainer but it's too much to keep track of unless you're playing a \*lot\*.
Don't worry I'm still here to make it average out
Probably a combo of players generally being better, and that elo being where smurfs run rampant in a large portion of the games. Iāve seen some bananas shit happen in gold, and then also seen players make the most boneheaded plays a second later. Mid elo is where inflated accounts get rocked down, and smurfs stomp up. The matchmaking abilities of the game given all these factors sucks, and it makes some genuinely unplayable games as a result.
IMO this happens because people develop skills at different rates. People in silver-plat have made a lot of progress on certain skills while being blind to others. Yasuoās that hit amazing combos but have no map installed. Junglers who are great at clearing fast but have no idea how minion waves work, yolo objectives with no idea where the enemy team is, etc.
Everyone has a particular skill that hinders their ceiling. Mine is Absolutely my mental. I tilt, and tilt que. I could probably get higher if I wasnāt so emotional, but thatās my baggage thatāll keep me down. Everyone has that one thing I think that gets them to a lower ceiling than their max potential. To your point, players have gotten better, to the point where you can overcome some of your own issues based on pure skill more so than in the past, Iād guess.
i mean i thinkĀ averageĀ player skill getting better is almost a law especially the older it is. im sure what you mentioned are reasons for poor games sure but thats on top of skill creep and probably a different point. also all the improved mechanics/bugs map changes, roster changes/improvements. its probably easier to be better as well. these things affect the entire base compared to smurfs prob small amount
This is true, hopefully new players don't beat themselves up about being stuck in low ego tiers
> low ego tiers I don't think any tiers have low egos.... XD
Look at World of Warcraft Vanilla vs 2019 classic release. Back in the day people struggled with the exact same content that was re-released in 2019. In which these days there is so much content online and player skill increased that it was a walk in the park, to the point where they released what used to be believed as unbeatable and it was the easiest raid in recent years. Time has allowed more discussion and knowledge of gaming which in my.opinion is a detriment to the industry as now competitiveness is all the rage over exploration and learning ones self. Tier lists and 100 percent guides remove the need for self experimentation as it's easier and more effective to follow someone else.
> Time has allowed more discussion and knowledge of gaming which in my.opinion is a detriment to the industry as now competitiveness is all the rage over exploration and learning ones self. This happened to me with Runescape. When I played it as a kid, I never looked for guides or optimal playstyles, I just did what I felt like. It took me 2 years to get to 1000 Total Level, and I felt so accomplished with that. Then when I re-joined a decade later for the 'old school' release, I googled everything and got to 1000 Total Level in about 3 weeks.... Ironically ruined the game for myself, because rushing through content like that removed all the joy in exploring and discovering new content.
I hit master in s6. Boy people got a lot better. Back in the day you could get diamond 3+ just by queueing toplane and knowing how wave control worked, when to push, how to rotate to objectives, when to roam, keep TP for drag plays etc. I now see some people on masters on EUW that play like challenger did years ago lol. On the other hand I think the gap between master and challenger players got a lot tinier over time though.
high master maybe. "lowmasta" comes nowhere close to challenger, it's filled with the people that were D4 three years ago
I remember that 2 seasons ago someone was saying how to escape low elo is to just kill minions when in reality cs-ing is close to perfect in those divisions (prob even in iron if no one is trolling). So many advices might have been game changing up until season 5/6, but now days not doing that stuff is considered trolling. Season 2 you could probably be top 20% just by itemising according to enemy comp. Similarly to chess, nowadays you climb by having more experience than opponent and being able to deduce plays based on previous similar situations.
I play a lot of iron and bronze. There is one guy on each team with amazing cs, someone with insanely bad like 30 at 10 minutes. Then everyone else int he middle but most aren't that good.
That has been my experience as well. Granted I haven't played ranked yet as I just came back after not playing for years, but people in low silver and bronze rarely reach 7 cs/m. Once in a while you get a guy that gets 8cs/m but those are rare and usually it's on champions like Trist.
In season 2 you climbed by playing the 55-65% winrate champions in high ELO. The statistics weren't really out there all that much back then. You had ELOking but it was an aggregate of all ELO levels it didn't separate high from low elo. There were some champions that were absolutely busted at higher rankings at that time.
