When does rank actually start to matter?

Seems to me no matter how high you climb there will always be people who ridicule you because of your rank. Golds degrade silvers/bronzes, plats degrade golds, diamonds degrade plats, etc. all the way up to challenger. And even challenger players get degraded sometimes by other challenger players.

Whenever someone does poorly in-game, the very first thing other players bring up is rank. "Dude you're only gold, you have no idea what you're talking about". Or my personal favorite "This is just my smurf account, I'm actually D3 lol".

I dunno, it just seems like the online version of a dick measuring contest. There's no viable correlation between dick size and sexual proficiency, but we like to think there is anyway. Similarly, I believe that there really is no strong correlation between rank and skill, especially since the definition of skill is highly variable.

For example a D1 player may have amazing decision-making skills and know exactly what do you in a given situation. But their map awareness might be totally dogshit, and they frequently get caught out and die. Likewise, someone in gold could be a 1-trick and have excellent mechanical ability with their champion. They know all the ins and outs of the matchups and how to play each lane to perfection. But when lane phase ends they simply don't know what to do and end up throwing their lead.

I feel like too many people focus on rank as a primary means of identification. It's easy to point and say "you're silver 2 and I'm plat 4, therefore I'm better than you". It takes a lot more work to actually delve into the details of how each individual plays and determine, based on a pre-designated set of variables, how skilled that person is at the various aspects of this game.

I hear it all the time from higher elo players: "Yeah, it never really gets better, there are people in master that are absolute shit". And yet so many people believe one's rank is the be-all end-all in determining skill.

I know quite a few people who don't even play ranked at all; they only play normal draft and blinds. They're unranked, but they have thousands of normal games logged. Would you call someone like that a bad player just because they don't care to play ranked? A lot of you probably would.

Personally I just laugh whenever someone mentions my rank, because idgaf about some imaginary number being compared to other imaginary numbers that supposedly tell me how good I am. It just doesn't mean anything to me.

I really think that the entire community is too up-tight about this whole rank thing. Just relax and play the damn game lol. If you really want to feel better about yourself by putting others down, go to Reddit or Tumblr. I'm sure you'd be very welcome there.