Elo hell does not exist

Competitive Discussion
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Why do you think these boosters climb people so fast? Why do you think people stay in masters and above?

I’m sorry Elo does not exist. I was one of the biggest people to say it does exist and I have been proven wrong.

My highest I ever hit was 3100 something so I had a buddy let me play his smurf on masters around 3900 so I played with some GM as well. I have been stuck In plat pretty much since this game came out. So I decided to see if I could hang with the masters and GMs.

Let me tell you it’s a completely different game. Aiming is the smallest part in masters. It’s all about mechanics and timing. Master genjis make play genjis look like bronze players. The teamwork and HEALING OMG THE HEALING IS TOP NOTCH. But you have to know to to play to push or make the team spread. Master players have game sense and timing that plat players and diamonds don’t. I don’t think I played with a zarya that didn’t have an average of 70+ charge. Or a rein that got his ult every time. It was unreal to see the difference. There was no mistakes and if someone did (mostly was me) the team took advantage and pushed and won the fight.

Then I played on my actual account and you can notice the difference. People going in alone, not healing (Moria players) and all picking DPS and not healing or tanking and creating space. Plat and below don’t play within the shield or even use the shield.

I make the same mistakes that I wrote above but I have a lot to learn and ELO hell does not exist you are where you are at because you don’t have the game sense these guys do and if you did then you would climb.

I think a lot of players should play higher up for a little because it will force them to actually look at their own mistakes. Omg i got ripped on so hard and i deserved it. But I’m going to learn and actually play the game now.

So basically it’s your faults that’s why you are down there.

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Let me tell you that i used to play pugs with masters/gm and was for the most part able to hold my own. No i am not saying i should be in masters, I am saying that in a team games people not doing their job and being stupid holds others back.

Specially in plat it is just a matter of rng, you roll or get rolled. The good games either win or loss are few and far between.

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I’ve played in Plat for most of my time in OW. I got 2 accounts to Diamond this season. One account where I played with friends, one account where I solo qued.

I have a 60%+ winrate on Pharah, my main, who I spent about 80% of my comp time playing on both those accounts. “Luck” had very little to do with my ability to climb or win.

Blaming teammates for your not being able to climb is petty and untrue. The only common denominator between your competitive matches and your SR is YOU.

I highly doubt a masters or GM player would have trouble climbing out of plat cos “bad team mates”.

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On my second account I was one game from breaking into Diamond I was the only plat on my team, we were on kings row the enemy team had a good 2-2-2 comp and my team on the other hand I had to choose between us having no tank or an Ana solo healing and while on attack our widow knew she couldn’t shoot though barriers so spent the whole time trying to get on that ledge between the point and defenders spawn needless to say she failed the whole time. I’m no pro and I don’t think I’ll ever hit Masters but how does a team made of the top “14%” of players not know how to make a decent team? How is that not a elo hell?

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then I ask what do people consider ELO hell.

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It absolutely exists on console where almost every single competitive match has a toxic player, a troll, a thrower, a leaver, a smurf, or a combination of all/some of those.

I placed 2996 on Xbox. That remains my season high. I got as low as 2395 before making it back to 2501 with a few hours of the season left and called it quits.

My playtime this season wasn’t even 30 hours. Previous seasons were all at least 100 hours. Since season 5 my playtime has been getting progressively less and less due to the toxicity/trolls/throwers/smurfs turning competitive into a joke.

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Elo hell is the idea that something happens only at a certain level of rank that prevent them, or makes it very hard for them to progress any further.

With your previous example, if people refusing to pick anything but DPS ONLY happened in Diamond, it would be a form of ELO hell, because it only happens at THAT level, which obviously isn’t true because uncooperative team members and bad team compositions happen at every level of play.

The point being that most things people like to complain about and use as excuses for not being able to climb, simple have nothing to do with the rank they’re at and actually happen across the board, thus making it nothing to do with their current ELO and everything to do with their actual skill rating.

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What a load of rubbish.

Your SR isn’t truly yours because your teammates have a direct effect on whether it increases or decreases.

This is especially true if you have trolls/throwers/leavers on your team or smurfs on the enemy team. Doesn’t matter how well you personally play, if you have any of those in game then it’s pretty much a guaranteed loss and drop in SR.

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Nope. Still nothing to do with ELO, this doesn’t happen ONLY IN PLAT, it happens everywhere and evryone has the same chance of it happening to them, everyone’s still on an even playing field even if the conditions are crap.

