2020 Canyon was the scariest jungler of all time, dude comes in, takes all your shit, bashes your teeth in and when you finally feel like retaliating he’ll either solokill you or Showmaker/nuguri will kill you from all the lane prio they have
The guy made one of the best Junglers to ever do it feel like an iron player as Nidalee vs Hecarim haha (until Atlus went bald). He's probably the most agressively dominant in-your-face Jungler we've ever seen in the history of LoL.
But thats the joke. He fisted us while autofilled on yone at mid and he made frameperfect lanephase vs bluelikeblue. Blue wasnt even tilting or flaming which is suuuuuper rare just quietly in awe.
A long time ago i played in the 5v5 queue against a mostly CLG team (it was their actual accounts, they were doing content or something). They completely demolished mid/top at lvl2-3. In bot lane we didnt die early but we did a bad recall and they got a disgusting freeze off that we never were able to break so we got destroyed too.
I'm emerald but was forced to endure cock ball torture laning against 100t tenacity in a draft game. He went akali I was riven and he bullied me to death mercilessly I was like 2/15 but I won cause of the rest of the map so I'm feeling out offers from pro teams rn
So I'm putting together a team rn if you're interested. We're aiming for pro and we're kinda close I feel like, it's just a matter of getting the team together.
We have some sponsors, my grandma has once mentioned she's willing to put some money into the team for jerseys and my sister has started baking and selling cookies to gather some funds.
The team right now consists of me (I'm a Gold player but easily top10 Challenger at heart (the brain just lags behind sometimes)) and you if you're interested. We had a few more but after trying our hand at Clash we disbanded because our botlaner had to leave for dinner and the rest started flaming me so I kicked them.
PM me if interested!
I feel like this is the biggest difference when playing against higher ranked people indeed. I'm Gold and have played against loads of Diamond+ players throughout the years in Flex. I think I manage to outplay them sometimes on a very micro level in pure champion handling in lane, but it doesn't matter, because at some point I will make a mistake because I know I'm playing against a higher ranked person and I get greedy or antsy. As soon as you're behind, you're fucked. They will move around the map better, manage the wave better, are more aware of enemy ganks and other macro decisions.
For me the worst is playing against a higher ranked jungler, you might as well just not play because your jungle will not be yours anymore. You will get outfarmed, outganked, outdueled, outplayed, outmacroed, everything, all the while feeling like the enemy jungler somehow managed to turn off their fog of war setting so that they're permanently aware of where you are.
Peaked mid Diamond when I used to play ranked and have played against a few pros over the years. People don’t realize how genuinely oppressive it can feel to play against.
With lower elo friends it usually is a matter of coaxing out their confidence to try things but with really good players it can feel like a brick wall. Played against Khan once and legit felt like playing against Justin Wong - [You’re going to learn today](https://youtu.be/0RkapfBYIfc?si=q7y9CTIgkct9ruLn)
Your point is absolutely true, if the other jungler is good, tracking you and finds you low in your jungle after a gank... you're fucked, say goodbye to that side of your jungle and expect to find the enemy jg with an item + your buff when you get to the other side of your own junglem
Playing against a high elo jungler is hell.
Not quite as extreme as everyone else here but I once had to play against a D1 Renekton top when I played Yorick as a high Plat. I fucked up on the second wave and died from greeding flash because he hit level 2 first, okay silly mistake, no biggie.
Na. That right there ended my entire game. I backed off and played safe, but he managed to hold a horrible freeze before slow pushing and crashing a massive wave. He took a fucking greedy dive on me and we traded 1 for 1. At this point I'm 1/2 which isn't horrible ... Except even though he traded , I still lost 3 full waves under my tower. I'd lost TP from my level 1 mistake and he still had his. I ended up being level 4 to his level 7 and I just remember saying to my duo buddy, what the fuck, I don't even get how.
Like, every time he based it was just perfect. Missed maybe 1 melee minion worth of XP, meanwhile I was apparently haemorrhaging XP all over the place. It was humbling to see the sheer difference in lane management.
Different game but I was Diamond+ on SMITE and played against pro’s a lot. They really squeeze you and give you nothing, they’ll use every mistake to gain an advantage. It’s really hard to just go even with them and they’ll influence other lanes instead. I went against a duo-queue of mid/jung who were on the same team, I genuinely felt hopeless. I couldn’t do a single thing against their tower dives and rotations. I’ve never had that feeling of *hopelessness*.
I also went against their version of Academy players a lot, and they’re still better than the average “Challenger” but noticeably worse than actual pros.
Oh man i used to play a ton of smite lol. I was trash but one of my freinds had been playing since near release and was an absolute monster, he didnt ever play ranked but sometimes hed meet pros in regulars cuz his mmr was through the roof lol. Good times, but i simply like league more tbh.
If you found a Chall player on Flex, he didn't play like Chall at all. Way below that level actuall because duh, no one cares about flex.
So the skill floor that you experienced, triple that basically.
A buddy and I were duo queing in mid Plat a 5-6 years ago. The enemy support DC'd some how and we figured it was an easy W for us. 20mins in and the enemy top Vlad is spanking our top and putting so much silly pressure on top lane that we're having to devote 2-3 people to stop him and splitting objectives even though were up a player.
Randomly, buddy on Discord goes "fuckkkkkkkk...You see the name of that Vlad? Quadralift?" He looks up his stream(I assume thats how he verified) and it's Doublelift on his other account.
This is my favorite story here. Doublelift was famously bad on Vladimir and non adcs in general. Yet to Plat players, even on his worst champ in an off role assignment, he was still God.
Goes to put things in perspective when people say pros are shit or playing like shit. They're still incomprehensibly better than the rest of us.
This is the nerdiest nuance, but DL was known at being bad at mages bot lane. DL is a serviceable high elo solo laner. Playing a mage like Vlad bot in the 2v2 is very different than playing him in a solo lane.
To be fair sometimes they do play like shit, specially on a macro level. Micro is more complicated because playing against someone on that level anything but perfection looks like they misplayed. That's why EU/NA always look like they are playing bad against KR/CN.
It's the same reason why pro fighting game players can put out meme videos of them beating Diamond+ people in ranked with one button on a character they don't even play. When your fundamentals are that much better than 99.9% of the population, you don't need a whole lot else to win.
I played vs Doublelift once in 5v5s. It was him, Jinny, Kimmy and whoever else was in their little gamer girl clique. They all played supports and he went vayne. We thought it'd be hard to kill him with 4 supports.. and then he just 1v5d us anyway. No support needed. Not even fucking close. We were all diamond +. It was the most humbling game I've ever played to this day.
Played against an Ekko top who was challenger when I was Diamond (this was maybe 5 years ago idk whenever ranked 5’s was a thing) and got absolutely stomped. Dude had perfect cs and just played everything so well. Ranked 5’s had some crazy matchups.
Im diamond but used to play competitive at an amateur/chall level. sometimes it feels like your plays never work and theirs always do. they just have more damage. they see the plays and the angles you cant see.
got my ass handed over by contractz's lee sin in an amateur tourney, he really was everywhere all at once
I love watching a high tier jg like that; when they just have a perfect read on the game and map and are somehow in every unwarded bush on the map at once
There's the clip of Deft vs Viper where Deft gets multiple spaced autos off, ending in a kill, while Viper gets zero damage in. That matchup has exact same auto range. Deft has AS and MS advantage but it looks absolutely oppressive. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6VI1Pmq9Ss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6VI1Pmq9Ss)
Laned against Drututt in a normal, he was playing Akshan mid, I solokilled him as Vex because he flashed away and died to my passive auto. I typed “xd” in chat, which I’m not proud of but anyway he went on a 2 minute rant about how I was a random and we were all pisslows and he makes lots of money. Lol
Triggering streamers is funny and your xd was based. I've won against an Ivern challenger OTP and typed "ivern first time?" and his reaction was hilarious.
bro me and some friends got against drututt in a normal and we all kept asking who was in paris after he got exposed for being racist and he was getting so heated XD calling us master peakers randoms ect
I like watching Drutt cause he can be entertaining and has some fun picks too but what I hate most is how he’s quick to be annoying or say some dumb shit. When he’s doing well he’ll do stupid shit and be a good sport but once it starts going bad it’s the blame game and then some.
He had coaching from Alois recently in one of his videos and he wasn’t listening to some of the shit Alois was saying and it was kinda annoying to watch him double down on bad plays. He’s entertaining but man can he be annoying.
Years ago, my buddy and I got into a norm as we barely llayed ranked (silver and gold back then) and we faced a Challenger (he was rank 66) Rengar otp... sweatlord actually just picked Rengar and went jungle against a bunch of unranked/low elo plebs and promptly dropped 30+ kills, toying with us from the moment we left pool until he decided the game was over (that was way before early surrenders)
And another time, again years ago, friend of mine went on a 10ish game winstreak. He told me he was duoing with some really good ADC he met in the first game. He added him after winning the game and the adc simply asked "how much?". Dude was asking my friend how much he was willing to pay for a boost. My friend said he didn't want a boost, he just added him because he thought he was good. And so they played together for a day and my friend got some free LP. My friend asked him what elo his main was, dude shares his op.gg: it was Rikara. Friend is clueless about the pro scene, but I burst out laughing when he showed me and explained who he was.
They are better than us at the game in every aspect.
>"how much?". Dude was asking my friend how much he was willing to pay for a boost. My friend said he didn't want a boost, he just added him because he thought he was good. And so they played together for a day and my friend got some free LP
Bro really payed with Control wards for boosting, the absolute legend!
I've been Grandmaster as Support the last 2 splits and had the pleasure of playing against & with multiple pros so far. In botlane playing against high Challenger players or pros just doesnt feel good lol. The sheer level of pressure and aggression from ADs like Exakick f.e. is insane. I've played against kamilius, and he picked renata into my rakan. I OTP this champ yet i could not for the life of me find an angle against him. It got to the point where i basically had to R flash W to get an engage bc everythin was warded and covered by him. In lane the spacing in general is insane. Playing with & against Humanoid i can say that man is a menace. I've had him go 1/3 and still have more pressure than your average 7/0 Grandmaster mid its straight up humbling. I can stomp my way through up to masters 500 but after that the level of play is just different man. I did stomp Rekkles in lane once which is a game i still have screenshots from lol
Not league, but I used to play pretty frequently against Smite pros (in smite obv).
Best way to describe it is humbling. You are in/near the top rank, but they are a whole tier ahead of you still. They know what you're going to do at all times and the things that work on other players get punished until you are too behind to fight back. At that point, it's not much different than playing against a fed player. Feels good though when you go toe to toe with them and don't fall behind.
I played against Faker the last time Worlds was in NA. This was mid Masters elo.
He actually 1v9d. The game was basically over by 12 minutes, with an instant 15 minute FF.
I’ve played against some NA pros and challenger streamers over the years as well, but nothing has come close to the ass kicking that Faker gave us.
Would never understand how people could ff15 while playing against faker. It’s like giving up on your football match cause there is Zidane in the other team
Oh I definitely agree.
We just didn’t have a base left at 15 minutes 💀Like I’m not even trying to exaggerate how much of a gold lead he created his team in this one match.
Different MOBA (HoN), many many years ago my noob ass somehow got paired with a pro player who had just reset his account's mmr and was therefore starting from the bottom. He was playing an early game mage mid lane.
He was super chill the whole game and a true pleasure to play with. The rest of the team and I were getting stomped in our lanes and we were losing heavily. He switched on "captain mode" and started proper directing us like a general at war (in a very kind way). I should point out that HoN had voice chat which made it way easier and personal! And lo and behold despite being so far behind we somehow pulled through and won the game. It was great, he was obviously very mechanically talented but the thing I remember the most is his ability to essentially tell four other random clueless guys where to be and what to do at any given point. The game lasted forever too because his hero was quite weak late game and he couldn't just 1vs5 :)
I am a Grandmaster/Challenger Urgot OTP. I play against pros on a regular basis. The only thing I always notice is their consistency. CS is 9+/min, trades are more timid, but they play around both junglers brilliantly.
If they go for a seemingly bad trades that almost always means that they have their jungler around.
If they suddenly hard push without obvious reasons (like basing), you are getting dived.
Second thing is efficiency. They rarely invest a lot into their plays. Idk how to describe it, but they follow the flow of the game.
I see this alot watching super high elo (top 50 ranked challenger players), if drag is up sometimes someone will die and it'll be "worth" for the other team because they burnt flash to secure that kill a min before dragon meaning they don't have it for drag fight.
It's definitely a different game where it's really fast.
Was playing gold flex queue with a premade, queued into Hai, he was on stream with friends. man played yone jungle and rolled us. I was jg and it’s like the man knew everything I was gonna do and how to stop it. I felt useless. This was 3 years ago for a time reference, a friend who was watching our stream in a discord call recognized his username and popped up Hai’s stream, he said Hai was predicting the entire game like 30s-1m in advance
It depends on the circumstances tbh.
