How to fix ranked for Low Elo Players.

Hello, my name is Legion0rigins and I am a Silver V player as of this season. Today I wanted to discuss an important topic that can help us lower elo players to get better at the game and develop us in a more rewarding environment. As we all know trouble with disconnects and afk's greatly affects our ability to climb in SoloQ and get better at the game. I have a simple solution to aid people affected by these other players without disturbing the overall architecture of the League of Legends ranked ladder.

Ok so lets start.

1. HOW TO AID PLAYERS AFFECTED BY AFK's So you queue up for ranked and you start your game. However all of a sudden you see one of the players on your team hasn't connected upon entering the game. 5-10-15-20 minutes go by and the surrender vote comes up for your team and you go to the end game screen. LP Loss 15-23.

This by far has to be the most annoying and infuriating thing for players. It makes us hate the game and ultimately want to not play because it doesn't feel worth it to go through 20 minutes of hell just to lose all of your hard earned LP. So whats the solution?

Riot should make it so that if your team has an AFK and this results in a loss your team (not including afk player) should NOT lose the LP for that game. It is a simple solution to a big problem and ultimately makes players feel safer playing ranked because if they lose due to an afk then they wont lose their LP.

2. THE RANKED LADDER AND HOW IT CAN BE ADJUSTED Ok so we all have been through the trouble of trying to rank up and losing our promo games anywhere from once to ten times. Its sucks and is a hard process to combat. Some of us even win our promos only to lose several games in a row and get demoted within the same time period. This is a big problem, because it discourages players to rank up since they feel its pointless if they can just be dropped again. So how do we fix this problem?

Lets start with my personal example. At the beginning of Season 5 I was in the bottom of Bronze 5. I queued up and worked my ass off playing the game to only achieve a simple Silver 4 position. I then lost a few games and found myself back in Silver 5 having to go back through my promos.

Alright so in order to aid players Riot should make it so that when you are ranking up in your specific divisions you don't have to play promo games you've already gone through (like Silver 5-Silver 4). This DOES NOT APPLY to going up to a separate Tiers (Bronze-Silver etc.) This means that instead of capping at 100 LP and playing division games you just go above 100 LP and end up at (X) LP at the bottom of the next division. This is VERY similar to how Master Tier and Challenger Tier work. You get (x) LP at the top or bottom of Master/Challenger tier and the highest Master Tier Players swap with the lowest Challenger Tier players. Its a system riot already uses but could help low elo players too.

3. SMURFING AND HOW ADJUSTING THE RANKED LADDER CAN HELP EVERYONE A HUUUUGE issue with low elo is players that smurf. It absolutely sucks to be placed against some Diamond smurf player who totally stomps you and your non smurf team. By making the previous adjustments to ranked queues it makes smurfing "easier" to get higher elo faster. Smurfing is technically not condoned by riot games but there truly isn't a way to stop it other than making it easier for people to take their smurfs and get them out of low elo AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. This just makes it so that if you happen to get placed against a smurf at least they wont be in your elo tomorrow, and you shouldn't get as many games with them because they will rank up so much faster.

4. WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT ANY OF THE CHANGES YOU HAVE SUGGESTED Honestly I cant make anyone care about my opinion, because it is after all just an opinion. But for people who have found ranking up a stressful and arduous process, this will really help. Now a lot of people say that if you are having trouble getting through low elo it means you belong there. This is actually a somewhat true, BUT mostly false statement. I can't actually count the number of times on my fingers that I have lost promo games because of AFK's or Smurfs. I have had both of my promo games foiled by AFK's before and it is something that happens WAYYYY too often. These changes make it so that ranking up is easier while also not being too easy. It means that if you get AFK's then YOU will not be punished for their misbehavior. Riot might have a crappy system to punish players, but at the very least they can make a system that doesn't punish everyone who doesn't deserve it. It's a game and people want to have fun regardless of whether they play ranked or normals. So don't punish a player for something they cant control and neither can Riot.

Anyways that's all the argument I have in me for now. If you think there is something I could add or change please feel free to comment.