One of my favorite parts about playing games is when I play in large queues with my friends, enough to fill a whole team so we don’t have any random people. Every day my friends and I get on Discord and we play either Valorant, Overwatch, or other games we’ve been into recently. My group of friends on Discord is a mix of best friends from home and our online friends from Virginia! Funny story, my best friend met one of them on Omegle, and they were talking on Snapchat for a while before he invited us to their Discord because they wanted more people to play a “10 man” in Valorant. These are custom Valorant games in which each team consists of people you know.

When we first started talking to this new group of friends, we played a lot of 10 mans together. This was during the time when Valorant beta was released which was also during the beginning of Covid. The game was actually released in June, and during this summer before my senior year of high school was when I really got into games and started improving in Valorant. Ever since we got closer to these new friends, we made plans to meet multiple times and they came up to Philadelphia three separate times! These days were definitely some of the times of my life! 😀

Here’s a picture with all of the friends I’m playing with as I’m writing this! “bunnies” on the right was the friend I was talking about above. Unfortunately we lost the one game we played, but then we got another friend to replace one who left, and then we won!

Valorant is definitely game to queue with my friends in, followed by Overwatch. Less of my friends play Overwatch, so I usually only queue with one or two people in comp. However, a few times we got 12 people for a full custom game of Overwatch! An Overwatch game with all my friends was really fun, and we always want to keep doing them, but it’s really difficult to find that many people.

In addition to the information about hanging out with my large group of friends I mentioned, we’re actually having a LAN party on Dec 17! I’m traveling to Virginia for the weekend with my other friends from back home and we’re bringing our computers to all play together as a group in person during that weekend! I’m extremely excited, which is why it’s easier to get through this week of work and studying because I know I’ll be at a party with all my friends the following weekend! 😀

Um…yeah…

I went down an entire rank in literally a week. No clue how I managed to do that, I think it was because I just kept queuing into games with my friends and losing since I wasn’t taking it as seriously. I took this screenshot before I left for Thanksgiving vacation, and I came back and played a lot of games this week. I also lost my plat ranks in Overwatch for Tank and Support somehow, I really need to figure out what’s making me lose games because as of now I have literally no idea since I feel like I’m playing the same way.

I went overseas to Europe for Thanksgiving, so I’m also extremely jet-lagged and actually getting consistent sleep by actually starting to sleep at a normal time. In an attempt to get my rank back, I’ve been playing this whole week and I realized that my games seem a lot easier than they used to be in plat. Because of this, I think I can definitely get back to where I was, but it’ll probably take a while. This is definitely tempting to do, but I have to remember that it’s finals week soon and I need to study for my two exams and work on my other projects.

As of now, this is what my match history looks like this week after I got back. I think I’m able to climb back to plat but it’ll definitely take long because it’s a lot easier to lose than gain rank. I definitely threw my rank and I don’t think I realized how bad it was until I took a step back when I got back home…LOL

Writing this as I just finished a game, I got Gold 2! I’m closer to Plat 1 but still a long way to go…