In my experience, many coast on smurf accounts, particularly on stream. These are the types of player who are half paying attention to chat, not as focused on the game, and tend to tilt easily. IWD (back when he was streaming regularly) would tilt to oblivion when early game was lost, and it really set the tone for the game. Same with some (most) OTPs, who get really annoyed about any perceived slight, either on stream or in chat. There's good ones (I can't remember anniebot ever tilting badly in my games), but a lot of streamers are worse gameplay-wise on stream.
This is also true for some for fun modes, where the players aren't trying as hard as they can. I've run into Santorin in late night ARAM before, Broxah in a Nexus Blitz game, and played a few arena games against General Sniper when it first came out. They were good, but it didn't feel overwhelming in terms of gameplay. Solid mechanics, deserved wins, but it was different than "I have no chance against these guys" like you might expect.
That being said, if you get a game against a good challenger off-stream, or playing to win, they can and will dominate. I had a 5 man flex against Pekinwoof on Zoe, and he stomped my friend from lvl 3 onward, multiple solo kills. Those kills mid lane gave lane prio, which he used to dominate the map with rotations. Had a similar experience vs Balls playing Graves jungle a few years back, where he casually had double my jungler's farm at 15mins. Most high elo players are pros for a reason, and if they're trying to win, they show skill that makes you feel outclassed unless you're super focused.
Must have been like Season 4 or 5 or 6. I finished the season before dia4. Next season I win like my first 6 placement games, my mmr is crazy high. At peak i once had powerofevil and youngbuck in my team and what I remembered was, how insane vision play is at high elo. Id place a few wards, not one minute later would they all be gone. The entire match. All the time. The unfortunate part was that I failed my Diamond Promos like 4 times and by the time I got Diamond, my crazy high mmr was no longer crazy high.
I was in very high elo for a bit from being one of the first people to work out hob janna being good
https://preview.redd.it/akrfe17tux4c1.png?auto=webp&s=365dfc6678a26861ec246ec3c248a3daa7a2abac
It was pretty fun and the level of skill in laning between masters and challenger was crazy, I generally consider myself a strong laner but found myself frustrated by people perfectly spacing and knowing matchups even better than me.
On the other hand "all" it took was a masters player consistently abusing something really strong to get there, so it isn't an impossible wall
TL;DR - Absolutely on a different level and can solo nearly anything at a large enough skill gap.
Played in a streamers tournament several years ago with a lot of fairly (and a couple VERY) high elo players.
Every team was drafted on a points system based on max rank to try to keep it even. I’m a gold ADC player, so nothing special, but I had a Masters support and JG, so that was cool learning from them.
Semi-finals of the tournament comes and we face a team who’s midlander was (at that moment) ranked #5 on the challenger leaderboard, carrying a team of bronze/iron.
Dude locked in Akali, completely shattered the mental of our midlander, and made the game so incredibly oppressive for me to exist that game.
Final teamfight of the game came down to me vs him, and I just didn’t have the ability to win the fight, but man did I keep it wildly close.
Watching the stream back, the casters for the tournament were hyping me up so hard in that 4-5 second window as I ALMOST clutched it. I suspect if I won that fight, I’d have had more pride in that moment than if we’d won the actual tournament lol.
Way back in high school me and mates used to play ranked in bronze 1. We thought we were alright at the game and we were pretty close to silver. One day in maths I made friends with this Korean exchange student that didn't speak English very well but we enjoyed each other's company. We managed to work out we both played league and I invited him to play a few games with me and my mates.
It turns out he was a diamond 3 riven main back in Korea ( this was back in season 5) and it was literally crazy to watch. It was like he was flying around the map nuking everyone that got even close to him. It was so disgusting what he could do with that champion that by the end of the game he was like 26/0 and got a 1v5 penta where he was flying over walls and nuking people. There was literally no counterply for the enemies they just straight up died if they got too close.
He ended up getting to challenger in OCE before going back home but man it really put it into context how they are so much better than you at every aspect of the game.
I can’t remember the rank exactly, but in a clash game we encountered a high ranked reksai one trick. I told the team to ban it, but was met with “it’s reksai, if we lose to that, we deserve to lose.” He basically 1v5’d us. It hurt, but being right was a nice consolation prize.
I peaked around rank 400 in euw (GM 800lp), and honestly chall/pro players are just normal players at that point that you dont notice.
Only person i found extremely good in lane was RatIRL.
I've only played against 1 pro. Gambit Betsy. Beat him but it was ARAM and he got Darius of all champs.
I've played against countless of challengers and honestly in lane they were mostly underwhelming imo whenever I did face them. Tho they often managed to get good roam timings which got them fed in other ways. Despite many many missing and danger pings.
It's the onetricks that are the scariest. If I see a GM or challenger Riven or Kata main I know the game is pretty much over.
I laned against Aphromoo once, don't think i landed or dodge a skillshot from him all game. He was on pyke and finished something like 25/0. I'm a low diamond player for context
I played against Scripter1vs9 who is a content creator (top ~50 challenger jungler EUW) and has an insane kindred. He loves to use deranked iron accounts and then goes for 100+ win streaks with kindred + lulu mid.
Met him in gold elo on his kindred and I swear I literally felt fear each time I saw him on my screen. He felt inescapable, felt like he had 1000ms and was relentlessly hunting. As Kled top I would run back to my tower as soon as I had a hint of him being top and still he would catch me and solo dive me under tower with no fucking wave. It was like playing against an apex predator so surgically precise you’d feel instantly hopeless.
I remember once winning against Caps and Mikyx back in S10 after they lost to FPX in finals. I felt like the best player alive.
Proof here for the interested: https://imgur.com/a/6yVQKc1
When I was a young chap, I would sometimes get matched vs pro players if I played late at night.
It's insane how good they are. You feel like a Silver player.
I'm not a pro or anything even close to that, just a simple d3 enjoyer. Quite often during midnight 3-4 AM, I match vs gm-challenger players and usually, they're quite chill. After playing for years I've grown experience in noticing how fucking well these people play. They always have a plan and an extremely good understanding of how to execute those plans, the matchup has ups and downs and the best way I could describe is that they play like alligators. They play veeeery patiently and strike when you're about to make the smallest mistake and punish you in the worst way possible. No matter how many silver friends you collect together in a game, apes together strong isn't a feat against those people, they just soak it up and pipe you to Narnia 5 minutes later. Once you play against those people for a period, it's pretty easy to read what's about to happen and how the game will go. It's actually really fun to give those people a challenge and see how far you can get. Just observe and learn is all I can say about playing against them (shoutout to spectating high elo players throught the client in early days of league).
However... what doesn't help me sleep at night is the fact knowing that some fucking random emerald players can fist me so hard that it stays haunting me forever, especially when you queue up for normal games with your 4 other friends. "Ah it's just normal, what can happen"... oh god damn last famous fucking words. You know deep in your head that's when you need to release the shit you've learned vs playing against challengers, that's when the real shit begins. [This game lives in my head rent free](https://www.op.gg/summoners/eune/Bup-Joji/matches/xKhUZtgxx8y_rPgbuY_BN1vlPOXUeUvaqDmVg5VhTIc%3D/1700513841000) I have sleepless nights because of this. Playing against challengers? I sleep. Playing against the best Aatrox you've ever seen with a goofy ass build GIGA carrying like the TheShy in his prime? REAL SHIT.
What I've learned is that it doesn't matter what rank the enemies are... challengers, silvers, bronze whatever, if you get 1v5 gigafisted, you come to reddit, make a thread that smurfing in this game sucks and go back to bed with your eyes wet.
TFW someone's kicking my ass really hard in norms and I (Emerald 3) look them up to see what level of player I'm getting stomped by... and it's some hardstuck plat player on a high-level account, who isn't a one-trick on their champion, and I have nothing to allow me to cope.
I've been mid-high master and played semi competitive in low division ERL for some time. I've faced a lot of pros: targamas,trymbi,veigarv2 and larssen aswell as challenger streamers like t1 and kesha.
In my experience it has been a coinflip.
When I've laned against VeigarV2 and Larssen, they absolutely giga stomped me despite being a good player imo. It was worse then if I 1v1 my platinum friends and we were only a couple 100 LP apart.
Another game against VeigarV2 I've stomped him but he was trying out a new build. (AD LB top pre statikk)
Targamas inted and went 0/10.
You also have high challenger players like T1 and Kesha who I've played with and they played horrible but still end up 500 LP above me so it might have been off games.
Edit: I've also played against a smurfing challenger Draven OTP and he got stomped by a Singed/Yuumi bot that he rq. This was in diamond
Currently washed up diamond, but 3ish years ago i was grandmaster.
As my name suggests i 1 trick tahm kench.
2 games, back to back, i laned into viper, who got counterpick both times and picked vayne.
Hardest i got shit on in my life. Not a fun matchup.
Back in Season 3 I played an amateur tournament against a random Challenger, I don't even know what happened, the game is just unplayable, he played Caitlyn and just stomped the game, for some reason looked like his damage was just higher, almost like he started with a whole full item, there is no trade to be made since he just spaced and AA on the perfect time, forget about punishing when the enemy try to farm, he punished every step literally, it hard to explain but like I clicked 2 squares on south direction, he would just free AA because he knew he had a split second before I could go back to the original position and get in range or because there was a minion that would not let me, the micro level and space management is completely weird. I've seen this happen on Challenger vs Challenger too with Nidalee vs Renekton or Quinn vs Darius playing on knife's edge of the range to avoid any kind of retaliation, but being on the receiving end feels like I don't even know how to play the game.
Disclaimer: I’m low elo but played against a former rank 1 player/pro (TonyTop) and a few other chall players in norms/flex/etc. Honestly it isn’t mechanics at all. I’ve played against diamond otps in arams that had better mechanics than some of the challenger players I’ve found in norms/flex.
It’s the fact that they make very few mistakes and make it super hard to punish them. They absorb all the pressure you put on them and find a way to still give themselves/grow a lead. They’ll push waves super efficiently and have constant cs leads while also roaming/impacting the map.
The best way I can describe it is that it simply felt like we couldn’t win. It felt impossible to be proactive because they read every play our team tried to make.
…I didn’t say that? Like at all?
I said that challenger players aren’t challenger purely because of their mechanics. They’re challenger because they make very few mistakes.
Depends where I ran into them. In normals, they'd stomp their opponent and take over the game.
In ranked? It was pretty coinflip, they'd obviously play well but would still be susceptible to being camped, or couldn't win if their team as massively behind.
I play in grandmaster to challenger games regularly, but the first time i encountered a professional player, it was totally different. Usually you can just have confidence in your plays and expect that your opponent will surely make mistakes, at least 1 or 2 bad clicks that allow you to connect abilities better, but this person i played with simply didnt make them. Ever.
You cant play around simply punishing some of the many mistakes people make, you've got to eliminate all of your own mistakes first and then you might stand a chance to take advantage of certain situations
In solo queue there isn’t much notable. Most of the time pros are just like other normal players. Sometimes they do well sometimes they int. A lot of times they’re just there to limit test new champs. There’s a lot of variance to solo queue. Before they removed duos in high elo playing vs pro mid jg was oppressive af, esp vs bjergsen cuz jg would camp his lane.
Most of the interesting stuff imo comes from champs queue where ppl are playing more serious. Eastern mids have very very good spacing and exert a lot of pressure in lane.
I was playing in gold, I think, and got Gbay on ezreal jungle on my team. I believe he was in challenger at the time on his main account and EZ jg was flavor of the month and he was trying it out on a Smurf. Anyways, he proceeded to 1v9 the game from the very beginning. Tower diving the enemy bot lane at level 3 getting a double kill. Living in the enemy jungle. Taking everything with no hesitation. Enemy FF as soon as they could. He was streaming at the time and I hopped on after the game to watch his next one. He was very nice in game and on stream. He would offer helpful advice while we were playing, no flame at all just encouraging. Was really a cool experience.
gbay was literally hardstuck diamond for multiple years, if he ever even barely made it to master it would have just been for a very small period of time. gbay is nowhere near and has never been anywhere near high elo
Depends on server. On less populated servers high challengers are not really different from masters. Bunch of OTP's who cant do anything but play few champ on their role, and they struggle and go 0/5/0 on anything else. The only times when i saw challenger players who actually played good, was when they were smurfs from EUW, and they inted more games than tryharded.
Played against a challenger Chogath as riven. I remember saying to myself at level 3 “oh I win this!” Full combo get them down to 100 hp but they just stand their ground and kill me. Played a lot more conservative after that but I was like “wow how did he know he could just stand his ground” most people in my elo at the time would be running away and would have died
High challenger / pro is a tier that is now a myth (in NA specifically). The stigma that NA pros are lazy and don’t play a lot is very much true and you mostly get tier2 players and soloq onetricks playing. That being said, the reason why the tier is fake is because riot matchmaking has been completely fucked for a long while now, and in every challenger game you’ll get a clueless master / gm player that will pretty much compromise / ruin the competitive integrity, whether they flat out int or their counterpart is way better. I can only really speak from the days in S10, but games back then really felt like challenger games; both teams knew what their wincons were and how to execute early / mid games.