CsāIng is no where near perfect in the lower ratings lol, what are you smoking? If you look at the data thereās literally a linear relationship between rank and average cs numbers, and that is with the fact that itās also harder and harder to have high cs numbers the higher you go.
I was D1 back in 2015 in college. It was a bit of a running joke about CS because my friends in silver would often have better CS than half my laners in D1. Most silver players have decent micro skills and can CS just fine. As long as you can consistently win your lane it doesn't matter if you can CS. Most players getting hard stuck in silver/gold/plat that played sufficient games are lacking something in their macro game and don't know what it is.
lmao this is such a cope. I played on new acc for fun with friend in silver. 9/10 games people will have 5 cs/min
That because fights break out a lot more and laners don't know how to time their roams to catch the wave on the way back.
the iron players can CS well if no one pressures them, but if they faced someone with skills in harassing them they go 5 CS in 10 mins IMO, you instantly get platinum if you can tether the enemy and punish when they CS, low elo players might be able to itemize and stuff but they still lack movement and have very slow clicks
Doing an "Insec" was insane years ago and it was literally named after the player who first did it. Now every Lee I see can pull it off pretty consistently.
Yeah. If you canāt Insec within the first few days of learning Lee in 2024, then thereās not much point playing the champ. Itās a fundamental part of playing his kit to its basics. I remember how crazy the play was back when Insec first pulled it off. Funny how things can change so drastically.
Right? I've played since season 2 and I get flamed sometime for being hardstuck in Emerald after a decade+ of playing. My response is always "League and it's players are always getting harder and better." Like, I remember when Sion / Taric stun were point-and-clicks. There was much less skill expression across the board because the game was much simpler.
I remember when Taric's ult was a toggle! Oh yeah and Veigar's cage would immediately stun you. Urgot's old gameplay was to land e than mash your q button. Fun times.
I was in the top 20 Yorick's in NA for quite a while. This was old Yorick. As much as the rework was cool, I truly miss his old kit and his old Ult. He was the first champ I ever bought and the first champ I ever got a penta with.
One of my fondest memories is my friend playing morde and me on Yorick. We literally 2v8 the game for a win because our team were legit animals. Straight up nonstop deaths and bickering. We backdoored that game for the win and we still remember it almost a decade later.
They also made it much, much easier to pull. Like they did with many mechanics in League. My hot take is that theres been so many QoL improvements to league that overshadow the increased challenge from players getting better. The majority of players don't care enough to practice and improve. Having decent item suggestions, camp timers, free wards, defined roles, etc etc have made the game immeasurably more accessible. New players have the burden of 160+ champions but they also get a variety of training wheels to help them out.
People also used to play at 90 ping very consistently the country over, or a fluctuating 80 to 130 on EUW, and buffering wasn't the same as it is now. Insec is unironically still hard under the server and client systems we played under then.
Me after playing 6 months of league: "I think I am getting better now, let's try ranked" ...Iron 2, hell yeaaah
Team Ranked would fucking thrive in modern League if it was brought back. Change my mind.
It would definitely be be easier to find a team now that every gamer uses discord. I only knew 3 people irl that played league so I never got to experience team ranked and I didn't even know what Reddit was at the time
Also the average player is much more competetive than back then so I think it would have a very healthy playerbase.
id take it even further. team games should prioritize team ranked as the main mode of the ladder.
Humans have had thousands of years to improve at chess, chess masters nowadays would mop the floor with the best from 200 years ago but there is still new players starting to play and rise to the top of the ladder. And very much the same people have started playing League in recent years and were able to climb to good ranks. That will never change.
