Vainglory Forums

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Do you have a team/party you can play with? If so, proceed as per normal.
No? Then welcome! Welcome to the wonderful solo queue experience we've designed for you! Here are some guidelines to ensure that you have the best time possible:

• Always play either Celeste, Vox, or Skaarf. They're the most OP, which means they're the best for winning the game, even if you don't like playing any of them.
• If someone instalocks, just soft-lock and forfeit the game. There will be no cooldown penalty Wait, this "spoils the gaming experience for others" you say? But if there's a bug in the system and I exploit it, surely it can't be my fault? If it was truly a bug which was important to the developers they would have fixed it rather than introducing useless money-spinners like skins.
• Ignore your entire party and head straight to the jungle. Hoard all the mobs and farm to level 12, disregarding all the pings that request help in the lane. There's no team in VG, not when the matchmaker pairs you up with mofos. Besides, everytime you do go to the lane, your "teamies" farm to Level 12 and look so. cool!
• On that note, since you're in the jungle, grab the minion mine the very moment it appears! If you get good at it, you can time your farming such that you're practically on top of the miner the moment it spawns. Since everyone the game pairs you with does it automatically, they must know what they are doing!
• If you encounter an enemy team comp of some combination or part thereof of Skaarf/Vox/Celeste, ignore your planned build and build two Aegis, one Warhorn, two Crucibles, and one Journey Boots. How else would we deal with 4% Fan the Flames and 1.75x attack speed? This is the one true Tao for survival.

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Nothing of what you've listed doesn't prevent you from getting to PoA where people are starting to not doing what you've listed.

At least in my case I have reached PoA in Solo Q by doing instalocking, by grabbing mine on spawn, by ignoring party till close to lvl 12, by never building Aegis or Crucible :)
Yes, I got to PoA playing WP/CP Joule/Glaive/Krul without close to 0 defensive items.

Yeah I meant it as that one can really get to a higher rank by doing exactly these things, even though they are frowned upon as bad etiquette.

I don't care about opinion of guys who definitely think behaviors you listed are bad etiquette.
My observations are based on leveling 3 smurfs up to PoA with 85-95% win rate and observing those "strategy thinkers" of PG-SA tiers who like to ping and guide their teammates on what they should do.

1) On instalocking. There is nothing wrong with instalocking in several cases:
a) I don't know how to play other characters / didn't practice any of them. That means I would better go with someone playing Krul / Glaive / Adagio only and let him play Krul or Glaive or Adagio even rather than thinking he should pick Ardan or Koshka if he doesn't know how to play them.
Same goes to if someone is playing Ringo only or Vox only, there is no advantage for any other lane hero which will compensate for skill level of playing different hero. Even Saw if someone is skilled with Saw, but have no clue about how to execute combos with Ringo or Vox.
b) If 2 people are softlocking e.g. Ringo - there is absolutely no reason why I must change my soft lock and not another guy, so I would rather hard lock my Ringo.
2) On grabbing mine. Sometimes it is even worth it, especially in Hotness and below. You get extra exp on your jungler and you can use it to your advantage like ganking on faster lvl 6, before enemies get to lvl 6 and take control over their jungle. Also you likely to distract enemy laner from lane and reduce chance of your laner being ganked, so pushing with your minions doesn't matter.
So fact of grabbing mine is not bad itself, what player does afterwards if he takes mine does matter.
3) On ignoring party. There are cases even in higher tiers when you have some bloodlusted teammates who chase enemies all the way to their jungles, fighting them for 20 or even more seconds, getting low on health and then get cleaned up by enemy laner who came down. And then they ping you with question marks. Who is an idiot in this case?
Same goes to when junglers ask for assistance defending themselves in their own jungle in case when enemy laner didn't even came down. That is their mistake that they can't handle 2v2 and there is close to no reason to help them. Laner loses more exp/gold in lane than your junglers who must retreat.
Same goes to laner who pings for assistance in 1v1 fight in lane or after he pushed lane and had been ganked. Even when enemy team came to lane altogether and ganked him with 3 people - correct response is to steal enemy jungle creeps and catch some of retreating junglers coming back to their jungle in bushes.
4) Aegis/Crucible does matter sometimes, more likely in higher tiers, but if enemy team doesn't build defensive items also (what happens very often in Hotness-) there is no point to blame your teammate who you consider to be a tank for not being tank. He may play whatever he wants.
As often I see both teammates in jungle building defensive and then doing less damage to Vox than he can lifesteal back from them.

A thought: solo queue is just that "SOLO". In the latest Vainglory update, as I read the accompanying notes, fast leveling players are slowed, therefore, allowing slow leveling players to catch up. Anything that strips away individual player effectiveness reduces game play & fun. Why shape game play with an agenda to force teaming, when no team exists in solo queue. This results in selection of the same OP heroes and no chance for a great SAW or Glaive (Petal, etc.) player to choose their favorite hero, because they are confident they can overcome the imbalanced meta & contribute to victory. In the lower half of skill tier levels (I'm guessing, since I can only speak to the highest I reached, Not Bad gold), a player can team play (locking last, choose heroes for team synergy, help teammates level more quickly) only to see their sacrifices in the name of teaming return defeat after defeat. Teammates AFK, or play low skilled tactics, resulting in losses and frustration - opposite of "fun". If an individual is a good player (fast leveling) the skill tier system will soon elevate them to a level where their teammates and opponents will be similar in skill, thus balancing the "teams".

Please consider next update a return to previous individual leveling by un-nerfing fast levelers.

If you want your software to produce team fights, just start all 6 heroes with complete builds. Then they can fight & not waste all that time farming.

I saw the changelog comment about ensuring that the rest of the team levels faster if they are lagging behind, but somehow it feels like these days I end up seeing farm-to-win junglers happily out-level the entire damn game (both their own teammates and the enemy team). There could be five of us (two on one side and three on the other) slugging it out in the lane, and we'd be at Lvl 6/7 while the jungler is at Lvl 12.

Once again, as you said, soloQ = solo. Seems like a good strategy is to ignore your entire team, be obnoxious, and farm until you reach Lvl 12 well ahead of everyone!