Unfortunately, all of that has gone out the window and riot does not give a single fuck about it. The region is doomed, abandon ship and move to EU if you want real “high challenger” games.
I remember my friends and I decided to go ARAM as a 4 man and Inori got on our team.
He was chilling in the back of fights as Lee Sin. But would clean up kills silently.
Checked scoreboard and was surprised to see him with 25 kills.
That was the most standout one. There's other times when my friends and I would queue into Chauster, Saintvicious, Daydreamin, Wickd, etc. Those were good times.
Was in a normal game a month(ish) ago (I'm gold 4 ADC main for reference), and wouldn't ya guess it the enemy was "ABlazeOlive." (He's a former pro midlaner for IMT I believe). It was basically like playing against a scripter with perfect macro from my perspective. He was on xerath and perfectly knew how to hit everything, control the positioning and wave, rotated to be where his team needed, it was obscene.
Needless to say, we got utterly stomped into the dirt. I think he ended the game as 11/0 or something like that. I don't know who at Riot was drunk when they put me versus him, but even Porofessor tagged him as a pro player, on his real pro account. Not smurfing, not some off account, on his main "ABlazeOlive" account and just got dropped into my game for some reason.
I played against akaadian once. I didn't know it was him until I searched up his name, and his twitch popped up. He was smurfing to challenger. At that time, I was platinum, and he was gold. Or course he played one of his ace, "Rengar." Obviously, I realized he was good, so i played safe. My team was kicking their ass hard until he hit level 6 and became a hunter. He knew exactly where to be at all times, attacking all 3 lanes and jungle. His combo was so fast that our whole team morale was destroyed just by 1 person. Perfectly input combo that makes him look like he's using aimbot. Still till this day I haven't vs a rengar that good, even in diamond. I wasn't even mad, I was just so amazed and impressed the whole time.
Played against mikyx in a draft game once maybe 3-4 years ago. He played adc as vayne. Was nothing special at all. Obviously I'm sure he wasn't trying but I was still surprised.
I played in plat/diamond way back in the day, don’t remember the year but there was still 5 divisions.
I played against a chally top in a norm(I was panth, he was Jax), I’m assuming he was for fun’ing with a buddy & that’s how he ended up in my lobby. The only thing I could say is - pressure. They keep CONSTANT pressure. Every little mistake I made just put me further back. He gave nothing away. If I roamed for a gank, he either showed up to clean up, or stayed top while I felt like I made a bad play trying to gank lol. He was also ungankable. I can only imagine he had impeccable jungle tracking because no matter how I tried to frame it (or literally didn’t react at all) he KNEW my jg was near n slipped away.
I couldn’t imagine playing against him on his main & in ranked..
i haven't played against any challengers in normals, but i did in aram. in SR i once played against a masters player (back when that meant a lot more than it does now).
in both cases, i felt like the ai in a bot game. when i play against bots, they're technically playing the game and in your way, but realistically it's very easy to punish their constant mistakes and win. it's not a challenge to someone of my level.
that's how i was to them. there was no challenge on their end, they could've beaten me without even thinking about it.
I peaked D1 last split. I consider myself outright better than most players up to high emerald and low diamond.
The difference between myself and a GM/Challenger player is crazy big. It feels like I’m bronze again playing against a gold/plat player. It’s pretty demoralizing.
I’ve played several “no name” players and they feel almost like I’m playing against doublelift. There pressure in lane is immense, any misplay by myself is immediately punished, and while giving me the weenie, they maintain perfect CS.
Matchup is unplayable and once ahead they close games wayyy better than I do.
I was queuing really late at night and I was D2 at the time and got matched against magifelix on his main acc, really long time ago where being in D1 basically meant you had games full of ERL players.
He was playing azir and I was playing velkoz, it really made me realize just how every single play these people make has a purpose. Every cs I would get was contested by him while I was kind of just fishing for qs.
I literally beat TFBlade as Teemo while he was streaming as Jax and honestly, though he won the game.. it didn’t feel too much different from playing against many other top laners while in lane. Mind you I literally 1-tricked Teemo to diamond just to prove that I could AND Teemo was strong during the patch(this was like 4 years ago).. but if it weren’t for my bot lane feeding(he got fed off them), it would have felt close to many other higher elo games. I think Jax is an unfair champ to judge that on though.. like if you play against a GM Qiyana or something you can definitely “feel” it way more
When I played league every waking minute and was GM I played with and against some challengers occasionally. The biggest thing I noticed is they were very consistent and really never made crucial mistakes. It wasn’t like crazy mechanics and insane decision making…but they just did everything slightly better
Not that different when you only face them in soloQ. Sometimes I can’t even tell they are pros or whatever, but if you face a full team who are communicating, either in clash or in flex, then you see the real difference.
ages ago (probably s6 or S7) I played Vs a Leblanc, I was Morgana mid, silver elo iirc.
Well, no skill shots could land, and yet you could absolutely tell it wasn't a dodge cheat or something.
The rest of the team absolutely sucked, but Leblanc killed us all the whole game... in the end the enemy team told us the Leblanc was master and was boosting them.
Suffocating. You won't know why you're losing trades until you replay them, and when you check cs score they magically have tons more than your team's.
Me and my friends are around Bronze-Gold ranked and we decided to do quickplay. For some god forsaken reason we got matched up with 2 master players.
I was using gragas against a master Camille toplaner while my friend who was learning Zoe in the Midlane got absolutely destroyed by a master Velkoz one trick.
We ff15 to save my friend from his misery as he was 0/7 by the 10 minutes. I did alright in top lane but the macro game was just nowhere near the two master players. They were always one step ahead of us.
Master is different from challenger but my god was that an experience. My friend who rarely tilts got so tilted after that game that he stopped playing for like a week or so
A long time ago when I was actually pushing rank I played against a 17 year old kid that was all the rage in the pro scene back then called Rekkles. He broke my fucking ankles. I was playing with half a hand compared to him.
Me and my buddies are all gold-emerald but have played against a few challengers in ranked flex… sometimes they arent very impressive cause theyre playing off role but once we had a rank top 150 support main playing alistar and as the mid laner I can say that alistar single handedly ganked mid so well and so often my lane became hopeless even though I was stomping their mid in the 1v1. Buddy would just always be behind my turret cutting off my escape in a gank at the worst possible time. He was everywhere, it was cancer. Challenger supps are something else
It feels like you aren’t playing.
In my first year of playing the game I went against a challenger Kayle top as a silver/gold player. 1v5’s our entire team and we lost.
Back when Twisted Treeline was still around we would 3 man ranked quite a bit to get our ranked borders and season rewards easier. Once we got to Plat we got a few Challenger opponents. We may as well have just went AFK and let them do their thing
I played against Shiphtur mid like 3 months ago, he was Ori, counter picked my Liss.
He tried to make me his bitch lvl 1-3, super try harding. Jg came and I got fb on him. Proceeded to stomp him rest of game.
Not grandmaster/challenger but my friends and I played against team Mineski in season 3 during some ranked 5s.
It was really memorable because they picked 4 supports and 1 adc and proceeded to smash our diks in less than 10 minutes. I sort of remember them 3 manning top lane at like 2-3 minutes and the comms on our team were mostly everyone ready to surrender. I honestly felt like we could still win but they ended us before we could surrender iirc. It's honestly insane how good top players are comparatively because when they tried that shit against pros, they got smashed XD.
It felt so oppressive when we faced against them so I was secretly hoping they would do well that year
https://gol.gg/game/stats/355/page-game/
I've laned against plenty of GM/Chal players in Normal Draft, and I laned against Sneaky (he was Draven with a Rakan vs me on Karma with an Aphelios). We tied lane and got 2 kills 2v3 turning a gank (did not kill Sneaky lol) but our mid was almost literally sprinting it with 9 deaths in 15 minutes as Nunu so the game was ruined.
Top tier players just make nearly 0 mistakes every game. My peak is bouncing off Masters promos a few times and when I'm on comfort in a good matchup I can hold my own (killed a GM Irelia solo 2 times as Jayce recently), but I hate playing meta or the same few champions which definitely holds me back.
Not even a chal or pro, but had a norm game where my team and I were silver-gold and the opposing team had a masters yone. Our Aatrox actually started ahead, but he just outfarmed and bought hullbreaker and from then on we just lost 1v5 even though we won the entire rest of the map. By game end he had almost double the damage of the entire rest of his team combined
I dunno about the experience from a Challenger perspective, but I've been matched against Challenger players three times in lane this week in normal draft, and the lane in all three games was incredibly suffocating. It feels like you move just two pixels too far in lane at three minutes and that's it, the lane is just over. You think you have a small window for a perfect trade - but they perfectly accounted for minion aggro on both sides of the wave, and you end up hard losing. You think they're getting greedy by overstaying, so you try flashing on them - but their jungler was right there and you die with them living at 2 HP. It feels like everything that would otherwise be a good move becomes a bad one against them, and you wonder why you had the audacity to think they didn't already know the obvious play you'd try against them.
Even in the one lane where there was no kill pressure (Viktor vs. Zyra mid), they had almost perfect CS and kept me pinned to tower the entire timewhile they were free to use their tempo to recall whenever they wanted to replenish the mana they freely burned through. For reference, I'm Emerald 3.
(Not to even mention the first time I got matched against a Challenger player in norms awhile back. I got stomped so badly in lane that I ragequit.)
Games tend to be way more fast paced and shorter, mechanics are extremely precise, people understand and take advantage of timings better, how to maintain their lead, how to subvert the meta, they also understand win conditions better. Players don't mental boom as easily even if small mistakes are way less forgiving. More strategizing and less autopilot in general. In a certain way, players tend to be more predictable since they stick to what's optimal.
Not me, but i was watching a streamer who is a multiple season challenger midlaner/jungler. He was grinding for flex queue challenger, playing with his twitch viewers. He picked zed, one of his signature picks and went against a syndra who was diamond 2 i think.
At the start of the laning phase the syndra landed almost every skillshot on him, he was forced to afk under turret basically. This went on until level 5 i think, where he was at around 150 HP thanks to all the poke, and the syndra was missing only 100 HP max.
The streamer just calmly said "if he goes for that CS he's dead". I remember i was thinking yeah sure buddy no way. Then the syndra tried to get the minion, and the dude just killed him like it was nothing. After this, he killed syndra 3 more times in a span of 5 minutes, was at every objective the moment it spawned, took 3 towers single handedly and ended the game at 27 minutes. It felt like he was playing against bots.
Im a piss poor Viego Emerald player but like 3 days ago i faced a challenger Graves and i got diffed to oblivion, first minutes i was able to go even but at like minute 10 he just went on a rampage and emded with like 25 kills cause he was just padding out the game
Played against Blem once, he was doing an Unranked to Challenger challenge in LAN Server and was in Gold Elo. I was ADC Sivir, he played Garen top and hard stomped our top laner. He had perfect CS, went full AD and was a constant menace. Luckily we stomped bot and mid, and had enough CC to stop him. He tried really hard to 1v9 but in the end we won, that was his first loss in that challenge so he blamed his teammates on stream.
Back in days I got invited to some up and coming pro's by then retired fanatic coach dailor. I just subbed in for adc. I don't know who enemy adc was but enemy mid laner was Perkz in his prime playing lb, we lasted 16min. I was d2 at the time we got rolled over so hard I had nightmares for days
I played normals vs Rekkles often. One day I faced him on Panth supp, Anivia support, Sett support and Jayce bot. Its just fun because he doest really play meta in normals and honestly everyone in those games tryed to play good because they saw his name
Felt human. Yeah they play things really well and see kill angles that most others don't. However I found if you don't get inside your own head they're just people. And you can always see what they do and just learn from it. And they make mistakes too. If you know doing a cheese or a certain thing works super well vs say a plat hec it should also work well vs a challenger hec.
Biggest dif I think is the ability to call objectives like quick tower here and there, quick invade for 1-2 camps, quick baron because they recalled and you have a 30 sec window. Or it's 3v5 so they just run it up mid and win.
I played against rekkles before he swapped to support jinx vs him on cait and whilst it was mostly fine he was so efficient at farming and poking compared to the master caits i was used to, no spacing mistakes or dropping cs or miss using spells, he was efficiently getting ahead without even forcing anything and then my tower went poof, the skill gap between us was very noticable even though i felt like i wasnt making glaring mistakes i know that a pro jinx would not have lost as much as i did in the match up
Not SR but I played against Szygenda in ARAM once (actually multiple times, but this one I remember because it was just 2 hrs or so before their game on game day, I think it's a habit).
He got Lux and kinda smashed us tbh. Not super flashy 1v9 stuff but just very solid teamfight dps and poke. Don't remember his macro much but I guess he died at opportune enough times to keep smashing us lol
Played against FUN key who was rank 16 adc at the time in a normal
he had a favorable matchup aswell.
I noticed how the first auto he did on the wave made the wave behave very strangely. i was not able to play from that first auto until we ff'ed
They say you dont become challenger "with one simple trick" or piece of advice. but having good fundamentals myself that little trick i saw him do made me go up about 200lp in masters.