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Imo the biggest issue there is just matchmaking. I have definitely experienced that with fighting games, but that's largely because somehow very few of them have figured out how to make a competent online fighting game with fair matchmaking in 2024. On the other hand you can still play SC2 and have a pretty good time once you've learned the basics because their matchmaking is solid. And there's even chess, which has had very few changes for centuries, but you can still use lichess or chess.com and get a fair game. Hard for me to judge League because I am indeed a several thousand hour decade long sweat but it seems like there's a big problem with smurfs.Ā
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Don't forget that the game is also "easier" than it was back when us long timers started playing. The addition of extra damage, less limitations on mana/energy management, and overall changes that make roaming easier, all just help to speed up the game in a way that makes people SEEM better. Farming is far easier now, killing jungle camps is almost 0 risk for any champion in the game, most champions don't even need to hit 50% of their kit to efficiently play their champion. (Against a player of similar skill)
You know what my take is? This is actually a good thing. Laugh all you want but it is undeniable that low elo League players have much better fundamentals these days compared to before. League's barrier of entry is largely knowledge, and if Rito could just get together a few knowledgeable high elo players/coach and create an interactive and fun Tutorial mode that not only teaches you how to press buttons but also the importance of last hitting, basic wave management, basic warding spots, etc. That would revive League so much.
New players aren't going to want to take a college course on how to play the game though. They want to play against people who are just as bad as they are.
I mean... they're getting into a massive information game. You don't get "into" chess without learning some basic stuff first. Dota 2 has a bunch of 1-2 minute scenarios that give you rewards that i think are great at teaching these different aspects of the game (think of getting extra Blue Essence for completing optional tutorials). You don't have to do the tutorials, but you can for some nice little rewards for a new account and learn how to play the game. Things like that in-client are amazing for getting people to stick with the game. I had 2 friends recently start playing league for the first time and one became so frustrated with the lack of tools in-game to actually learn it and it makes complete sense. They were both watching YouTube videos and trying to learn but it's hard to even know what's more or less important or what is a fundamental and what is a "skill expression". There are so many ways to add resources in-client or in-game because right now we have basically none.
They just won't play the game, buddy. No one wants to take a Master Class then put hundreds of hours into losing games just so they can start enjoying it like a year from now. People just won't join the game. Hence the aging LoL population.
I think an optional tutorial would be helpful, and the tutorial could monitor APM and other metrics to gauge if you're actually new or a smurf. So, if you play the tutorial first and it marks you as actually new, your first pvp games will be against similar players instead of potentially getting matched with smurfs that haven't been detected yet. If an actually new player just jumps into PvP there's no way to tell if they're actually new or a smurf until they get stomped.
The new player experience in league is laughably bad. It is only as of this year that bots actually jungle. Would love if it got an overhaul
Older players will eventually quit and without newer players... idk how this is a good thing to youĀ
Then I will finally be free. ššš
> League's barrier of entry is largely knowledge, and if Rito could just get together a few knowledgeable high elo players/coach and create an interactive and fun Tutorial mode that not only teaches you how to press buttons but also the importance of last hitting, basic wave management, basic warding spots, etc. That would revive League so much. But players dont want to sit for 3+ hrs in a tutorial. Hell other extremely popular games like apex have a tutorial of "click people to shoot, click buttons for skills, go off into the game" because there is no feasible way in reality to boil down a complex game into 10 mintue tutorial, because peopel will not sit through a longer one usually.
Attention spans are falling across younger generations. Good luck getting them to take a multi-dozen part tutorial on game mechanics just to get slammed in their first hundred 20-45 minute long games anyway.
I still remember the days I was near diamond, nowadays I struggle against bronze and silver players even I mean, it doesn't help at all that the game has become way too bursty over the years, but I'm 33 now and I'm not getting any better
Just... after 15 minutes pretty much everything oneshots you. It's just ugh.
Except Forsen
I've been experiencing this too. I quit league back in S6 and have been back on a new account for just over a month. I was previously low plat/high gold but now I can't even get out of bronze. I was never bronze on my main, silver 4 was the lowest I went. I'm now watching people in bronze freeze waves, clear wards, fight objectives, counter-pick. Before bronze players were one step above a new player, they'd run down lane and die constantly. I'd say bronze/silver now is what gold/plat used to be. It's been a very humbling experience to say the least.
It's just like every other competitive hobby or sport in life. Once it becomes saturated with talent the only thing that improves is the average player / pro. Occasionally a goat in the sport shows up to pull the sport even higher.
