Y U MAD BRO?

Thought I'd post some thoughts here - I'm probably overdue for a vlog, but here's what I got.  I few days ago (a week, w/e.. I don't know), I noticed I was quietly getting to rage induced levels of play with folks.  Zero booze required, just straight up I hate you for doing anything shitty and I had immunity (eg not my bad, its all you bro).  Now, absolutely hating feeling that way (its like you know you are having dickish thoughts, you know if you keep playing you are going to verbally insult folks and be an asshole), I decided it was time to bugger off and go solo for a bit (where I am now). Also, I learned if I'm playing with folks I don't know and I'm playing champs I suck at, I tend to get less mad at other people and rightly put the blame on myself for failings. 

Anyway, I have my issue pegged - I'm under a ridiculous amount of stress with work (this past Saturday I unexpectedly worked from 3AM to 11AM for instance), I just don't have the patience.  I also find it interesting that I don't really get mad at people I don't know when I'm in the state of mind, but I'm really quick to anger with folks I do know.  If you are following this thread, I think I realized I had a problem right around when I was like F u blujay.  Way too much rage on my part over dumb shite.  My stress is fading some... I'm on call this week still, but the major pain should be over with now.  As such, I expect I'll try to get some games in with you folks again very soon if you are free when I am. 

Just thought I'd share as I've been a bit of a ghost on my main lately.  Night all!

Not saying that's not a good method, and it's in fact the same thing I've done myself.  Being able to make mistakes without becoming a non-factor in a game is a wonderful way to get better at a champ you don't know.

Just pointing out that you should keep in mind the CS thing while you do it, so you don't get needlessly discouraged.  Or let yourself pick up bad habits like relying on your ult or overheated autos to CS more often than you should.

So, again keeping in mind that I'm playing rumble on a low level account, I'm finding it easier and easier to last hit now.  Getting a decent amt of practice with how to use the flames properly and how to balance my heat.  Still need to practice the heat mechanic a bunch (eg keeping it at 50 for dmg and only overheating when I want to).  

I find with his ult that i really, really, really only want to use it in team fights.  Sure, its fine solo, but so much freaking better in a team fight.  I'm sure that's common sense, ofc, but its kind of to the point where I'm chomping at the bit watching a ton and looking for an op to tp in or get into a team fight. 

Anyway, I've developing a decent amount of top lane champs now.  I also find that I really enjoy solo lane champs quite a bit more over a duo lane.  Less variables there (up vs a good support u have a bad support; u have a dumb adc, they have a good adc, etc). 

you can still have a dumb support, and the enemy can have a good ADC if you're top lane... it's not as if the other lanes magically cease to exist. And junglers matter a lot more for toplane than botlane, and you absolutely can lose lane due to a bad jungler who feeds double buffs level 3.

For a bad support/good ADC, the "burden" on you is just shifted from laning phase and into teamfights. If you have a bad support versus a great ADC, and you're playing botlane, your responsibility to the team is to try to lose as graceful as possible and let your team do the carrying. If you're top lane and your botlane gets massacred, your responsibility is now to either TP down there and try to save them, or to get equally fed toplane.

And not all champs are equally good at dealing with enemy fed ADCs. Rumble probably being one of the weaker ones... Lucian/Tristana aren't exactly going to be standing in your ult for very long.

If you want to win, you should be playing wherever you think you'll have the most impact. The long and short of it is probably: "hiding" yourself in a solo lane and drawing the lane doesn't always work in that way. If you don't trust your teammates, i feel like putting yourself against the strongest enemy is the best way to deal with that. (Unless you're playing a midgame champ and you're going to get fed off of your mind in laning phase).

Maybe that "is" top lane. But so far this season, top lane has been the weakest place in terms of % winrate champs. The high win rates have all been jungle, adc, support (and Ziggs). Even the strongest toplane champs of the season (Ryze, Maokai, Shyvana, Trundle, Irelia, Gnar, Rumble) have all only barely been above 51% at their best.

