“Elo Hell” is a condition that exists when three conditions are met:
A rating is given based on team performance in a match, instead of individual performance.
You have minority influence on the outcome of the match.
You have no control over the other members of your team.
Condition 1 is obviously met; Condition 2 is mathematically provable to exist; Condition 3 is the default method of playing Ranked matches game.
Yes, you can partner with other players; however, this is inconsistent (other known players are not always available), does not sufficiently fix the problem (you would have to find 4 other players and partner with them every match in order to fix the condition), and is itself a flaw in the game (games with parties should be in thier own queue). I know Blizzard has stated that they see party games as the same as non-party games… but they are wrong.
Elo Hell is a real, proven condition. It is not a matter of perspective, it is a matter of mathematical fact. This is a game where you are assigned an individual qualitative rating, over which you only have marginal control.
So… I’m out. Until you fix this crap, you are not worth my time.
And since you’re not worth my time, you’re also not getting my money.
The core concept of “ELO Hell” is that you’d have to spend exorbitant amounts of time, effort, and patience to change your rank. If you have a lot of those, ELO Hell isn’t an issue. If you don’t, you get stuck.
To my knowledge, the only place “ELO Hell” really exists in HotS right now is in Bronze, where you have to win a ton more games than you would in, say, Plat to gain the same rank increase. They might have already fixed that though.
unfortunately they said it’ll be like that solos vs solos and parties vs parties but we got fooled… they just cover it up by showing you that you’re playing vs solos “meanwhile you’re playing vs a full party and they got communication” while you’re with 4 other solos and barely any communication. that’s the part i agree on and i find it pretty much unfair specially since they lied about it.
#2 isn’t true, because a GM like Fan, Chu8 or Danatan have immensely more impact on a Bronze or Silver game than the implied 10% (being 1 of the players in the match).
Their impact might be close to 80-90%, i.e. they are doing all the heavy lifting in the entire match (activating objective, clearing lane, pushing lane, capturing mercs, clearing mercs, killing towers and forts, killing enemy players while not dying themselves)
while everyone else runs around brawling or doing meaningless actions like throwing spells into bushes and two tanks headbutting each other.
If you watch any of those bronze-GM climb challenges it becomes clear very quickly why they manage to win nearly a hundred games in a row. Almost nobody else in their matches is doing anything useful.
The only ELO hell is if you’re a slightly better player than the league you’re in then it’s a very long and painful grind to get to your skill level. If you’re several leagues better than you are placed, you’ll climb easily.
More than likely, if you’re “stuck” in Bronze, you probably belong in Bronze, but anything from Gold to Diamond becomes hell to climb through.
In the sense that you can hate the other teammates you have and feel trapped everytime you are in a draft with less skilled players who pick badly no matter what you say. Yes this exists but you CAN get out of it sometimes it just takes a CRAZY LONG TIME.
I have had 4 “Time outs” in draft where teammates have heroes locked then didn’t lock in. When the clock expired it must have picked me, and since I didn’t show anything I got bounced and put in leaver queue with a 600 pt penalty.
The problem that locking early does is that I don’t know what we have, or what the other team has. I want to find something we need or works together. If I change then I’m the troll for changing.
Your teammates at your rating is hell but it is possible to climb.
Your rating [MMR] is based on your winrate. Your winrate has one and only one constant: you.
So your winrate will show your own personal output, will be based on your performance.
This was proven falls multiple times by ppl climbing out from ranks lower than their skill lvl on their smurfs.
This one is… “true”. Actually not really either, since you can go get a party with members you know and can rely on.
Incorrect. Your rating isn’t based on your performance. It’s a composite of the outcomes all your previous rated games in a given season. Since, mathematically, you should only have a 10% influence on the outcome of each game, that means you only have a maximum of 10% influence on your score.
Here’s the kicker; even if you had literally twice the influence you currently have… you would still have a minority influence (around 18%) on your score!
In other words: Your rating does not show how good you are; it reflects how good your teams have performed in relation to other teams. It attempts to be a qualitative measure, when it isn’t. And while you might be the consistent factor across all those games, and have more influence than anyone else, your score is still mostly (by a VAST margin) decided by others.