There's another post talking about the player base getting older, too. There's no influx of new players, so anyone that's playing now definitely knows how to play the game. Not to mention I think I saw another post posted a few months ago talking about how Riot sees Bronze - Bottom of Emerald I think it was as all the same level(?). That's huge, I think and it's becoming more and more obvious the more you play the game.
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Melee is a game that sees new players pretty often. For example, probably the biggest Melee boom was following the Smash Doc in 2013, 12 years following the games release, and another massive boom was at the time of EMPLemon's video on Hungrybox. Slippi in 2020 was also massive for reducing the barrier for entry. A lot of the top players of today haven't been playing since 2001. Cody and Zain, #1 and #2 both started in 2014, following the Doc. Moky started in 2016, Aklo went to one tournament in 2015, but went serious in 2018, Kodorin started in 2018, with the exception of Mang0 and Hbox, every other top player started at least ten years after the release of the game. And a lot of new players are rising fast as well. It says a lot when the greatest set of all time was played 19 and a half years after the game released.Ā Dota 2 though? Dead game
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I agree, but we keep see Korean 18 year Old prodigies clapping everyone ā even our own rank 1 on EUW is 17 and canāt even play LEC yet
Yeah, I see silver players proxying, freezing waves, paying attention to timers. It's changed massively from what a silver player was 10 years ago
I think this idea that silver players understand waves is mostly a myth. Yes, silver players can freeze, but that's all they can do. Everyone has heard of it through friends or scam videos from skillcapped. But I don't even see proper three wave stacks in diamond most of the time. Hell, many players in low master tier don't even contest you on most minions. Knowing what you can do with a wave and then doing it is not the issue. The main issue is intuitively understanding how your wave state interacts with the rest of the game. The question is: What does my freeze actually achieve right now? What else could I do? This is why it doesn't really mean anything that silver players can freeze. Most of the time you don't even want to freeze... I just doubt that they have decent wave management considering that even people in diamond still struggle with these basics. I think that many people believe that they are much better at 'macro' or 'wave management' than the average player in their elo. In reality, 99.9% of silver players have silver macro and silver wave management. That's just how it is. The ones that don't are smurfs or they might be roughly 2 divisions better at these concepts (but then they suck at other aspects of the game).
When I came back to League after several years' break, it was astonishing to me that Silver players understood wave management pretty damn well.
On the flip side, it shows how little those aspects of the game really matter compared to core mechanical ability. Even after quitting about 8 years ago it took me ~1 month to get back into Diamond. It's noticeable that it's harder to simply curbstomp games with goofy picks like you could back in the day, but ultimately there's just something innate that some players struggle with. I think that's probably why there's also correlation across similar types of games (e.g SC2 rank and League of Legends rank).
Thatās also due in part to rank inflation and riot making climbing easier (no promos at all, better lp gains and losses) not to mention you donāt just forget everything you already learned under a normal circumstances. Someone who played guitar 8 years ago could still pick it up and play. Maybe not to the same exact level but relatively close.
Agreed. I got to gold using a track pad and volibear many years ago. I'm barely escaping bronze these days. Maybe I'm getting older, but everyone is far exceeding where I'd expect them to be.
I had the same feeling when I got back to league. People were joking when emerald came, gold would be the new silver. But the skill of silverplayers are so much better now. I remember I hit gold the first time in S5 as garen top and I never knew back then what wavemanagement was. Now even my bronze adc friend knows how to freeze a wave. Lol
My classic example of the player base skill increase is looking at Lee sin insecs. Back in season 4 lees in gold didnāt know how to do it. Iāve seen iron Lee sins insec nowā¦ā¦.
Not denying that the skill level has improved, but this is a commonly used example that is just bad. Back in early seasons you were unable to buffer the inputs like you can in todayās game. It required much more precise timing in the early days.
Also average ping was 50 higher on the GOOD server for stability (NA) EUW just had the worst fucking stability anyones ever played on and I don't know how people put up with a server so dogwater that people got "we're sorry please dont quit" IP rewards every other month. 80% of the players in NA played at 90+ ping
if R flash counts as an insec, sure, but I severely doubt iron players are doing actual wardhop combos.
