How Challenger Players Smurf With 70%+ Win Rates And You Can Too

you could argue that league of legends has become one of the most successful games of all time due to a near perfect balance of accessibility and competitive complexity fighting games and real-time strategy games have the ultimate learning curve a newer player will lose to a high ranked one a hundred out of a hundred times this is a really good way to ensure that hard work will pay off and you feel like there's an unlimited cap to how much better you can become but that does come at the cost of scaring away newer players on the opposite end games like call of duty rely heavily on a casual player base a new player can come in and find success immediately while not feeling so threatened by the game's learning curve as for league of legends it fits almost perfectly right in the middle a casual audience can still feel like they have a voice here and the initial learning curve is very daunting but the game has ways to work around it there are easier champions like warwick garen or annie that allow someone to focus on the game around them and not be overwhelmed by their abilities because the game is not 1v1 but instead 5v5 it allows a newer player to taste victory from time to time while they learn even if they weren't necessarily the best player in the game in this game an overwhelming majority of players are between the ranks of bronze silver and gold with the most populated divisions being silver 4 and gold for by ranked distribution 81 of players are these ranks bronze silver or gold with 35 of all players in silver alone but that's just the players who are ranked there's still a very good percentage of players in this highly competitive game that don't even play ranked and don't have a rank solo queue is an environment that some players just don't want to deal with whether it's the toxicity the grind the addiction of lp gains and losses or any number of factors it might just be better for your mental health to play casual a-rams with your friends but what if you just can't stop queuing up over the last decade hundreds of millions of league of legends players have been playing ranked for one main reason the competition for those at the very top who are now in the professional scene their grinding commitment to the game has surely paid off esports and competitive league of legends have never been more popular with players signing these huge multi-million dollar contracts if going pro isn't your thing certainly being a top-rated player on the ranked ladder could help start up a career in content creation and streaming platforms like twitch and youtube for those at the very top can be even more lucrative than being a professional player for years in the league of legends community we've been viewing the latter ranking as the most important detail about a player almost like a social status lol players are obsessed with comparing ranks among their peers other gaming content creators are expected to be skilled enough to appreciate their gameplay music and art creators have to be amazing artists but in games without dedicated ranking systems the first question doesn't always default to what rank are you your rank in this game is your main identity often seen in a social media bio in a stream title to say hey my gameplay is worth watching and the praise amongst your friends and fellow redditors allows you to have a little bit of respect and in most regards this is completely deserved no different than a successful millionaire has the right to own a mansion or brag about having a supercar challenger players deserve the praise that they get being challenger is so unfathomably rare and difficult that whatever success that they have in the content or professional gaming world is earned they are the top one percent for a reason but with that being said let's not talk about the one percent let's talk about the 99 there are entire youtube channels based around helping you improve in this game content dedicated to guides and information to help you get better entire companies both third party applications and websites that are designed to help the average player become the best league of legends player they can be some of which i've even worked for i've created and produced hundreds of videos about tier lists champion guides and anything else that allows players to learn more so if there's an entire sub market within the massive scope of league of legends all based around increasing your rank why does it feel so hard to climb if you have all these resources at your disposal why is it that every year players latch on to some new idea for why they can't climb the ranked ladder during the early seasons of league of legends it was all about elo hell during the art and censor years better bot wins and for the last two seasons it's a jungle diff to understand how and why this happens how some players can not just hit high ranking in this game but also do so in a way that seems like winning solo queue is almost a guarantee going directly to the source was the only option here i interviewed and spoke to some of the highest rated players in league of legends but i specifically spoke to those with extremely high win rate accounts players who were smurfing in high elo a collection of solo queue players amateur professionals one tricks and up-and-coming 16 year old challenger players that will go pro once they're eligible this is their story this is how they reach the top of the ladder and one of the most popular competitive games of all time and