i am completely cursed in ranked.    I get to play mid.  The guy I'm playing against at mid dc's at the start of the game and is gone for like 15 min of the game.  I force their jungle to cover mid for like 10 minutes.  I gank for my non warding bot over and over.  They manage to feed over and over.  Our jungle doesn't ever take adv of me keeping their jungle at mid... no fucking idea what he's doing.  So, no ward feed bot, dumb jungler, and a missing player on the enemy team... we lose.  amazing. 

i watched that game - though i do think your bot lane was the biggest problem, there were other issues.

Beginning of the game:

1- the invasion call was a good one, so it was good that you called that out

2- obviously you were fine the first few minutes, got plenty of CS, etc

3- your bot lane decided to help Udyr at blue, which put them way behind in lane because they were 30-45 seconds late or so. Bad, but not an insurmountable thing (esp compared to a mid who DC's level 2). 

4- Udyr wasn't really very comfortable with the invade - he wasn't sure when to smite/etc and i know Udyr is pretty blue-reliant for his very first clear, it may have thrown him off of his pace to start red, which is why he didn't have a significant advantage over Hec not being a jungler. 

After this is where things started to go wrong.

Generally, the jungler isn't that strong... but since he leached a lot of gold + EXP, he was really more of like a "super" mid, because he got mid CS + EXP, in addition to starting blue buff. He also caught you around his red buff at the 6 minute mark or so? So he did have that early kill.

Your bot lane, Soraka in particular, cannot do anything to prevent Hec from slaughtering them under tower, esp when Hec was mid-Hec. She did buy/use wards: 7 green, 1 pink, and she did have a sightstone (which doesn't count to that 7). Just she couldn't do anything to stop Hec. Stuff like not warding your blue towards the end of the game really didn't "lose" the game for your team, even though that is probably what she should have done.

Hec's first gank is def when things started to go awry, when you + Udyr (who was also having lag issues), went down to 4v3 bot lane that first time. Hec was basically unkillable, Soraka couldn't do anything, and Sona's ult hit both you and Udyr when you guys went in.

Their bot lane was warded (since you were counter-ganking their gank, which was the right thing to do). 

i couldn't say exactly 100% what went wrong there - other than the fact that Soraka can't do anything. Udyr may have bear-stanced the wrong target, or whatever. Game was hardly over though.

Later, When Malz reconnected, he came back to lane level 2, while you were level 9. Maybe you were just trying to be nice, but you were letting him CS and everything instead of just trying to kill him outright. But since the game wasn't going great, killing him was def the best decision.

Later on, you went bot lane for a gank, did okay, did damage, all was good. However, you started to recall (with full hp + mana), and then Hec counter-ganked. Even though you saw him coming, you decided to finish your recall and that is what ended up giving Hec another 3 kills. After that, the opposing team was all under 20% hp - you could have killed them instead with just a single Q. 

Plus, the enemy Nasus got pretty strong - Garen struggled against him.

7/3/11 - 182 v 5/7/3 - 148. 

Obviously, you did phenomenally mid lane with your CS (241).

Anyway, though your bot lane certainly lost the game for you guys, more than anything else. That evaluation is a fair one. That said, i think there was a few things could you have done that could have drawn the game out a lot longer (even though, being realistic, Nasus would have killed you all anyway). 

You've def had a bad string of luck with ranked games and i hope that it starts working out better for you. 

he was farming both jungles - 125 CS as a jungler compared to fed Hec's 122. He also died bot lane a lot of times (8 altogether). 

OK, finally fixed network adapter issues.

ProTip: Do not play ranked games with network adapters that you have not tested.  I tried to play with a Wireless USB card which was supposed to be good for gaming.  It was not.  Horrible, horrible lag.  As in, spiking to 3k.  Luckily, my team was terrible, so I'm 99% sure that we would have lost that game anyway.

So I got a nice new network adapter from a local store, and it seems to be working very nicely.  So I'm back in business.

And Pacov, 1-7 in ranked?  I can't wait to see what tier you get put in.  It's looking like I'm going to get stuck in some low level silver tier, so it will take me a while to work my way up.

oh I'm on my way waayyyyyy down...

server maintenance is announced.  Usually 5 minutes at the most.

DC's do happen, mainly during peak hours.  Pretty easy to log back in tho np.

I feel for yous.

yah - i got on a little later.  Fun game.

pacov is now... bronze div 1... wow...

OK - some thoughts before going off to bed.  1st - I think I hit around 1600 elo in season 2.  I didn't really play a hell of a lot of ranked.  Just destroyed playing duo queue with vlad.  After that, I stopped and elo attrition dropped me to a smidge below 1400.  I start back up in pre-season 3.  I duo a bunch with hunnybadger playing as his support.  Maybe about 5 games.  We go like 1 and 4.  I don't really think there was any real fault in my play during that time frame and hunny only blew it like 1 game... we just ended up with smeh teammates so that even if we won our lane, there would be 2 other lanes that were feeding.  In short, not a hell of a lot that we could do.  So, I decide, fuck it.  I'm going to solo queue.  It will definitely feel good to "earn" my elo straight up in solo queue.  From there, I go like 2/5. This puts me 3/10.  That puts me in tier 1 of bronze.  So, I fight a little bit and will hit silver pretty quickly, I'd think. 

Out of all the games I've played (w and w/o hunny), I feel like I personally underperformed 1 time.  That's it.  2 of those 10 games actually had outright trolls in them (1 game was an ori jungler, the other I can't remember)... both games were folks saying they were trolling... so, out of all my games, I lose 20% of them because of people intentionally being asses. 

