It’s no secret that I tend to play a lot of old shit. I played Left 4 Dead long after the heydays passed by, and the public servers were reduced to long queue times and dwindling players whom began to all look familiar as players gradually disappeared. On my phone, I still play Pokémon Go and Fire Emblem Heroes despite the fact that the OCD generation of gamers have already flocked onto at least 2-3 other more recent and time/money sucking mobile games. And, with some regularity, I am still playing League of Legends.
Oh, League of Legends.
I can’t honestly say that I believe that they’re still the world’s most played video game anymore, what with the Overwatch League really gaining momentum, and Fortnite seeming like today what my nightly L4D sessions were 8-9 years ago (really, that long ago?). Despite my general interest in both games, I have an issue with first and third-person perspectives where they make me a little motion sick and it takes me some time and reps to break through until it doesn’t bother me, and despite the fact that I overcame them in the past with L4D, Resident Evil and Mass Effect titles, I just don’t really feel like investing the time yet to do it again. So, I still continue to play League, which hasn’t totally alienated me like it pretty much has with all of my other friends and mythical gf, all of whom I used to play with on a very regular, nightly basis.
That is until my most recent losing streak, which hit eight games last night. And put me in a really dejected, and salty mood, that lingered up until this morning, even after a night’s sleep. The thing is, this isn’t even my worst losing streak ever (14 consecutive losses), but at the current combination of game interest and the stage of my life in general, this particular losing streak really left me feeling with a completely disillusioned feeling that I’ve completely wasted my time and debating on whether or not I should just stop cold turkey, and go find something more constructive to do with my time.
Yeah, I know it sounds silly and very sour grapes to predicate emotions based on the outcomes of competitive gaming, but who doesn’t like winning? The matchmaking of League has always alleged to be somewhat fair, but in eight straight games, it’s abundantly clear that it can’t be chalked up to just a bad draw of random ARAM characters eight straight times, as much as I’m getting paired up with people who have zero ideas on how to play their characters, much less the game itself, despite the fact that I’m well past the level 50 threshold, where it should be assumed that most people know how to play the game.
For example, I get on a team where someone whines about not knowing how to play Ornn, a tank, so after failing to trade with someone else, they re-roll, and end up with Twitch, a squishy AD carry. The team now has four AD carries, no tank, and zero front line. The other team ends up with some crowd-control bruisers who stomp our frail and squishy team in 16 minutes. The next game, the other team ends up with three AD carries, but instead of us squishing them into oblivion, they work well together, and destroy my team in six minutes.
Shit like this happened in eight straight games, and I grew more and more frustrated with each ensuing loss. I’d even draw the characters I like the most, like Jinx or Lulu, or Miss Fortune, and no matter how well or poorly I did with the ones that I have some talent with, the rest of my team would be utter garbage, and another L gets tacked up on the board.
I sat down at like 7:30, hoping to get a quick win, and then go find something else to do, or watch some Netflix afterward. By the time I lost my eight straight game, where I was dominating with MF, but my team failed to protect me in a team fight which we got aced and then lost the game, it was near 10 pm, I calmly but angrily shut down the League client and turned my computer off and left my office.
I legitimately felt like my entire evening was wasted chasing a win that never happened, and the thought of how much of a cancer that League felt like permeated my head, and I was feeling bitter and angry at the world over a video game. League tends to exemplify and highlight the reasons why people like to play single player video games or work independently in the world, because failure on account of someone else’s inabilities is way worse than failure endured by one’s self. And I’m by no means saying I’m a LCK professional League player by any stretch, but I was far from the least effective player on each of these eight losses, and I couldn’t help but feel aggravation at being paired with at least one anchor of a teammate, and wonder just what the fuck League matchmaking does behind the scenes that I continued to get paired with such incompetent teammates.
You’d think that after like five losses, I’d get paired with some professional Koreans or something so that I could curb stomp the shit out of some fuck faces, but then again, I probably thought the same back when I lost 10-14 in a row in the past.
I know of at least one friend who would attribute the unpredictability to playing nothing but ARAM, and such a sentiment isn’t entirely wrong. But then I begin to think about the general flaws of the game itself, and how there’s not really a happy medium of a game mode that doesn’t result in 35 minute games that snowball like crazy after eight, leading to 20 minutes of getting smashed, while the player base is full of idiots that deliberately refuse to surrender so that everyone can suffer the indignity and time wasting of a bad defeat. Believe me, if there was a way I could play as Miss Fortune or Jinx all day long in a competitive mode against other humans that didn’t require an hour per game, then I’d probably be playing it; but because there isn’t, ARAM it remains.
I haven’t given two shits about the competitive scene, and I have very little interest in tuning into streams or the professional matches this year. I still feel like Riot Games is straying too far from the game’s functionality and balance in favor of growing the professional competitive scene and sucking the dicks of all the professional real-sports teams all desperate to buy in investments to it, which goes completely against my business belief that one should never leave behind what brought them to the dance, but that’s what tends to happen when the big money tech companies of today are being run by the Adderall-fueled ADD twenty-somethings who think they’ve got the whole world figured out.
The bottom line is that League is kind of like a cancer to me that I feel like I should cut out of my life at times, but be it through obsessive compulsive routine, Stockholm syndrome, or just the fact that I stick with things, the likelihood of it happening isn’t that great. I already know that I’m thinking about getting back on the horse, and having to remind myself to not be toxic if anyone says anything at all because I’m feeling that volatile about the game. That, and the fact that through League, a lot of good has happened, so I shouldn’t go cold turkey, but god damn does this fucking game piss me off sometimes.