Of course, that could all change this next season. And there's a lot to say about playing what you find fun, rather than only playing what is 100% the best all the time. It is a game, afterall.

Well, let me put it like this - I prefer to be in roles/situations where I'm not relying on my teammates to carry me.  Always nice if they do, ofc, but I'd rather do as much lifting as I can.  I just think you have a bit more control over your own fate directly in a solo lane (barring the my jungler just gave away dbl buff stuff ofc).  The laning variables are reduced to can I beat my lane opponent w/ and w/o jungle interference.  Can I gank other lanes (I've actually been doing quite a bit of top lane roaming to set up deep wards and gank mid)?  There's just more variables in a bot lane setup.  Also, there's no hiding in top or mid.  The only champ I think you should play some as a stall out top is nasus for the stacks.  I'm looking to win the lane in CS, kills, and either roam or take tower.  Rumbles actually really good at pushing a wave and then roaming (but sucks a bit at taking out towers quickly). 

"If you want to win, you should be playing wherever you think you'll have the most impact."

Yup - I currently feel like rumble can have a pretty strong impact. If I don't trust my teammates, the best thing to do is win my lane and gank lanes or win lane + tp, etc. 

Anyway, all in fun and my thoughts based on recent experiences.  Oh - and I think some very sick things are going to happen next season with the health regen items for tankier tops.

Think I'll be playing some on my main tonight - I'll see if any of you fellas are around and up for some games. 

so, I thought folks were a bit more in tune w/ reddit than they are.  Going to start sharing a little more reddit content here and there as such - some interesting things to talk about.  1 guy did an analysis of the current feral flare item on pbe... and its pretty damn OP and hopefully nerfed.  The one I'm sharing is penta kill statistics.  Just take a look if interested. Results are a little bit surprising... make note of the total games played... most of these results are based on MILLIONS of games.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19gR50yb8BOMIkq6pARzT8qvtgWDxb58w6ndLAEkve-M/htmlview?usp=sharing&sle=true

Anyway, played 1 game on my alt to get FWOTD and then played some games with karl/cow.  Had a lot of fun overall, but seriously have no idea how match making is working recently.  On my alt (level 25) I end up against diamonds 1/4-5 games. So, either mm is jacked or something is carrying over from my main.  Tonight karl/cow/pacov (diamond/plat/plat - I played on my main) ended up with a silver 1 adc and an unranked support.  Both kind of smeh. Up against 2 diamonds, 2 plats, 1 gold.  I guess I don't really care that much, but its just kind of weird. Not sure why my team needs to be handicapped (that unranked fella had a 45% win rate... so not like some good fella that doesn't play ranked). 

If I'm honest, I'm also wondering why some people are climbing up in elo lately as well.  Say what you will about pete, but gold? And thunder has some difficulty hitting plat.... I mean.. wtf.  It's a strange world. Zen climbs up to diamond...

Now that zen bit, that makes me think that its just a matter of the grind (I guess pete must factor in here as well). Take a look at our ranked win rates. I'm currently plat V with a 54% win rate. Stand to reason that I'm winning more games than I'm losing, I can rise up if I simply play games.   I mean, that's the math. If I just play games, I'm winning more than I'm losing on avg.  That means I almost certainly will keep moving up until my win rate hits 50% and dips.  So, unless some major deviation is expected, I can grind out games and move on up (zen god). Then seeing these occasional total mismatch wtf games where you get 1 diamond, 2 plats (all high win rate) with a silver and an unranked... doesn't make sense. Makes me think something might be going on that favors people grinding out. 

Anyway, I will add that as far as I'm concerned, pete earned gold, zen earned diamond. 

Since Riot removed clamping it is much easier to climb (up until Diamond V) due to the nature of win streaks and how they affect promotions versus the natures of lose streaks and how being demoted works. Win streaks generally "overpower" lose streaks, since it requires multiple consecutive losses when you are already at 0 LP in order to demote.

Sure, it does take going 3-1 in the short term to actually promote, but you can also occasionally skip ranked tiers, and when you fail a promotion series there's very little penalty (usually reset back to ~80 LP). Similar, when you break a losing spree, you get set to non-zero LP, so it's actually impossible to get demoted unless you promptly lose 2 games again.

