It seems as though every time I play ranked I'm matched with people who don't seem to understand a single facet of the game. They'll build terribly, not ward, feed kills or get caught and cost of the game. I just honestly feel like I shouldn't even play ranked sometimes because no matter how well I do my team manages to throw the game.

I honestly don't know what to do anymore. I only play my best champs in ranked but for example, I cant carry as an ap carry when our tanky champs (lee and jayce) go pure damage so I've got no meatshields and the enemy team has a veigar. I dont even get counter picked, its just like I lose in matchmaking or something.

Any advice would be appreciated, I'm getting really discouraged and just sick of the community because of how horrible my experience with solo queue is...

Solo queue is purely about your ability to carry the team, or your luck on either getting good teammates/ enemy having bad teammates (til at least 1500 ELO)

What this means is that not only you must win your lane, you also need to get other people to be fed. For example, if you are playing AP mid, you should be assisting the jungler, then top lane or bottom lane, or maybe even both. YET you are still winning mid. Now that is carrying and you should win by just pushing.

On the other hand, if you are playing top lane, you must have the ability to shut down the enemy top (top lane is easiest to snowball anyway) and then assist the jungler, or counter jungle the enemy, while giving mid some help. This way when you win both solo lane, you should be able to push top or mid lane or just take advantage of the map objective before the enemy ad carry gets the big items.

fact: in the case of an average player per elo you will get as many good teams as you get bad teams; however, the human mind only remembers the times that created emotion, in this case sadness and anger.

remember that the only variable you can change is yourself, lead your team to victory with proper calls and better mechanics. If you think that your teammates all have downs then keep in mind that this wont change; however, make something obvious to them and even they wont get caught or die as much ex: 2 teammates face check a bush near baron and die, solutions: ping for them to retreat if you think its not safe, ward that bush and ping that enemy is present, get really fed and end the game early. You cannot blame your teammates however bad they are because they cant be changed, ask yourself what you could have done to make that situation happen differently because that is what can be changed.

The first thing you have to learn how to do is how to play ranked in SOLO queue.

Also, you need to learn how to play solo queue in your given Elo bracket.

I can't really help with the second one as the meta changes everywhere, however, my advice, honestly, would be to practice the **** out of the champs in normals still. You've just started playing ranked according to lolking.net, so stop playing for awhile (I noticed you have 9 normals matches and only one ranked, which is good).

Honestly, here is what I would do. Play normals until you are 50% w/l ratio (I'm assuming you have a few more losses than wins). Regardless of what you do now, until you can dominate your lane 90% of the time (I see you probably did not do this with your Ahri ranked game) you cannot carry in your Elo bracket.

In my experience, the absolute most important part of solo queue (especially at lower Elo) is the laning phase. It's all about who dominates who (and then what they do after they dominate). Sometimes it's due to bad team comps (I've seen a team losing by 30 kills win simply because they had, like, Amumu, Malphite, Kennen, Ezreal, and Lux or whatever, you can't beat that AoE Stun/Ult combo, no matter how fed you are, but this isn't very common).

If you are top lane, your number one priority is to destroy your laning opponent and keep him underfed. Then you need to either roam to their jungle with your jungler, or roam to mid to get your mid fed, so that eventually the two of you can get your ADC fed. If you're mid your #1 priority is destroying your laning opponent and keeping him underfed and underleveled (APs scale better than everyone else with experience), then you need to roam top and bot to help your allies control their lanes.

Bot lane is a little different. Your job is to get as powerful as possible before teamfights start, and to gimp your opponent so that when teamfights start he's worthless. This is why a 10-minute bot tower push and destroy is often a bad idea. You won't be strong enough at that point yet to enter the fight, you still need farm.

Think of winning as a matter of averages. Imagine the "win" is decided by a series of "numbers" representing "mistakes taken advantage of" (because this is honestly how you win, by taking advantage of the opposing team's mistakes), with the number increasing in value by how important the mistake was. If both teams' sums of numbers total something like 1003 for Blue and 1028 for Purple (and you were blue, and say your own individual "Score" was 250 (so more than 1/5), and your lane oppoenent's "score" was say 197 (so slightly less than 1/5, you did your "job" by shutting them down)) then a small increase in your skill level would have been all you needed to actually win that game, however, let's say they have a smurf on their team and the scores were something like 1003 for Blue (you) and 1270 for Purple, if your and your lane opponent's "scores" are still the same, you can see how much harder it would be for you to actually make a difference in this game. However, that smurf's individual score would be something like 4-500, which means you can be that good, you just aren't yet.

This is the concept behind carrying. That smurf actually did 30-40% of the work for his team. He still needed the team to win, but he did most of it. He carried himself first, and then he led his team to victory by capitalizing on the other team's mistakes and not allowing them to capitalize on his team's mistakes. He played the game so well, that even though you also did well, you stood no chance against him.

The reason I bring up averages is this: If you are constantly at like 250 "points" while your laning opponent is constantly at around 200 "points," you aren't going to get nearly as far as if you are instead at 300 points and he's consistently at 150. Learning to shut down your lane *that* much better can make all the difference when it comes to average win rate.

Get better.

EDIT: I'm very proud of that comparison, I came up with it on the spot. Wow. Go me. (Maybe it's useless to others but it makes a ton of sense to me, lol)

In response to the previous post, I'm actually at like 55% wins in normals. I'll keep in mind everything that people have been saying. Unfortunately, I've been doing a lot of the things suggested and my teams just get stomped all the time. Like when we for some god awful reason have a support mundo or voli (which has happened numerous times in my games -_-) they never buy wards. I try to offset this by buying some myself, however I have to make sure I can actually purchase items as well. It's catch-22's like this that screw me up in ranked games it seems, that and people being arrogant and refusing to listen when i ping for a retreat when we will clearly not win a fight.

Or you can find a friend that is like the same skill as you and play solo ranked together. It will help you a lot and if you guys get to 1500. Then you are good to go! :)

It is just the fact that ranked solo queue is more of a test of your ability to carry a team or work with people that you don't know, rather than your ability to think about the game as a team.

Nonetheless you will have to keep trying to win, and getting yourself out of the lower elo should help you to meet better players in the queue.

Note: Duo' queue can be really good for some, but from my experience it usually push you to face against better player, at the same time, when you are duo queuing, you increase your chance to face other duo, and at this point of the time, a lot of the duo queue are actually elo boosters, which you will defnitely don't want to play against.