Rant from a friend who doesn't want to post under his own name plat+ since season 2

I've thought about making a rant on the state of solo queue for awhile now, but haven't gotten around to it till now (this won't be very organized because I'm too lazy to take time on a rant lol). I have 3 accounts in diamond+ and it's an absolute hellhole. I believe that there's more luck involved in diamond than there ever has been in the solo queue ladder for low-mid diamond. I have 1 account I reached D5 on in 34 games from plat 5, 1 took 215 games to reach D5(with D1 ish MMR), and the other I hit D1 mid LP in about 200 total games. I don't consider myself to be a "Great" player, but I think I play well enough.

1. What I find it comes down to is that anything above D4 and under D1 is just a bunch of smurf/boosters. Smurfs and boosters everywhere in mid diamond. I've had many games in D3-D4 where the players have 75%-80% winrate on the champs that their account has never played, or they have no games played in normals and their winrate is through the roof. The lack of a real transition from low to high diamond is part of the major reason I think so many people stay in low diamond for so long.

2. No recourse for getting a troll/AFK. The reason for the rant is because I have not had any fun in the last two weeks or so, because the games I've had are entirely decided by who has the ally that wants to troll/AFK. I am well aware that people are going to say "Oh but not everygame has one", but the issue is that FAR too many do. In my last 20 games, I have won 13, and lost 7. Of those 13 won, I faced 5 individuals who were either DCing or permanently left, and 4 that were blatantly trolling such as 3 zeal nunu support, 6 tears zyra support, 2 protobelts(working on a third) support lucian, and support jinx who would try to take his ADC's farm and then eventually sat in base. That makes 9 of my last 13 wins entirely free and I didn't even have to work for them. 70% of my recent wins were gimmes. Of my 7 losses, 6 were trolls, and 1 was a legitimate loss due to the auto feed...I mean autofill system. I got the same master tier Blitz main that raged at the ADC and jungle all game to then sit within the walls of our base until we lose twice. I got an AFK because he was filled. An auto-filled support that got raged at for building the wrong item so they ran it down mid. A Nasus top that died 1 time, ONCE, and then sat at T2 tower spam pinging the jungler till we lost. And a top Darius that died 19 times because he kept running into the enemy intentionally because he didn't like our jungler till we lost. The one loss that wasn't due to trolling we had 3 players that were jungle one tricks, who were on roles they had sub 40% winrates with and we lost in under 20 minutes while actually trying.

3. MMR, brackets, and promos. Brackets are meaningless, but it's what people see. You can be B5 and have masters MMR if you dodge your promos everytime, and then if you won 1 and lost 1 forever you would never advance. As I've played 13 promos this season, I've kept track and found that promos are against you, you have overall worse allies than the enemy. On top of that you have to have a 75% winrate, while the cards are stacked against you (win 1 for promos, then win 2 of 3 to advance). Dodging a promo match that you're being trolled in results in a loss on your promos, so you might aswell try your best to win.

All in all I think that the current ranking system has become a toxic sludge fest in diamond. The games are almost always entirely one sided, and more often than not (in my experience) the games are decided by smurfs/boosters, trolls/afkers/inters, or DCs. Autofill screws you if you get two one trick ponies on your team, and so one just feeds and your chances of losing in mid-high diamond are very very high. I think if you get a little LP extra for playing out an autofill game it would incentive people to learn roles outside of their mains. Even with autofill I'm consistently getting 10-15 minute queue times, and with dodges and load times I'm spending 50% of my time waiting to play, only to have nearly 70% of my recent matches be instant wins or instant loses(Because I'm not LCS and don't hardcarry my team). This has been going on for a few weeks now, and it's getting insanely unfun.

I'm curious as to people's feedback. I'm sure plenty of people are going to argue that ranked is just fine, but there are less ranked players this season than last for the same time into the season by a large enough margin to show an issue. I think Riot is doing well on balances/reworks for champs, but horrid on the ranking system as the Elo system is flawed for a team based game.