In League of Legends, a win rate that’s even slightly higher than 50% will guarantee that over a period of time, you will get to play in higher divisions. But a key part of reaching that 50%+ win rate is having the right attitude. In some of your games, you will lose by a huge margin because the enemy team is much better than yours. In other games, you will win convincingly because your team is much better than your opponent. And in a relatively small percentage of games, the result will be decided by small things. One of them is attitude.
Control What You Can and Ignore Everything Else
If you haven’t figured it by now, in LoL there are things that you can control, such as your champion’s actions, and things that you cannot control (at least not fully), such as your teammates’ actions. To play to the best of your ability, you need to focus on your game and accept the fact that other people will play the way they do.
If you think you can teach someone how to play LoL in just one game, you are wrong. At most, you might be able to convince them to buy an item or coordinate with you during a team fight. But you will certainly not be able to control their every move. And keep in mind, there are 3 other players on your team.
The more you focus on your game, the better you will do and the less frustrated you will be. Even if you lose, at least you know you’ve done your part well. And just based on probabilities, if you do that regularly, you will win more often than you’ll lose. Perhaps in this game, one or more bad players are on your team. Next game, they will be on the enemy team.
On average, in League of Legends everyone gets the same amount of luck and the same amount of bad luck. The difference is made by what you do and how well you play. Good players move up the ladder because on average, they win just a bit more than they lose. Bad players go down because on average, they lose just a bit more than they win. And some people just stay where they are for months or even years, because their win rate is 50%.
Accept Responsibility
Your goal should be to gradually improve over a period of months or even years. Be a student of the game, study the best players, take notes, and try to figure out what you can do better. If you always blame others and never look at your own actions, you will never see your mistakes. Get this into your head: on average, you are not significantly better than your teammates. If you would be, you would move up the ladder.
Accept Each Challenge as It Comes
If your expectation is that you will get great teammates every game and simply crush your opponent, you’re unrealistic and you’ll probably get very angry a lot of the time. Instead, accept the worst-case scenario before the game even begins: “My teammates will feed, we will fall behind, and I will be in a bad position. I will be forced to think really hard about what can be done to win the game despite the gold and experience disadvantage. But if I’m better than my current Elo, I will find a way.”
When the worst-case scenario doesn’t happen, you have reason to celebrate. But when it does happen (and it will more often than you’d like), you will be prepared. Your attitude will be one of resilience and you will not give up that easily. That alone will win you a tiny percentage of games. But even if it’s 3%, that may be the 3% you need to go from 50% to 53% and gain Elo over time.
