Yesterday, I decided that I was going to start playing ranked games on Summoner’s Rift.

If you read the blog post from two days ago, you know that I’m very disappointed with the new Twisted Treeline update, and will be switching over to Summoner’s Rift unless they make drastic changes to the new Twisted Treeline. I decided there wasn’t much of a reason to linger in the past, so I got started with Summoner’s Rift.

I queued up for my first solo queue ranked game of all time, Upon entering the champion select lobby, I announced that I can either play middle lane, top lane, or jungle. Although jungle was my last preference (the other two roles I outright cannot play), I ended up getting jungle. Which was fine.

I picked Nocturne and started the game. I did not smite blue buff and went straight to red to do an early double-buff gank. My allied Lux missed her bind, which wasn’t a huge deal – I just went back into the jungle and continued ganking.

Several minutes into the game, I successfully pulled off a gank in bottom lane where I killed the enemy attack damage carry. Unfortunately, although I got first blood, my two allies in bottom lane overcommitted to the kill and ended up both dying to the enemy support Soraka, who simply hit her Q key and got a double kill.

By the time I made it up to top lane, it was too late – the enemy Nidalee had already reached level 6, and it was near-impossible to kill her. We had a Malphite who was building straight tank, so we didn’t have enough burst damage to kill Nidalee before she ran into the brush for her movement speed buff and leaped away.

Once laning phase was over, my team was terribly underfarmed and underleveled. Every time we would engage in a fight, I was the only one who had enough items to stay alive and deal damage, while the rest of my team would either melt immediately or have to disengage after three seconds of fighting.

My final score? Four kills, 4 deaths, and no assists. The team scores? Five kills for our team (yes, that means I had 80% of my team’s kills), compared to the enemy’s 15. We lost.

I decided that I just got unlucky with my team placement and that my allies were all just really bad. I queued up for another game, and played Swain in middle lane against an Ahri.

I unfortunately gave away first and second blood to Ahri because I was lagging, but once I stopped lagging, I killed her about four times in a row. Then, the enemy team realized that I was starting to get out of control, so people from other positions started coming to middle to gank me. I killed all of them too.

I ended the game with 13 kills, but, surprise, surprise, we still lost the game. Why? Because every other position on my team did terribly and lost their roles.

Except our support.

Our support got 6 kills.

-__-

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Yesterday, there was a massive update to the Twisted Treeline map on the public beta environment on League of Legends.

If you tuned in to my stream yesterday early morning, you might have seen me showing a preview of the update. The stream was about five hours long and took place over night, so I was extremely sleepy and didn’t really have much brain processing power to be able to even think about what I was doing.

Now that a day has passed and I managed to get some sleep, I took a look back at the replay of the stream last night to come up with some well-thought-out reflections and opinions about the update.

I don’t think I really mentioned this yesterday because I was still in the thrill of trying out something completely new, but my overall feelings about the update is that I strongly dislike them.

I preferred Twisted Treeline over Summoner’s Rift before the update because I felt Twisted Treeline was a more high-action and fun map while still maintaining all of the fundamentals of Summoner’s Rift. The premise of the entire game was basically the same, but it took place with fewer players on a smaller map.

If you know my history as a gamer, you know that I have pretty good micro, but terrible macro. In the sense of League of Legends, that means that I’m great at fighting, but bad at keeping track of everything going on in the game and setting goals to push to achieve victory. I liked Twisted Treeline because there were fights breaking out all the time, and that was what I liked; there were also much fewer things to worry about because you only have to keep track of three enemies and a smaller map space with fewer objectives.

Basically, the old Twisted Treeline was just like a smaller Summoner’s Rift.

I unfortunately have to say that I feel the new Twisted Treeline is closer to a combination of Dominion and Summoner’s Rift, rather than just a smaller version of Summoner’s Rift.

When Riot wanted Twisted Treeline to have tons of action all the time, they reached an optimal level with the old map. When they tried to bump this up some more with the new map, it went over the edge, and now the fighting and action is in excess. The best way for me to describe it is that it’s basically mass chaos, now. If you truly want to secure a victory on the new map, you have to fight over and defend so many things that the entire game is basically constant fighting all over the map.

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I streamed for almost five hours today after the new Twisted Treeline map update, the new spider champion Elise, and the Harrowing skins were released. If you missed the stream, you can watch a replay of it below:

(Embedded player not working? Try this link. http://www.twitch.tv/parkzer/b/335979221)

I posted the link to my stream on the League of Legends forums and ended up getting around 200 viewers part-way through, which I found really funny because I wasn’t even playing that well and was curious why people would want to watch me die over and over again.

If you know about my League of Legends career, you know that I main on Twisted Treeline. At first, I was extremely excited that they were updating Twisted Treeline. Unfortunately, after playing it for five hours, my opinions have changed. I will be releasing a blog post tomorrow regarding some detailed feedback about the new map, and why I don’t like it.