What it means to play a tank is quite apparently not all so self-evident to certain players. (Obviously I’m talking about the wonderful bronzies I’m stuck with for the time being.) A tank is not defined by its item set. You can have all the armor in the world, but if you don’t act like a tank you’ll be just an useless XP hog on your team.

It’s actually quite similar to the job of the support. You must make sure that the enemy team doesn’t kill your carries. Roughly put, the support’s job is that the enemy team can’t kill the carries, while the tank’s job is that they won’t.

It’s not news in any sense, but I managed to get out of bronze (again) a few weeks back. I ended up there in season 4 – I don’t know if I just screwed up my placements or I decayed down from silver not playing for half a year at all, but I had to work my way out again. It didn’t take as long as I feared it could (I have horrendous luck and always end up with terrible teams when I’m in series).

On a related note, I still had a few people on my friends list who (I guess) I added while I was fighting my way out of bronze in season 3. I’m well aware that I’m not a good player, but when I see people stuck in bronze 5 for years, that lack of any progress is amazing even in my eyes.