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I highly doubt a masters or GM player would have trouble climbing out of plat cos “bad team mates”.

Watch Just_Stevo’s Bronze to GM Sym Only video set. He went 51-0 going from Bronze to Plat (although there were a few close calls that he only barely won thanks to a single teammate wising up and helping him), but once he hit plat level the skill level of enemy players was just high enough that the incompetency or bad teamwork of his teammates made him start losing games.

It really hit a wall starting when the very match beginning after he made Diamond. Instantly he went on a losing streak of like 10 in a row - not because he was playing badly for all the games, but rather because his teammates refused to help a Sym and the enemy was good enough that he couldn’t solo carry anymore.

Mind you the fact that he was using troll voices, and being passive aggressive with his teammates when they brought up his Sym play, means that he attracted more hate than if he had instead just admitted that he was a GM Sym OTP smurf.

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LOL I think you’re getting the idea of ELO and the idea of players on your team having an effect on the game mixed up. The things you’re talking about don’t just happen at a certain rank, which is what this whole topic is about. You’ve proved absolutely NOTHING by stating “trollers/throwers/leavers” exist.

The only common denominator between your comp games and current SR is YOU.

Finding it hard to climb, you more than likely just belong at the current SR/rank you’re sitting at nothing more.

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Every single of these comments are still blaming other people, why not fix their mistakes and predict what’s going to happen and that’s what makes the difference between you climbing or not.

Boosters can solo Carry people from platinum to masters but you can’t climb to diamond. Because of mechanics and being smart and intuitive and that is not what others have in lower ranks and that’s why you are down there and that’s why I am in high plat still

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Right off wikipedia “Elo hell (also known as MMR hell) is a video gaming term used in MOBAs and other multiplayer online games with competitive modes.[1][2] It refers to portions of the matchmaking ranking spectrum where individual matches are poor quality and are often determined by factors such as poor team co-ordination which are perceived to be outside the individual player’s control. This ostensibly makes it difficult for skilled players to “climb” up the matchmaking ranking (and out of Elo hell), due to the difficulty of consistently winning games under these conditions. Its existence in various games has been debated, and game developers have called it an illusion caused by cognitive bias.[3]” so you saying it only being at certain ranks is wrong.

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Hey hey hey calm down there, buddy.
Although most players are placed in their “general sr”, that doesn’t mean they’ve had multiple leavers/throwers/trolls in their games to add onto the losses that they’ve already had.

You can’t blame someone for not being able to climb. It’s not entirely their fault.

And I wouldn’t say masters are all-that. Imo, mid-GM -> Top500 knows what they’re doing for the most part.

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Here’s the thing that people don’t get.
You can have the game sense and the knowledge what to do and when but you don’t always have the ability to transfer it to game play like a coach in many sports.
You can have Game Sense but no Mechanics or vice verse!
You need to improve both aspects to get to the 1%!
And that is where the team comes into play if the other in your team cover you weakness and you cover theirs then the win becomes easy.
That what people here don’t get overwatch is team based so yeah I do get to say my sr doesn’t show my ability because not all of us have both Game Sense and Mechanics.
Some people will do a lot better in a team then alone!

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I have my personal ELO hell in the 1900-2100 range. I can’t explain why, but if I go more than one game below 2100, I’m going below 1925 guaranteed. I cannot climb above that without grouping. I can spend long stretches of times and many games solo in the 2200-2400 range, but if I get an unlucky streak, I’m going to get stuck back in silver.

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This is very oversimplified. Elo hell exists, just not for some players.

For one, anyone that has never touched higher-tier games, does not have the right to be shouting “Elo hell” or “forced 50%”. If you haven’t deranked from Diamond+, then yes… it’s fair to say that Elo hell doesn’t exist and XYZ player is just not good enough.

But if you have been in Diamond+, and you personally experience deranking from Diamond+, you have every right to believe in Elo hell.

You were in Diamond+. You graduated from the previous tiers. If you were consistently in a particular rank for several seasons, and then suddenly deranked, it wasn’t because you got worse or that players got better.

You got unlucky.

  • You can have proper game sense of a higher skill level, and still get matched with players that don’t have that experience. If you’re on a loss-streak/at risk of deranking, this can compound into the matchmaker continually sorting you with players that don’t have experience/game sense as you go down further in SR.