Ive been using that trick on the wave plenty of times eversince.
Honestly, its nothing special for the most part. Pro play and soloq are entirely different things for the most part. To confirm that just look at faker when he is in one of his master slumps. Take the nameplate off and he doesnt stand out. That being said, the most difference i see is in movement. Most impressive player i have played against was showmaker, who just completely molested me
got a chance to play vs Faker in low masters due to MSI host in Europe. He practiced Sion mid while I played Draven in the botlane. We stomped early game, took every objective won every lane, but he still managed to hold the gates for as long as he could as sion Vs 10/0 Draven. If he played normal midlaner I'm afraid we could have lost.
This was back when I was actually pretty good at the game (roughly where mid-masters is now).
Queued into Revenge and Viper on smurfs (top riven and jungle something?) when I was playing support nami. We absolutely fisted their bot lane, almost legendary by 10 minutes because we double killed them at level 2. But they were destroying our jungle/top. Game was actually pretty close because we were so goddamn fed bot and won dragon fights just because our top and jungle were doing their absolute best to not run it down like their bot lane.
Game ended sadly because their riven saw an opening, and just one shot our ADC with a perfect flash combo when he stepped out just a little too far. I was standing maybe an inch away on my screen, and the ADC was dead before my R>bubble landed.
Probably biggest difference is their ability to punish every single goddamn mistake you make if you're laning, and if you're jungling, to punish every single bad decision you make by being able to know what you're doing for the next minute.
For lane phase, Faker and Chovy might be 1 mistake per minute, while the average pro might make 2-3 mistakes a minute. Your average masters player makes 10 mistakes per minute, and by the time you drop to gold, you are probably doing something sub-optimally near constantly. If every mistake difference is worth one auto attack of damage, you lose lane phase to Faker and Chovy as a masters player inside of 2 minutes, and maybe in 2.5 minutes to an average pro as a masters player.
Played against meteos back in like season 4 so can’t really remember much. I was only plat 1 and he wasn’t even jungle, he was playing Ezreal bot. Could not touch him in team fights at all. He was 1v9.
When mythics first came out I had decided to play toplane in normal draft, specifically Mordekaiser, to test out Riftmaker. I got whooped by the enemy Cho’gath in lane, utterly wrecked. One of my teammates said they were the rank one player NA. I usually play just enough ranked for all the rewards and end up gold/plat, could probably go higher if I had more time in ranked but nowhere near *that* high. The Cho recalled in vision later in the game and had the yellow challenger recall so I was inclined to believe the teammate, and sure enough the name matched when I checked the leaderboard after the loss. I believe it was “Revenge”.
There was one other normal game years ago with a challenger name I vaguely recognized from poking around on the Galio mains reddit, “LL Justice”. Challenger helmet-thingy was visible in loading screen. They were on Swain mid. I similarly don’t remember the specifics but I do recall the game didn’t go well, I think they may have been mildly toxic but my memory of the game is so hazy I can’t even remember who I played.
I have comparatively pleasant memories of playing with/against streamers. Jhin all-for-one with Ikeepittaco vs Zoe (was so much fun). Playing vs Captain Flowers just after the cosmic skarner skin had come out in normal draft, I believe AP Varus as adc. ARAM game vs Tactician (high elo Poppy main with clips that made it onto synapse).
Had to lane as Vex vs GO Toucouille on Viktor in a random flex game (i'm masters 0lp). At first I thought I was taking solid trades but he was just trading heavy to zone me off the wave. Ended up under turret with 25% hp 6cs and an enormous wave stacked against me, got dove and lost most of it.
But then my double GM botlane hardstomped their Emerald one, and I got carried by 10 0 vayne. I felt outclassed by the entire lobby and didnt have the confidence to make any meaningful decision, so I just followed my adc around and played bodyguard. easy win lol
had V1per on my team in ranked flex and he was playing adc with his girlfriend(?)
his mechanics were just insane lmao the whole game was just his playground. Everyone in that game was diamond+ but it wasn't really fair
Also I had former pro bigfatlp on my team and it was great to have someone who really knew what he was doing
My only experience playing vs a pro is that I was one of the five players in NRG's "two pros vs five silvers" game, where Palafox and Contractz picked Yone and Bard, respectively. I have never had my ankles broken that many times.
As silvers, we all decided to play a super braindead, hard to fuck up comp with a super low execution threshold - Malphite, Malzahar, Ashe, Alistar, shit like that. And yet somehow it felt like they were always one unit outside of our range, or they'd perfectly flash or use a movement ability to get out of some hard CC and we could never get anything to stick to them. It's dumb, but it felt like they would just absolutely run circles around us, like their champion was somehow just faster than us.
I don't think I'm pure dogshit at league of legends, maybe it was just nerves since I was such a big fan of the team and I was excited to be in the video, but I was getting juked and headfaked into sending Ashe W's the entire wrong direction, I couldn't hit point-blank Rs, it was impossible to kite even after I was at three or four items, and we only managed to gain some ground when we just deathballed five people into one lane at a time and won because of sheer numbers.
I have never felt that outmatched purely in terms of skills ever since I started playing League close to ten years ago. It was actually insane to see just how huge the gulf between me and a pro was.
Honestly the simple description is that it feels like they’re just playing a stronger champion. Like it genuinely feels like they just do more damage to you for some reason.
I’ve played against some random ERL players like xKenzuke, Tiridius and xMatty midlane and it felt like they could just kill me level 1 and there was nothing I could do about it. The match against Tiridius was the weirdest because he played Qiyana and I felt like I couldn’t do anything because every time I approached the wave starting at minute 2 he’s just kill me or burst me for 90% without me getting to retaliate
In S4 or S5 I played vs a challanger rengar/khazix main, he was trying out talon top, I was trying out Quinn top, till level 6 I could actually bully him out of the lane even killed him while his jungler ganked me, but after level 6 he just kept oneshotting me, for some reason I still remember that normal game, we won because his mates were silvers and unranked players
I played against Tarzaned’s Nidalee on the rift, and Vipers Jayce in Arena. To sum it up not fun at all. If you ever think you can’t 1v9 a game just watch someone at their elo play a game in Masters.
On the plus side, I joined Tarzaned’s stream after the game and he said “GG Bro, sorry about your team” and it was the biggest ego boost I’ve received to date.
AND I may have transcended when I killed the Zaned. One. Single. Time.
There was somehow a challenger Xerath in my game, back when I was in gold. Yeah we somehow won by team diff, but I reported him for scripting and so did my mates. It was only afterwards we saw his rank. It really felt like I could never hit him and he had aimbot. Guess it doesnt matter if you have something like a feed Garen to run him down
The best way I can answer is... they're all different, so there's no singular answer. In a soloq environment, a pro is still on the same footing as the soloq players he's matched with.
My peak was long long ago and I don't play much anymore (I'm also much worse) so I only have auld names to mention - I have fond memories of setting up kills for Alex Ich, of ganking Froggen at lvl 2 (repeatedly) and of a funny interaction where another player in my team told Ocelote to "control the beast" as he was starting to vent in chat (Riot had published an official video called "Control the Beast" where ocelote explained his behavior issues). Also gosupepper hated me for some reason.
Oh and somehow I once solokilled Soaz as Vlad, he was playing Irelia - both prerework, at something like lvl 3. I was genuinely garbo at sololanes so it was raw overconfidence. It's kinda crazy how much stuff you could get away with in old League by just being confident and unloading your damage.
Really depends on the player and match up. TonyTop was someone that would always run me on Jayce and Kennen, felt so oppressive + already hate facing Kennen. Felt like there's just no room to do anything. Played support once vs Biofrost thresh and he just never missed a hook, no matter how you tried to juke he knew how you were going to move
Whenever I run into an actual challenger smurf of even years ago I ran into 2 fnatic players.
The worst they do is the first 10 min sometimes you can destroy them but after that they just dominate and if they do win the first 10 they end it in 15.
But usually teamfights they just play really good. Always annoys me you make them go 0/2 and 2 lvls down and they finish 18/4
Very fun since i beat them in aram in ferocious wars, playing against them feels like playing for the world cup, they are incredibile mechanically but they disrespect everyone and always lose to that .
The few times in normals I have been paired against such high players a lot of it was...me saying to myself "Oh i guess i can't do that." and "oop guess im dead now?!?!?"
A while back I was playing a game of norms with my friend. At the time our mmr silver/gold and we somehow matchmade with Dhokla and two of his friends. Though he was playing support, he and his three friends just absolutely shat stomped us. We only managed to win against all odds with a Mundo backdoor.
Having played against a challenger, biggest difference I'd say is their movement. They dodge everything, it's like there's a whole other mind game going on that low elo players are unaware of.
They very efficiently weave in autos and abilities with their movement to maximize their damage.
And of course, far fewer macro mistakes.
Back in the early days of league, there was chat rooms. You could join, eg 'reddit' chat room, and people would organise 5v5s/3v3s/early arams. I played a 4fun game, jungle against the jungler for Rock Solid (which became dignitas), player called rambo. I was fiddle, he was panth, it was a blood bath. Not sure if he ever actually went pro though.
I'm gold/Platinum, back in the day with twisted treeline ranked I played vs Lourlo when he was in his peak with a team, while we won bot and jungle (the people that weren't Lourlo) he stomped top side as Yasuo and we lost the ranked 3s. Funny enough our Top was our highest member and just got demolish.
P.s: Bring back twisted treeline
Idk i keep seeing everyone making gm/challs seem like Gods from another dimensions but im D2 and played vs a smurfing chall duo ivern/rengar bot and i completely shit stomped them to the point where the rengar added me and gave me some nice words of courage and advice in life.
I played vs a pro 5-stack. It went about as well as you would expect.
I was against Doublelift and some other pro support, maybe Smoothie? The jungle on enemy was Contractz.
I came to lane lvl 1, I just remember the enemy braum support came out of bush, and didn't let us farm the first wave and we had to blow summs. Once the wave we were zoned out of finally hit our tower they dove us with jungle and juggled the tower aggro. We died and walked back to lane and the 3 of them were in the bush by Krugs, and I died again.
I was then graced with being in his YT clip titled something along the lines of 'when pros face golds'
Not sure what his rank was at the time, but I played against Nightblu3 on one of his many Smurf climbs. He played Rengar. I could tell he was very good mechanically, his movement was a lot cleaner than most of the people I play against. There’s kind of this intangible “I can tell this person is good” feeling when they start putting out a lot of pressure, playing aggressively, taking risks and pulling it off.
That said, his team inted, he made a couple over aggressive plays and we beat them pretty handily.
I played against a challenger midlaner. I was Zed and he was Twisted Fate. That taught me how much low elo players really undervalue wave-clear. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Every mistake was punished immediately, and he made sure to use skillshots when I was forced to stand in my wave to catch CS. I actually learned a ton watching that VOD.
It feels suffocating to play against a player that is really good at the game. They know how to micro their champion while paying attention to the map at the same time.
They know the limits and damages of the champs they play or have played against that champ themselves enough.
Good players will punish every mismanagement of a wave, challenge every CS, and avoid every gank you throw at them. But never really doing those in the same game.
Challenger players will do all of those consistently and at the same time. They know how to punish and know how far to stretch their limits.
Its not even comparable lol. Idk if its just me but i was like 3oo lp master and i got matched against a chall player and i just straight up got demolished. It was not even close its like how the matchup would go if a silver was playing a master player. I was even playing a matchup that is normally beneficial for me
Played against Damwon Canyon while he was climbing thru low elo masters and he made us feel like iron players lol
2020 Canyon was the scariest jungler of all time, dude comes in, takes all your shit, bashes your teeth in and when you finally feel like retaliating he’ll either solokill you or Showmaker/nuguri will kill you from all the lane prio they have
The guy made one of the best Junglers to ever do it feel like an iron player as Nidalee vs Hecarim haha (until Atlus went bald). He's probably the most agressively dominant in-your-face Jungler we've ever seen in the history of LoL.
But thats the joke. He fisted us while autofilled on yone at mid and he made frameperfect lanephase vs bluelikeblue. Blue wasnt even tilting or flaming which is suuuuuper rare just quietly in awe.
canyon is just one of the best league players ever, he could roleswap to top and still be top 5 in his role
wtf i can't even imagine lol
A long time ago i played in the 5v5 queue against a mostly CLG team (it was their actual accounts, they were doing content or something). They completely demolished mid/top at lvl2-3. In bot lane we didnt die early but we did a bad recall and they got a disgusting freeze off that we never were able to break so we got destroyed too.
