On high elo and low elo

This is written as a response to a Diamond 5 friend who was having one of those "League crisis" and feels down that he lost to some borderline silver/gold player in solo laning. Oh, and Diamond 5 LP cramping hueheuehueheuehue.

Here's the thing: this D5 guy mains mustache guy (81% win rate) and his ranked picks are densely packed with bot lane champs. He has a general idea of match ups outside the bot lane mini-verse but the game is big enough that you'll (or should) consistently learn new things, even ignoring new champ releases/patch changes. The small things in individual champions. And obviously people no matter what elo will make mistakes (zoning out, bad day, miscalculation, etc) or otherwise there will be no losing/winning team.

What I really wanted to remind everyone is that League is not a 1 v 1 game and beating a higher elo in an individual match up is technically minutia compared to the larger scale. There are so many details in the game, so many match ups, so many item combinations, so much team combinations, so much niche picks, so much YOLO off-meta picks, so much math that most people don't want to do, it is unfair to expect anyone to be responsible for every expectation. Oh, and let's not forget the trolls and people on chat restriction for a legit reason impeding in other people's play.

But you don't necessarily have to be some autistic savant who memorized every game knowledge there is. Game knowledge still has to relate to basic human intuition (or you memorize for nothing), communication skills and organizational skills. Low elo is generally categorized by lack of common knowledge across all teammates and we all seen that in the way people can be so scattered across the map; they all have separate timings about when to do objectives (or whether or not to even do them) based on understanding of enemy team comp. Ever feel awkward about pushing or how to organize a solid push after landing phase is over? Yeah, that's it. Lower adaptability or sense of certainty.

Just because you have 2 - 3 picks per lane doesn't mean your picks and current game knowledge, no matter how many LCS streams you watch or guides you read, is relevant to how you actually play. In normal games you play against people practicing new champs, casuals, and the variance in elo through friends playing together. It is not an accurate representation of how well you play certain champs and it can indeed take time in ranked to find out if the kit in your chosen pick actually serve you from a psychological perspective.

So can some silver 5 hold a debate with some plat in terms of game knowledge?

Perhaps. People will always share tips about the game and always theory craft.

But will the former be pragmatic about this knowledge? Because you're only as good as how well you digested your flat knowledge and most non-genius digest this through experience and/or self-analysis.

I see lots of people in my elo go on all-chat brag about how they beat some diamond guy in their solo lane, bitch about why some plat guy isn't carrying them by 20 minutes but I find them more than often these people will find some way to get back into the game. When my gold duo partner has a plat border support that isn't serving the team, at least initially, we may get mad but we tell ourselves that the game is simply big.