https://na.op.gg/statistics/tier/ I'm using an external site, not sure if it is correct. I would be interested to hear Riots thoughts on the Iron Tier, why they made it, and what purpose it holds to keep the rank? Seems much more like an insult than anything else.
Iron ended up being kind of pointless since they didn't add the change to make all accounts start in Iron 4 mmr like they planned. Also didn't help that the beginning of the season super boosted a ton of accounts with the horrible positional mmr stuff.
Here is the breakdown on leagueofgraphs
https://www.leagueofgraphs.com/rankings/rank-distribution
It's only 1.8% but 1.8% of 50 million people is still 900,000
Iron was never going to have a massive amount of people to begin with. The entire ladder is literally on a bell curve. Only a few amount of people will be at the very bottom or at the very top of said ladder just due to design. Just like the vast majority of people are around Silver due to that being the middle point of the ladder
Iron is more than just iron 4.
I think these tiers are made to offset the potential inflation of players getting into Diamond+. Afterall, you could keep increasing how many tiers there are between Diamond and Challenger, but that also opens windows for more players from Diamond 4 to move up to a rank they may or may not have been eligible to be in simply because more headroom was allowed by opening up, GrandMasters per se, allowing 100 players, potentially, to move forward from Masters, then Diamond I into Masters, then Diamond II in I, III into II, IV into III, and so on, without effort.
Having Iron more or less negates this potential flow and forces players into claiming their spots into Grandmasters, etc.
I could be wrong of course. That's just my theory on why Iron has to exist.
