The Current Meta and ELO (or MMR) Hell

A lot of people refute the existence of ELO hell. You can call them stupid or ignorant, but fact probably stands that they've just not encountered it. And if you have never seen or experienced something, it can be hard to believe it exists, even if others claim it does.

Regardless of whether you believe it does or doesn't, the current meta is exasperating its existence (or, if you don't believe it exists at all, this is a nothing but lunacy). So let's go over how this works:

The past meta that we just got over was incorrectly referred to as the "assassin meta" - it wasn't so much the assassin meta as it was the "damage" meta. It was whatever champ could do the most amount of damage the quickest. Give it a few seconds thought - the same period where assassins were prevalent is also the same period where hypercarries became incredibly prevalent? That doesn't raise an alarm? How about Kha'Zix demolishing entire teams just because he couldn't be outdamaged and CC was hardly an issue to him?

Point is, this is the meta where the saying "carry harder" was spoken more than any other - because you could carry harder. It wasn't about what you could do for the team so much as who's carrying your team and whether or not they could outdamage the one carrying the enemy team. It's the same reason why if you were ahead you would build damage items and if you were behind you'd build tank - because if you were behind you weren't going to outdamage, so you might as well just soak up as much damage for the one on your team that could. If your entire team was behind, well, guess you were shit out of luck - unless you hit a power spike or the enemies played flat out stupidly, you weren't about to come back.

And that's how it was - a period focusing on individual play and power limits. If Akali got fed, that bitch was going to haul her team to victory like Jesus carrying the cross, and if Kha'Zix got fed it was a nuclear wasteland because he nuked entire teams. And you could viably "carry harder" in this meta, you could - if you went a champ that focused on sheer carrying potential, you could drag your team kicking and screaming from the brink of defeat.

But that's not the case anymore. Welcome to the "tank" meta as we're calling it - again, a misnomer. I've seen tanky teams get absolutely annihilated by teams packing no bulk at all, and it's because of the comp. It's not a "tank" meta, it's a "team" meta. Brought about by a myriad of new items, your team composition is now far more important than before, which puts the emphasis on teamplay. This is good - and it's bad.

We have a good side where your team is never really out of the game if you have a good, strong composition - play your cards right and, even if you're not quite up to snuff on items, you can still do your job heavy handedly and come out on top. It's not "quick, kill Akali before she kills us all, she's all their damage", it's "okay, Galio's going to taunt the shit out of us, so whittle him down before he can reach us so we can quickly kill him and then fight back before the rest of their team beats the ever-loving crap out of us". It's not "hey Fizz, go dive their backline and kill the bastards and then we'll distract them after you Zhonya's so you can kill the rest of them", it's "okay, we're going to use RG to scatter them, Fizz go pick off a straggler if you can get one, but otherwise I'ma go zone the ADC and I'll probably wind up getting killed but ours can outdamage and-"

You get the picture. Less focus on who you want to point the finger of god at and more focus on how you're about to play the cards you're dealt to win the fight.

But this is bad for solo-queue. Because it's solo-queue. Chances are, if you're finding it to be a breeze to get promoted, somebody else is finding it to be a massive pain in the ass - because if you aren't getting the subpar teammates, then that just means somebody else is. And there are the subpar ones, oh there are, have no delusions about that. With how shitty the ranking system is, you shouldn't be surprised if you're getting shafted with some of those leeches. And with it being the team meta, you can try to carry all you want - but let's break it down for you what the new meta says.

So first of all, you gotta have a proper team composition. If you're a mix-and-match bunch of ragtag outliers filled with niche roles and almost nothing but that to contribute, you're not about to have a good and easy game unless you absolutely stomp laning phase and end that game fast enough that you never see a meaningful teamfight.

Second of all, your focus is now teamplay - in a perfect world, this means that each player is going to be putting in 1/5 of the work required to achieve victory, and the winning team is the one that collectively did better at that. Of course, 1/5 is hardly the case - this number is going to vary as generally you will have one player doing the best at all times, but while it used to be that one guy could be doing 4/5 of all the work of the team, this is no longer the case - you're going to be looking at numbers far closer to 1/5. And that's as it should be in a team game.

So why can't "carry harder" apply anymore? Well, let's consider: if everybody in the game has the mindset that they must "carry harder", they're all going to be trying to carry. Because that's the idea, right? If you can't carry, carry harder. No exceptions if you want to get to higher levels now! Everybody has that mindset - but then, that means that not everybody can carry. You can only really have one person carrying at a time. How the hell does that work? You'd have to do all the work for your team every single time you play the game, which begs the question of how the other people in your ELO ever made it to that point. Surely they couldn't just surf on that many games to there? Maybe they're all promos - but that's not likely, don't be fucking stupid.

That's just kind of the initial logical dilemma with that frame of thinking - the real problem right now is that it's impossible to truly carry your team on your back - you can't just pool all your money into a single person and have them do everything for the team, it just won't work anymore like it used to. So consider that your team must all do their parts to win, meaning 1/5 of the work towards victory yadee yadee yada. If the enemy team's whole number is bigger than yours, then victory they win. If yours is bigger, then yay you win. That's what we've set up.

So let's consider that your teammates are behind. Let's put a number value to this - say, they're all at 900. You are at 1500. That's pretty good - you're fed, you're doing work. Right on. You got this. That's how much you're contributing for your team to victory versus your own team's doing.

The enemy team is at 1200 each with one person at 1300. Your numbers add up to 5100 - theirs add up to 6100. You would have to ensure that you - and/or your team - contribute an additional 1000 points to win. These numbers really don't mean anything, it's more of the logic of the issue - you basically have to almost double your work in order to come even with the enemy team. And it's not that simple to do anymore. You can't just say, "Well then I'll go blow up their team while you wait here". No - somebody has to zone the ADC, somebody has to engage, somebody has to do this somebody has to do that - you can't solo-carry. It's no longer a thing. If your top Vlad's got no gold to his name you can't go looking to your Akali mid to make up for his role because it's not about the damage, it's about what a member of your team contributes. It's why team comps are important - every member contributes a little bit of something to the whole group to make a strong and healthy team. If one of those members isn't contributing something now, that means you're missing a fundamental point.

What this, as an endpoint, means is this - your ELO and MMR is no longer heavily reliant upon how you as an individual do. You are now affected far more than ever by your teammates - and in solo-queue, this is a nightmare. And I would urge Riot to develop a far better way to rank players, because it's no longer a "I got demoted I suppose I'll just carry the three games back into rank" - it's "I got demoted dear god I hope my next three teams work with me well enough to get me back up". It's not solo-queue - it's "fight with strangers" queue. It's not just about you - it's also about those four other fucks that all called mid and apparently none of them know how to jungle or ADC.