League of Legends General Discussion Thread

[Voldymort]

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[Deceptus]

snip

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Oh my God. Bottom right corner of my picture. Ulica Kartuska. Kartuska street. Kartuska? Karthus? Oh LORD, it's Karthus Street in Poland.

Omfg.

My anus is ready.

[spellman]

So my work e-mails have lit up with people discussing ELO Hell yet again.

I think the most important bit is where I mentioned Law of Large Numbers is such that you should settle into your proper ELO. Next remark was that they are stuck because they don't have the time to pull themselves out of the hell they find themselves in. Both time to play enough games and time to get good enough to pull themselves out of 12-yr-olds pissing at each other.

[v8mark]

I've played at a range of Elos now, from about 1000-1500. I really don't think there's a significant difference in attitude between different Elo groups. Difference in intelligence and game sense, for sure. But the raging is constant across all Elos.

On the Elo hell argument... you deserve your Elo, assuming you've reached a critical mass of games (usually about 100).

[sunrise089]

On the Elo hell argument... you deserve your Elo, assuming you've reached a critical mass of games (usually about 100).

Devil's advocate: I've seen ELO ranges of 300+ for several people. Explanation?

[Dantski]

Devil's advocate: I've seen ELO ranges of 300+ for several people. Explanation?

So many factors in every game.

1. Player skill changes over time.
2. Relative player skill changes over time, I'd argue a 1500 ELO player a year ago would be worse than a current 1500 ELO player.
3. Champion skill, everyone has a different level of skill with each champion.
4. Luck, sometimes you facecheck bushes which are unlikely to have enemies in and you die. Sometimes people fail flashes, sometimes you win a 50/50 smite for baron. There's plenty of luck.
5. Duo queueing, having a reliable partner who won't ragequit and is sensible makes a difference to regular soloqueue. Remember in soloqueue there are 9 other players in the game who could troll, 4 on your team, 5 on theirs. With duoqueue its 3 on your team and 5 on theirs still.
6. Patches change gameplay. Maybe someone who mained Orianna after she came out got to 1700 ELO, but after she got nerfed they never found another champion they can be as effective with.

That's only 6 and there's a lot more if you have the time to consider it.

[spellman]

A range of ELO isn't the problem and natural. I have 5-game losing streaks due to sheer luck. It's being "stuck" in a certain 1000-2000 point region and claiming it's because you keep getting nubtards that make you lose.

Also, Pro players tend to swing even further since they're playing at the tail ends of the normal distribution.

[v8mark]

Devil's advocate: I've seen ELO ranges of 300+ for several people. Explanation?

I can't really add to what Dantski's said, other than to say that in a system where you only contribute 20% of your team’s overall output, there’s going to be a lot of variance due to factors beyond your control. But the idea that a 1500 Elo player isn’t going to win 35 out of 50 games at 1100 Elo is silly.

I went down to 1034 Elo at my lowest point in Season 2. (I’m now 1441.) I think at least half of Dantski’s factors apply to me in this case. My biggest problem in my first 50 games (during which I went 20-30, and after which I was 1034 Elo) was that I was picking champions poorly. Because I only had a small pool of champs, I was picking Cho (for eg) in a team comp that wasn’t suited for it (maybe we already had a Galio, or other similar tanky AP). I also played a lot of Ashe, which is a poor idea at low Elo because people don’t realise how little damage she does at early levels. I also didn’t play support because I was of the mindset that “you can’t carry your way out of low Elo playing support”. (You can carry your way out of low Elo with support. If you want an illustration, look at my Soraka ranked statistics.) Champion selection is one of the most important parts of the game, and if you can’t play, say, 20 champs to a reasonably high level, you’re going to struggle sometimes in ranked.

I also think I had a lot of bad luck during my placement games. Strangely, I was 1407 at the end of Season 1, although I think this was actually above my skill level at the time because of good luck with placement games. As I said, there’s a lot of variance. I will certainly say, though, that the difference even between 1100 and 1400 Elo is really noticeable. Certain types of player exist at 1100 Elo that simply don’t exist at 1400 Elo (the exhaust/ignite support Jax, for example). CS across the board is higher because players are mechanically better, and the level of warding and map awareness is a lot higher.

There’s something about League of Legends that makes it very difficult for people to judge player skill. I think it’s simply because there are relatively few meaningful inputs from the player; there’s a relatively low mechanical skill cap. Once you’ve reached a certain level mechanically, 75% of being good at LoL is strategic, I think. Poor players are often poor players precisely *because* they don’t understand what is good play in this regard, which makes them less likely to recognise their own poor play.

(As an aside, I’m once again going to plug one of my favourite ‘tutor’ streamers -- along with Sulla, of course -- Rakalakalili’s YouTube lessons are really excellent. There’s a lot of good advice hidden in there. I think he’s done something like 30-40 lessons now, spanning a range of Elos from 600-1700. His YT channel is ‘RakalakaliliLoL’, and he doesn’t get nearly as many followers as he deserves…)

[Krill]

Any answer that includes luck does however mean that ELO is not down to just player skill, and implies that players can be at lower ratings than they perhaps deserve, thus ELO exists.

[v8mark]

But the Elo Hell argument isn't about some players being at a lower rating than they deserve at the moment. It's about them being unable to raise their Elo because they feel they're disproportionately affected by bad luck compared to other people.

Which, given the number of games such people have played and the probabilities involved, is really not much of an argument.