From A New Player - Skill Disparity In Ranked Is Absurd
I've been playing League for about 2-3 months now, and Ranked for almost a month or so. I consider myself okay but not great at every role except top, which I try not to play because I'm terrible at it. After my placement matches, I was put into Silver 2, and since then, I fell to Silver 4 and just go back and forth from Silver 4 to Silver 3 over and over again.
From the perspective of a new player, the way the competitive ranks are set up makes absolutely no sense. My expectation when I play ranked is to be matched up with other people around my skill level and experience, so theoretically for my MMR, that should be Silver 4 to Silver 3 level people like me. However, what actually ends up happening is an EXTREME disparity of skill in every single game. The difference in ability between the best player in any given game and the worst player is absolutely astronomical.
I'm talking every single game, in the same game there is someone (or multiple people) who is 0/6 with 68 CS or something at 20 minutes, and someone who is 12-0 at the same time. I watch the 0/6 person, and they have absolutely no clue what they're doing, dying to basic things like running back into lane and immediately engaging again against someone ridiculously fed because they have full HP and the fed person has 40-50%, so they think they can win, or people who never leave their lane like ever, for any reason. On the other side, we have people who are obviously far, FAR better than me, walking all over the map and deleting the entire opposing team.
I normally play bottom lane, either support or adc, and in my experience, either we kick the other team around the map like soccer balls, or else we receive an unholy curbstomp without a prayer of even being able to farm minions. It doesn't feel good either way. When I win my lane like that, I feel sorry for my opponent getting matched up against me when they should be lower, and when I get beaten down, I wonder what the hell the opponent is even doing at a rating low enough to be matched to my skill level.
The result of this is that every single match feels decided before it ever starts by the flip of a coin. As someone who is neither a god awful feeder or a super god like team deleter, whether I win or lose depends entirely on whether I have the feeders or the gods in any given game, and so with that said, my question is this.
How is it that the clueless 0/6 people with 68 CS and enemy team deleters are considered close enough in skill to be placed in the same game? In a game with (as far as I can tell) 27 different ranks, how is there such a glaring, canyon wide discrepancy between skill levels in the same game? Why is it that Riot allows this to continue when it 1) prevents players from properly gauging their skill level. Case in point, I FEEL like I have gotten a lot better at the game, my individual scores are better and I can duel my platinum friend in lane better than when I started, however my MMR has DROPPED 150 points since I started ranked; 2) sends a clear message to new players in particular that improving at the game is not rewarded, but is subject to a random string of luck, and thus discourages efforts to improve since there is no visible benefit or reward.