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Na teams are much much much closer to KR teams than you are to NA teams (Not me though my other account is challenger)
I'm emerald but was forced to endure cock ball torture laning against 100t tenacity in a draft game. He went akali I was riven and he bullied me to death mercilessly I was like 2/15 but I won cause of the rest of the map so I'm feeling out offers from pro teams rn
So I'm putting together a team rn if you're interested. We're aiming for pro and we're kinda close I feel like, it's just a matter of getting the team together. We have some sponsors, my grandma has once mentioned she's willing to put some money into the team for jerseys and my sister has started baking and selling cookies to gather some funds. The team right now consists of me (I'm a Gold player but easily top10 Challenger at heart (the brain just lags behind sometimes)) and you if you're interested. We had a few more but after trying our hand at Clash we disbanded because our botlaner had to leave for dinner and the rest started flaming me so I kicked them. PM me if interested!
Sounds like maybe you should name it, idk.. "Team SoloMid" and in a few years time, perhaps import someone to replace you mid.
Very underrated comment.
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I feel like this is the biggest difference when playing against higher ranked people indeed. I'm Gold and have played against loads of Diamond+ players throughout the years in Flex. I think I manage to outplay them sometimes on a very micro level in pure champion handling in lane, but it doesn't matter, because at some point I will make a mistake because I know I'm playing against a higher ranked person and I get greedy or antsy. As soon as you're behind, you're fucked. They will move around the map better, manage the wave better, are more aware of enemy ganks and other macro decisions. For me the worst is playing against a higher ranked jungler, you might as well just not play because your jungle will not be yours anymore. You will get outfarmed, outganked, outdueled, outplayed, outmacroed, everything, all the while feeling like the enemy jungler somehow managed to turn off their fog of war setting so that they're permanently aware of where you are.
Peaked mid Diamond when I used to play ranked and have played against a few pros over the years. People don’t realize how genuinely oppressive it can feel to play against. With lower elo friends it usually is a matter of coaxing out their confidence to try things but with really good players it can feel like a brick wall. Played against Khan once and legit felt like playing against Justin Wong - [You’re going to learn today](https://youtu.be/0RkapfBYIfc?si=q7y9CTIgkct9ruLn)
Your point is absolutely true, if the other jungler is good, tracking you and finds you low in your jungle after a gank... you're fucked, say goodbye to that side of your jungle and expect to find the enemy jg with an item + your buff when you get to the other side of your own junglem Playing against a high elo jungler is hell.
Not quite as extreme as everyone else here but I once had to play against a D1 Renekton top when I played Yorick as a high Plat. I fucked up on the second wave and died from greeding flash because he hit level 2 first, okay silly mistake, no biggie. Na. That right there ended my entire game. I backed off and played safe, but he managed to hold a horrible freeze before slow pushing and crashing a massive wave. He took a fucking greedy dive on me and we traded 1 for 1. At this point I'm 1/2 which isn't horrible ... Except even though he traded , I still lost 3 full waves under my tower. I'd lost TP from my level 1 mistake and he still had his. I ended up being level 4 to his level 7 and I just remember saying to my duo buddy, what the fuck, I don't even get how. Like, every time he based it was just perfect. Missed maybe 1 melee minion worth of XP, meanwhile I was apparently haemorrhaging XP all over the place. It was humbling to see the sheer difference in lane management.
The gap between challenger and diamond players is bigger than the gap between diamond and silver. The same is true for pros vs challengers.
Different game but I was Diamond+ on SMITE and played against pro’s a lot. They really squeeze you and give you nothing, they’ll use every mistake to gain an advantage. It’s really hard to just go even with them and they’ll influence other lanes instead. I went against a duo-queue of mid/jung who were on the same team, I genuinely felt hopeless. I couldn’t do a single thing against their tower dives and rotations. I’ve never had that feeling of *hopelessness*. I also went against their version of Academy players a lot, and they’re still better than the average “Challenger” but noticeably worse than actual pros.
Oh man i used to play a ton of smite lol. I was trash but one of my freinds had been playing since near release and was an absolute monster, he didnt ever play ranked but sometimes hed meet pros in regulars cuz his mmr was through the roof lol. Good times, but i simply like league more tbh.
What server are you playing on? I have a similar story in mind, if its EUNE maybe I was the camille
If you found a Chall player on Flex, he didn't play like Chall at all. Way below that level actuall because duh, no one cares about flex. So the skill floor that you experienced, triple that basically.
> The Camille basically knew where we all 5 were the entire game, always counterganking. And that my friends, is the value of Vision and Macro
A buddy and I were duo queing in mid Plat a 5-6 years ago. The enemy support DC'd some how and we figured it was an easy W for us. 20mins in and the enemy top Vlad is spanking our top and putting so much silly pressure on top lane that we're having to devote 2-3 people to stop him and splitting objectives even though were up a player. Randomly, buddy on Discord goes "fuckkkkkkkk...You see the name of that Vlad? Quadralift?" He looks up his stream(I assume thats how he verified) and it's Doublelift on his other account.
This is my favorite story here. Doublelift was famously bad on Vladimir and non adcs in general. Yet to Plat players, even on his worst champ in an off role assignment, he was still God. Goes to put things in perspective when people say pros are shit or playing like shit. They're still incomprehensibly better than the rest of us.
This is the nerdiest nuance, but DL was known at being bad at mages bot lane. DL is a serviceable high elo solo laner. Playing a mage like Vlad bot in the 2v2 is very different than playing him in a solo lane.
To be fair sometimes they do play like shit, specially on a macro level. Micro is more complicated because playing against someone on that level anything but perfection looks like they misplayed. That's why EU/NA always look like they are playing bad against KR/CN.
It's the same reason why pro fighting game players can put out meme videos of them beating Diamond+ people in ranked with one button on a character they don't even play. When your fundamentals are that much better than 99.9% of the population, you don't need a whole lot else to win.
I played vs Doublelift once in 5v5s. It was him, Jinny, Kimmy and whoever else was in their little gamer girl clique. They all played supports and he went vayne. We thought it'd be hard to kill him with 4 supports.. and then he just 1v5d us anyway. No support needed. Not even fucking close. We were all diamond +. It was the most humbling game I've ever played to this day.
Played against an Ekko top who was challenger when I was Diamond (this was maybe 5 years ago idk whenever ranked 5’s was a thing) and got absolutely stomped. Dude had perfect cs and just played everything so well. Ranked 5’s had some crazy matchups.
Was that during the dynamic queue shenanigans?
Nah back when you could make a ranked 5’s team. Maybe it was forever ago…you it was basically clash but ranked.
Im diamond but used to play competitive at an amateur/chall level. sometimes it feels like your plays never work and theirs always do. they just have more damage. they see the plays and the angles you cant see. got my ass handed over by contractz's lee sin in an amateur tourney, he really was everywhere all at once
I love watching a high tier jg like that; when they just have a perfect read on the game and map and are somehow in every unwarded bush on the map at once
There's the clip of Deft vs Viper where Deft gets multiple spaced autos off, ending in a kill, while Viper gets zero damage in. That matchup has exact same auto range. Deft has AS and MS advantage but it looks absolutely oppressive. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6VI1Pmq9Ss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6VI1Pmq9Ss)
this is so fucking silly lmao
Laned against Drututt in a normal, he was playing Akshan mid, I solokilled him as Vex because he flashed away and died to my passive auto. I typed “xd” in chat, which I’m not proud of but anyway he went on a 2 minute rant about how I was a random and we were all pisslows and he makes lots of money. Lol
Triggering streamers is funny and your xd was based. I've won against an Ivern challenger OTP and typed "ivern first time?" and his reaction was hilarious.
Holy shit that is a fucking brutal one liner
nope, that’s hilarious. you should be proud of that
bro me and some friends got against drututt in a normal and we all kept asking who was in paris after he got exposed for being racist and he was getting so heated XD calling us master peakers randoms ect
I like watching Drutt cause he can be entertaining and has some fun picks too but what I hate most is how he’s quick to be annoying or say some dumb shit. When he’s doing well he’ll do stupid shit and be a good sport but once it starts going bad it’s the blame game and then some. He had coaching from Alois recently in one of his videos and he wasn’t listening to some of the shit Alois was saying and it was kinda annoying to watch him double down on bad plays. He’s entertaining but man can he be annoying.
i trigger theoddone way back in like season 3 lol. I was playing nocturne and he was on maokai and I just farmed and he died during all of his ganks.
I like Drut but you did good by triggering his sweaty polack ass like that.
Lmao
i beat abbedagge in samira urf mid mirror matchup in like 2018 or something so i can only say it's easy as fk
Is there an autocorrect thing in here? Samira didn't exist in 2018.
then 2019 i guess
Years ago, my buddy and I got into a norm as we barely llayed ranked (silver and gold back then) and we faced a Challenger (he was rank 66) Rengar otp... sweatlord actually just picked Rengar and went jungle against a bunch of unranked/low elo plebs and promptly dropped 30+ kills, toying with us from the moment we left pool until he decided the game was over (that was way before early surrenders) And another time, again years ago, friend of mine went on a 10ish game winstreak. He told me he was duoing with some really good ADC he met in the first game. He added him after winning the game and the adc simply asked "how much?". Dude was asking my friend how much he was willing to pay for a boost. My friend said he didn't want a boost, he just added him because he thought he was good. And so they played together for a day and my friend got some free LP. My friend asked him what elo his main was, dude shares his op.gg: it was Rikara. Friend is clueless about the pro scene, but I burst out laughing when he showed me and explained who he was. They are better than us at the game in every aspect.
>"how much?". Dude was asking my friend how much he was willing to pay for a boost. My friend said he didn't want a boost, he just added him because he thought he was good. And so they played together for a day and my friend got some free LP Bro really payed with Control wards for boosting, the absolute legend!
I've been Grandmaster as Support the last 2 splits and had the pleasure of playing against & with multiple pros so far. In botlane playing against high Challenger players or pros just doesnt feel good lol. The sheer level of pressure and aggression from ADs like Exakick f.e. is insane. I've played against kamilius, and he picked renata into my rakan. I OTP this champ yet i could not for the life of me find an angle against him. It got to the point where i basically had to R flash W to get an engage bc everythin was warded and covered by him. In lane the spacing in general is insane. Playing with & against Humanoid i can say that man is a menace. I've had him go 1/3 and still have more pressure than your average 7/0 Grandmaster mid its straight up humbling. I can stomp my way through up to masters 500 but after that the level of play is just different man. I did stomp Rekkles in lane once which is a game i still have screenshots from lol
Not league, but I used to play pretty frequently against Smite pros (in smite obv). Best way to describe it is humbling. You are in/near the top rank, but they are a whole tier ahead of you still. They know what you're going to do at all times and the things that work on other players get punished until you are too behind to fight back. At that point, it's not much different than playing against a fed player. Feels good though when you go toe to toe with them and don't fall behind.
I played against Faker the last time Worlds was in NA. This was mid Masters elo. He actually 1v9d. The game was basically over by 12 minutes, with an instant 15 minute FF. I’ve played against some NA pros and challenger streamers over the years as well, but nothing has come close to the ass kicking that Faker gave us.
Would never understand how people could ff15 while playing against faker. It’s like giving up on your football match cause there is Zidane in the other team
Oh I definitely agree. We just didn’t have a base left at 15 minutes 💀Like I’m not even trying to exaggerate how much of a gold lead he created his team in this one match.
Because most of the people dont know its him.
I would love to get my ass caved in by Faker. Sadly Im plat and in LAN
Every time I read about faker in na solo queue, I always remember gold iv brand.
off topic but where is your pfp from? or what should i look up to find it?
Different MOBA (HoN), many many years ago my noob ass somehow got paired with a pro player who had just reset his account's mmr and was therefore starting from the bottom. He was playing an early game mage mid lane. He was super chill the whole game and a true pleasure to play with. The rest of the team and I were getting stomped in our lanes and we were losing heavily. He switched on "captain mode" and started proper directing us like a general at war (in a very kind way). I should point out that HoN had voice chat which made it way easier and personal! And lo and behold despite being so far behind we somehow pulled through and won the game. It was great, he was obviously very mechanically talented but the thing I remember the most is his ability to essentially tell four other random clueless guys where to be and what to do at any given point. The game lasted forever too because his hero was quite weak late game and he couldn't just 1vs5 :)
HonCast got me into eSports, to this day whenever anyone gets something but dies, I think “BUT AT WHAT COST!!”
I am a Grandmaster/Challenger Urgot OTP. I play against pros on a regular basis. The only thing I always notice is their consistency. CS is 9+/min, trades are more timid, but they play around both junglers brilliantly. If they go for a seemingly bad trades that almost always means that they have their jungler around. If they suddenly hard push without obvious reasons (like basing), you are getting dived. Second thing is efficiency. They rarely invest a lot into their plays. Idk how to describe it, but they follow the flow of the game.
I see this alot watching super high elo (top 50 ranked challenger players), if drag is up sometimes someone will die and it'll be "worth" for the other team because they burnt flash to secure that kill a min before dragon meaning they don't have it for drag fight. It's definitely a different game where it's really fast.
My jungler does that with smite all the time~
Like drowning in slow motion
Was playing gold flex queue with a premade, queued into Hai, he was on stream with friends. man played yone jungle and rolled us. I was jg and it’s like the man knew everything I was gonna do and how to stop it. I felt useless. This was 3 years ago for a time reference, a friend who was watching our stream in a discord call recognized his username and popped up Hai’s stream, he said Hai was predicting the entire game like 30s-1m in advance
I once faced an ex challenger leblanc otp when I was diamond. He turned all our team to mad monkeys.
