u/sharkymb

I hate emblem games man, turns the whole game into a fiesta from level 3 lol. Anyone else feel this way?

I see a lot of people in plat and emerald being afk under tower lvl 1. As a jungler you should know that what you are doing can be the difference between Shaco oneshotting you 5 times in lane or him being behind all game, because you placed a simple ward lvl 1 to give your jungler information about potential invades.

This should be a "fundamental" for any player in ranked trying to win imo.

I have so many years of playing this game on multiple accounts at this point that I feel like I have finally seen it all. Let's start with the fresh account's journey:

As you queue up on your brand new lvl 30 account you are immediately placed with gold and platinum players. You play 2, maybe 3 games at this rank, stomping every game until the algorithm catches on and you are placed in a place that some will say doesn't exist anymore - smurf queue. Yeah, I guess you could say it's not 5 smurfs vs 5 smurfs anymore, but yesterday I was in a game where there was only 1 guy who didn't have the "fast climber" tag, so yeah... Call it whatever the fuck you want, it very much exists still and you don't get placed there unless you are genuinely way above your current ranks skill level, as far as I can tell. Here you meet the first category of smurfs.

The Low Gold fighting pits

1. In this place your account has gone through placements and is in high gold/low plat. Your real rank is way higher, and the game knows that. You are placed in games with similar people, except there is one problem... Everyone has a way higher actual rank, yes, but everyone is also from way different ranks. Someone is from Emerald 4, someone is from D3. Then maybe one guy is actually just plat 2, but has been placed here as a "mmr gauging" game. In these games it is WAR. Everyone has different skill levels leading to complete chaos. There is absolutely no way to know which lane is going to be the one stomping either, so good luck choosing your jungle path. Only the strongest survive.

The Checkpoint

2. You have proved yourself in the fighting pits and the system now wants to find out where you belong between emerald-master. Your first game is around Emerald 4/Platinum 1. If you have been stuck in this elo before you know this is a very frustrating place to be. The main reason is that this is the checkpoint for fresh accounts that are clearly above platinum level, no matter if they are emerald or grandmaster. The other reason is that this is typically the rank you get stuck at when you have mastered laning phase, but lack the fundamentals/macro to climb higher, leading to A LOT of frustration of people with 500+ games in E4 not understanding why they aren't climbing. If you can win consistently here on a fresh acc you just get automatically placed in master+ queue.

What are your smurf stories and observations?