Just a couple of silly mistakes and small hints that might help you improve and win a few more games.

1. Negative attitude in champ select

This is actually the action that gave me the idea to write this post.

If you are in champ select, don’t call anyone a “noob”. The people you’re currently in the game with are going to be your teammates for the next 20 minutes, minimum. So you don’t want to give them an excuse to dislike you and start ruining morale. It sounds may sound stupid but morale is incredibly important in league, teams with their heads down will lose games more games than those that don’t.

So also don’t mention how you’ve had nothing but “noobs” all day and how you hope this team is good. 9 times out of 10 this flags you up as someone who will rage at the slightest mistake in game and can result in people losing faith in you before the game has even started.

2. Using Lolking as facts

Lolking.net, and websites like that, are incredibly useful tools and can tell you interesting information about both your own team and the enemy team. If you search for the person you’re laning against and they’re playing their favourite champion, then you know that they are a good player of that champion and you can react accordingly by not playing so aggressive until you’ve gauged what they can do.

But don’t flag up how the AD carry on your team is a ‘bad’ AD carry because in his last game he went 2-7-4, because you’re going into the game with the wrong attitude and on top of that you’ve dragged your team down to your level. They probably had a bad game last, maybe they got camped by the jungler or maybe they fought against a duo queue bot lane who stomped them. Regardless of what happened last time, this is a new match and you’ve just made someone dislike you before the game has even started.

You can use Lolking to get additional information for your team, but use it in a positive way.

3. Raging

Not really much to say here that hasn’t been said before in 1000s of other articles.

If you rage, you are less likely to win games. According to Riot, if you verbally abuse your teammates you lose 16% more games. 16%! That means every 6th time you lose while abusing your teammates you would’ve won the match. So if you’re currently winning as many games as you’re losing and you’re abusing your teammates then it is 100% your fault that you’re stuck in ‘elo hell’.

Do. Not. Rage. At this stage there really is no excuse.

4. Not buying wards

Again not much to say here that hasn’t been said before. There are plenty of guides out there relating to warding.

But I will just say buying wards wins games. Every death you prevent, every jungler you spot and every Baron attempt you catch will help you climb the ladder. Just start buying 1 ward every time you back and just see the difference. It’s honestly things like this that are preventing you from improving.

5. Selecting OP champions when you haven’t played them

Just because you saw Meteos play Zac really well or Scarra dominate on Diana doesn’t mean you can if you haven’t practised them. You need to know the niches of a champion before you should be playing them in ranked. Just because you know what the champions abilities do doesn’t mean you’re good enough with that champion to win.

Why is Scarra building Lich Bane on Diana? Is it for the move speed or the Passive? Is it because he can proc the sheen effect often on that character? You may not lose because you don’t know the details I’ve listed here but in a close game it could cost you.

Practicing a champion is fine, but do it in a normal game to learn the ins and outs of a character before you get caught out in a high pressure situation.

6. Killing a tower and not pushing the advantage

When you drop a tower in league you open up a vastly different situation within the lane and it is how you react to this new situation that will determine whether you win or lose. Some games can be won by just continuing to push your lane but most of the time you need to exert your pressure elsewhere on the map and force the opposing team to react.

If the opposing laner follows you away from lane, then he’s missing out on CS that you can get on your return to your lane, if he doesn’t follow then you can dive/take other objectives with a 1 man advantage. It’s really lose-lose situation for them unless you aren’t putting enough pressure on the map in which case they can just farm themselves up and end up stronger than you.

So if you see them just farming, do something about it. Take towers, kill the other laners, steal buffs, do dragon, call your jungler up to gank them. Anything that isn’t passively farming in lane.

7. Lack of communication/pings

This is a bit of a double edged sword but having better communication is usually good unless you’re going about it the wrong way and annoying your teammates. But lets just look at a few things you can do to help your team.

• Ping whenever you see the jungler
• Ping when you’re coming to gank, both when on the way and when going in
• If you’re jungling, tell your team how you want them to react to you ganking. Sometimes its worth them going all in as you approach, sometimes you need to make the first move
• Tell your jungler where the wards are and when they expire, wards last for 3 minutes so you can quickly say “Ward, River, 11.13″ if you see them placing a ward at 8.13. You almost always catch people out if you come to gank as their ward expires

During champ select make sure you communicate with your team. Just saying “top” isn’t the best help. If you’ve got a limited champion pool tell your team. “I’d like to go top Renekton” is much more useful and your team can try and build around it.

8. No variation in item builds

Players don’t always react to the enemy team comp with their item builds and it does separate the good from the bad players. If you’re against an AD mid you need early armour especially if you don’t have armour runes on your AP page. If you’re against an AP top then an early hexdrinker can swing the lane in your favour. Learn to adapt your build to suit your needs, the needs of the team and to counter the opposing team.

Enemy team is running double AP? Ask your team who’s getting an early Bulwark or tell them you’re getting it.

AD carry getting fed? Where are the Randuins and Frozen Heart being built?

These small changes in item builds can give you team the advantage in a teamfight to win you the game.

9. Going back to base when your team needs you

This one frustrates me almost more than raging does. Summoners seem to back at the stupidest times and given there are 5 players all wanting their next item you can end up with your team not being able to pressure the map just because there are too many of you in the base or “I only need 300 gold for cloth armour, i’m going to get wraiths!” moments.

Sometimes it is worth waiting for that big item but if the enemy team has grouped up you need to react to it now, not in 40 seconds when the turret is down so you could buy another longsword. I appreciate that sometimes it is worth giving up objectives so your AD can grab GA or BotRK but you lose permanent map pressure by losing turrets. If you win a teamfight you need to pressure the map and take turrets/dragons/barons. If you’ve aced the enemy team there is almost no excuse not to grab some map objectives!

Also be wary of the baron/dragon timings. If they are up within the next minute then now might be the best time to back so you’re at full strength and ready for the fight/quick baron.

10. Use timestamps on the chat to time dragon/baron

Here’s a little hint that I was told about a while ago. If your team saw Baron/Dragon die then you get a message appearing in the chat log telling you when it was killed. You can then use this message, with the timestamp feature of the game, to calculate when Dragon/Baron will spawn next.

Baron’s respawn timer is 7 minutes from its death and Dragon’s is 6 minutes. It doesn’t do this for the smaller camps in the game but you can quickly add “OB” for our blue or “TR” for their red and then calculate the time that you should be back, ie red dies at 10.55 so type “TR 15.55” and you know to when to be back for a quick steal.