this is how you can learn from them to climb the ladder [Music] the different pieces of input and information that i was looking for were a mixed bag of specific questions related to current league of legends topics and some more general questions that have been relevant for several years for current topics they gave some insight on abusing overpowered strategies such as the master yi and taric funneling or why some players are meta-slaves or have to pick flavor of the month champions and others can successfully hit challenger on one tricks some general talking points were about how much does total champion mastery matter and on top of that how do you reach that point how do you become the best draven or the best kindred player they also pitched in some thoughts on how some players can be stuck in the lower ranks and not climb how can players have well over a thousand games and be the same rank that they were several years ago finally we finished up with topics like duo abuse which is a term coined by league of legends players describing the fact that players feel as if it's far easier to climb with a duo than playing solo they talked about whether or not they choose to forfeit games or never give up in their practice schedule how they approach solo queue from both a mental standpoint and grinding day after day in game let's start by talking about why some players struggle to even queue up for rank to begin with when asking a higher rated player how to get better often times the first response you will get is just play more this advice is only two words but it's a good starting point every single challenger player has played thousands and thousands of solo queue games in their lifetime if you're seeking improvement you must spend more time with this game that's the nature of any topic or skill in real life too the saying that you've probably heard sometime in your life is that it takes ten thousand hours to master a skill sometimes it's easy to forget that in the literal sense in a player versus player environment when there are three million 263 159 players ranked on the europwest server in order to be rank one you can't just be really good you can't just be excellent at the game you must be better than 3.2 million other people in order to be a silver player you objectively have to be better than bronze players you don't have to be diamond to get from silver to gold but you do have to at least be a gold player how can it be that some players just aren't able to climb even after thousands and thousands of games and still be relatively the same rank one reason could be your attention we hear all the time that practice makes perfect but in reality it's more like perfect practice will make perfect in league of legends you have resources things like gold and experience in life you also have resources things like time money knowledge and energy but one resource that you need to think about more is your attention dr k's youtube channel and company is a great resource for gamers interested in psychology one of his videos touches on the topic of how he made it through medical school only studying two hours per day i want you guys to think about if i'm studying a textbook and i read everything on the page i don't understand the information right like i can read the information but i don't get it then what happens is i read the page again and i read the page again and the fourth time i read the page i get it does everybody understand what i'm saying so in what scenario could i read something 10 times and not understand it distracted right so like the more like let's say that i'm studying and i just got broken up with my like my girlfriend just dumped me how many times am i gonna have to read the page to understand it and i would study between like 4 30 and 6 30 or 5 and 7. did it first thing in the morning when my mind was completely clear and i studied two hours a day in med school when his other classmates were probably studying five six maybe even 10 hours per day something normal for med school buried in their textbooks all day long how did he make it through only studying 2 hours per day you do not have to play 10 ranked games per day in order to get better nebula is a challenger zoe main and he told me his best advice would be to only play a few ranked games a day on his recent account with the super high win rate he was only playing between 2-3 ranked games per day it's entirely possible for you to improve only playing a very small amount of ranked games so long as your other hours are spent watching replays vod review youtube guides and watching challenger streams what this does is allows you to focus your full attention to those very few games this will in turn make them as quality as possible with your mental state completely cleared it's a lot easier to focus on winning and your own personal mistakes in any situation where you're playing 10 or more games per day if you lost let's say 7 or 8 of those games in a row during one day imagine where your mind is going to be on that last game the two game schedule is similar to dr k's two hour studying sessions with his attention completely focused and tied to studying it was way easier to soak up the necessary information and not let anything else in his personal life or brain distract him from what he needed to focus on to be fair if we back up for just a second there is a good reason why playing only two games a day would seem hard and unfulfilling and that's because of the toxicity of ranked imagine this situation i'll give you a