If i have 1500 elo and I duo que with someone thats 1100 elo, the game difficulty that we would play at would be 1300.
so does that mean that if I lose, the game sees me as a 1500 losing against a 1300 and i drop much more elo because of this?
vice versa does this mean that when I win I get barely anymore elo?
Yeah, if you're way higher elo than the other players in your game, you gain noticeably less MMR for winning and lose noticeably more for losing. I did a lot of duo queue with someone that was silver V when I was gold I, and eventually came up with that, in doing that, I had to maintain a 53% win rate just to stay at the MMR I was at from doing that, which only seemed to be like a gold III or so MMR, even though the league system had me in gold I.
And it does this in normals, too, not just ranked. If you want to get a high win percentage, kda, etc., duo with people worse than you. But if you want to raise your MMR it's going to be a lot easier if you don't queue up with people worse than you.
yes, it actually does work like that. its to prevent duo queue smurf boosting. otherwise, anybody could get a friend to smurf on a duo and get free mmr on the higher account
this still works in low elo, but it is difficult to do this to get to rank 1 challenger because no smurf of yours can be way better than you
