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PSA: ELO hell exists, but it's not because your teammates are holding you back...

SzGamer227··4 votes·705 views

...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.

11 Comments

Dolasaur2 votes

Wanted to point out promotion assister. For everyone that it applies to (up through Gold 1 I think? so like 90%+ of players?), you start with a free win on your promo series. So for the first 1/2 are won on the first try, that's good. But you need a new base for your recursion, as 3/4 of the first division promo re-attempt (with the free win) will succeed.

Edit: And after some quick pencil math, the win rate on promo re-attempts looks like 11/16.

SzGamer2271 votes

Thanks a lot for pointing that out. I've gone through and fixed all the numbers to give a more accurate idea of the extent of this. Divisionals is significantly less nightmarish now, but League Advancement still looks pretty atrocious.

Dolasaur1 votes

It's supposed to be updated now? I think the probabilities are still off.

Your first division promo series attempt has a 50% win chance. Cumulative total: 50%.

Your first division promo series re-attempt has a 75% win chance out of the previous 50% failure rate. That's an absolute chance of 37.5%, and it brings the total to 87.5%.

The exclusion of the first two cases (losing both first attempt and first re-attempt) brings us down to 12.5% of the total possibilities, or 1/8. But your summary still says "1 in 4 promotions..."

I'm too lazy to do the math on uglier numbers, but the probabilities for the cascading failure series for tier promotions should follow a similar exponential pattern: 0.5 * (5/16)^N where N signifies the number of consecutive failed promo re-attempts up through and including that one.

It's definitely still ugly, and there probably are dozens of people out there that this has happened to. I'm just nitpicky about math. :)

SzGamer2271 votes

Ah, I misunderstood how the free win system worked. I assumed that the free win applied to every promo series rather than just re-attempts, which was an oversight on my part.

With the updated numbers in the main post, I have it as a 1 in 4 chance to lose each Divisional Promo Series, so 1 in 4 chance of losing one, 1 in 16 for losing two in a row, 1 in 64 for losing three, etc. For League Advancement, I have it as a 5/16 chance to lease each Series, so 5/16 chance of losing one, (5/16)^2 of losing two in a row, and (5/16)^3 for losing three.

If the free win doesn't take effect until after the first loss, that would explain my mistake. X,D

Dolasaur2 votes

Sorry for not explaining thoroughly; it's a bit confusing, tbh. And when it came out, people were actually complaining about rank inflation because now it wouldn't take as much to get up to the next rank, lol.

Bob the Toastr1 votes

Good job for doing the math on this. I've been frustrated for a long time with it but I've never bothered to do the math for it.

SzGamer2272 votes

Since you showed interest in the numbers, I thought I'd let you know that someone posted saying I overlooked something in working this out, and that the main post has been updated to reflect the fixed values. (I had forgotten to include the free win for reaching Promos for most Ranked players.) Divisionals is significantly less nightmarish now, but League Advancement still looks pretty atrocious.

Dynikus1 votes

the problem with this post is that you're basing everything on the assumption that you win 50% of your games. Generally speaking, you need more than a 50% winrate to climb. If you're winning as many games as you're losing, you're likely where you should be until you improve your gameplay, in which case you'll win more often than you lose.

SzGamer2271 votes

The way the system works is you get placed at a higher MMR than you are currently ranked and then climb by earning more LP for winning games then you do for losing. The way you increase your MMR is to increase your win rate, sure, but then once you're at the higher MMR, your win rate is back at 50%, so increases in win rate are temporary while the system works to matchmake you with players of your level.

If you are in Bronze 2, and you start playing at a Silver 5 level, you're going to see an increase in win rate because you're still playing with Bronze 2 players. Winning more games causes your MMR to rise to a Silver 5 level, at which point your win rate levels off to 50% once more. You are once again winning just as many games as you are losing, but you're still climbing to Silver 5 because the system gives you more LP for winning and takes away less for losing.

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