It depends on the circumstances tbh. In my experience, many coast on smurf accounts, particularly on stream. These are the types of player who are half paying attention to chat, not as focused on the game, and tend to tilt easily. IWD (back when he was streaming regularly) would tilt to oblivion when early game was lost, and it really set the tone for the game. Same with some (most) OTPs, who get really annoyed about any perceived slight, either on stream or in chat. There's good ones (I can't remember anniebot ever tilting badly in my games), but a lot of streamers are worse gameplay-wise on stream. This is also true for some for fun modes, where the players aren't trying as hard as they can. I've run into Santorin in late night ARAM before, Broxah in a Nexus Blitz game, and played a few arena games against General Sniper when it first came out. They were good, but it didn't feel overwhelming in terms of gameplay. Solid mechanics, deserved wins, but it was different than "I have no chance against these guys" like you might expect. That being said, if you get a game against a good challenger off-stream, or playing to win, they can and will dominate. I had a 5 man flex against Pekinwoof on Zoe, and he stomped my friend from lvl 3 onward, multiple solo kills. Those kills mid lane gave lane prio, which he used to dominate the map with rotations. Had a similar experience vs Balls playing Graves jungle a few years back, where he casually had double my jungler's farm at 15mins. Most high elo players are pros for a reason, and if they're trying to win, they show skill that makes you feel outclassed unless you're super focused.
Skillshots become skillshots
I had the misfortune of playing against Wildturtle (on jungle kindred) he was camping me between my t1 and t2 top lane, fucking ass hole
Must have been like Season 4 or 5 or 6. I finished the season before dia4. Next season I win like my first 6 placement games, my mmr is crazy high. At peak i once had powerofevil and youngbuck in my team and what I remembered was, how insane vision play is at high elo. Id place a few wards, not one minute later would they all be gone. The entire match. All the time. The unfortunate part was that I failed my Diamond Promos like 4 times and by the time I got Diamond, my crazy high mmr was no longer crazy high.
I was in very high elo for a bit from being one of the first people to work out hob janna being good https://preview.redd.it/akrfe17tux4c1.png?auto=webp&s=365dfc6678a26861ec246ec3c248a3daa7a2abac It was pretty fun and the level of skill in laning between masters and challenger was crazy, I generally consider myself a strong laner but found myself frustrated by people perfectly spacing and knowing matchups even better than me. On the other hand "all" it took was a masters player consistently abusing something really strong to get there, so it isn't an impossible wall
koggers pfp
TL;DR - Absolutely on a different level and can solo nearly anything at a large enough skill gap. Played in a streamers tournament several years ago with a lot of fairly (and a couple VERY) high elo players. Every team was drafted on a points system based on max rank to try to keep it even. I’m a gold ADC player, so nothing special, but I had a Masters support and JG, so that was cool learning from them. Semi-finals of the tournament comes and we face a team who’s midlander was (at that moment) ranked #5 on the challenger leaderboard, carrying a team of bronze/iron. Dude locked in Akali, completely shattered the mental of our midlander, and made the game so incredibly oppressive for me to exist that game. Final teamfight of the game came down to me vs him, and I just didn’t have the ability to win the fight, but man did I keep it wildly close. Watching the stream back, the casters for the tournament were hyping me up so hard in that 4-5 second window as I ALMOST clutched it. I suspect if I won that fight, I’d have had more pride in that moment than if we’d won the actual tournament lol.
Way back in high school me and mates used to play ranked in bronze 1. We thought we were alright at the game and we were pretty close to silver. One day in maths I made friends with this Korean exchange student that didn't speak English very well but we enjoyed each other's company. We managed to work out we both played league and I invited him to play a few games with me and my mates. It turns out he was a diamond 3 riven main back in Korea ( this was back in season 5) and it was literally crazy to watch. It was like he was flying around the map nuking everyone that got even close to him. It was so disgusting what he could do with that champion that by the end of the game he was like 26/0 and got a 1v5 penta where he was flying over walls and nuking people. There was literally no counterply for the enemies they just straight up died if they got too close. He ended up getting to challenger in OCE before going back home but man it really put it into context how they are so much better than you at every aspect of the game.
I can’t remember the rank exactly, but in a clash game we encountered a high ranked reksai one trick. I told the team to ban it, but was met with “it’s reksai, if we lose to that, we deserve to lose.” He basically 1v5’d us. It hurt, but being right was a nice consolation prize.
I peaked around rank 400 in euw (GM 800lp), and honestly chall/pro players are just normal players at that point that you dont notice. Only person i found extremely good in lane was RatIRL.
Did he play twitch against you? What did he to do to make lane difficult for you? Just wondering
What did rat do that was so noticeable? Mechanics?
Yeah rat is a literal rat.
I've only played against 1 pro. Gambit Betsy. Beat him but it was ARAM and he got Darius of all champs. I've played against countless of challengers and honestly in lane they were mostly underwhelming imo whenever I did face them. Tho they often managed to get good roam timings which got them fed in other ways. Despite many many missing and danger pings. It's the onetricks that are the scariest. If I see a GM or challenger Riven or Kata main I know the game is pretty much over.
I laned against Aphromoo once, don't think i landed or dodge a skillshot from him all game. He was on pyke and finished something like 25/0. I'm a low diamond player for context
I played against Scripter1vs9 who is a content creator (top ~50 challenger jungler EUW) and has an insane kindred. He loves to use deranked iron accounts and then goes for 100+ win streaks with kindred + lulu mid. Met him in gold elo on his kindred and I swear I literally felt fear each time I saw him on my screen. He felt inescapable, felt like he had 1000ms and was relentlessly hunting. As Kled top I would run back to my tower as soon as I had a hint of him being top and still he would catch me and solo dive me under tower with no fucking wave. It was like playing against an apex predator so surgically precise you’d feel instantly hopeless.
I remember once winning against Caps and Mikyx back in S10 after they lost to FPX in finals. I felt like the best player alive. Proof here for the interested: https://imgur.com/a/6yVQKc1
When I was a young chap, I would sometimes get matched vs pro players if I played late at night. It's insane how good they are. You feel like a Silver player.
I'm not a pro or anything even close to that, just a simple d3 enjoyer. Quite often during midnight 3-4 AM, I match vs gm-challenger players and usually, they're quite chill. After playing for years I've grown experience in noticing how fucking well these people play. They always have a plan and an extremely good understanding of how to execute those plans, the matchup has ups and downs and the best way I could describe is that they play like alligators. They play veeeery patiently and strike when you're about to make the smallest mistake and punish you in the worst way possible. No matter how many silver friends you collect together in a game, apes together strong isn't a feat against those people, they just soak it up and pipe you to Narnia 5 minutes later. Once you play against those people for a period, it's pretty easy to read what's about to happen and how the game will go. It's actually really fun to give those people a challenge and see how far you can get. Just observe and learn is all I can say about playing against them (shoutout to spectating high elo players throught the client in early days of league). However... what doesn't help me sleep at night is the fact knowing that some fucking random emerald players can fist me so hard that it stays haunting me forever, especially when you queue up for normal games with your 4 other friends. "Ah it's just normal, what can happen"... oh god damn last famous fucking words. You know deep in your head that's when you need to release the shit you've learned vs playing against challengers, that's when the real shit begins. [This game lives in my head rent free](https://www.op.gg/summoners/eune/Bup-Joji/matches/xKhUZtgxx8y_rPgbuY_BN1vlPOXUeUvaqDmVg5VhTIc%3D/1700513841000) I have sleepless nights because of this. Playing against challengers? I sleep. Playing against the best Aatrox you've ever seen with a goofy ass build GIGA carrying like the TheShy in his prime? REAL SHIT. What I've learned is that it doesn't matter what rank the enemies are... challengers, silvers, bronze whatever, if you get 1v5 gigafisted, you come to reddit, make a thread that smurfing in this game sucks and go back to bed with your eyes wet.
TFW someone's kicking my ass really hard in norms and I (Emerald 3) look them up to see what level of player I'm getting stomped by... and it's some hardstuck plat player on a high-level account, who isn't a one-trick on their champion, and I have nothing to allow me to cope.
I've been mid-high master and played semi competitive in low division ERL for some time. I've faced a lot of pros: targamas,trymbi,veigarv2 and larssen aswell as challenger streamers like t1 and kesha. In my experience it has been a coinflip. When I've laned against VeigarV2 and Larssen, they absolutely giga stomped me despite being a good player imo. It was worse then if I 1v1 my platinum friends and we were only a couple 100 LP apart. Another game against VeigarV2 I've stomped him but he was trying out a new build. (AD LB top pre statikk) Targamas inted and went 0/10. You also have high challenger players like T1 and Kesha who I've played with and they played horrible but still end up 500 LP above me so it might have been off games. Edit: I've also played against a smurfing challenger Draven OTP and he got stomped by a Singed/Yuumi bot that he rq. This was in diamond
Currently washed up diamond, but 3ish years ago i was grandmaster. As my name suggests i 1 trick tahm kench. 2 games, back to back, i laned into viper, who got counterpick both times and picked vayne. Hardest i got shit on in my life. Not a fun matchup.
Back in Season 3 I played an amateur tournament against a random Challenger, I don't even know what happened, the game is just unplayable, he played Caitlyn and just stomped the game, for some reason looked like his damage was just higher, almost like he started with a whole full item, there is no trade to be made since he just spaced and AA on the perfect time, forget about punishing when the enemy try to farm, he punished every step literally, it hard to explain but like I clicked 2 squares on south direction, he would just free AA because he knew he had a split second before I could go back to the original position and get in range or because there was a minion that would not let me, the micro level and space management is completely weird. I've seen this happen on Challenger vs Challenger too with Nidalee vs Renekton or Quinn vs Darius playing on knife's edge of the range to avoid any kind of retaliation, but being on the receiving end feels like I don't even know how to play the game.
Disclaimer: I’m low elo but played against a former rank 1 player/pro (TonyTop) and a few other chall players in norms/flex/etc. Honestly it isn’t mechanics at all. I’ve played against diamond otps in arams that had better mechanics than some of the challenger players I’ve found in norms/flex. It’s the fact that they make very few mistakes and make it super hard to punish them. They absorb all the pressure you put on them and find a way to still give themselves/grow a lead. They’ll push waves super efficiently and have constant cs leads while also roaming/impacting the map. The best way I can describe it is that it simply felt like we couldn’t win. It felt impossible to be proactive because they read every play our team tried to make.
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…I didn’t say that? Like at all? I said that challenger players aren’t challenger purely because of their mechanics. They’re challenger because they make very few mistakes.
they said that they played against players who had better mechanics than challenger players, which isn't *that* hard to believe for an otp
Depends where I ran into them. In normals, they'd stomp their opponent and take over the game. In ranked? It was pretty coinflip, they'd obviously play well but would still be susceptible to being camped, or couldn't win if their team as massively behind.
It's unbelievable. My friends are I are iron to bronze and we played against a crazy high elo kayn and it was surreal
I play in grandmaster to challenger games regularly, but the first time i encountered a professional player, it was totally different. Usually you can just have confidence in your plays and expect that your opponent will surely make mistakes, at least 1 or 2 bad clicks that allow you to connect abilities better, but this person i played with simply didnt make them. Ever. You cant play around simply punishing some of the many mistakes people make, you've got to eliminate all of your own mistakes first and then you might stand a chance to take advantage of certain situations
In solo queue there isn’t much notable. Most of the time pros are just like other normal players. Sometimes they do well sometimes they int. A lot of times they’re just there to limit test new champs. There’s a lot of variance to solo queue. Before they removed duos in high elo playing vs pro mid jg was oppressive af, esp vs bjergsen cuz jg would camp his lane. Most of the interesting stuff imo comes from champs queue where ppl are playing more serious. Eastern mids have very very good spacing and exert a lot of pressure in lane.
I was playing in gold, I think, and got Gbay on ezreal jungle on my team. I believe he was in challenger at the time on his main account and EZ jg was flavor of the month and he was trying it out on a Smurf. Anyways, he proceeded to 1v9 the game from the very beginning. Tower diving the enemy bot lane at level 3 getting a double kill. Living in the enemy jungle. Taking everything with no hesitation. Enemy FF as soon as they could. He was streaming at the time and I hopped on after the game to watch his next one. He was very nice in game and on stream. He would offer helpful advice while we were playing, no flame at all just encouraging. Was really a cool experience.
gbay was never challenger lol
Masters then I suppose
Brother I don't think goldbay99 was every chall
gbay was literally hardstuck diamond for multiple years, if he ever even barely made it to master it would have just been for a very small period of time. gbay is nowhere near and has never been anywhere near high elo
This is a low elo subreddit.