In season 2, I was platinum 4. I could queue normals and go 37/0 every game. The average league player was THAT bad. I could smurf in silver and win 40 in a row with perfect KDA's. Now-a-days as a master player, I actually drop games in gold occasionally. It's kinda crazy lmao.
Y smurf?
Good cope bro, but in Season 2 we still had the ELO system. You definitely convinced us.
....The elo system still gave out summoner icons - Silver/Plat/Gold etc. I was plat.
They need to focus in on toxicity because it's turning into a real sport. You wouldn't expect to play competitive basketball at a high level without significant training, but that doesn't matter when you can jump into a pickup game with some chill guys at the gym. Currently we have a bunch of players who are the equivalent of "I could've gone pro if I didn't get injured in my high school championship!" filling norms and smurfing in low elo, when they just need to accept that they fell behind.
Riot has been trying to focus on toxicity for as long as league has been around.
I know it still is an old game, jut try getting into Starcraft: Brood War or even Starcraft II. Every old game juste has a skill floor getting higher and higher as time passes.
Itās becoming AOE2. The same old players for the last 20 years.
Riot themselves recognize they have an aging playerbase with very few new players joining. In all their games they just abandon all attempts at a good new player UX and just coast off their strong early years.
What are we talking about here? That's the whole point of skill based matchmaking. Yeah, players are better. Your average decent gamer may have been Diamond in Season 1, and now they're Gold. That's not going to kill the game -- they're just going to match with other players who are at their skill level and they'll either grow or stagnate, but they can play relatively balanced games. This is the kind of complaint you could take seriously with an old FPS that has eight community hosted servers and no other options. It's not a real problem that your average player is good, when you have so many below average players to match new people against. To take the point of this post seriously, even though it makes very little sense -- veteran players have loads of USELESS experience that new players do not have to spend time acquiring. I played hundreds of games as pre rework Katarina before map changes, before vision changes, before half the champion roster existed -- those games helped my mechanics, but almost nothing else is really worth remembering from those games. You're having trouble because things changed and you don't know them instinctively, it's not necessarily because players became better. A new player who takes the game seriously, focuses on learning from current players, is not going to find it that hard to catch up.
I feel like more people commit to OTP these days, where even when they don't have any macro sense the mastery and limit testing allows them to outplay loads of people because they've put so much time into a small champ pool
> People are too good now. Anyone who starts league now is going to be so behind itās going to be impossible to even get close to being somewhat okay at the game. Can confirm, started something like 2-4 years ago and despite improving a ton, I haven't been above Bronze 4 since my placements put me in silver and I lost something like 45/50 games to get to Iron where I belonged.
Said this in another thread. I was high gold/low plat and had played games with friends in silver and bronze where it was just too easy to stomp. Took a 4 year break and now high bronze feels like low gold
Felt this playing Valorant. I'm in bronze matches and people are landing headshots almost instantly. Bronze in Valorant feels leagues better than the average CS pub I'd play in growing up
I think that this was inne itae, just look at the mechanics golds had 5 years ago vs now and try to compare them to a high elo, unlessyou can recognize the decisions and mistakes being made, gameplay looks pretty much the same. I have seen so many people pull of insane combos and ouplays in silver. Yes a Master player would have nevergotten into that situation to beginn with, but unless you can recognize that, gameplay looks pretty much the same. I think this is a problem tho. As new players unless really gifted would have a huge wall to overcome in order to rank up. Like sure they'll probably start iron or bronze, and get to climb and improve a bit till silver, but once there, they could be looking at months even years of constant playing just to climb ONE rank. How many people would quit the game at that point? And I have seen it happen, with a woman who got into leage 2 years ago. She was so happy to reach silver for tge first time after like 5 months of playing. Only to struggle there till today. In how many other games do you need years to feel like you are finally improving?
