User blog:Mineko Charat Lucky/Don't Play to Win, Ever

This is a problem most players have, which is they try to win instead of trying to improve, and this thought is the root cause of many problems and complaints. I'll try to keep this short.

First of all, when you have the mindset of playing to win, yes, you'll play better, but you'll be watching the goal (which is to win) much more than yourself and your teammates. The higher your hopes, the harder your disappointment as they always say.

Soon, when you make mistakes, you become desperate, as it puts you further from the goal, and you will try even harder to win, being more aggressive or more afraid depending on your style, opening up more window of errors for the enemy team. Should your teammates make mistakes, you will start to complain at how they're so bad at playing LoL and you'll be flaming that you're in Elo Hell and they should uninstall for making you lose plus various other insults and their mums.

If your game has a troll, things escalate much higher, you would be internally cursing the guy for screwing up your game and you would think of quitting LoL or so and complaining about how toxic the community can be.

So why should we play LoL if we don't play to win? League of Legends have other similarities to chess besides the Elo system - the mindset for people to win games. In chess, if you play to win, the psychological effects can backfire you hard. Downwards Spiral Effect etc. There are thousands of games where a game can be drawn by causing unintentional stalemates because they tried too hard to win.

This is what Grandmasters told lesser players the secret to increase Elo - play to improve.

The difference you ask? Playing to improve and playing to win still has the same goal of winning, but the mindset is much different.

When playing to improve, it's not only "I'm playing to improve myself", it's also "I'm playing to improve the game condition."

How to play to improve? Keep asking questions on before and after every occasion, and make split-second decisions asap.

For instance, when you want to go to unwarded territory, you ask yourself "Is it safe?", and you'll check if the enemy players are on the map, if yes then it's most likely safe, else you don't facecheck.

Or if you die after a gank, you ask yourself "how do I not die again?", then you analyze if are you still in lane trying to farm instead of returning for safety, or are you hugging towers while 3 or 4 full health enemies are trying to hunt you down. Try not to blame teammates unless you really can't find any errors in your play, which is very unlikely.

Keeping this up will make you make you think "Am I playing better? Have I improved enough?" the more you play. Don't think of the game as a burden, think of it as a problem solving puzzle. There's trolls in your team? Enemy is goddamn fed with 20 stacks of Mejai? Think of them as an obstacle in a normal puzzle. What is the best move you can make?

This is exactly like chess. You improve conditions, you improve positions, no matter how bad they are. When most chess players or even normal people who know the simple rules are offered a simple "mate in one" puzzle, they can obviously do it, no problem. When the same puzzle arrives as an actual game, they can miss it, because most chess players still have the mindset of "play to win", instead of "play to improve".

When you "play to improve", even if you can't get a positive result, you would try not to get an even worse result. In a bad position? Think of a way to make it better, or even turnabout it should chances appear.

At the end of the game, ask yourself, "Am I playing properly?" "What mistakes have I made during the game?" "Did I do my job?" "Did I try to turnover bad coditions to good?" Figure that out from here and you'll actually improve, and you'll realize "Elo Hell" is all but a myth, troll players can continue trolling as they don't affect your skill, and just report any toxic players that get in your way, since it's also part of problem solving.

Yes, there may be inevitable games, but if you play to improve, it makes it much harder for the enemy to have a total win. Playing to improve is tournament-level play, yet it's still much more emotionally-easier and efficient to handle than playing to win.