Case-in-point, i actually have a NEGATIVE win rate. My official stat is 49-49, but i went 6-4 in placements. So my actual "ladder" win/loss rate is 43-45. If you look at my last 35 ranked games only (where i climbed from Gold 75 LP II to Plat V), i was actually i was still actually 17-18 overall.

(Before y'all judge me for my negative win rate: i went on a 12 game losing spree and a 14 game losing spree in the space of 35 games. While obviously i wasn't playing my best out of all of those games, and some of those losses are very well my fault, 9-26 is just exceedingly bad luck. 26-9 is the record that Challenger players have when climbing to low diamond in marathon games. So unless my "true" skill is actually somthing like Bronze . . .).

That said: Diamond is actually harder to climb than it used to be because of Master Tier. Master Tier did a big ELO shuffle and basically made "old Diamond 1" into 3 tiers: what is now diamond 2, current diamond 1, and master tier. So that bumped old diamond 2 to diamond 3, 3 to 4, diamond 5 is actually now diamond 4 and diamond 5 (it's the same difficulty to actually climb TO diamond 5 as it used to be).

TIL peter is better than hedgie at this game.  Also, I quit LoL forever because the world doesn't make sense to me any more. 

Ball busting aside, I think you might have it figured out.  Clamping changes are almost certainly having an impact.  Clamping was the only thing that made hitting gold even kind of challenging for me in the previous season.  Take that out of the mix and that might explain things.  I do think there is something going on with matchmaking where the anomaly (mismatch) games are being tossed out more often.

Re: Difficulty Hitting Plat

I nearly got demoted back to Silver and have never been near Plat this season.  At one point during a prolonged mega tilt, I was earning 15 LP for a win and losing a little less than 25 for a loss. I'm the poster boy for 'grinding' games not being a guaranteed way to get higher elo.

Re: Earning Diamond

If Zenny got Diamond, he earned Diamond.  If one was to say he only got there from spamming games that would be interesting to me because I personally don't have a zen (hahaha!) enough personality to play as many Ranked games as he did without tilting.  Yet it's easy to dismiss the part of his personality that allowed him to climb as opposed to someone whose personality allows them the patience and dedication to research the game or practice CSing drills to help them do better.

I'd sound silly if I said "Oh, if I had better mechanics I'd be Plat."  Well duh!  Yet no one would probably bat an eye if I told them "If I just ground out more games, I'd get to Plat." Well... until they saw that I did grind the games out and nearly got demoted from it.

Re: FF 2.0

Pacov, could you link that?  I'd be interested since I heard people bitching about it and a Rioter explained that since the new jungle respawns slower, you'd have to get some stacks by ganking and/or invading to get it going.  No more being the most powerful champ in the game at 30 minutes without having had the enemy team ever see you.  High risk, high reward item that can make you useless or OP depending on how well you play?  Sounds good in theory to me.  Might need some adjustment, or people might just need to know that this isn't the same jungle? 

Re: VPN

I've been trying out different servers to find the best one in LA to connect to.  They all seem to be the same except one, which actually made me start having the issue again where I'd click on shop items and not have it register.  I switched to another server after that game and everything was smooth again.  The internet is very mysterious!

here's that vid:

mm... just made some nerd purchases.  Picked up a corsair graphite 780 case and asrock z97 mobo.  Will be putting that together tonight.  Undecided if I'm going to do an OS wipe or not - might as its been a really long time.  The mobo upgrade isn't all that huge (had an asus something or other with z77 chipset).  The case is super nice though.  Going from a mid tower to a full as well. 

Anyway, that will take some time tonight, but I'm planning on staying up late as I have the day off tomorrow.... which I really need as I've been pretty well crushed by this on call stint. 

