ELO Hell: It exists.
I just made my way into gold rank, after spending all of season 3 just going from bronze to silver. My report is this: ELO Hell does exist; it's a real thing.
Riot proclaims that it doesn't. When a platinum, or diamond player goes down to check it out, they win all their games and moves out of it; thus there is no ELO Hell problem. But that's exactly the problem: platinum and diamond players smurf into bronze league, and then a silver or gold player is supposed to fight them there. So unless your team also has a smurf, then you're going to lose, and the system is going to force you into an even lower teir, or at least cause your ELO growth to slow, making you have to win more games, and that means fighting more dumb battles.
At lower teirs, you may as well just roll some dice, and let that decide the outcome. Roll a die: if it's over 3. you win the battle. What you actually do in the game, has almost no meaning. People say things like: If you play well every game, then eventually that will push you ahead." That's true, however the effect is akin to playing five games, and the rules are: "roll these five dice; you can raise one of them by 1. If three of them are about 3, you'll rank up." If you roll all ones--two enemy smurf games, critically bad player on your team, 2 DCs on your team, you lost a game in your frustration--then you'll be down a lot of points, and your ELO growth is lowered, so now you have to throw ten dice to progress. When you finally edge your way to victory in a teir, then you have to throw down 3 dice, and if you lose, "hey, just win 3 games in a row, and you can try it again!" Can you see how a problem can begin to exist, when you're effectively just throwing dice, and the more you lose, the more dice you have to throw to progress.
Look, I just made it to gold rank, okay: I am a gold player. If I was in bronze 3 right now, with the same number of games played, then I don't think I would get out. After making it to gold V, I played with a silver V player in a ranked game, where I had to play support as I was last pick. In that game, here's what I saw: jungler ganks bot; I ping a low health target as they retreat and jump on them, and afterwards the jungler says "I didn't know you were going to dive." Our mid lane is lost because our mid laner was watching top instead of the lane they're standing in. Later on, the enemy ADC tries to sneak through the bush to get behind our team, and they ran into me; I pinged the enemy adc, and have them pinned: my team--a quarter of a screen length away--does not care, and eventually the enemy ADC killed everyone on my team. So you see, your individual skill as a player is not the deciding factor in a game: you can make the right plays, and your team just will not follow up on it. Yes, the enemy team played better, and I agree, they're the better team: but that does not mean I, personally, am a bad player. Unfotunatly, the ELO rating system thinks that means I am a bad player, and belong in bronze league, forever.
When I made it to silver I, I then proceeded to drop only one game: winning every other game up to gold teir. Finally players play rationally, and my ability to play well actually impacts the game now. Simply not losing my lane, means something in the game.
How the game plays in silver I, is probably how Riot assumes the game plays in bronze league--only there should be worse mechanics there. It's not. Bronze III is basically about "which team has a DC on it; that team losses." I got really good at playing 4v5 in bronze III. If your team is equally as good as the enemy team, but one of your players permanently disconnects ten minutes in, then you're going to lose. Bronze league is no way a test the skill of a playerl: it's a test to see if all the computers are working. Even in silver IV, you still see players disconnecting regularly. Can you imagine what bronze V is like then, Riot? No, you can't: the horrors are unimaginable.
What's needed is a wood league, so all the players that disconnect every other game, will get dropped down into it, and stop impacting the game. By bronze III, there should be a 99% player connection rate, so some test of skill at least begin to happen. As it is now, the entire teir of bronze league is a hell of bad issues that simply should not be deciding player ranking: smurf players, so many players with connection problems, just really really bad players. Yes, bad players should be at the lowest ranking, but you still have to play with them, even at silver IV. In bronze V -> silver III, the deciding factor is: which team has the worst player. Then: which side has a smurf. Then: how well does an individual player play? If you're a silver or gold player at heart, then you're just going to get trumped again and again in bronze league, and it will take an entire season to get to see some genuine competition, and that's no way for the world's most popular game to be played.
