I finally fixed my MMR after 200 games with a ~55%WR. A few takeaways.

This thread is not for you if you believe that the total amount of games determines your MMR, then we wouldn't have MMR changes based on streaks. This is not how elo systems work and I recommend you document yourself on how they work at a base level. Your MMR changes somewhat often and the only meaningful metric is anyone's guess, but if you look at someone's past ~200-300 games, I believe you can get a pretty good picture, do remember that gains / losses are also affected by who you area against.

I sit at ~55% WR in my last 205 games: https://prnt.sc/qb0m71 , before I started by then ~200th game, my MMR got dumpstered by a huge loss streak about 4 months ago: https://prnt.sc/qb0ro3 and this turned my account into a dumpster fire, as well as me genuinely not caring anymore since I knew it'd be nearly impossible to get my MMR back, but I did it anyways.

This, by maths alone, should've allowed to climb up to close to diamond, if not more, unfortunately, it did not happen. Nearly all my loses are in promos and they usually go very bad. I was wondering how I can make this work better and have started looking at times when I played these last 200 games to help me better understand it.

I've weeded out games where we had someone clearly trolling and running it down because reasons and there were a total of 16 matches like that, leaving me with 189 "fair" (well, you know how it is) games to analyze. As such:

7AM-1PM: ~39% WR 2PM-9/10PM: ~46% WR 12AM-7AM: ~61% WR

The games are somewhat equally distributed in these time spans and I noticed that my win-rate shoots up the sky when I play at the time when :eyes: some cough people *cough are sleeping, I assume.

So, I went through each of these late hours games to try and pinpoint, as best as my memory allowed, if my win-rate should've been worse / better and if I take that into account, my 12AM-7AM WR would end up at ~57-58%.

Assuming I'd only play during that time span and I would get lucky in my promos, I could climb to D4 in ~250 games. In fact, an increase to 59% would allow me to climb to D4 in ~160 games if my calculations are correct.

But even so, my WR is huge for climbing in a healthy way in the past 205 games, so what happened? Promos. I lost critical matches and had 10 promos for P3 in which almost exclusively a person either left or went 0-12 and there was no hope. I would lose 2 promos, be left at ~60 LP, then have to win 3 more games to get back into promos and sometimes I'd lose some of these 3.

If you're above 51% across your last few hundred games (I believe n=150 is enough, though), you need to play an obnoxious amount, but just an increase to 52% should nearly half the amount of games you need to play. Going from 51% to 55% as I did should / 4 the amount of games needed.

Things to take away:

1. At least for me, there's clearly a very good time to play. I find the late night games to be full of tryhard people that I can work with.
2. If your MMR is destroyed after a huge loss streak, it'll literally take you ~150-200 games to fix it, unless you manage a ~60% WR consistently across about ~50-60 games. This is the sad truth but if you've had a loss streak, the system punishes you greatly and forces you into a monster grind to get back to where you should be. You'll be fighting +13-15 LP gains and -20-21 losses all this time. It's very hard to beat it.
3. All of this means that, above all, unless you're exceptional (which main master / GM players aren't), you're not going to climb fast on an account that has rotten MMR. Your best choice is to find a high main person willing to duo with you.
4. League is, if you're just reasonably decent, a long grind, it's a somewhat long grind if you're a bit good, a medium-sized grind if you're good and you can blast through your way to D3-2 in ~150+ games if your level 30 account has huge MMR. Meaning that if your goal is to get an account back to D3-4 as D+ main yourself, you'll fly through gold, then hit a plateau in P4-1 as you've reached your skill ceilling. If you're challenger, you're gonna be able to stomp even D games, espcially if you're a duo.

All in all, this means that the culture of "lol hardstuck" is not accurate and most of the crazy climbing people see on streams is done by people who are challenger and in duos (a challenger player is so far ahead of everyone else in terms of MMR that for him, even D games feel like bots.).

Don't lose hope, but be prepared to put in a lot of time.

More importantly, if you have a 55% WR in your last meaningful batch of games, it means not only are you good, but you're above that. Not exceptional, meaing, you're not stomping anything, but you're on your way to the next divison in the next few hundred of games. As such, it's not worth to be stuck on 20-30 failed games. You should always think in terms of hundreds of games, thousands if you're willing to put in the time.

If, after ~1000 games during the season you haven't seen a clear improvement, then, it's 100% you. My expected outlook, although I won't make it before the pre-season ends is: ~300 games to D4-3.

Further reading on the topic: https://medium.com/@pmaymin/how-long-does-it-take-to-climb-a-tier-if-your-win-rate-is-52-5207699932cf