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A Controversial Theory

SteelMankind··9 votes·1,759 views

People in low elo are not neccesarily bad at their best champs, they're just bad at the game.

Let me explain.

Relatively difficult champions that aren't the absolute most meta picks and/or are only played by onetricks have relatively little change in winrate between Silver and Plat+, according to champion.gg, despite the playrate remaining about the same.

Orianna, Gangplank, Draven, Zed, Bard, Thresh, Yasuo, and more are all good examples of this. When looking these up, the only time I was wrong was for Taliyah and Aurelion Sol - both have noticeably high winrates (and playrates) in higher divisions.

Lower elos drag down winrates when actually difficult champions become meta, and people in low elo switch over to them and feed. Azir and Nidalee are good examples of this.

I can also remember a time when Orianna was considered a very difficult champion, one that low elo players should avoid. But if you think about it, whats gonna stop a Silver mid main from getting pretty good at Ori after a few games? The mechanical challenge of landing ults and moving the ball around while maintaining good positioning is something that you get from being comfertable with videogaming overall.

I think that, as League has gotten more popular, the average mechancal skill of players in every division has gone up. Keep in mind that 4 seasons ago, Lee and Ezreal were considered hard champions. When Syndra was released, she was considered hard. TF and Alistar also used to be hard champs.

TL;DR over the years, the mechanical skill of all League players has improved to the point where classically difficult champs are just as good in low elo as they are in high

11 Comments

RiotRiot Ellarian13 votes

I think you're totally right, in my mind there are actually two primary skill paths in league:

One is how good you are at your champion. How well you hit abilities, learn your trading cadences, push the limits and start to excel.

One is how good you are at the game. How well you understand map movement, objective timing, relative strategy strengths, map awareness, etc.

It's easily possible to be REALLY good at one, but REALLY bad at the other (or just bad at both, like me!). The game is actually best learned through the first lens: understanding your champion, your role, your strengths and weaknesses, what you should be doing every second of every game. Once you are sufficiently comfortable with that lens, you actually begin to grasp the flow of the game and your place in it.

I absolutely LOVE watching people learn the game as they begin to master a champion and suddenly enter the wide world of understanding the game, it's a fascinating progression.

Just my 2 cents, at any rate.

woodvsmurph1 votes

Yes in general lower elo players are bad at macro compared to people say... 2 divisions higher (bronze vs gold; silver vs diamond/plat, etc.). However, there are also people in low elo who have mechanics of lower or equal elo to their peers, yet have macro understanding well beyond their rank. You can't really see the latter very often in low elo because unlike 2+ years ago, people do not take advice or criticism well now. For instance, in over half my games this season as a silver I am the only person on the team warding - whether I'm jungler, toplaner, or support. And if I ask team to do something as simple and logical as warding with their FREE trinket wards, they call me toxic and flame me. You make a call to grab a "free" baron when your team is behind while the enemy team grabs drag and your team ignores a good call to force a 3v5 drag contest... and dies - giving the other team baron as well as drag and forcing you to 2v5 try to stall a game-winning push by the enemy team. And you are "bad" and lack "teamwork" because you refused to join a suicidal outnumbered fight for cloud drag. Hard to tell that such a player has good macro play if it requires a team that listens to intelligent macro calls. When I get teams that do, I tend to win even if our team lost 2 of their lanes. Silver honestly needs an investigation into players because I can tell you that if I played as poorly as over half my teammates this season I would be in low level bronze instead of silver. I know people have bad games, but there should still be a certain level of basic knowledge and macro skill at each tier. I shouldn't regularly see people in silver with worse macro than people in mid tier bronze - especially when their mechanics are no better than bronze 1-2 players. Anyways, sorry I turned this into a rant when I just meant it to be a quick commentary.

woodvsmurph1 votes

It is much easier to see how good someone is at a champ than to see how good they are at "the game" depending on the player's elo and the tools they have to communicate. In solo queue for instance, a low to mid elo player may have genius macro, but be unable to show it due to his/her team refusing to listen to good shotcalls and instead taking bad fights repeatedly. The best way to see a player's macro in such a game is to watch their decision-making in the early stages of the game - do they anticipate enemy ganks correctly, spot tp plays, counter-jungle or counter-gank, outplay ganks, etc. to build themselves a lead in disadvantageous situations or come out even in situations where they should lose out big time (such as being ahead in cs and even in kda while being camped by the enemy jungler for 15 min straight early game despite getting no help from their team).

