What is "Elo Hell"

"ELO hell" is more or less an excuse for not being able to climb. It involves finding anything else to blame but yourself.

Things along the lines of "I cant climb because......":

• My team mates are always trash

• I always do well but can never win

• I always have afkers/trolls on my team

• Autofill makes it impossible to climb

• I always win lane but my team is trash

and so on. Its pretty much a list of excuses people use instead of accepting maybe they're at the rank they deserve to be at

When your better then the average player in your division but not quite good enough to carry matches.

When your teammates go 0/9, every single ranked game you play

When your mmr rises so you play with in a higher elo but you can't win enough consecutive games to for your rank to catch up.

There's probably a few different perceptions of what Elo Hell is.

But I bet the most common one is when a player has the idea that they are stuck in a elo they perceive them-self as being too good for. This feeling is of course delusional, nobody can really get stuck in an elo, they are just unable to climb higher because they are where they belong, only by becoming better at the game can they hope to climb higher. But because they believe themselves to be already good enough to climb they instead blame anything but themselves for the reason they can't seem to climb any higher. They blame their teammates for sucking, they blame the enemy for smurf-ing or duo-ing, they blame Riot for broken champions or poor matchmaking, any excuse will do because its never their fault of course.

Basically this version of Elo Hell is a delusion, it doesn't really exist except in the mind of the person who thinks he's stuck.

I've also see a slightly different version of this, where a player isn't delusional about their own skills and knows they have climbed as far as their skill can take them, at that point they say they have reached Elo Hell. This is because at this point there is basically no going up or down, you are "stuck" hovering around your right elo, which means no matter what your do unless you actually work at getting better at the game you will lose just as much as you'll win. You are "stuck" with players who are of equal strength. They pretty much have a correct view of the system but I guess don't like the outcome of it? I don't know. I rarely encounter this kind of Elo Hell explanation.

With this version of Elo Hell I can at least agree that it exists, I just don't understand the beef someone have with it.

There might be others, I'm not sure. This is at least what I have heard of it.

PS: I don't mean to judge the people who prescribe to the first version of Elo Hell too harshly, while I don't agree that Elo Hell exists I understand the feeling of frustration at what match making can look like at times, and of course the game isn't perfectly balanced, and yeah there really are smurfs out there, etc. It's not a perfect system, but ultimately there is no such thing as your kind of Elo Hell.