This is a silly exercise I'm going to try. I am combining something I've thought about a lot, but never really written about, with something that's well, not all that important really. Yes, this is another League of Legends post. But don't worry: this time it's only partially about League of Legends and mostly about this other thing. Also, I'll post future League of Legends content on the blog Nick made, so I won't be polluting this blog with it any more.
Almost any accomplishment in this world requires considerable effort. There are exceptions—sometimes people really do just stumble onto accomplishments. Usually, it doesn't work out that way. And the really important accomplishments often entail monumental efforts, sometimes by groups of people working together. To those of us living in this universe, that part isn't news. But it goes deeper: because people naturally value accomplishment, they also value all the things that go along with it. There's a whole lot of adversity, hardship, pain, and frustration out there, and only a fraction of it goes into actually doing something good. Those things are usually considered bad, but when they are steps on the road to an accomplishment, the situation is reversed and they are considered valuable. This part probably isn't news either, but people don't seem to give it very much thought.
The pain endured by someone with terminal cancer is generally considered to be an evil, something to be, if possible, expunged. The pain endured by someone training for an elite athletic contest is generally considered to be a source of pride, possibly a mark of greatness, or at least not a bad thing. Obviously it's actually not as bad as the former. It doesn't follow that it's good. And yet people generally seem to view it that way.
To loosely borrow a sort of coinage that I won't even bother mentioning here because I'm already boring everyone to death, I'll call this concept a "pro-adversity trance." Adversity accompanies many great things and is sometimes causally necessary for great things. There's an unjustified, but nearly universal assumption that while adversity in general is bad, any adversity that leads to a positive accomplishment is good. I don't know if this is an innate part of human psychology or if it's largely cultural, or some combination of the two. I see no logical reason for this belief, but I can see why it would make a lot of emotional sense: there are so many good things that can only be achieved through adversity. That's the way the world works. It is not within our power, nor will it be in the foreseeable future, to make it so that adversity isn't necessary. It's a grim fact of our collective circumstances. And because it's a grim fact, it's emotionally appealing to view it in a different way, to associate the adversity necessary to accomplish something with the accomplishment itself, to assign value to something that would ordinarily be undesirable.
If we had the option to somehow change this unfortunate fact, a pro-adversity trance would be detrimental. People would think that losing the hardship that goes into accomplishing something would make accomplishments less precious. People would reason that it would make us weaker. It's actually true in a whole lot of cases that obtaining something freely, without having to go through the adversity usually associated with earning that thing, leaves one weaker in some way than undergoing adversity to earn it. And that sucks. It's a sad consequence of the universe, maybe something that could be different, or maybe something that is wholly unchangeable, but it's not noble.
Since adversity is so often necessary for accomplishment and this isn't going away any time soon, a pro-adversity trance could actually be advantageous. This might be a problem for me, as I apparently don't have one. If I did, I probably wouldn't be calling it a trance. Like I said, I don't know if this is innate or indoctrinated. For whatever reason, maybe just because my brain is so fucked up, the effect is either very weak or nonexistent for me. I don't value adversity. I hate it. Even when I do fight through adversity and actually do see the rewards of my efforts, I don't appreciate the efforts; I hate them. I don't know if that makes any sense or not. If it doesn't, consider it a sign that I am, indeed, fucked up.
All of that is something I've thought about a lot and wanted to write about for a long time, but until now, I hadn't. In the past, it has worried me a lot. I find myself resenting people that are better than me at something if I know it's because they worked at it. I do sometimes make a lot of effort and I seem to be a pretty stubborn person, so it doesn't affect that. But it might make me lack motivation or self-discipline sometimes. I don't know. I think I'd be better as a writer if not for this crap. I think it's holding me back. I also think it might be a really important part of my personality or something. And so I'm torn.
None of that is specific to League of Legends or even particularly relevant to it, just inane pontification about vagaries. I could write this post without invoking League of Legends at all. Oops, too late.
I recently started playing ranked games, something I'd been putting off for when I thought I was ready. I think it was a mistake for a variety of reasons, some of which I'm not too sure about and some of which I think are sound. Having played normal games with and against a lot of people that have played ranked, I've come to associate league ranking with player skill, although the correlation there is a bit messy. Based on my own assessment of my own skill, I decided that I should be ranked Gold, or maybe high Silver, but probably Gold. Of course, I'm biased, but that was my take on it. I realized that the placement match system is imperfect. I could end up too low, possibly even too high, but more likely too low. And if I ended up too low, I knew I'd have to work my way up. I'd have to climb the ranks. It was something I'd end up trying to do anyway even if the placement matches put me exactly where I thought I should be. It wasn't going to come as a shock to me. I half expected it.
My first three ranked games, I won easily. In the fourth, I thought I did well enough, but my teammates did not. I lost. The fifth game was even worse and I performed poorly with my best champion, but still better than the rest of my team. I was frustrated with how bad my teammates seemed to be. In the sixth game, my opponents couldn't gain ground anywhere and surrendered quickly and uneventfully with seemingly little actual combat other than a few skirmishes we won decisively. For the seventh game, I played support, but accounted well enough for myself, I think. We won our lane, but the other lanes lost and our team was dominated. I made some mistakes in the eighth game, but came back and started to play better, only to see the rest of my team do so badly that we were completely trounced. In the ninth game, I was the only one on my team not to feed and had no chance whatsoever (my K/D was 1/2, while the others were 2/6, 2/8, 0/8, and 0/8, with details only getting worse from there). I had some hope for the tenth game and did get fed, but it wasn't enough and all four of my teammates fed again. Once that game was over, an animation played congratulating me on achieving a ranking: Bronze II. I was disgusted.
Since then, I've played two games and lost both. Like the Elo system it replaced, the League system is supposed to place people based on "winningness." It's not about how many kills I had or how few deaths I had. I've played twelve games and won four. I lose two thirds of the time. So far, anyway. Small sample size, I know, but still, given that information alone, Bronze II seems, if anything, generous. I know there's no reason to expect better. I also know there was no reason to expect that I'd get lucky with matchmaking. I still think I'm better than Bronze II and I'm perfectly willing to put that proposition to the test. I remain willing to try to climb the ladder and go for Gold, even though it is a long way. And I hope I make it. But I won't appreciate it. I already know that if I do make Gold, I won't look back in retrospect and think that my having climbed out of Bronze is a mark of pride or anything I'll ever value. I hate it now and will continue to hate it. I'm not sure how comfortable I am with that realization, but it's how things are.
Anyway, I don't know how much I'll write about League of Legends in the future, nor how much I'll write about other things in the future, but I've decided that it really is best to separate the League of Legends stuff from my other material. Nick has helpfully already provided a space for that. Future content related to League of Legends, instead of being posted here, will be posted on that blog: http://eschatonlol.blogspot.com/
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