I'm finding it impossible to find a decent team. Any tips?

[Monsterbaby]

Hey guys!

A bit of a text here, I'm sorry. (if you want you can skip and go to the last part)

Next to WoW I play League of Legends, in fact it is my favorite game. At first I was recruited into a team which were a group of friends who were one short. I played with them for last season mainly as support and made it all the way to Silver.
The ADC and I always managed to win Bot Lane and it felt like the whole team had a lot of potential for this season.
Then one guy leaves to Smite, and get everyone else to join him - so now I am stuck without a team.

For the time being I've for the first time tried out solo queue. Not bad, I went to Silver II straight after my first qualification, and I tend to get communication going between members in order to win more games than I've lost.
However I miss the Teamplay, I miss the sort of casual-yet competitive group we had going, without anyone yelling - but giving each other good praise when we did well.

Now, I've been searching all over for another team - but I've found it impossible, as I've only played ranked for 1 season (Despite I've done incredible well!) I've tried the official forums, but all I get is groups of 14 year old being ultra serious and replacing people like they replaced their baby teeth.

Does anyone know of message boards, forums or other places which have a bit more of mature audience, and has a casual-competitive thing going with gold/plat ambition?

(As this is not a "recruit me" post - I'm going to leave out my Name and Region)

[Duronos]

We have a mix here, you have me who tends to disagree with everyone and am higher than most on the ladder then pretty much all of them. Then you have Soulstrike who's like D1/Master on OCE but that's OCE and I really don't think at the highest of elo's it compares to EUW but he/she would still probably be somewhere in Diamond. The thing is, depending on who you talk to it will most likely be different for each person.

I tend to disagree because I see the game in different fashion than most others here, people often argue something and I kindly point out if they're so smart why aren't they Diamond or even Platinum (Plat really isn't that high to be honest, though there is a huge skill jump in the Plat 1 to Diamond 5 area, trying to get out of it can be hard). You know, you'd probably think I'm being an asshole from the way I write but I don't mean any harm. In regards to dealing with 14 year old kids who leave for another team or replace you, it doesn't really matter.

The unfortunate truth about LoL, being Silver you're not going to find a "decent" team. If you really want to have a good team you need to rise through solo queue and when you hit high diamond/master then you can look at your friends list, see who's cool and worth a shit and talk to them. Some may say no and you're going to be like "man he's a great player too" but you can't have everyone that is ideal. You have to rise in solo queue to have a decent team, nobody in Silver really sticks around for long because either they don't play the game enough or you get the occasional few who rise away from there. Silver is the largest league within the system by quite a bit and I'm going to tell you that if you want a "decent" team then you need to play on your own in solo queue.

I know you're thinking, "but what about communication?!", fuck communication. I could pull a group of mid plat players with me as the jungler and have no voice chat and beat a bunch low plat players because of the skill difference (to be fair I'm a mid-high diamond jungler though) even if they were using voice chat. I'm ranting a bit but it's because you're currently facing the harsh reality of LoL, your friends move on but you want to stay. Stay strong mate and spam solo queue but I highly recommend using champions that carry and focusing on one role while having one side role.

Good carry champions for a lane:

1. Top - Riven, Irelia. Top is a really hard lane to learn... It's in the middle of bumfuck, Idaho and if you lose the lane early you're more often than not going to stay behind pretty hard. It's very unforgiving and you usually want to run TP for map control and that requires you to have a mastery of knowing when to use it. I will say though if you can master someone like Riven or Irelia you can carry and while you may need to be more fed than other lanes it's much easier to get more fed than other lanes as top due to the nature of the position.

2. Mid - This is a weird lane because there are actually a lot I believe that can carry hard since you can roam well in mid but generally speaking any AP Assassin and Zed though the higher you go Zed will get banned out.

3. Jungle - Shaco, Panth, Vi, Lee Sin. As a jungle main I can tell you that jungle is the hardest position in terms of decision making, you don't have to cs hard but man do you have to have a knack for where the other jungler is. Shaco is great to master because he is a solo queue god (I think he's even good in premades and could be used in LCS but he's weird and I don't think many LCS junglers really know how to use him well), can literally gank 24/7 and if played correctly can invade. In jungle you have to keep track of timers, know the timers for dragon if the enemy team kills it but you have no vision, example = "24:34". Jungle is currently I think one of the hardest positions early game next to top lane.

