The Jungle

Normal Games

Hunger & Thirst

Created By : Unknown ~ A blog about various video games Article Solo-Q Is a Jungle was published by Unknown on Saturday, 22 June 2013. There are currently 0 comments: for the article Solo-Q Is a Jungle Articlewas published byon. There are currentlyfor the article

For some reason everyone wants to reach high elo, but they aren't willing to do what is necessary. Most people will create invisible barriers preventing them from getting better and it makes no sense to me. The use the barriers to justify why they can't climb to the top while not realizing if they removed the barriers they'd rise to the top. Its like setting up a roadblock so you can't get to work, then explaining how you would have gone to work if the roadblock wasn't there. Does that make sense?Metaphorically, Solo-q is the jungle of league of legends. Its not a person or a living being, so for the love of god stop trying to reason with it. You simply survive it, and you don't stop doing it until you stop playing the game. I'm tired of people trying to pioneer their own method of getting to high elo and say that all they want to do is be a challenger tier player. Frankly, they're lying to themselves or just being straight up disrespectful to everyone else. If they really wanted to get high elo, they wouldn't need to pioneer a path to do it. I'm not saying its wrong to do it, pioneer your path to diamond but don't do it under the guise of wanting to be a better player. If you got lost in the jungle would you choose that time to try and survive your own way? What would you do? Most likely you'd try to remember all the survival shows you watched and try to copy what you saw.I mean, it is the jungle and the best way to survive in the wild is to adapt. Yet you rarely see anyone scouring forums on how to get better at league of legends using this basic skill. That person isn't going to attempt to adapt because adapting in a non-life threatening human vs human environment is harder to start. In the wild you can admit to yourself that an animal can find food better than yourself, so you'll follow it and eat what it eats. If a rabbit eats some berries I'd probably figure I can eat them too. When it comes to the game however some people would be hard-pressed to admit that there is something that can be learned from another player. "How did Kha'zix go 12/0 by twenty minutes? My team is such garbage. If they had let me mid Malphite like I wanted to I would have won against Kha'zix." Thats just the typical stuff you see in solo queue, and this is the wrong mindset for multiple reasons. I'm not going to go on and say that you couldn't beat that Kha with Malphite mid, that point is literally irrelevant to getting better. Its as if you're downplaying what the Kha has done by stating you could beat them.This is where the jungle metaphor and adapting comes into play. You're in the jungle and you just can't seem to catch any meat. You might be stronger, smarter or even faster than some of the animals but they're not hungry like you. So what you do is copy what they do to catch the food they do. If they catch rabbits by flushing them of the shrubbery then catching them, you do it just as they do. You don't go on about how if you were the rabbit that shit wouldn't work on you or how you couldn't be killed as easy. You use the same techniques to pray on them- you adapt to the jungle. You don't go on about how you could have won that lane against Kha, you watch the replay and study the player. You note his every movements, you study his play like you're going to make a documentary about it and then you employ his tactics next game. You play Kha and do what he did, you adapt. WORST case scenario you get stomped, learn how to counter him and gain something new to adapt to. Its literally that easy, you just learn what stomped in your last game. Whether it was your teams mid, the enemy support or yourself. You study how that happened and do it next game. Once you got this down and gain all that freelo, you realize that you haven't even achieved your final form yet.Now some people might think what I'm saying isn't really valid because my surviving the jungle metaphor is about a single person while winning games takes the whole team. If you were thinking that I can already tell you weren't thinking about surviving the jungle, you were just thinking about winning. Winning doesn't mean you're surviving the jungle, its a product of surviving. First of all, stop playing so much solo q games like normals if you're worried about your rating. Normal games are like street football(get a few friends, some nets and playing) games, ranked solo q is much more akin to organized football. Not in the team sense, but that the outcome of the game matters. Not to say you can't apply what I say in this post to ranked games, but most people probably can't bring themselves to it because at the end of they day they're trying to win the game and not improve. They may not take the extra risk which could be a huge learning experience because its a ranked game and that could really hurt progression. If thats