deal i'll give you 100 ranked games and in 60 of them you get to win of course you'll still lose 40 of them but if i asked you this right now everyone would take this deal you're guaranteed to win 20 more ranked games than you lose and by the end of them you'll gain some lp it seems like a no-brainer but what if i told you in those 40 games you're going to experience extreme levels of toxicity you will experience trolls afk's ragers and feeders on top of that if you only play 2 ranked games per day it's going to take you 50 days to complete them and somewhere in those 40 games there will be a loss streak of 8 losses in a row meaning that for 4 days straight all you did was lose you can kind of see how this might be tiring because all your mind will be thinking about is for four days in a row you didn't win a single game this might be a major contributing factor on why players choose to play as many ranked games as possible in one day because they will hope and pray that they finally get a good team it's not true and it's not good practice but it feels understandable your focus and your attention is a resource that's hard to understand at first but thinking about it logically it starts to come together nobody's brain is perfect and all of us are limited by our attention spans it's just human nature if you had a rough day or your mind is elsewhere it's almost impossible to play at your top level a distracted mind simply cannot play league of legends to its full potential because the game takes so much out of you mentally this game should require your full undivided attention because you must constantly assess the minimap cooldowns timers objectives skill shots it's complicated so of course when any kind of tilt sets in or you become half afk in your brain you'll never learn anything and never learn how to improve avoiding tilt is a really big thing but there's a couple of tricks that we've seen over the years lately it's become more common for players to speak up about how toxic this game is and one of the ways that league players are combating toxicity is with mute all mutal and han zimmer is great advice another one is music whether it's on or off try to pick one and stick to a pattern many of you may love that head banging hardcore house music for whatever reason it keeps you focused and awake on the other hand guys like bjergsen and faker swear by no music and consider it a huge distraction from my experience i've always recommended this alpha brainwave music i'm fairly certain it's just a placebo effect and has no real scientific evidence that it increases any brain activity but for me it works great and keeps me calm and focused so whatever works just go for it there's a relatively common trap within league of legends that the lower ranked players will care too much about champion mastery this will go for the actual in-game mastery points that you get and being more concerned with their mechanics than is otherwise necessary it's pretty common to see the lower ranked players on champions like riven zed and yasuo care so much and have an obsession with their mechanics their combos and their mastery points despite their games still needing a little bit of work let's make something clear champion mastery and champion mechanics are important in this game you need to use your abilities in the best way possible you should be working on your skill shot accuracy and you have to have a clear understanding of your ability combos because the cleaner the execution the better so why did every challenger player say that champion mastery points don't matter how can there be players like sheriff buford with 9 million mastery points on dr mundo and still be in silver how come mastery points don't seem to be a good representation of skill level in february of 2017 ark second who is a former rank 1 player and a multi-season challenger uploaded a video to his youtube channel titled what is the difference between each elo it's only 55 seconds long and funny enough that's all it needed to be his explanation was so simple and to the point that it's almost too perfect to explain why there are differences in skill level and ranking in this game he outlined a spreadsheet of 55 different contributing factors to winning not everything on the list is weighted equally though understanding the metagame and powerful champion picks on the current patch is way more valuable than the type of mouse and headset that you use so although champion mastery is very important and is of course on the list this paints a better picture for why it's not the end-all be-all champion mastery is just one of the many factors that contribute to winning league of legends games additionally mastery points don't make a player better it's just a measurement of how much time they've put into the champion two players one with a hundred thousand mastery points and one with a million mastery points could still see the player with 100k points have better mechanics and overall cleaner combos what's far more important for total champion mastery in getting better are the things that you don't work on in the practice tool or things that you may not notice in montages laning trading and match-ups that's what makes you better the reason that challenger players are so focused on their laning matchups and getting the wave management farming and csing to perfection is because in order to be a challenger player you have to lane against a challenger player you might think that rumble mid isn't very difficult to play and you may even think that rumble