  • It is entirely possible for a person to run into a string of leavers and throwers, which can result in deranking.

  • It is entirely possible for you to run into a string of matches of auto-locking DPS, where you no longer can carry.

Some players have a good string of luck, or a higher competency that they get placed into a higher SR on first placements. They’ll never have to grind up, and thus never have to experience ping-ponging back and forth around certain SR ranges.

By extension, people that are in Masters+ have carved out their niche that they’re almost always guaranteed to be there that they never have to worry. Even if they decay, they can just stop playing for that season, do placements next season and get right back into Masters+.

Someone who has Master/GM/Top 500 can just wait until the last week/day of a Season, finish placements, and get ranked right where they left off the last season, just to pad their rank.

They can just mess around smurf account where they won’t care in the mean time. For them, Elo hell will never exist. But for other players who experienced a misfortune of dropping out of a rank, Elo hell is a fair and valid belief.

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I’d believe you, OP, if it wasn’t for the simple fact that we have absolutely zero control over who we have on our team and who we play against. That’s where your theory pretty much immediately falls through. Yes, you could be held at fault to an extent, but it’s not solely your problem. What you’re basically suggesting here is that the following doesn’t exist:

Throwers
Disconnects
Toxic players
One tricks
Cheaters
etc.

Now, if we could eliminate these and each, and every, match strictly depended on one’s skill, then you’d be onto something here. As it stands though, we don’t live in a perfect world and we never will, so we can’t simply remove these anomalies from the equation just to support your defense. The reality is, we are going to have that same toxic player on our team 2, 3, maybe even 4 matches in a row.

We are going to get a thrower at some point just because we lost the first round. We are going to encounter players that have a godlike aim which can only be explained through the use of an aimbot (especially when watching the kill cam). We are going to have one tricks that want to run Sym or Torb on attack at Hanamura and cause you to lose. This is the reality.

We can find plenty of players that absolutely do not belong at their rank for one reason or another and while some of them may be at their rank because of themselves, I can assure you that there are just as many that are at their rank because of others. I’ll just tell you the same thing I’ve told others when it comes to ELO hell. I forget what video it was that I watched on Youtube, but it basically holds true, even to this day.

40% of your matches you will win regardless of how you play
40% of your matches you will lose regardless of how you play
20% of your matches will actually be determined based on skill

At the end of the day, while skill does matter to an extent, you shouldn’t eliminate the luck factor as well since your teammates are controlled by the roll of the dice and you have no idea if you’re actually going to get a good or bad team the moment you queue up. You just have to hope for the best. Stylosa said it best when talking about the matchmaking for comp… Every match is pretty much already determined at the hero select screen.

I didn’t realize how true that actually was until I started thinking about it, but I’ve had so many of my matches fall apart even before we get out of the spawn because of my teammates already arguing for one reason or another because of a pick. Alternatively, I’ve won a lot of matches because everyone on the team was fine with the composition and they actually felt confident about it.

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All of this is just as likely to the enemy team as well though…so you’re still on an even playing field in terms of ‘chance’.

The very fact that smurfs exist proves that ‘skill’ is far more of a contributing factor to the outcome of games than ‘bad luck’ is.

I’ve climbed from Silver to Diamond since I’ve started this game, that’s a career game of over 1000SR. If ELO hell existed I’d have never left Silver.

Improving is the biggest factor in determining your rank, I’ve run into smurfs/throwers etc. But people forget that that factor is only a small percentage of ALL of the games a player has. The majority of games don’t have throwers or smurfs or cheaters.

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I’ll say it in a sentence in a team based game and in one that the developers and everyone else is saying is team based it’s stupid to say your not depended on other players.
You need to stop looking at this game like a normal fps and start looking at it like any other team based sport.
of course a grand master can go from bronze back to grand master he is part of that 1% that are at an all other level!
But there are other that are really good at only parts of the game and if you put them with other good players they can still hold against the top 1%.
And there are proof for that in all sports where not so amazing players get to top teams because they are really good at just one thing.
They don’t get to be the quarterback or forward or any other main positions they get the less glamorous postions .
So stop making these game all about personal stats because for the lower 95% the team is a big factor!
And it’s not all about smurfs/throwers sometimes It’s just people that cant play anything else good and then you just end up in a team that is not working and it’s nobody’s fault it’s just people that are not working good together even when nobody is flaming and nobody is tilting.

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