PSA: ELO hell exists, but it's not because your teammates are holding you back...
...it's RNG.
And before you get any wrong ideas, no, this does not have anything to do with normal matches being thrown out of your favor due to poor matchmaking, random disconnects or trolls messing up games, or anything of the sort that people might complain about.
It's purely because of Promo Series.
Look at how the ranked system works. You're matched with people around your skill level, and outside of Promos, you are given an increased amount of LP to make up for being at a higher MMR than your rank entails. However, in Promo Series, you're still expected to win more than 50% of the games to promote even when you only have a 50% win rate. Consequently, Promo Series are 100% based on luck.
Let's look at how much you might be expected to be held back from Division to Division. You start off with a 50% chance to win after 2 or 3 games. If you lose, the system gives you a free win to help you along, and you you have a 25% chance to fail each reattempt. Failing a retry at your Divisional Series costs you 2 games right away (you must lose two games in a row to fail), and then you have to play at least 2 games to reach 100 LP again (unless you're earning twice as much LP for winning as you lose for losing). If you go on a hard losing streak, you might have to play 4 or more games before you reach 100 LP again. Let's look at how many games you might be stalled for during a Divisional Promotion.
1 in 2 promotions are beat on their first try, pausing climb for 2-3 games.
1 in 2 promotions are instead lost, pausing climb for 6-9 games. Not great.
1 in 8 promotions force you to play 10-15 games for no reason. A serious annoyance.
1 in 32 force you to play 14-21 extra games. Would this be Elo Limbo?
1 in 128 force you to play 18-27 needless games.
Considering you're just trying to get from one division to the next, being stuck at 100 LP for more than 20 games could easily feel like hell. Before you point out that these odds start to get really small, I'd like to point out that there are over 1 million players ranked in League right now. If 250k of them ever promoted from one Division to another during their career, almost 2,000 people have been held back from their deserved rank for somewhere around 20 games, just because Promo Series is keeping their ELO from reaching their MMR.
Since you have to win 3 out of 5 games to rise from League to League, you can guess that this RNG is going to be even more problematic to people who are down on their luck. With one free win, you have a 5/16 (~31.3%) chance to fail successive attempts after your initial 50% chance series, costing you 4 or 5 games immediately (an average of 4.6), then at best requiring you to play 2-3 games if you get those wins right away to reach 100 LP, and possibly costing you 4-5 if you mix in some losses.
1 in 2 promotions are beat on their first try costing only 3-5 games.
1 in 2 are lost instead, costing 10-14 games from your climb.
15.6% (~1/6) promotions force you to play 16-23 games for no reason.
This is where I marked Limbo for Divisionals. Look how common this is now.
4.9% (~1/20) promotions force you to play 23-32 games for no reason.
This would be the outskirts of hell.
1.5% (~1/67) promotions force you to play 32-43 games for no reason.
This far in, you're wading through some deep sh*t.
If 100k people have promoted from one League to another, almost 1,500 of them experienced Elo Hell of this magnitude. That's assuming they all persisted in trying to reach the next League, and didn't quit or give up after 30 games of being denied progression due to RNG. I know I would probably quit if I played that many games without progress, and if Hell is anything, is being so close to something that you want, but being held back from it without reason, over and over and over again.
If anyone has any questions about how I got any of this, feel free to ask, but if you're going to label me as someone who is complaining about the ranked system because I feel like I'm stuck in ELO hell, I'd like to point out that I'm not even ranked this season, let alone an invested ranked player who might go through enough promotions to get shafted by the system in the first place.
