by Reece "SabrewoIf" Dos-Santos
Ever have those moments when you believe
the matchmaking gods are out to destroy you? When you get players who AFK,
flame, feed, and refuse to co-operate? Deep down in your heart you know that
you’re playing out of your mind to ensure that your team makes it to the late
game, but you just can’t help your three allies who are shouting “GG” nine minutes into the game? Yes, this happens to virtually everyone and it’s something
that just can’t be avoided. Especially when you’ve just been on a tearaway win
streak, those are the moments when you happen to notice the things that go
wrong even more.
What’s important is how you deal with such events. Like it or
not, most of us league players are hot-headed. We will attempt to shrug off the
last games problems and storm right into the next game demanding our rightful space
in a solo lane ready to carry our scrub teams to the finish line. But what we
don’t realize in the spur of the moment is that from the time you enter that
lobby and say “Mid” instead of “Hi team, mid pref,” you’re already on tilt.
When on tilt it’s incredibly easy to
notice things that are going wrong in other lanes. Suddenly, you become a
professional level analyst who feels the need to direct your teammates how to
CS properly and how to position themselves. In fact, for some players, it’s the
hardest thing to simply not tell that top laner that he might be missing a few
brain cells. In the mind of such a player, they’re not trying to flame, they’re merely trying to rally together what they believe is a rag tag group of
players desperate for a leader. For some other players, Tilt will have them making mistakes they wouldn't usually make themselves, like overestimating how much mana they have left for an all in dive or believing they can make it away without
having to flash. Mistakes turn into desperation and suddenly you find yourself
diving three members of the enemy team in an attempt to kill the ADC and ensure
your team doesn't get deleted. I mean, if you want a job done right, do it
yourself...no?
Some players go into the game simply
expecting to lose. What would usually be a cheerful, driven player becomes a
pessimist who will sit and wait for a mistake to happen so they can say
something along the lines of, “Well I knew that would happen.” The pessimist
doesn't actually flame, but their general down putting behaviour and reluctance
to commit a hundred percent of their ability to their actions leaves them and
their team at the mercy of hungrier opponents. Other players become
quickly enraged at the thought of seeing their hard work towards a certain goal
reduced to nothing. Ever wanted to simply beat that promotion series but just
can’t make it through?
The hardest part of defeating Tilt is
simply knowing that you’re on it, but no matter how hard it may be to admit that sometimes your three game losing streak is coming down to things that you've done
wrong, you have to do it. Similarly, it’s just as hard to admit to yourself that
you played to the best of your ability but simply weren't meant to win that
game. Things like that happen. Even the best players don’t win every single game. I
don’t have to remind people of Fnatic’s terrible run in the Spring Split of LCS Season Four, where they dropped games to every single team and looked like they
were on the verge of collapse. Even throughout the Summer Split, Fnatic looked
shaky, but what saved them was the acknowledgement that they were tilting; that
they can do better if they cooled down and talked over their strategies and
game-flow with Araneae - who became their coach and their source of
guidance in what could have been a dark time.
The other alternative to solving
tilt is to simply stop, take a break, and commit yourself to doing something
else for a while until you’ve reset yourself enough to be able to go into a game
again with a clear head and renewed confidence. I
myself am doing this right now. This article is being written as a way for me to cool off after acknowledging I was on a tilt. As an example of why this is so helpful, look only to Diamondprox and his
sudden increase in efficiency in the last Superweek of this season's Summer Split. His gameplay was suffering as a result of Gambit’s inability to adjust
properly, and he was subsequently benched. Within
that break, Diamond was able to look back upon the games of his team and said while watching a game from home that he now understood how Gambit fans felt
watching their performances. Fast forward to his return and the difference was
clear as day. His confidence was back and he helped Gambit surge towards their
best week all split.
