2 stack versus endless 5 stacks

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I wanted to just ask if this is fairly standard these days. Everytime I queue up a game in a 2 stack, I inevitably get a 5-stack. Just checked, my last 20 games have been all 5-stack. I wanted to just ask if this is fairly standard these days. Everytime I queue up a game in a 2 stack, I inevitably get a 5-stack. Just checked, my last 20 games have been all 5-stack. I wanted to just ask if this is fairly standard these days. Everytime I queue up a game in a 2 stack, I inevitably get a 5-stack. Just checked, my last 20 games have been all 5-stack. I wanted to just ask if this is fairly standard these days. Everytime I queue up a game in a 2 stack, I inevitably get a 5-stack. Just checked, my last 20 games have been all 5-stack.

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I play in the SEA server, and only with my buddy. I used to be bouncing around high ancient years ago but more recently I could feel I was both getting worse personally and also not keeping up with the meta (general tactics and strategy, not just balance patches). I recalibrated last year and ended up legend 2. Since then…partially due to the 5-stack situation and maybe cuse I'm bad, I'm not archon 5. In reality it's probably even less i guess. I'm fine with it, I'm not as competitive anymore neither do I have the time. My friend is currently crusader 5, I'm less informed about his past rank history.

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What I'm not fine with is losing almost every game to better coordination and lately maybe even a few smurfs in my endless stream of 5 stack opponents. It feels especially bad to lose like this, you just feel like you can't really change anything. Working with solos or another 3 stack is just always going to be abit slower in response time lack of understanding of each other's intentions, worse pick synergy and not a small amount of egotistical kill-chasing (this is SEA afterall). That last bit is especially well exploited by 5 man teams. For those same 20 games, I've lost 18 of them, and not in a happy way.

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Frankly I don't mind if I become a herald potato. I've also tanked losing streaks before. This just feels different than before. It's less frustrating, more just tiring, losing in this style. Especially considering I don't play as much anymore, used to be daily years ago, now it's maybe twice a week. Just imagine facing this every few days, for the past half a year. Damn battlepass got my lizard brain to keep playing.

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And will it even get better as we drop even more ranks? Somehow I doubt it….admittedly it's anecdotal, but I feel like the games are getting harder, not easier, and that might have to do with the increasing number of "guardians" in these 5 stacks with 100% win rate on tinker or something as we fall in rank. Fewer "legit" 5 stacks at lower ranks? I don't know.

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Any 3 stack we end up with usually doesn't seem to pick or strategize around fighting 5 stacks, who almost 100% of the time go for full team timing pushes which force you to either let towers go for free or fight them into unfavorable conditions. Is it that these 3 stacks don't face 5 stacks every game like we do, or they just don't care? I don't know about that either, since all of these 5 stacks speak either exlcusively another language (again it's SEA afterall) or they only deign to use broken English to insult and denigrate us….usual fare. They never answer my question about this topic. What's their norm? 3 stack + 2 solos vs similar? For that matter what's the 5 stack norm. There seems to be a lot of them, I never take more than 2~3mins at most to queue.

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So what's everyone else's experiences?