How increased damage makes it harder to climb elo
If you drop a bowling ball into the ocean, there will not happen much. If you drop a bowling ball in a bathtub, you might break the bottom.
Volatility is your enemy If you want to climb in league or any ranked game for that matter, volatility is a major factor of influence when it comes to small sample sizes.
What is volatility in league? High damage means volatile games, where odds of winning and losing vary more due a bigger chance factor. When margin of error decreases, games as always can go in both directions, however they are prone to less variables and thus increasing volatility. To put it simple; if 1 hit equals 1 death, that means 1 hit has way more impact on the outcome of a game than when 1 hit equals just 1/3 of a death.
Skill being the only variable is not enough to change the influence in a small sample size. What does that even mean? If you are better or worse than the elo you are currently playing in, you should either climb or fall, obviously. But the odds of you climbing substantially in let's say 10 games is negligible and dependant on short term odds. For example, you might get someone going AFK, or a feeder or just poor players for several games in a row. In the long run this will even out, because the enemy is also under influence of these factors. But a series of 10 games is no measure of skill (unless you are a master player in bronze). a series of 100 games is, but due to the high amounts of damage increasing the volatility of the game this becomes less than it has been. 100 games is still a measurable sample size to be able to consider if you are above or below your current elo, but climbing is much harder now because of the reduced amount of variables.
Let's try and illustrate this. As said before if 1 hit equals 1 kill the game is much more odds reliant than when 1 hit equals 1/3 of a kill. Imagine you're playing a dice game against your opponent and the objective is to throw the highest amount on average on the dice and you decide to throw 10 times. If you each have 3 dice and throw them 10 times, the odds of winning without skill are simply 50% (given that there are no ties). Nothing special there, but the difference in the expected average is what we are trying to look at.
Throwing 3 dice 10 times equals 300 results. Throwing them just once is only 100 results. Meaning the chance factor is huge throwing with just a single die. If you keep throwing long enough the average will eventually always be 3.5, but throwing with 3 dice will get you to that average a lot quicker, than throwing with just 1.
But you might think that there are a lot more variables that influence the game and that damage is just a small part. Well actually no. Damage is everything.
Skill and damage are the core ingredients to the game. Take Meta for instance, people complain a lot about meta and it can definitely have a huge impact on you personally when your champion is nerfed into the ground and tanks become useless or whatever. This can cripple you and I have seen several friends leave the game due to crippling balance changes, but it doesn't change a thing, because it doesn't fundamentally change the game in any way unless something is so completely OP that it reaches a 75% winrate (warwick S6?). These are minor influences and on a personal level, but in the grand scheme of things meta doesn't affect the core game experience and only affects a small set of variables, whereas damage complete throws the whole game out of balance when altered incorrectly.
I must be nuts saying that Meta doesn't matter right? You've played Warwick at his 75% winrate and you climbed from S5 to G5 in a week! Imagine that same Warwick with the current damages. If he would not be banned 100% (which he would be - another thing that nullifies Meta and OP champs), he would probably have a 90% winrate and you wouldn't climb to G5 but to P5, which only proves the point that damage is a more important factor to everything.
It has taken such proportions that right now there is no meta, not really. You can play Heimerdinger bot and no one bats an eye, hell I've seen Janna top completely ruin a Mundo. No one cares, because no one knows in what state the game is. The only piece of meta I can see is that tanks suck and that AD is OP.
Conclusion A master player would be out of bronze and silver in a heartbeat, but for him to go from Plat/Diamond will probably be just as tough as former Plat players to get out of Gold, which for me seems to be impossible right now.
Any thoughts?