the case it'd be much better to play normals to improve your gameplay, then ranked for the sole purpose of winning(or "tryharding" as some put it).You can survive thirst seven times over before you have to survive hunger. A lot of people are thirsty for some form of online validation. How many people who are trying to raise on the ladder drop the line "I don't play X champion because its FoTM/I stopped playing X champion because its FoTM" like thats a good thing. Those people are going to hit a brick wall in their play and won't overcome it anytime soon. Those are the people not willing to adapt, simply because they let their ego get the better of them. Those people have so little hunger, no, they've run into the negative amount and now they're thirsty. They're thirsty for validation from other people because of what they do or do not play as if that gets them some sort of respect. They're letting that thirst get in the way of what they want. You don't want to be recognized for what you play, how you got to where you are but the kind of player you are now. Stop with the thirsty habits and watch the replay of that Jayce that dominated your last game, copy and apply to your next game. The only pro player I know that was famous for this was Chaox and he got clowned for it sometimes as if it was a bad thing. He'd state how X was OP if he got stomped from it and proceeded to only play X. You need to adapt that kind of mentality to evolve in this game. Most high elo players have it because as soon as they get stomped with something or see an item used in an intuitive way they're already q'd up and ready to try it out. "OP" shit is like wildfire in high elo as far as I've seen on streams, as soon as its introduced its beaten until its apart of the meta and finite counters are in place.The biggest thirst(and hunger) enabling mechanic in my mind is the league system, or any rating system for that matter. It a breeding ground for negative thoughts such as being better than another player. Your rating means literally nothing once your in game, and yes, I know this is said a lot. Said so much people just take it for granted and don't really think about it. That 12/0 Kha might be rated silver, but he may have been playing like a diamond player that game. He may forever play the rest of his games like a bronze player, or silver, but lets just say he played like a diamond player that game. He gave your team such a beating you surrendered at 20 minutes, the only reason the Kha didn't have over twenty kills. Your rating doesn't set a cap on your play in a game. If that was the case you could never get any better or worse. That number is nothing, stop overplaying its value. It simply states how far you have come up the ladder, thats it. Knowing it doesn't mean the level at which you will play that game, realize you can always learn something from players in games. Don't use rating to prevent you from getting better, use what you know will you games. From experience, you know that Kha dominated your team and you will use said Kha to dominate others.I haven't even talked about hunger yet, most likely because it isn't needed to climb the ladder. Its something you have or you don't, not really something you can manufacture as its natural. Hunger can be triggered by pretty much anything, but you can get up and one day decide you're going to hunger for X. You don't play league all your life, never watch a game of Dota, know nothing about it and then wake up the next morning and hunger to be the best dota player of all time. Hunger is much stronger than thirst, I mean if you really hungry to get better you'd already be playing OP heros and things such as pride for not playing them wouldn't even come into the equation for you. I mean real hunger, losing sleep at night because you couldn't do something you thought you could so you stay up thinking of what went wrong. So hungry that you hate/admire wildturtle because he has three accounts in the top 5 of the challenger tier. Just the thought that the only real thing preventing him from having 50 accounts and preventing anyone from becoming a challanger is that it may not be humanly possible. You may not see that as a reason to hate/admire someone but its probably because you're not hungry. Its like there is 50 spots to a university and the university allows you to take multiple tests and take up as many spots as possible. They have 50 tests, they all are different and one guy just gets the highest mark on all of them and gets all 50 spots. Its not even that he's currently smarter than you, its that no matter what you do, no matter how much you study and that ONE person is always ahead of you. Its one thing to know that there will always be someone better than you, but to know that there is one specific person who will always be better than you is something else. When that person has no advantage over you, and they're effectively letting you know that they'll always be better. Its that kind of competition that breeds hunger.tl;dr Stop feeling sorry for yourself, adapt to the jungle and stop being the food for the people who do adapt.