The last game I played in my 10 placement matches was the biggest POS on earth (we won, btw).  We get a team that chooses not to jungle.  I'm 1st pick and ask the support to let me pick for them and they pick up my mid.  They ask me to pick thresh.  I do.  Then when its time to swap, they don't have thresh.  Was pretty awesome.  Then I end up laning as thresh with Riven top (no jungle).  We destroy, get 2 towers, and then Riven dc's for 10-12 minutes.  I'm happy as a schoolgirl.  Anyway, the other team was atrocious and we eventually win somehow.  It was an utter nightmare.  

Anyway, if my assessment is correct and I lost 20% because of trolls, 10% because I underperformed, and then 40% because of crap players, you'd think I'd be discouraged.  Actually, I'm not.  I like the new league system.  I never really had anxiety over playing ranked, but typically just had too many folks online to bother with ranked (tis true - if you watch my stream, I almost never am solo... which is nice and not nice if you want to play solo queue).  Now, I'm actually excited to get some solo ranked in.  I've always considered myself a well rounded player.  Not amazing, but pretty solid in most roles (fuck you, jungle).  I want to transition into someone that can carry even with the worst POS team on earth.  That's a challenge.  It also forces me to request, 100% of the time, roles that can carry.  I've been focusing in on mid as I think that has the most potential to carry.  I can "kind of" carry as "support" lux, so I can always pull that if I need to support, but I really don't want to rely on any teammate to carry me and just be pleasantly surprised if they do a good job. 

So, even if I continue to get my ass kicked, I'm excited to try to rise through my bullshit tier 1 bronze league and wander over into silver.  We'll see how that goes.  I still don't really know how quickly I can rise in a tier, but I'll have an idea soon.  I certainly feel like I'm better than a bronze player and I'm looking forward to show that. 

Last - consider firing up some ranked if you have not and just try to have fun.  Nothing to stress about.  Good ol crappy pacov will likely be below you anyway. 

Its so frustrating to lose easily winnable games because of teammates who just dont get it.  Of my first 5 losses, at least 2 were easily winnable if we just had non completely stupid teammates.  As in, they just have to be there when they are grouping.  Instead I have things like this Riven who insists that he must farm to "catch up" 35 minutes into the game while they are taking 2 towers plus inhibitor.  But hey, those 20 cs he got will totally make up for the 1500 gold they got from turrets, plus the inhib.

I just don't get why people have so many problems teamfighting.  All you have to do is be close enough so that you can be at the fight if it gets engaged.  But this repeatedly eludes people in solo queue.  They repeatedly split off, somebody gets caught, 4 people die.  Repeat 3 or 4 times, and a game that you were winning turns into a stupid lose.  What is so hard about not splitting off all the time?  I never get this.

Pacov, I hate you.  Stop bragging about all that good luck you've been having.

I just dropped a rank, five games in a row, support for an utterly incompetent collection of boobs that couldn't kill a fly with a nuke.

I actually had the highest champion damage this last game with support Zyra,  they surrendered at 20 without doing any team fights so it's not like I got to build AP late game.  I outdid my carry twice yesterday with Taric too.  Oh to have even just a mildly retarded ad carry that does dumb shit like tower diving for a 1/1 trade when he's worth more.  I might even get excited over someone that could just hold their own at this point.

Time to catch up on random posts that I missed... Glad you were able to sort your computer woes out karl.  So, now you don't think you have a mobo issue?  Sounded like more than just network problems. Anyway, wish you the best of luck.

How come?  Was I on a tear about how ap yi mid was a POS or something in the past?  Wouldn't surprise me.  Guy farms like a champion at the very least. 

Lol replays does work... or did in the past.  It could be things are broken now as sometimes they need to make updates when new patches come up... which means it could potentially be broken at any time.  I used to save all my replays, but LoLReplays is pretty damn unstable on windows 8 (randomly crashes the LoL client itself, often are really, really bad times (ranked game champ select, for instance...).  Anyway, replays are extremely useful.  I'd recommend downloading lol replays, playing a game, and then try to load the replay of that game.  That will confirm if its working at all.  Then, see if you can get some replays to work not via download.

I'll give you an invite if you are on and we need people.

You'd do well to pick up a few more support characters.  We could def try to put you wherever, but in general, you should have at least 2-3 supports you can play well.  Taric is great - you should pick up soraka/sona/janna (all of those or 2).  Sona is probably the most useful of those 3.  Also, I should probably put you through "support boot camp" where I yell at you and tell you how to play support.  I'm sure its super fun.    Not to say we'd make you play support, mind you, but its a good idea to have 2-3 that you can play - plus the more chracters you have, the easier it is for us to swap characters at champ select (eg if I'm 1st pick, I'd generally prefer to pick a support and have someone else pick a mid for me.  The reason for this is that I can avoid getting counter picked, etc).  Anyway, hopefully I'll catch you soon.

re: the game rawr posted - its quite a bit of fun. If you liked diablo III, pretty good odds you'll at least be entertained by the game.  And its in free open beta right now, so no cost.  Give it a look.

Thanks for the offers.  I'll add you dax, and pacov - I'm always up for some constructive...yelling.

I'll pick up Sona today.  I keep looking at her and I have had some good experiences playing alongside her as Cait. 

Taric - I like him. i just haven't played him enough and figured out what I should be doing with him.  I'm going to find a good guide to read through. 

I looked briefly at that beta game..  it looks good but i had to look away.  I just don't think I have the time to spend on another.  Right now all of my free time is spent on LoL but I still enjoy GW2.  I've got the whole Metro Humble Bundle to play...  the SotS2 thread that keeps popping up around here reminds me that I bought SotS Complete and have not tried it at all.  I haven't touched FE since it was launched...  I picked up Arx Fatalis and want to give that a go.  I outwardly regret but secretly am happy with the fact that I missed out on the D&D Ultimate collection that was posted recently.  Not to mention the boardgames...