User blog comment:Texas Snyper/Elo Hell and You: Part 1 - The Impassable Barrier/@comment-3337222-20110904192016

ELO Hell doesn't statistically make sense to me. The reason being that the matchmaking system tries to give people games they can win 50% of the time. Simplistically, even if your ELO is very low, and your losses greatly outnumber your wins, you'll still win occasionally. If you've become good enough to get tougher opponents, the game will give you allies that are just as good as them and you ON AVERAGE. You won't ALWAYS have the worse players on YOUR team. So, if you actually have truly amazing LoL skills, they should slowly affect EVERY OTHER game more to the positive (occasionally you should win when your teammates are bad). In other words, you should, slowly but surely, win more games than you lose.

My guess is that the majority of people who complain about ELO hell are playing champs that aren't suited to being played outside of low ELO or highly coordinated teams (like Shaco). Not all champions are perfectly suited for every ELO range. Same thing goes for certain team strategies. Warding the map won't stop a team that's smartly pushing, plainly out in the open, all game long. Likewise, running around, being loners, won't help against a team that goes everywhere and does everything together. You have to look at the bigger picture and adjust on the fly, not just memorize certain mechanics and simplistically think using them will make you a pro. I honestly think the ELO Hell complainers just don't understand what's happening a lot of the time, and so they lash out at their allies over things that, while certainly smart for them to have been doing, aren't usually the primary reason they're losing.

I'm not amazing at the game myself (I'm in that 50/50 range), and we all have those really bad allies that cause us to lose when we otherwise wouldn't have (like the Taric I recently played with who got no health until level 11 and no real resistances until level 13 . . . by which point he was dramatically under leveled), but most of the time there are clear, team-wide mistakes being made, by both teams (often involving myself). And, no matter what, I always see things I could have done better to work with my team or micro my champ.

Biggest problems I see people (including myself and the enemy team) making regularly: 1. Deciding which of the following concerns is the biggest priority at any given moment (deciding what you can afford to lose in exchange for the most reasonable chance to win). 2. Blatant overextending. 3. Overextending beyond what basic map awareness would lead us to believe is wise. 4. Last hitting and efficient/safe farming. 5. Not coordinating positions properly for the most optimal defense and offense. 6. Redundancy of actions (people competing for jungle creeps or the same lane while the enemy is cross pushing). 7. Lack of sight wards. 8. Improper team fight initiations and targeting.

Somewhere in that list you can place basic micro skills (making your particular champion deadly/hard-to-kill and using their abilities to best further your team to the enemy nexus), but that placement is never exact, since it seems to vary in importance from one ELO to another. The reason is because these problems are not limited to JUST people in mid to low ELO. You'd be surprised how reckless and foolish people with great win/loss ratios can be when they're out of their chosen element. Often they got to where they are from being really good with some really complicated characters (like Akali and Irelia) and never learned or cared about the majority of the basics I just listed. Sure, higher ELOs will generally get 2, 3 and 4 right before relying on their raw skill, but the more a technique involves someone relying on their team, the more you'll see even highly ranked players screwing it up.