CASE STUDY: Diagnosing a 2000 Games Hardstuck Emerald Player

What would you do if you were hard-stuck Emerald after playing 2,000 games in the last eight months and after getting coaching? Well, Ether from the Bot Lane Academy thought their best bet was to give us a call.

Now, the reason this piqued our interest is that this is what our League achievements channel looks like in the Bot Lane Academy, but this is what Ether's League graph looks like.

So why is he such an outlier? Why was he not able to climb while being a member of our Bot Lane Academy, and ultimately why is he hard-stuck? Today we're gonna take a look at his OP.gg, break down two of his VODs, and hopefully find out exactly what is holding him back and what he needs to change.

Charlie, where do we start?

All righty.

So to start with and to paint the picture here, we have to understand, like who is this person and, and why have we decided to do this case study?

Case studies are typically extreme examples we select.

Yeah, it's a bit of an odd one.

I would say comparatively to a lot of our other podcasts, which are typically about toxic individuals who have very ba- poor relationships with the game, who maybe don't align with our principles and philosophies here at the podcast.

This was an internal Bo- Bot Lane Academy member who actually reached out to me privately in DMs.

He started the conversation.

He said, "Look, Curtis, I know you guys have done case studies in the past.

I kind of think I'm a, I'm a good case study, you know, uh-

Candidate

... candidate."

Yeah.

"So you know what? I'm gonna volunteer.

Hands up.

Pick me." And he gave me a bit of context, right? Now this guy is a very extreme case.

He's in Emerald and that already spiked my interest.

Emerald is a very common plateau point.

There's a lot of people out there who struggle in the, in the Emerald rank, um, so I thought it'd be a good opportunity to deep dive into this rank.

Why is someone hard-stuck Emerald? How can that happen?

With 2,000 games.

Yeah.

We'll get into the OP.gg in a second, but before that, like so this player has been in the Bot Lane Academy, right? So Bot Lane Academy, for those who don't know, is one of our coaching academies.

So this is a player who has like committed to improving at the game.

They've played a lot.

They've played like 2,000 games this season as we'll get into.

They have been in the academy since April this year, so like four or five months of like proper dedicated work.

And as you guys saw at the start of this video, we, we get a lot of results in the Bot Lane Academy.

Yeah.

So this is an anomaly.

I think most people think that people climbing quick is the anomaly.

No.

In our case, the [laughs] someone-

Yeah

... being stuck for this many games and putting in this effort and being active is very anomalous.

Well, that was- that's actually a very important note.

If this was a random person who reached out to me in DMs who wasn't in the Bot Lane Academy, it's like, oh, fair enough.

Yeah, you're probably not really playing with a lot of attention.

Yes.

You don't have any direction.

But the fact that he has received coaching-

Yeah

... and is still stuck, that's rung alarm bells for me.

I'm thinking, I'm, I'm personally genuinely very curious what the hell is going wrong.

Yeah, 100%.

So let's jump into the OP.gg now and take a look at what we've got.