Dude it's terrible. I got platinum in season 3 on a different account, had multiple gold accounts and it seems they started doing this garbage towards the end of season 3 / early season 4. I shit you not, I could go 32/2/25 or something in a 45-55 minute game while taking 6-8 turrets by myself and my team would do absolutely nothing except chase Udyr through the jungle leaving me to solo push.
I remember one of those games where I had a score similar to that and my 2 deaths out of over 55 team deaths cost us the game in PLATINUM. I had taken 8 turrets (There are only 11 on each team) and they were the only 8 turrets we took. I looked at turret damage at the end of the game and I had basically all of it. I remember they had little slivers on every single damage bar and mine was this giant bar that pretty much toppled everyone's and we still lost. I was literally 1v9. Not one single fucking asshole on my team would help to push even though I had opened up 2 inhibitors by myself, it was like my team was buying time for the other team to kill me once or twice so they could end.
Wanna know what happened after this? I continued to lose more and more games and I think I hit an 18 game loss streak, because eventually after having multiple games like that, you are GOING TO TILT. I believe I had over a 60% win rate and was 100 wins OVER MY LOSSES and eventually I ended up going something like 20 losses OVER MY WINS. I would literally win 1 and lose 3 no matter how well I did. In fact, the only games I won were the games where I played like complete dog shit because my previous teams just didn't give a fuck, wouldn't help me push, fed 100 times, etc. That's why I quit and stopped spending money on this game. I didn't mind losing when I was a dog shit player but when I was at my peak and my mechanics were good, my game knowledge was good and I still couldn't win I pretty much gave up.
I never had the best map awareness, it wasn't terrible but it wasn't awesome. I still managed to not die a whole lot because I had extremely fast reactions. I now have much better map awareness but my overall mechanics aren't as good because I just don't play anymore. I die less now than I ever did but I still get dog shit teams. Having a team that gives 2 deaths per minute every game is uncarriable, even for a challenger player. I don't have proof, but I have duo'd with 2 different challenger level players (one of them was Diamond in season 2 and played with people like Reginald, Dan Dinh, Dyrus, etc. and he was my roommate), and the other was an elo booster who boosted accounts with his brother who I became friends with after trolling them because I was a pick ahead of his brother and I wanted to support. I picked Lulu bottom, we had no jungler until about 7 minutes when we could roam, and we pretty much dominated the game.
The first case of my roommate said he couldn't make challenger as soon as season 3 started but I know he could have if he had actually tried because it is literally the same as being Diamond in season 2 so I am definitely including him. He didn't like to duo but we did try it a few times on his smurf and we did ok, but it was never anything special. I ended up getting to around 1550-1600 ELO at the end of season 2 right after they had ended the season so I didn't get my rewards and I was fine with that. Going into season 3 I got placed into Silver 3 or something like that and I knew something was fishy when they started hiding the ELO but I knew it wasn't finished and I was able to pretty easily climb to platinum although it did take a lot of games. This is where the second case of the ELO boosters come into play. I got platinum and then I proceeded to go on a HUGE losing streak after reaching plat 4. I then decided to take up my friends on their offer to duo with them so that we could have 2 good players in the game. You wanna know what they told me after I duo'd with them? MAKE A NEW ACCOUNT BECAUSE YOURS IS FUCKED!!! They told me there are only 2 ways for me to get out of that shit and it's either 1. make a new account and get into Diamond or better. 2. duo with someone who I sync well with and can communicate well with who is equal skill level to me. I couldn't do the 2nd option and I never really bothered with the 1st option. The reason we didn't sync well was because of a language barrier. Their native language was Chinese and they didn't speak English well so when I said I didn't want to make a certain play they couldn't understand it. Arguably I did slightly better with the challenger player but he hinted that the highest we could go with our communication level was probably low platinum because Riot was totally FUCKING me on match making.
TL;DR Riot hides the ELO for a reason and it's not for your benefit.