mid is just a cheese pick but if you watch any one of wendt rumble's videos you can learn so much about mid lane wave management and when he explains the matchups and how to play them it instantly shows how and why he is challenger all right so i'm against ryze i took d shield obviously this guy's one i want to back early to get tier but i'm pretty sure i can't force him out of lane like say it was a quirky you could try to force them out of lane before tier because they usually start corrupting pot or d shield but this guy started a sapphire crystal so there's very little chance that i actually deny him as early as here there's a pretty high chance i run into their jungler but [Music] okay i'm pretty sure i can 1v2 this if i wait out as red smite okay that's fine their guy could face check this so i'm gonna okay i gave up like a mid wave for like half of his health instead of spending all day talking about champion mastery points and combos focus on win rate farming and damage per minute if you're a numbers guy and you like stats a kda and a win rate on a player shows far more about how skilled they are than their mastery points on the champion the higher the rank the player is the easier it should be to learn a brand new champion a high-elo player should have a much better time learning a brand new champ or a role because overall game knowledge is transferable if a new player is struggling to grasp the fundamentals of the game and perfect the core concepts imagine also trying to learn 10 champions at the same time the crazy part is that even in the case of challenger players it is not easy to learn a new role or champ the type of league content on twitch that's been all the buzz lately is the new role challenge famously tyler1 a challenger level bot laner in draven maine decided to start a jungle only account after 811 games in the jungle he reached challenger tyler finished with a 52 win rate overall with 947 wins and 864 losses there were tons of people who doubted that he could even reach master tier but just understand this is by no means demeaning his accomplishments what he was able to do showed the community just how good of a league of legends player tyler1 is being able to hit challenger on an off roll that he never really played before in many respects is a huge accomplishment but that's the point that's how long it took a challenger player to get back to his rank it took him 1811 games because league of legends is one of the most complicated games you can play when a current challenger player takes nearly 2 000 games to reach his expected rank just because he switched a role and a position what does that say about how hard learning a new champion is this is why one of the most common pieces of advice to get better is to one trick and that's usually the best approach being a one trick or eliminating a lot of champions from your champion pool means that you bring down the variables that you have to learn your main question stops becoming how do i play the yasuo versus zero matchup and starts becoming how do i play the azir matchup or the leblanc matchup or the rise matchup the reason is because your yangshuo pick is now a given the only variable becomes the enemy champion many of the challenger players told me that they take their one trick or role so seriously that if they get auto filled they just dodge the game let's all be honest for a second it's really hard to learn new things and getting better and seeing improvement is a long and daunting process it's not necessarily always fun either one thing that holds us human beings back is the psychological biases that can get in the way of our progress quite a few are relevant to league of legends in the topic of improvement but none greater than the dunning-kruger effect the dunning-kruger effect was first explained in the year 1999 and it outlines why humans have such a hard time rating their skills and comparing themselves to other people time and time again some studies have shown that we're not very good at judging our competence in one study 88 of american drivers said that they have above average driving when mathematically of course only less than 50 percent of people can genuinely be above average at anything something that might surprise you is that it doesn't have as much to do with ego and cockiness or arrogant people as you might think generally speaking people are willing to admit when they make a mistake especially big ones that end up hurting a lot of people the issue comes in that in order to recognize a mistake you have to have some level of knowledge in that particular field this is what dunning and kruger described as the double curse people don't know how much they don't know basically there's a good reason why any player in any rank might feel stuck and like they can't get any better or they can't seem to win when you hear them say time and time again they don't know how to improve and how climbing is such a difficult and long process despite the fact that they have friends who are higher ranked despite the fact that they know that millions and millions of people around the world are higher ranked it can feel like getting out of gold is impossible and dunning krueger could be the best explanation as to why it feels that way [Music] let's say that there's a game that we play where i roll a die it's a six-sided die right so i'm the guy that rolls the die and you're the guy that has the options on like what what outcome to predict so instead of picking a number you you have option a and you have option