Again, incorrect, for the reasons stated above.
I will note that if a guy like Fantaro enters into a Bronze match, they would absolutely destroy the competition. I’m not saying that highly skilled players aren’t highly skilled. However:
Fantaro and other top-level players are orders of magnitude better than Bronze Players.
They could still lose the match. No matter how well a GM player does, if they have other people on their team not doing what they are supposed to… you lose.
Actually, yes it is. Unless you queue up with four specifically chosen people on your friends list, you don’t have control over the other members of your team.
This part is only true if you are at a rank that is around your skill level. If you are much better than your current rank, you do not have a minority influence, you have a very large influence.
If you can maintain a 55% win rate you will climb very fast.
Yes you only control 10% of the input to the game, but it doesn’t take very much to put you into the positive when it comes to win rate.
I climbed from Silver 5 to Platinum 5 over two seasons playing very casually with a 56% win rate on KR. My account isn’t even level 200 yet and I only play enough games to knock out my quests.
ELO hell only existed at Bronze 5, and that may even be fixed now (can anyone confirm?). You don’t need to be GM to climb to where you belong. You just need to play only ranked and not waste time with brawls or QM.
I strongly agree with this and from personal experience. I’ve mostly been a Plat/Diamond player, more in Plat than in Diamond. I recently played on my deceased partners account and it ranked into Bronze 3. It was a pretty fast climb to get it into Gold 4.
I found this also to be true, the account is now sitting on Gold 2. It became much harder to climb fast after I hit Gold, as my true skill level is pretty much Plat. When GM’s do a Bronze to Master challenge of course they climb faster with high win-rates and progress more quickly though most divisions, they already have the skill and game knowledge of a GM.
It’s a bit out of date, but still pretty accurate, it’s essentially just a grind to climb if you’re only slightly placed below your true skill level.
Climbing solo compared to climbing with a team or part teams is entirely different I agree. I do think the current SL where it’s no longer solo queue can’t be compared to the ranking system of HL, what we have now is a version of Team League. I thinking climbing solo in SL is harder than it was in HL, but it’s still possible.
Elo Hell exists partly because there’s an excessive amount of crappy players in this game that get stuck there. If you’re a good player, you can take advantage of that and help push the game in your favor… otherwise you probably deserve to be there.
So, I’m going to respond to several posts at once. This has actually been a much more civil conversation than I expected, so thanks for that.
Again…
Yes, you can get out of “Elo Hell”. I’m not denying this.
However, due to the structure of the game, that “50.1%” win rate is mostly out of your hands. The proper metaphor is that it’s a “surf”, rather than a “climb”; while you can and should maximize your positive impact across all your games, your movement up and down ranks is still mostly out of your hands even for a player who clearly outclasses their competition.
The simple fact is that no wannabe competitive player will readily admit that they just aren’t good enough for higher tiers. This is a team game, and yes, team work matters, but in a situation where everyone is equally crappy, one person will stand out and make that much more of a difference, and those are the players that will proceed. Just face it. You think you deserve more, but you really don’t.
I, personally, have not once been stuck in bronze, silver, gold, or platinum. I usually get to high diamond before the stress of performing well causes me to just avoid competitive play altogether. Maybe I deserve to be higher, or maybe I don’t, but it would be incorrect to think that just because I feel like a good player, I deserve to be something more. If you want it, you keep playing, and that’s all you can do.
I’ll look up my Silver 5 climb and get back with you. It didn’t take me very long though. In one season I was to Gold 3, and by the second season I was Platinum 5. My win rate was always around ~55% and I mostly played solo queue ranked.
And on top of that I don’t speak Korean. My skill level is probably mid-Diamond.
But you are wrong. You do not have a 10% control over the game.
You do 10% more damage in team fights
You take 10% more camps
You win objectives by 10%
You get 10% more experience than your opponents
You destroy structures 10% faster than your opponents
All of these little increases means your own team is a higher level, has lvl 10 first, wins more objectives, kills the enemy faster, has a talent tier advantage.
If your team is roughly the same as your enemy as you have claimed, then your 10% is a force mulitplier that snowballs every second of every game, giving your team a comparatively easy win.