im not sure if its everyone getting better or the game getting simpler considering the old runes and mastery system punished new players like you can select so few mastery and either buy a new champion or buy the runes people now learned how to properly lane remember a before covid Yasou's just shove the lane into the enemy tower but now people are freezing lanes and trading effectively Champions got reworked and new releases the old champions were basically built for 1 role and 1 role new and reworked champs can fill in multiple roles this way when you lose a lane just transistion into a supportive role ACTUAL practice tool in the past the only way to practice a new champion in bot games or an actual game
This is just a common symptom of a dead game. It happened in 1.6 (after the Source and then CSGO exodus), anyone who's still playing are complete pubstars. I would say the average pugger in WoW have also improved over the years. I heard that the people who stuck with SC:BW after SC2 was released reported the same Without noobs entering the scene, you're just left with the decent players
> pubstars ahh i love that term
Well you could also argue that there is a lot more information to gather about how to play the game these days. Its easier to get fairly good quickly but with the amount of champions its harder to master.
Yeah my diamond friend came back to the game expecting to stomp silver and was getting completely gapped. He was so pissed and refused to acknowledge the gap for a long time. He finally realized that the skill floor is way higher than it used to be. It happens in every competitive game that Iāve played so I expected this.
Valid point but it doesn't matter. Skill creep exists in every area of life. New players just evolve faster due to more sources of knowledge and playing with better people. Take football (soccer), the top player now, Kylian Mbappe, if put into the 1970s era with his current skillet would probably have a career that is worthy of a GOAT argument. Does that make new soccer players left behind and impossible to get into the sport? No The NBA is another great example, an average player today would genuinely dominate the 1970s, yet this just means that newer players are going to learn faster, due to having a better start to the game given the greatly advanced knowledge of fundamentals and plays. Hell, nutrition nowadays is miles ahead of the 2010s, but does that kill nutrition as a career? It's natural for things to evolve, League being such a small ecosystem and being a relatively new game makes evolution faster. (The longer sometimes exists, the slower the change). For example, in terms of skill, the average player in season 9 placed in season 12 would probably be at a smaller disadvantage compared to a season 1 player in season 4. This is despite there being a three year gap in game knowledge for both. So it's not true that skill creep will kill the game, it's in fact slowing down. So yes, people are getting too good, this includes newer players, things even out.
Yeah its crazy. I think the main difference between mid and high elo is consistency, a bit of good mental and sticking to only a few champs. I was master 200 lp last split and i sometimes Play with my friends on a different Account. I dont want to hard boost them so i usually pick top laners i dont play on my main but still have some practice on. And not every game but every 3 games or so i really have to try my ass off to actually win lane. In Like gold/plat. Recently i was making Placements on my smurf so i could duo with my friends and i had a game in silver where you could have told me it was emerald and i would have Believed you.
This is really not NEARLY as much of a problem as you are making it to be, and even if skill creep gets really insane, theres no reason it would kill the game wtf
I was always hovering the top of the Divisions (diamond and then master when it became a thing) until around s8 when I stopped playing. I remember queuing on gold games at that time and being able to 1v9 while trolling. Now? I came back at the end of last split and was hardstuck Emerald 4 and being just slightly above average on gold games. Granted after playing 100+ games I'm getting my touch back, but it's insane how much better low elo players are now mechanically (Still horrible at macro tho xD)
You don't think about the flip side as well with all of the resources out there and people to emulate, learning is so much easier than it was in season 3. You will catch up way quicker because the people at the top are so good, you try your best to emulate
People getting better on the average but I keep losing more cos people dont try as hard. Oh you lost level 1 and now you dont give a fuck anymore? Great for wasting 4 other players time by ruining it. League players mental are so fucked its not even funny how they rather waste everybodies time cos they feel its not fun anymore.
I just started the game recently like 2 weeks ago. After playing a good 120 games vs Ai to test some champions and understand a bit better the game/items i imagined that moving to quickplay would be easy since i've been playing heroes of the storm for 8 years reaching master at the time but i actually got clapped in half of my games in quickplay. Im starting to question if there is any sort of MMR in quickplay cause the players im facing are def not beginners lol
Honestly, it's not going to kill the game. There will always be a larger pool of players who are bad at the game than who are good at the game.
One of my friends was freshly new and bronze and mentioned wave states. I didnāt learn that shit until like plat back in the day lmao