The flaws of the League ranked system rest on skill being a fluid concept.

I get it, promos are frustrating and feel unfair. Games where you get fed and then lose feel unfair. Sometimes it feels like Riot is trying to lock you at 50% winrate whether or not you deserve the win or not.

But the issue with League, or any MMR system, is that it is based on analyzing human skill levels and 100s, if not 1000s, of variables when not everyone has the same skillset. That guy who inted 0/4 and caused your team to forfeit? Perhaps he was a teamfighting god who wins those fights 10x harder than the guy who stomped him in lane.

To add insult, skill levels fluctuate based on things like the time of day, champion they're playing, and champion they're playing against.

Yes, certain elos should have baseline skills, but everything past those skills is entirely up to what the player explores and intends to learn. The reason that high elo seems to be so caught up on all the exact same concepts is because

1. Confirmation bias. I see games where pros feed and lose and games where they stomp. Are the games usually closer? No. There are fewer deaths and better decisions, but that's because of point number 2.

2. Knowledge is exclusive until you get into high elo. They're almost all friends and as such they play with each other and share the same knowledge. They know how to not die and keep high cs scores and what calls to go for because they've experienced these things over thousands of games or they tell their friends to help them get better.

So outside of baseline skills (which are usually incredibly high in D1 50 LP and above, which explains the marginally closer matches), players are free to explore the skills and traits they want to. There are still disparities, but they're not as pronounced.

Bronze and SIlver have very few of those baseline skills. Almost all of them can cs well (I started in S3, so the fact that Bronze 5 can now somewhat frequently get 6-8 cs a minute in some of their games blew my mind), but outside of csing, lane trading skills are radically different, so are roaming, splitpushing, objective control, zoning, and teamfighting. And on top of that, they can have moments of clarity in which they make decisions that are tiers ahead of their peers. Maybe they just figured out how to properly use Caitlyn traps to zone people off towers, and if they keep playing Caitlyn they will rise to whatever elo similarly skilled players are playing at.

**TL;DR **that is why skill is so hard of a concept for us to grasp or gauge effectively. Some people are similarly skilled but focus on specific traits. Sometimes people play characters that their personal skill is much lower/higher with. Sometimes you just get better at the game and need to grind out a few matches for your rank to truly reflect your skill. But, your rank is a reflection of your average skill level and if your average skill level gets higher, you will climb (vice versa for dropping) and start to see real progress. Your skill level constantly changes, and this is one of the better systems to judge a fluctuating skill level (raw MMR systems are usually better, in my experience).

As a consolation I do agree a QoL change would be starting new ranked players with lower MMR. Perhaps Bronze 3-2?