Low elo, some may refer to it as elo hell due to the fact feeders, afkers, and dumb plays are abundant. So let's explore this hellish place we call low elo, starting with the attitudes you encounter.

"Mid y u no call mia", "wow real jungle u never gank". You may come across these in your low elo escapades, and in my opinion this attitude is one of, if not the leading cause of lost games in low elo. It seems that a lot of the players in lower elo can't stay level headed.

The inability to keep a level head can cause them to become flustered, and when they get flustered they play worse. Playing worse can cause them to lose, or blame others (which causes you to lose 18% more games) for their lack of awareness, overextension, or lack of wards. This chain of events often spur arguements which in turn constitute bad play due to the fact they spend more time raging at eachother than focusing on the game.

The fix? Ignore it and play your game. I can't tell you how many times I've seen games be won or lost based just on attitudes, people need to either get along, or ignore the problem to keep calm and carry on.

"Mid or feed". Self entitlement on the champion select screen, another reason for lost games, catering to my point above, so many arguements start on this screen, generally, first, second, and third picks get what they want, while fourth/fifth pick fill in whatever is left.

In good ol' low elo though, most people argue general pick rules. Later picks often threaten to feed if they don't get what they want, more times than not people don't want to play support. The list of problems in this key part of any game goes on and on. That may or may not turn out into something like this:

So how does one combat this?

My advice: Learn every role and let people play what they're comfortable with. Either that or play 10000000s of games with 1 champion and get so good you never lose, ever. If you force the other people on your team into roles they aren't comfortable with or don't know how to play, it's only going to affect your team in a negative way, and is usually not worth the trouble.

Replicate this example in your mind: your team is doing baron, you're winning the game in terms of items / gold, meanwhile the enemy team has a 6 stacked cho'gath jungle and a fed graves. Cho flashes over to attempt to steal, messes up, graves and rest of their team flash over to teamfight, your team was in a great position, easily could've aced, but instead everyone but you focuses the cho'gath and gets taken down by graves. Low elo strikes again! Not a lot of people follow through and focus the right targets.

To get a whole team of players who do that is pretty great, and if you do get that you will usually win the game as long as the lanes don't get destroyed. How do you combat this? You explain to them beforehand what needs to happen, make sure the fight happens on your terms, and pray to god your team makes the right decision.

The list of low elo woes goes on for a very long time, I may make another article in the future on this subject, but for now I'm going to leave it at that. To sum everything up: keep calm and carry on. GLHF.