Some Thoughts/Constructive Feedback on the Ranked Experience from Iron-Diamond

Hello there! I'd like to preface this with a little introduction about myself, and my history playing League of Legends. I have been playing since Season 3, and I started my ranked climb in Bronze 5 that season. I finally reached Diamond in Season 6 after taking a year or so hiatus from competitive play for personal/mental health related reasons.

I've been a consistent Diamond player every season since then, and although I've never made it out of Diamond, I've come very close in the past. At the moment, I'm on another hiatus due to school/midterms coming up, but I wanted to reflect on my climb this season, how it compared to past seasons, and address some things I liked, some things I disliked, and offer some suggestions that could potentially help some of the less savory points I experienced.

I started on a fresh account this season, so I climbed through every part of the ladder, from Iron IV to D4 where I currently am now. At the end of this, my winrate is sitting at a cool 58% overall, which I am happy and satisfied with. I think it's fair to break up my criticisms based on the elo, since the experience of playing the game is so vastly different based on the environment in which you're playing in.

Part 1: Low, Low Elo I didn't really know what to expect coming into ranked this season. I knew I would start my climb from Iron IV as a fresh account, but God save my soul, I have seen things you wouldn't believe. As a pretty consistent mid-high Diamond player in previous seasons, I thought I'd breeze through to Gold. If I held a 78% winrate last season in Diamond, I could beat a bunch of bronze scrubs, right?

I couldn't have been more wrong. It felt like I had to completely re-learn the game to climb through this part of the ladder. In Diamond, when your teammates lose, you rarely see any hard feeding, but down there it happens nearly every game. The game at this stage is more effectively played as the team therapist than anything else. If you're remotely competent and can build a lead for yourself, you end up spending more time placating your abusive, toxic teammates and trying to corral them into objectives, and get them to play League of Legends instead of allchatting to each other. The amount of games that were close to unwinnable due to afk players, trollpicks (zilean jungle, anyone?), or just inexperienced and unskilled players practically running it down made the game very difficult. I joked with some of my friends that I felt like I was playing Dark Souls and not league, because one misstep and I'd get two-shot by a boss that one of my teammates created.

My main criticism of this part of the ranked experience is the amount of outright trolling that I saw. First timers in ranked, weird and unorthodox picks, or outright threats to troll in champ select lead me to dodge quite a few games after learning the hard way that some people in this elo just want to play the game, and they don't exactly care that it's ranked. My suggestion is to add one free dodge. I know dodging doesn't affect MMR, and I know this scenario isn't super likely, but I got caught in 3 champ selects in a row which were held hostage in silver by trolls threatening to int because their teammate from last game was on the team again. I had to dodge 3 times and incur an LP loss every time, which felt pretty bad. Giving players a free dodge before incurring LP loss might lessen the sting a little bit, and give incentive to people to dodge toxic matches a little more often.

Part 2: Mid-Elo, Gold-Low Platinum What an absolute thunderdome. I don't really have words to describe my experience here other than a thunderdome. Take the Iron experience of trolls, soft inters, add a healthy dose of smurfs, and ramp up the toxicity tenfold when platinum rolls around. Elo heaven this was not. What frustrated me the most about this part of my climb was that while low elo is fairly easy to 1v9 if you get fed enough provided nobody is outright running it, it feels much more punishing to come back from any sort of deficit once you get here. Macro play is starting to develop, and while throws are common, there's a relatively equal likelihood that your own team is throwing as the enemy team is. I would characterize 75% of my wins or losses as coming down to one pick or bad call where someone walked where they shouldn't, or took a fight that they shouldn't, and paid the price for it. I wouldn't exactly characterize this as coinflip territory, but some of the ways games are won or lost are incredible. The levels of toxicity are absolutely absurd, particularly in Platinum. Everyone is an incomplete player here. A lot of players are mechanically gifted, but couldn't recognize a good call if it smacked them right in the face. This leads to a hardcore god complex, where people feel that they're good at the game and deserve to win because they outplayed their lane opponent and got some kills, but start hardcore flaming when your team hemorrhages objectives since they didn't make any good calls to distribute the lead to the rest of the team.

The least enjoyable part of this experience was honestly the toxicity. I understand that I could mute them, but the sheer amount of childish and petty behavior that stems from someone typing something they shouldn't have in chat is absolutely unreal. My proposal is to lock cross-team chat for players known to abuse it, similar to how a general chat restrict works. This could be a smaller step leading up to a total chat restriction, but I think a lot of players get extremely caught up in flaming their own team or the enemy team in cross-chat, and adding a special, separate restriction for players abusing that privilege would both reduce distraction and toxicity concurrently.

Part 3: High Plat-Low Diamond Take the aforementioned platinum toxicity and make it exponential. This is the true Hell I experienced this season. Even though I was still handily winning most of my games, none of them felt good or were fun. Borderline Diamonds not quite good enough to make it tilting off the face of the planet, boosters, smurfs, and toxic gatekeepers call this region of the ladder home. Every game feels like a coinflip of which team tilts harder, has the boosted player/autofill, or has the booster/smurf to carry them 1v9. You can honestly tell which team is going to win based solely off of an op.gg search in loading screen most of the time, since there's usually an X factor either hardcore propping one team up, or tearing a team down before minions even spawn. Some people are plat MMR but have already reached D4, so they don't care about winning the game. It's hard for them to demote, so they just flame everyone and play champions and roles they don't really understand, just messing around in ranked games without really trying to win.

The most unbearable part of these games is the level of smurfing and boosting, though. C'mon, Riot. I know your job is hard, and I'm usually defending you guys on balance/game design. But a level 42 account with no previous ranked experience cruising through the ranks at 85% overall winrate is either boosting the account to sell it, smurfing far below their rating to ruin games, or duo queuing with some to 1v9 boost them to an mmr they couldn't realistically achieve on their own, usually D4. This elo is an absolute coinflip cesspool.

Especially this season, with LP gains in D4 being +14/-13, you need to win 7-8 games to win your series assuming nothing wild happens, but in this elo, what are the chances of that? Odds are someone playing for fun, a smurf, or a booster come along, and you're just back to playing coinflip simulator unless you have the time to hardcore grind out games to a large enough sample size to offset the ridiculousness that happens here.

I can't personally name the account due to Boards rules, but look at the tier graph of this player that showed up in my diamond promos. Really?

This is why this part of the climb is so frustrating. I played against 3 smurfing GM players IN A ROW in my final diamond series. All 3 were top laners in my lane. I know they were GM because they were all streaming and linked their Twitch.tv accounts in postgame. I'd estimate that in any given game, at least one of the players is an "x-factor" smurf/booster. While I recognize that in the long term, smurfs won't prevent climbing, it provides additional frustration and complication that shouldn't happen, in my opinion. To reach Diamond, I should have to demonstrate that I'm better than platinum, not that I can survive against a GM player for 10 minutes and hope that I get carried.

I don't exactly know what can be done about this last point of contention. The easiest way I can think of to solve it would be controversial. Mandatory 2 Factor authentication would allow smurf accounts to be flagged easily, but it's possible to spoof phone numbers to circumvent it if you're motivated enough. I understand already that there's zero tolerance for boosting, which is certainly appreciated, however.

That just about wraps up my thoughts. These are my personal opinions, and if you disagree with me, I'd like to openly discuss it. League of Legends as a game and as a community can only benefit from discussion of problems within itself, and hopefully, reach a point where they become non-issues. To any that took the time to read through this, thank you for your time, and I appreciate you giving me the time of day.