4. ADC - Graves, Lucian, Corki, Draven. This position generally isn't hard lane wise but it's really hard to learn how to teamfight properly with. I can't say much about it as I don't believe I'm very good at it.

5. Support - Janna, Morgana, Blitzcrank, Thresh. Supports can carry hard, I personally believe Morgana (tossup with Thresh though) is the best support in the game for solo queue from all the experience I've had or at least currently. This role requires you to control bot lane, you are the steering force of it you just don't have to cs bar targons shield. This is my secondary role after jungle and I think both of them compliment each other in terms of how they work, it's a much more "look at the grand scheme of things" throughout the game since you're worrying about keeping wards up correctly without getting caught whereas the jungler worries about lanes and objectives. Think of bot lane as one person playing but separated into two aspects of laning, as mid and top you have to worry about csing and trading with the enemy champion whereas bot it's sort of the same thing but the support focuses more on the champions whereas the adc focuses on cs.

Long post I know but to end on that you're going to have to make a decision, LoL is not a game I believe you can play casually and enjoy for a long period of time if you have no friends to play it with. On the contrary if you decide to say, "screw it I want more and to be better at it than everyone else" then it's perfect because you can work towards it and get Diamond and if you really are thirsty and have the available time you can make Master/Challenger. I personally believe anyone in D1/Master/Challenger that can play more than 5 champions in a certain position can make a team and make LCS if they learn how to work as a team and study fundamentals of the game. LoL is hard, it really is, I was watching a stream for a pro Super Smash Bros Melee player who's part of the top 6 in the world (top 6 are ahead of everyone else for the most part) and was trying to explain that LoL was a hard game due to the amount of time needed to get good and stay good and how many variables there within any situation within a game.

I like Melee I really do but people were shooting me down saying LoL was easy, if it were easy we'd all be higher on the ladder. You know how many games I had to play to reach Diamond? 10+ games a day kind of thing. You can make it with less to be honest as I made it through Plat in less than a month but you hit Diamond 5 and you quickly realize, "Oh fuck this game just got harder". Diamond 5 is a cesspool of shit, the worst elo in the entire game I've experienced thus far. They were saying, "the APM in Melee is huge" (unless you play Puff like me ) and I agreed it was but the amount of time you have to put into the game to be better than most is a lot less. People that have played for years and are still alright are that way because they don't really practice. I've put in 5 months and am already climbing up very very fast, much faster than LoL and I only practice for about an hour to two hours a day or so.

Point is, keep playing the game if you want to rise so you can say, "fuck yeah I did that", and you'll learn to hate aspects of the game but at the same time you'll love what you've accomplished. Maybe your friends come back in a 6 months and see you're in Plat and they're like, "woah! You got really good at this game". You know what separates the good players from the ones who don't improve? They play a lot more but while they're playing they make a conscious effort to become better such as focusing on dragon timers learning a lot of champions to become mechanically proficient with them etc. You can't just play on autopilot you have to make a conscious effort so your abilities in the end just become natural.

Good luck.

[Axethor]

If your looking to make a team with other people on the internet I have to agree with Guru, you need a higher ranking. People in Silver might be looking for teams, but more often than not those players are just looking for an easy carry or they are a group of friends with an open slot and will drop you if you "under perform."

My best advice for is to make a team with 5 IRL friends. I have such a team, and while we don't actually play together to rank up on the 5v5 ladder, we always come together for tournaments that my college hosts. We practice the week going into the tournament and decide who is currently the best in what role, the team comps we will try, and what champions we will play in those comps. Everyone is on voice chat during the practice and for the tournament obviously.

And this is where I disagree with Guru, communication is super important. I go to a small college and our team has become quite infamous here for never losing a tournament we participated in. We had to play on separate teams one time just to entice other people to join. We regularly beat teams with higher overall ranks because we put in the time to work as a team and had better communication. For one tournament we had a team with one player who was Diamond 1 and the rest were Silver-Gold level. They didn't even make it out of the first round to a team of random silver-plat players. The finals up until this year were always my team and another team made up of Gold and Plat players who also did similar preparations we did, but it always ultimately came down to us performing better as a team. That team unfortunately graduated last year though plenty of new teams have sprung up to try and challenge us in our last year together.

TL;DR Get a better solo queue rank or play with 5 friends are your best options.