Toxic Island Conspiracy Theory.

I was placed in Bronze V. After ~40 games I had around a 30% winrate.

I reevaluated how I was playing, made some adjustments, started winning.

"Carried" myself, with no duo queue, to Bronze I over the course of 40+ games. At one point my winrate was 65%.

And that's when everything went wrong. I started having issues in the front end; I've always had them, but now they were getting worse. In game my ping is consistently 40, however while in queue time and time again my connection is interrupted.

Why is this relevant?

The game thinks that I'm queue dodging. I get hit with the 5 minute penalty frequently for not "pressing accept" and occasionally the 30 min with LP loss. After this happening a few times, I began to notice something: my teammates were behaving differently.

While ascending to Bronze I, I could count the number of toxic players I met on one hand. As I mentioned this was over the course of 40 games, so it could hardly be called luck. After my "dodges", I found I was matched with raging players tilted because they were on a losing streak, players with constant ingame ping issues, etc. I hardly encountered any of this on my way to Bronze I, but now it's 3 of 5 games if not more.

I've heard the idea of Toxic Island in the past, and feel it fits here. I am "toxic" because I "queue dodge", and now I'm matched with toxic teammates.

Maybe I'm just making excuses for myself and this is the same as "Elo hell". On the other hand I feel that it's way to coincidental, and that I was winning too consistently for too many games to be lucky. Also, it makes sense for Riot to do because it corals all the negative players together to drive each other nuts.