In LoL, I just stuck to playing some games on my alt account.  Just hit level 26 (I'm a bit of a nerd and I really enjoy when I level up and get more runes/masteries).  My current alt more or less has a nearly complete AD top lane page with jack crap for AP.  Oh - and I took the time to report some crap for botting yesterday.  You can go on the LoL support site and open a ticket there.  If riot does something, then super.  W/e though.

Nothing super exciting on /r/leagueoflegends so far today. 

Well, my new case is great... took about 2 hours to set up proper.  Love having a full tower though.  It's pretty damn big compared to a mid tower, but its easily the best layout I've ever had in a case.  All cables are designed to be moved all around and hidden. Really clean setup.  Be nice and easy to upgrade a mobo. Oh.. btw... I blew it with the mobo I bought... wrong cpu for the board.. kind of a no brainer... anyway, I have to return that.

Riot's jungle write up in case anyone missed:  http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/gameplay/preseason-2015-new-jungle

Finally about done with my computer build debacle - def lost quite a bit of time this weekend to sorting that out.  Got a much nicer kit now, though.  Details later. 

OK - so I picked up this gigantic case on oct 30th (corsair graphite 780 case) along w/ a mobo (asrock z97).  The plan was to install the new mobo in the new case and swap out ram/cpu/etc and dump into new case (essentially getting rid of my old mobo.  I started all this because i was noticing some instability here and there.  And it's been forever since I've done a fresh install, so I figure let's do in 1 shot.  Anyway, turns out I'm an idiot and I should have checked what type of socket I had (I thought my old mobo was an 1150 and it turns out it was an 1155). So, after I finish gutting my pc and installing the mobo, I realize that my cpu doesn't fit.  So, I decided well fug it.  I pull out the new mobo and install the old into the new case and finish the build (so now its all original parts in new case). Side note... as you will soon see, I'm kind of ocd about my pc...

I install the software and it goes quickly enough.  I decide load all the windows updates before installing anything else.  Well, I learn a few things.  1 - you can't just jump to windows 8.1 - you have to install all of the previous windows updates first.  Anyway, I start the updates and somewhere along the line, an update fails in a catastrophic way.  It tries to install and then puts the OS into an unrecoverable loop.  So, I try a few things, can't figure out a way to sort that, and do another install.  I read somewhere that someone hit a similar issue with security patches putting him into a loop and he solved it by installing them manually... well.. there are 100+ updates. 

I hold off on that approach and look into slipstreaming.  Slipstreaming is a process where you take an ISO of a windows OS and preload it with w/e - in this case, I wanted to preload it with windows 8.1 or at least all of the windows updates.  Well, you can't "Legally" slipstream to 8.1 as M$ is apparently retarded about their ISO's now... just for windows 8.1... yeah... and after a bunch of research, I learned that slip streaming windows 8 isn't exactly doable now (you can't download the bulk updates for some reason without MSDN).  Super. 

Anyway, I try a few more installs and eventually figure out that I'm having a problem with a specific set of patches and I manually install them... whoopie.  I then install windows 8.1 from the M$ store.  I then try to install updates after window 8.1 and those just fail... not a big deal, but they won't install.  Not a big deal if you aren't OCD about your computer.  Anyway, I reload all of my software and I'm good to go... except for those few patches.  But that said, I'm still seeing a few quirks outside of that (that I had hoped to sort with the reinstall/reseat of CPU). 

The next day, I do a bunch of research.  New processor, new ram, new SSD acquired.  I gut my new case removing all the new stuff (cable mangagement is great, though, so its actually fast to rebuild reinstall (about 1 hour for the entire build).  Os installs like a champ and patches up, no issue. windows 8.1 no issue.  All patches no issue. Just now finished reloading all of my software/patching things.  Think I'm almost square now.  End result, stupid amount of hours worked, upgraded, super fast, super stable (fingers crossed) setup.

• Case - corsair graphite 780 case
• Mobo - asrock z97 extreme 4
• CPU - Intel Core i7-4790K Haswell Quad-Core 4.0GHz LGA
• RAM - Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) PC-1600
• SSD - SANDISK 240GB EXTREME PRO SSD
• VID - ASUS Radeon R9 280X 3GB