League of Legends: The Pros and Cons of Playing Ranked at the Start of Season 10

Pros

1. You get it out of the way.

A lot of players get nervous when they start doing their placements, putting a lot of emphasis on those first eight games. After all, don’t you want to win as many of the placement games as possible to get a good start to your climb? By playing those games the first day, you don’t have the opportunity to get in your own head and overthink these games.

2. You won’t feel left out.

All your friends are going to be online, playing and talking about their placements. Do you really want to be left out of the fun?

3. Doing it early gives you more time to climb.

The sad fact is that, unless you are far higher ranked than where you were initially placed, it’s going to take a lot of games to climb back to your proper elo. If you waste two or three weeks not playing, hoping to get a higher quality of games when you do play, that’s just two or three weeks you won’t have at the end of the season for the final push.

4. Everyone is going to be tryharding.

It’s the start of a new season, with a clean slate and a chance to recover from poor rankings. This means all your teammates are going to be very motivated, giving their all to help you win your games.

5. You’re likely to get a lot of bad players on the enemy team.

There’s that old saying in League of Legends, if you’re not a bad player there’s a better-than-not chance that the enemy team with get bad players (since there are four possible bad teammates you can have versus five possible bad enemies you can face). The beginning of the season is a great opportunity to take advantage of the chaos and beat up on some bad players you normally wouldn’t get the chance to face.

6. You’re probably going to avoid smurfs.

In those first few days of the season, high elo players are far more likely to be doing their placements on their main accounts rather than smurfs, to try and grind up as quickly as possible (they do this, by the way, because they know that there are a lot of wonky things that happen in the early season that can give them lots of free LP). For those of us mere mortals in the lower elos, that means there is very little chance that a Grandmaster is going to be in your games, beating up on you and your teammates.