Or take the NA LCS promotion tournament. GCU vs envy. In game 4 I believe, solo got a huge lead on renekton and his team transitioned to a 1-3-1 split to maximize their pressure on the enemy. But they ended up feeding away their lead until the game was basically back to even and then winning a crucial fight which let them ultimately break the base and win - about 15 min after they SHOULD have done it. Why did this happen? For starters, one of the times they pushed enemy tier 2's in their 1-3-1, it wasn't a 1-3-1 because santorin valued farming his own jungle (too far to help his team) over breaking down enemy tier 2 towers. The main issue though was that they lacked adequate warding to CONTROL the vision on either side of the enemy jungle and didn't have enough points of strength to punish the enemy overloading 3 to catch and kill the solo pushing renekton. If GCU had done a 3-2 or 4-1 split, they would likely have broken the tier 2 towers and potentially the inhib towers much faster and without losing renekton's and their team's lead in the process. 3-2 split -- you have renek and either mid or jungle push one lane and bot duo push the other; mid or jungle (whichever is not in lane) lurks in jungle side that has vision control - ready to punish enemy and win 3v3 if they 3 man the renekton lane since that is where their primary advantage was. If enemy brings 3 or fewer to counter renekton and jungle or mid's push, they can brute force tower AND potentially tower-dive to delete 1 or 2 enemies trying to defend. If they bring 4, they can just keep wave pushed to tower and would probably come out even in 3v4 or be able to buy a ton of time while disengaging. Meanwhile bot duo would have a 2v1 and be able to secure tower PLUS potentially get a kill or 2nd tower. Either way, it is applying more effective tower pressure (albeit in fewer lanes) and simultaneously reducing the enemy's ability to force a hard engage to punish the split push than the 1-3-1 gcu used. 4-1 with fed renekton splitting AFTER securing solid vision control in enemy jungle. Renekton's job here is just to keep waves pushed to enemy tier 2. He was ahead enough to survive 1v2 and either disengage, or outright win depending on which enemies are sent for him. Anything more than 2 sent for renekton means his 4 teammates guaranteed dive bot, grab 2 kills, and probably push all the way to breaking inhib tower. If they send 2 top to stop renekton, his team can still 4v3 chunk the enemy out and force the tower. They still have potential to tower dive and grab kills too. If the enemy sends 5 bot to stop renekton's 4 teammates, renek grabs free tower top and is able to tp bot to help his teammates as they disengage - letting him tp behind the advancing enemy team - a perfect setup for him. Thus I disagree with analysts who act like teams split-pushing 4-1 or 3-2 instead of 1-3-1 are always doing the less optimal thing. Clearly in this match the 1-3-1 was not the correct setup due to the strong engage and lockdown potential of the enemy team comp. I thought of this after seeing the first failed attempt and called that it wouldn't work - as they tried it time and time again falling to the same mistake to completely bleed away their lead for only half damage on mid and bot tower in return for repeat kills by enemy team on renekton and others. So we can see even at high elo with players who clearly have good macro compared to the player base at large that there are players and/or teams with much lacking macro or other teams with players who lack in individual talent compared to their opponents but win via better macro (hello clg?). Higher elo does not always mean better skill at a champ, nor does it mean better macro understanding. It should, it usually does, but not always.

ChaddyFantome7 votes

People in low elo are not neccesarily bad at their best champs, they're just bad at the game.

This is neither controversial not a theory, lol.

SteelMankind3 votes

A D1/Master tier streamer might laugh at Plat III sub's claim that they're good at, say, Viktor, on the belief that a player sub-D2 couldn't possibly play a skillshot-based champ. I've seen this attitude so many times before, and I think it's high elo players not drawing a distinction between being good at League back in S1 (when they were new) which was 90% macro/game knowledge, vs. being good in S7 where there's a ton of intricate and unique champions.

Like, a Gold Zed onetrick might be able to do some fancy jukes and triple shadow combos, but might not know to group for a Baron play or something nuanced like that. I think a lot of high elo players, especially junglers, have a tendency to completely think of League skill as decision making capability, and so dismiss what may be very real claims of skill on a specific champ.

Alex h87212 votes

I would tend to agree with this, the main reason low elo is what it is is b/c of macro, focusing on kills over farm, not going for objectives etc, but usually most of the players i see have decent mechanics.

Dominick Destine2 votes

Saying that Bronze Chaos is Bronze Chaos is not a controversial statement.

Then again, these boards are full of Bronze Chaos members and they hate being recognized for what they are.

NineTailedMystic2 votes

That's because some people can be classist dicks.

YokoNomi1 votes

There's always credibility where it's due, when someone makes the effort to aid in the mentality of the players struggling to grasp the issues involved with the games they've had in the past, and how to become a better person in spite of it all.

Games involving inexperience of either myself or my team mates, that I get, accept, understand, and embrace. More so than not though, this is unfortunately not the case. There are times (especially now days) where I feel like I absolutely have to duo with a friend of mine, just to tolerate the games I've encountered in the past. Trolls, toxic players, players with unreasonably inflated ego's, etc. It happens on a much more frequent rate, and at times, it feels soul crushing. No amount of verbal couching can justify why I have to almost routinely report players that seem to think they're above the system, and at times, even openly admit that the only reason they have their account and are playing ranked, is to ruin someone else's experience.

I don't mean to bring down your message with this sour dose of woe, but it had to be said.

SteelMankind1 votes

Yeah, of course there's negativity and all that, I wasn't arguing against that. Just that the advice to play easy champions like Garen or Annie if you're in Silver might not be the best advice in 2017, because a Silver player in 2017 is more than capable of learning mechanically difficult champs.

La Belle Sauvage1 votes

As a proud, slowly improving Bronzie myself The difference from last season (my first) and this season makes me wonder how I even one any games last season.

Last season someone scolded me for not buying locket, and I replied if you want a locket buy one yourself. To be fair I was playing Zyra, but I didn't say that because I was playing her. I said without any understanding of the item and it's benefits. Had I realized it last season I may have at least considered it.

I had no idea about CS/min (when in top) or wave management.

Whereas this season all those things are on my radar. My game decision has improved over last season, but now I understand just how much farther I have to go.

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