User blog comment:Texas Snyper/Elo Hell and You: Part 2 - Skills That Pay the Bills/@comment-82.83.41.77-20110907192715

I've made the experience that at the ELO hell ranges people may be quite good at one or two of the skills you mentioned above, but really suck at the others. That's what creates much of the frustration and randomness. In one game map awareness might be less important as the enemy team stays in their lanes, laning goes on and on and on and then they surrender at 20, because your team had better farming. The next game your enemies run around and suddenly your whole team is srewed, because nobody seems to have map awareness and you keep dying to ganks. What I want to say is that one player with one set of skills can do totally different in different matches and therefore he may seem like ELO 1600 in one match and like ELO 800 in the next. That's why ELO hell seems to be so inconsistent, I guess. I think an important feature of higher ELO players is that their skills are more consistent - they do well with many different champions and roles and their understanding of the game doesn't only extend to warding or only to "the tank has to initiate", but to all this kind of stuff at once.

People who feel superior to other players at their ELO often are better at one of these skills and therefore feel like better players (e.g. "I'm warding and calling mias, the others are not therefore we loose"). What they don't see is that their understanding of other parts of the game is not as good, but they just don't feel this could be what lost them the game. Imagine player A jungling and warding all the time, but never ganking or ganking very poorly. He will blame his team for loosing their lanes and therefore loosing the game. Player B who actually is a bad farmer and overextends a lot will blame player A for not ganking. So both feel superior, but none of them really is. On higher ELO, this won't happen that much.