b right these are your two choices option a is i'm gonna roll exactly a six if i roll exactly a six you win the game right option b is every other number one through five so let's say we do that right we do that in practice i roll you know you pick option b so you win if i roll one through five i roll the die and i get a six most people most most human beings on earth this is like one of the ways the human brain is really stupid they'll look at that and they'll be like okay i made the wrong decision the outcome was six so it was wrong to pick b this time i should have picked a that's how most people think but the reality is that you know even though the outcome was worse you still made the right decision with the information you had i cannot possibly make a video like this and not talk about the greatest league of legends solo queue player of all time the all-time rank 1 challenger player that we all know and love apto or dopa a multi-time rank 1 korean challenger a rank 1 chinese challenger and even rank 1 on the chinese super server during an interview one time he was asked what separates him from other korean challenger players his response was about a thought process that he claims to have learned about back in 2015 which is eliminating result-oriented thinking he does everything that he can to avoid thinking about the results of the situation and instead think about the process of how he got to that situation when a league of legends game is finished every player is concerned about the result whether they won or they lost whether they gained 18 lp or lost 18 lp that typically is the first thing on your mind but if you think this way after the game all about the result in the lp gains or losses it probably is blinding and clouding your judgment during the game as well a great way to avoid result-oriented thinking is to imagine a situation where you went on a massive winning streak it's really good to win a bunch of games in a row but what makes apto the greatest player ever is that he never looks at his games based on the results and he instead looks at them based on what happened situational thinking allows him to remember that even if he was able to win a bad lane matchup that doesn't mean that he will always be able to even if he won 10 games in a row that doesn't mean that he played perfectly and if he loses a game but felt like he made a lot of correct plays and decisions then the process-oriented thinking tells him to just keep doing that even if the most recent result didn't go in his favor for the last decade all of us have been collectively trying to figure out and struggle with what it takes to climb in this game but learning from these challenger players with high win rates as well as the secrets and tips from established gods of the game like apto really gives us some light on what they potentially do that you and i don't however let's make one thing clear there is no secret formula we can talk all day about what these guys do to climb discuss which champions they play and have a conversation about the current metagame what their strategy is for climbing how often they queue up and what guides they watch but at the end of the day there's somewhere in the range of 50 or more factors that will contribute to you killing the nexus at the end of the game a challenger player has every facet of the game mastered to at least a 9 out of 10. to achieve real improvement it's about accepting a growth mindset stop worrying about the results and instead think about the process of where you're going and where your next steps are if you welcome in new ideas and understand the consequences of the dunning-kruger effect develop a small enough champion pool that you're comfortable on stick to a schedule of ranked games and replay review putting all of your focus and attention into solo queue when you play it if you learn about the meta and you take any other skills that you've learned over the last couple of years and you put them all together in one gameplay package that's how you finally will climb if that sounds like a lot of work to you you're precisely correct it is a ton of work and it's incredibly challenging but that is the reason why esports are exciting that's the reason why pro players exist and why challenger players have careers and content in streaming worth millions of dollars they've earned that right because they've put in the time and focus their life around this game but remember if you're not willing to do that that's perfectly okay there is nothing wrong with playing casual a-rams or normal games with your friends at the end of the day even if this game can make you a millionaire even if you can become famous and popular in the world of esports by being good at it it's just that it's just a game anyway i hope you enjoyed leave a like and subscribe if you did find it helpful and enjoyable throughout and i will see you guys in the next [Music] video [Music] you

Channel: Exil

Views: 417,182

Rating: 4.9226222 out of 5

Keywords: challenger, league of legends challenger, league of legends, lol, unranked to challenger, proguides, league of legends pro guides, league of legends 10.16, mobalytics, lol gameplay guide, skill capped, how to mid, league of legends gameplay, lol how to climb, climb ranked league of legends, league of legends tips, how to improve at league of legends, how to get better at league of legends

Id: GOpJTFI467I

Length: 27min 31sec (1651 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ExilYoutube]

I love Dr. K, so I had to put him in here :)