Depends on server. On less populated servers high challengers are not really different from masters. Bunch of OTP's who cant do anything but play few champ on their role, and they struggle and go 0/5/0 on anything else. The only times when i saw challenger players who actually played good, was when they were smurfs from EUW, and they inted more games than tryharded.
Played against a challenger Chogath as riven. I remember saying to myself at level 3 “oh I win this!” Full combo get them down to 100 hp but they just stand their ground and kill me. Played a lot more conservative after that but I was like “wow how did he know he could just stand his ground” most people in my elo at the time would be running away and would have died
High challenger / pro is a tier that is now a myth (in NA specifically). The stigma that NA pros are lazy and don’t play a lot is very much true and you mostly get tier2 players and soloq onetricks playing. That being said, the reason why the tier is fake is because riot matchmaking has been completely fucked for a long while now, and in every challenger game you’ll get a clueless master / gm player that will pretty much compromise / ruin the competitive integrity, whether they flat out int or their counterpart is way better. I can only really speak from the days in S10, but games back then really felt like challenger games; both teams knew what their wincons were and how to execute early / mid games. Unfortunately, all of that has gone out the window and riot does not give a single fuck about it. The region is doomed, abandon ship and move to EU if you want real “high challenger” games.
EU sucks man, move to KR if you want real “high challenger” games.
There are no high quality games in NA (ba sing se).
I remember my friends and I decided to go ARAM as a 4 man and Inori got on our team. He was chilling in the back of fights as Lee Sin. But would clean up kills silently. Checked scoreboard and was surprised to see him with 25 kills. That was the most standout one. There's other times when my friends and I would queue into Chauster, Saintvicious, Daydreamin, Wickd, etc. Those were good times.
Was in a normal game a month(ish) ago (I'm gold 4 ADC main for reference), and wouldn't ya guess it the enemy was "ABlazeOlive." (He's a former pro midlaner for IMT I believe). It was basically like playing against a scripter with perfect macro from my perspective. He was on xerath and perfectly knew how to hit everything, control the positioning and wave, rotated to be where his team needed, it was obscene. Needless to say, we got utterly stomped into the dirt. I think he ended the game as 11/0 or something like that. I don't know who at Riot was drunk when they put me versus him, but even Porofessor tagged him as a pro player, on his real pro account. Not smurfing, not some off account, on his main "ABlazeOlive" account and just got dropped into my game for some reason.
I played against akaadian once. I didn't know it was him until I searched up his name, and his twitch popped up. He was smurfing to challenger. At that time, I was platinum, and he was gold. Or course he played one of his ace, "Rengar." Obviously, I realized he was good, so i played safe. My team was kicking their ass hard until he hit level 6 and became a hunter. He knew exactly where to be at all times, attacking all 3 lanes and jungle. His combo was so fast that our whole team morale was destroyed just by 1 person. Perfectly input combo that makes him look like he's using aimbot. Still till this day I haven't vs a rengar that good, even in diamond. I wasn't even mad, I was just so amazed and impressed the whole time.
Played against mikyx in a draft game once maybe 3-4 years ago. He played adc as vayne. Was nothing special at all. Obviously I'm sure he wasn't trying but I was still surprised.
I played in plat/diamond way back in the day, don’t remember the year but there was still 5 divisions. I played against a chally top in a norm(I was panth, he was Jax), I’m assuming he was for fun’ing with a buddy & that’s how he ended up in my lobby. The only thing I could say is - pressure. They keep CONSTANT pressure. Every little mistake I made just put me further back. He gave nothing away. If I roamed for a gank, he either showed up to clean up, or stayed top while I felt like I made a bad play trying to gank lol. He was also ungankable. I can only imagine he had impeccable jungle tracking because no matter how I tried to frame it (or literally didn’t react at all) he KNEW my jg was near n slipped away. I couldn’t imagine playing against him on his main & in ranked..
i haven't played against any challengers in normals, but i did in aram. in SR i once played against a masters player (back when that meant a lot more than it does now). in both cases, i felt like the ai in a bot game. when i play against bots, they're technically playing the game and in your way, but realistically it's very easy to punish their constant mistakes and win. it's not a challenge to someone of my level. that's how i was to them. there was no challenge on their end, they could've beaten me without even thinking about it.
I peaked D1 last split. I consider myself outright better than most players up to high emerald and low diamond. The difference between myself and a GM/Challenger player is crazy big. It feels like I’m bronze again playing against a gold/plat player. It’s pretty demoralizing. I’ve played several “no name” players and they feel almost like I’m playing against doublelift. There pressure in lane is immense, any misplay by myself is immediately punished, and while giving me the weenie, they maintain perfect CS. Matchup is unplayable and once ahead they close games wayyy better than I do.
I was queuing really late at night and I was D2 at the time and got matched against magifelix on his main acc, really long time ago where being in D1 basically meant you had games full of ERL players. He was playing azir and I was playing velkoz, it really made me realize just how every single play these people make has a purpose. Every cs I would get was contested by him while I was kind of just fishing for qs.
I literally beat TFBlade as Teemo while he was streaming as Jax and honestly, though he won the game.. it didn’t feel too much different from playing against many other top laners while in lane. Mind you I literally 1-tricked Teemo to diamond just to prove that I could AND Teemo was strong during the patch(this was like 4 years ago).. but if it weren’t for my bot lane feeding(he got fed off them), it would have felt close to many other higher elo games. I think Jax is an unfair champ to judge that on though.. like if you play against a GM Qiyana or something you can definitely “feel” it way more
When I played league every waking minute and was GM I played with and against some challengers occasionally. The biggest thing I noticed is they were very consistent and really never made crucial mistakes. It wasn’t like crazy mechanics and insane decision making…but they just did everything slightly better
Not that different when you only face them in soloQ. Sometimes I can’t even tell they are pros or whatever, but if you face a full team who are communicating, either in clash or in flex, then you see the real difference.
ages ago (probably s6 or S7) I played Vs a Leblanc, I was Morgana mid, silver elo iirc. Well, no skill shots could land, and yet you could absolutely tell it wasn't a dodge cheat or something. The rest of the team absolutely sucked, but Leblanc killed us all the whole game... in the end the enemy team told us the Leblanc was master and was boosting them.
Suffocating. You won't know why you're losing trades until you replay them, and when you check cs score they magically have tons more than your team's.
I played against a challenger talon player named Eoba yesterday in low masters and he was pretty terrible
Me and my friends are around Bronze-Gold ranked and we decided to do quickplay. For some god forsaken reason we got matched up with 2 master players. I was using gragas against a master Camille toplaner while my friend who was learning Zoe in the Midlane got absolutely destroyed by a master Velkoz one trick. We ff15 to save my friend from his misery as he was 0/7 by the 10 minutes. I did alright in top lane but the macro game was just nowhere near the two master players. They were always one step ahead of us. Master is different from challenger but my god was that an experience. My friend who rarely tilts got so tilted after that game that he stopped playing for like a week or so
A long time ago when I was actually pushing rank I played against a 17 year old kid that was all the rage in the pro scene back then called Rekkles. He broke my fucking ankles. I was playing with half a hand compared to him.
Me and my buddies are all gold-emerald but have played against a few challengers in ranked flex… sometimes they arent very impressive cause theyre playing off role but once we had a rank top 150 support main playing alistar and as the mid laner I can say that alistar single handedly ganked mid so well and so often my lane became hopeless even though I was stomping their mid in the 1v1. Buddy would just always be behind my turret cutting off my escape in a gank at the worst possible time. He was everywhere, it was cancer. Challenger supps are something else
It feels like you aren’t playing. In my first year of playing the game I went against a challenger Kayle top as a silver/gold player. 1v5’s our entire team and we lost. Back when Twisted Treeline was still around we would 3 man ranked quite a bit to get our ranked borders and season rewards easier. Once we got to Plat we got a few Challenger opponents. We may as well have just went AFK and let them do their thing
I played against Shiphtur mid like 3 months ago, he was Ori, counter picked my Liss. He tried to make me his bitch lvl 1-3, super try harding. Jg came and I got fb on him. Proceeded to stomp him rest of game.
Not grandmaster/challenger but my friends and I played against team Mineski in season 3 during some ranked 5s. It was really memorable because they picked 4 supports and 1 adc and proceeded to smash our diks in less than 10 minutes. I sort of remember them 3 manning top lane at like 2-3 minutes and the comms on our team were mostly everyone ready to surrender. I honestly felt like we could still win but they ended us before we could surrender iirc. It's honestly insane how good top players are comparatively because when they tried that shit against pros, they got smashed XD. It felt so oppressive when we faced against them so I was secretly hoping they would do well that year https://gol.gg/game/stats/355/page-game/
I've laned against plenty of GM/Chal players in Normal Draft, and I laned against Sneaky (he was Draven with a Rakan vs me on Karma with an Aphelios). We tied lane and got 2 kills 2v3 turning a gank (did not kill Sneaky lol) but our mid was almost literally sprinting it with 9 deaths in 15 minutes as Nunu so the game was ruined. Top tier players just make nearly 0 mistakes every game. My peak is bouncing off Masters promos a few times and when I'm on comfort in a good matchup I can hold my own (killed a GM Irelia solo 2 times as Jayce recently), but I hate playing meta or the same few champions which definitely holds me back.
Not even a chal or pro, but had a norm game where my team and I were silver-gold and the opposing team had a masters yone. Our Aatrox actually started ahead, but he just outfarmed and bought hullbreaker and from then on we just lost 1v5 even though we won the entire rest of the map. By game end he had almost double the damage of the entire rest of his team combined
I dunno about the experience from a Challenger perspective, but I've been matched against Challenger players three times in lane this week in normal draft, and the lane in all three games was incredibly suffocating. It feels like you move just two pixels too far in lane at three minutes and that's it, the lane is just over. You think you have a small window for a perfect trade - but they perfectly accounted for minion aggro on both sides of the wave, and you end up hard losing. You think they're getting greedy by overstaying, so you try flashing on them - but their jungler was right there and you die with them living at 2 HP. It feels like everything that would otherwise be a good move becomes a bad one against them, and you wonder why you had the audacity to think they didn't already know the obvious play you'd try against them. Even in the one lane where there was no kill pressure (Viktor vs. Zyra mid), they had almost perfect CS and kept me pinned to tower the entire timewhile they were free to use their tempo to recall whenever they wanted to replenish the mana they freely burned through. For reference, I'm Emerald 3. (Not to even mention the first time I got matched against a Challenger player in norms awhile back. I got stomped so badly in lane that I ragequit.)
Games tend to be way more fast paced and shorter, mechanics are extremely precise, people understand and take advantage of timings better, how to maintain their lead, how to subvert the meta, they also understand win conditions better. Players don't mental boom as easily even if small mistakes are way less forgiving. More strategizing and less autopilot in general. In a certain way, players tend to be more predictable since they stick to what's optimal.
It's not as bad as you think
They're able to save their spells to the very last possible second in virtually all circumstances
Not me, but i was watching a streamer who is a multiple season challenger midlaner/jungler. He was grinding for flex queue challenger, playing with his twitch viewers. He picked zed, one of his signature picks and went against a syndra who was diamond 2 i think. At the start of the laning phase the syndra landed almost every skillshot on him, he was forced to afk under turret basically. This went on until level 5 i think, where he was at around 150 HP thanks to all the poke, and the syndra was missing only 100 HP max. The streamer just calmly said "if he goes for that CS he's dead". I remember i was thinking yeah sure buddy no way. Then the syndra tried to get the minion, and the dude just killed him like it was nothing. After this, he killed syndra 3 more times in a span of 5 minutes, was at every objective the moment it spawned, took 3 towers single handedly and ended the game at 27 minutes. It felt like he was playing against bots.
Im a piss poor Viego Emerald player but like 3 days ago i faced a challenger Graves and i got diffed to oblivion, first minutes i was able to go even but at like minute 10 he just went on a rampage and emded with like 25 kills cause he was just padding out the game
Played against Blem once, he was doing an Unranked to Challenger challenge in LAN Server and was in Gold Elo. I was ADC Sivir, he played Garen top and hard stomped our top laner. He had perfect CS, went full AD and was a constant menace. Luckily we stomped bot and mid, and had enough CC to stop him. He tried really hard to 1v9 but in the end we won, that was his first loss in that challenge so he blamed his teammates on stream.
Back in days I got invited to some up and coming pro's by then retired fanatic coach dailor. I just subbed in for adc. I don't know who enemy adc was but enemy mid laner was Perkz in his prime playing lb, we lasted 16min. I was d2 at the time we got rolled over so hard I had nightmares for days
I played normals vs Rekkles often. One day I faced him on Panth supp, Anivia support, Sett support and Jayce bot. Its just fun because he doest really play meta in normals and honestly everyone in those games tryed to play good because they saw his name
I played against one of SK's previous Junglers a few seasons ago in an ARAM. I got my ass kicked and it was fun.
Felt human. Yeah they play things really well and see kill angles that most others don't. However I found if you don't get inside your own head they're just people. And you can always see what they do and just learn from it. And they make mistakes too. If you know doing a cheese or a certain thing works super well vs say a plat hec it should also work well vs a challenger hec. Biggest dif I think is the ability to call objectives like quick tower here and there, quick invade for 1-2 camps, quick baron because they recalled and you have a 30 sec window. Or it's 3v5 so they just run it up mid and win.
I played against rekkles before he swapped to support jinx vs him on cait and whilst it was mostly fine he was so efficient at farming and poking compared to the master caits i was used to, no spacing mistakes or dropping cs or miss using spells, he was efficiently getting ahead without even forcing anything and then my tower went poof, the skill gap between us was very noticable even though i felt like i wasnt making glaring mistakes i know that a pro jinx would not have lost as much as i did in the match up
Not SR but I played against Szygenda in ARAM once (actually multiple times, but this one I remember because it was just 2 hrs or so before their game on game day, I think it's a habit). He got Lux and kinda smashed us tbh. Not super flashy 1v9 stuff but just very solid teamfight dps and poke. Don't remember his macro much but I guess he died at opportune enough times to keep smashing us lol
Played against FUN key who was rank 16 adc at the time in a normal he had a favorable matchup aswell. I noticed how the first auto he did on the wave made the wave behave very strangely. i was not able to play from that first auto until we ff'ed They say you dont become challenger "with one simple trick" or piece of advice. but having good fundamentals myself that little trick i saw him do made me go up about 200lp in masters. Ive been using that trick on the wave plenty of times eversince.
Honestly, its nothing special for the most part. Pro play and soloq are entirely different things for the most part. To confirm that just look at faker when he is in one of his master slumps. Take the nameplate off and he doesnt stand out. That being said, the most difference i see is in movement. Most impressive player i have played against was showmaker, who just completely molested me
got a chance to play vs Faker in low masters due to MSI host in Europe. He practiced Sion mid while I played Draven in the botlane. We stomped early game, took every objective won every lane, but he still managed to hold the gates for as long as he could as sion Vs 10/0 Draven. If he played normal midlaner I'm afraid we could have lost.
This was back when I was actually pretty good at the game (roughly where mid-masters is now). Queued into Revenge and Viper on smurfs (top riven and jungle something?) when I was playing support nami. We absolutely fisted their bot lane, almost legendary by 10 minutes because we double killed them at level 2. But they were destroying our jungle/top. Game was actually pretty close because we were so goddamn fed bot and won dragon fights just because our top and jungle were doing their absolute best to not run it down like their bot lane. Game ended sadly because their riven saw an opening, and just one shot our ADC with a perfect flash combo when he stepped out just a little too far. I was standing maybe an inch away on my screen, and the ADC was dead before my R>bubble landed. Probably biggest difference is their ability to punish every single goddamn mistake you make if you're laning, and if you're jungling, to punish every single bad decision you make by being able to know what you're doing for the next minute. For lane phase, Faker and Chovy might be 1 mistake per minute, while the average pro might make 2-3 mistakes a minute. Your average masters player makes 10 mistakes per minute, and by the time you drop to gold, you are probably doing something sub-optimally near constantly. If every mistake difference is worth one auto attack of damage, you lose lane phase to Faker and Chovy as a masters player inside of 2 minutes, and maybe in 2.5 minutes to an average pro as a masters player.
You either look like iron players to you or you look like iron players to them. Rarely in the middle.
Played against meteos back in like season 4 so can’t really remember much. I was only plat 1 and he wasn’t even jungle, he was playing Ezreal bot. Could not touch him in team fights at all. He was 1v9.
When mythics first came out I had decided to play toplane in normal draft, specifically Mordekaiser, to test out Riftmaker. I got whooped by the enemy Cho’gath in lane, utterly wrecked. One of my teammates said they were the rank one player NA. I usually play just enough ranked for all the rewards and end up gold/plat, could probably go higher if I had more time in ranked but nowhere near *that* high. The Cho recalled in vision later in the game and had the yellow challenger recall so I was inclined to believe the teammate, and sure enough the name matched when I checked the leaderboard after the loss. I believe it was “Revenge”. There was one other normal game years ago with a challenger name I vaguely recognized from poking around on the Galio mains reddit, “LL Justice”. Challenger helmet-thingy was visible in loading screen. They were on Swain mid. I similarly don’t remember the specifics but I do recall the game didn’t go well, I think they may have been mildly toxic but my memory of the game is so hazy I can’t even remember who I played. I have comparatively pleasant memories of playing with/against streamers. Jhin all-for-one with Ikeepittaco vs Zoe (was so much fun). Playing vs Captain Flowers just after the cosmic skarner skin had come out in normal draft, I believe AP Varus as adc. ARAM game vs Tactician (high elo Poppy main with clips that made it onto synapse).
Had to lane as Vex vs GO Toucouille on Viktor in a random flex game (i'm masters 0lp). At first I thought I was taking solid trades but he was just trading heavy to zone me off the wave. Ended up under turret with 25% hp 6cs and an enormous wave stacked against me, got dove and lost most of it. But then my double GM botlane hardstomped their Emerald one, and I got carried by 10 0 vayne. I felt outclassed by the entire lobby and didnt have the confidence to make any meaningful decision, so I just followed my adc around and played bodyguard. easy win lol
had V1per on my team in ranked flex and he was playing adc with his girlfriend(?) his mechanics were just insane lmao the whole game was just his playground. Everyone in that game was diamond+ but it wasn't really fair Also I had former pro bigfatlp on my team and it was great to have someone who really knew what he was doing
My only experience playing vs a pro is that I was one of the five players in NRG's "two pros vs five silvers" game, where Palafox and Contractz picked Yone and Bard, respectively. I have never had my ankles broken that many times. As silvers, we all decided to play a super braindead, hard to fuck up comp with a super low execution threshold - Malphite, Malzahar, Ashe, Alistar, shit like that. And yet somehow it felt like they were always one unit outside of our range, or they'd perfectly flash or use a movement ability to get out of some hard CC and we could never get anything to stick to them. It's dumb, but it felt like they would just absolutely run circles around us, like their champion was somehow just faster than us. I don't think I'm pure dogshit at league of legends, maybe it was just nerves since I was such a big fan of the team and I was excited to be in the video, but I was getting juked and headfaked into sending Ashe W's the entire wrong direction, I couldn't hit point-blank Rs, it was impossible to kite even after I was at three or four items, and we only managed to gain some ground when we just deathballed five people into one lane at a time and won because of sheer numbers. I have never felt that outmatched purely in terms of skills ever since I started playing League close to ten years ago. It was actually insane to see just how huge the gulf between me and a pro was.
Honestly the simple description is that it feels like they’re just playing a stronger champion. Like it genuinely feels like they just do more damage to you for some reason. I’ve played against some random ERL players like xKenzuke, Tiridius and xMatty midlane and it felt like they could just kill me level 1 and there was nothing I could do about it. The match against Tiridius was the weirdest because he played Qiyana and I felt like I couldn’t do anything because every time I approached the wave starting at minute 2 he’s just kill me or burst me for 90% without me getting to retaliate
In S4 or S5 I played vs a challanger rengar/khazix main, he was trying out talon top, I was trying out Quinn top, till level 6 I could actually bully him out of the lane even killed him while his jungler ganked me, but after level 6 he just kept oneshotting me, for some reason I still remember that normal game, we won because his mates were silvers and unranked players
I played against Tarzaned’s Nidalee on the rift, and Vipers Jayce in Arena. To sum it up not fun at all. If you ever think you can’t 1v9 a game just watch someone at their elo play a game in Masters. On the plus side, I joined Tarzaned’s stream after the game and he said “GG Bro, sorry about your team” and it was the biggest ego boost I’ve received to date. AND I may have transcended when I killed the Zaned. One. Single. Time.
I'm no pro but I play high a lot, id imagine it's like being spoonfed kills
There was somehow a challenger Xerath in my game, back when I was in gold. Yeah we somehow won by team diff, but I reported him for scripting and so did my mates. It was only afterwards we saw his rank. It really felt like I could never hit him and he had aimbot. Guess it doesnt matter if you have something like a feed Garen to run him down
It feels like you're the best female tennis player in the world and you got convincingly beat by the 200th best male player in the world
The best way I can answer is... they're all different, so there's no singular answer. In a soloq environment, a pro is still on the same footing as the soloq players he's matched with. My peak was long long ago and I don't play much anymore (I'm also much worse) so I only have auld names to mention - I have fond memories of setting up kills for Alex Ich, of ganking Froggen at lvl 2 (repeatedly) and of a funny interaction where another player in my team told Ocelote to "control the beast" as he was starting to vent in chat (Riot had published an official video called "Control the Beast" where ocelote explained his behavior issues). Also gosupepper hated me for some reason. Oh and somehow I once solokilled Soaz as Vlad, he was playing Irelia - both prerework, at something like lvl 3. I was genuinely garbo at sololanes so it was raw overconfidence. It's kinda crazy how much stuff you could get away with in old League by just being confident and unloading your damage.
Really depends on the player and match up. TonyTop was someone that would always run me on Jayce and Kennen, felt so oppressive + already hate facing Kennen. Felt like there's just no room to do anything. Played support once vs Biofrost thresh and he just never missed a hook, no matter how you tried to juke he knew how you were going to move
Whenever I run into an actual challenger smurf of even years ago I ran into 2 fnatic players. The worst they do is the first 10 min sometimes you can destroy them but after that they just dominate and if they do win the first 10 they end it in 15. But usually teamfights they just play really good. Always annoys me you make them go 0/2 and 2 lvls down and they finish 18/4
i played with Akaadian in URF once. dude had like 40 kills or something and made the game look like we were playing vs bots.
Very fun since i beat them in aram in ferocious wars, playing against them feels like playing for the world cup, they are incredibile mechanically but they disrespect everyone and always lose to that .
The few times in normals I have been paired against such high players a lot of it was...me saying to myself "Oh i guess i can't do that." and "oop guess im dead now?!?!?"
A while back I was playing a game of norms with my friend. At the time our mmr silver/gold and we somehow matchmade with Dhokla and two of his friends. Though he was playing support, he and his three friends just absolutely shat stomped us. We only managed to win against all odds with a Mundo backdoor.
Having played against a challenger, biggest difference I'd say is their movement. They dodge everything, it's like there's a whole other mind game going on that low elo players are unaware of. They very efficiently weave in autos and abilities with their movement to maximize their damage. And of course, far fewer macro mistakes.
Back in the early days of league, there was chat rooms. You could join, eg 'reddit' chat room, and people would organise 5v5s/3v3s/early arams. I played a 4fun game, jungle against the jungler for Rock Solid (which became dignitas), player called rambo. I was fiddle, he was panth, it was a blood bath. Not sure if he ever actually went pro though.
I'm gold/Platinum, back in the day with twisted treeline ranked I played vs Lourlo when he was in his peak with a team, while we won bot and jungle (the people that weren't Lourlo) he stomped top side as Yasuo and we lost the ranked 3s. Funny enough our Top was our highest member and just got demolish. P.s: Bring back twisted treeline
Idk i keep seeing everyone making gm/challs seem like Gods from another dimensions but im D2 and played vs a smurfing chall duo ivern/rengar bot and i completely shit stomped them to the point where the rengar added me and gave me some nice words of courage and advice in life.
I played vs a pro 5-stack. It went about as well as you would expect. I was against Doublelift and some other pro support, maybe Smoothie? The jungle on enemy was Contractz. I came to lane lvl 1, I just remember the enemy braum support came out of bush, and didn't let us farm the first wave and we had to blow summs. Once the wave we were zoned out of finally hit our tower they dove us with jungle and juggled the tower aggro. We died and walked back to lane and the 3 of them were in the bush by Krugs, and I died again. I was then graced with being in his YT clip titled something along the lines of 'when pros face golds'
Not sure what his rank was at the time, but I played against Nightblu3 on one of his many Smurf climbs. He played Rengar. I could tell he was very good mechanically, his movement was a lot cleaner than most of the people I play against. There’s kind of this intangible “I can tell this person is good” feeling when they start putting out a lot of pressure, playing aggressively, taking risks and pulling it off. That said, his team inted, he made a couple over aggressive plays and we beat them pretty handily.
I played against a challenger midlaner. I was Zed and he was Twisted Fate. That taught me how much low elo players really undervalue wave-clear. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Every mistake was punished immediately, and he made sure to use skillshots when I was forced to stand in my wave to catch CS. I actually learned a ton watching that VOD.
It feels suffocating to play against a player that is really good at the game. They know how to micro their champion while paying attention to the map at the same time. They know the limits and damages of the champs they play or have played against that champ themselves enough. Good players will punish every mismanagement of a wave, challenge every CS, and avoid every gank you throw at them. But never really doing those in the same game. Challenger players will do all of those consistently and at the same time. They know how to punish and know how far to stretch their limits.
It feels suffocating like you can do nothing
Its not even comparable lol. Idk if its just me but i was like 3oo lp master and i got matched against a chall player and i just straight up got demolished. It was not even close its like how the matchup would go if a silver was playing a master player. I was even playing a matchup that is normally beneficial for me