What a Ladder is and what Riot thinks a Ladder is

To make things simple. We will only use 10 rankings for said ladder. In any ladder based match people are assigned numbers. For this, we will assign everyone a 0 ranking. After winning a couple matches you progress to rank 1, 2, 3, and so forth. Now, let's say you are in rank 4. Being in rank for you will be playing against other rank 4's naturally to maintain your position. Also fighting you will be rank 3's, because they want to move up in the ladder. You will also be fighting rank 5's that try to beat you to maintain their position so they don't drop back down to 4. So in a typical ladder you would be facing ranks 3~5 if you were rank 4.

Now, Riot feels ladders are matched much differently. If you are rank 4. You'll fight be fighting other rank 4's. But, if you've been doing well, Riot doesn't want you climbing the ladder too fast so they are going to throw you into a bunch of 7's because they think your MMR is too high and want to slow the process down. During this match you also have a rank 2 guy in your group because he's been so lucky and the last 8 games he's had his other 4 teammates bring him to victory every single time. So now we have a rank 2 and 4 vs a couple 7's. Also on the enemy team is a rank 9. He's had some bad luck lately and is about to lose his rank and drop to 8. Riot feels bad so he's placed in a lower competition tier to maintain his 9 status that he apparently so rightly deserves. Oh, the other team doesn't have any lower level Ranks because no one in that queue was in a win streak. Thus was born our MMR and the 18 minute loss because the 2 and 4 could not keep up with the 7's and 9. The 2 and 4 weren't given the learning curve by being matched with other 4's and maybe 5's so they become fed up with ranked and now troll Normal and Aram. So now this guy doesn't want to play ranked because he's on a team with ranks 27 fighting a team with ranks 79 because they were on a win streak and the other team was not. He thinks to himself "ranked is shit."

Now we have the other guy. This guy just lost a bunch of matches. He's been demoted once and his luck still hasn't gotten any better. He dropped from rank 6 to 5 and his MMR is so bad the entire game is consistent of ranks 1 and 2. Only problem is most of the time his other 4 teammates always seem to be worse than the enemy team's bronze players. He wins lane every game but he can't carry to victory because his team is down 32:9 and he has his only teams' kills. Poor guy just went down to rank 4 because he never got to play within the rank of his peers. And the new players don't understand how a 5v5 team fight works yet. Now he doesn't want to play ranked and trolls Normal and Aram because "ranked is shit".

Now Mr. Yasuo main is looking at his ranking in LOL and is wondering how his rank only has 18 other people in it. Doesn't this game have thousands upon thousands of players? Does his rank really only have 18 other people? There must be some kind of mistake. If there's only 18 people in that rank, how come I've never seen any of these people? It's a new batch of 9 other people every single game. Where are they coming from? The rank below him only has 24 people. The rank above him has 36. That's still less than 100 people near his rank. Where are all these other people coming from? Where is their rank? Are they real? He's so confused. This MMR makes no sense. He hasn't once played anyone that he's seen listed near his rank. Are they just grabbed out of thin are? Roll of the dice? Not enough players so they take from ANY rank? Mr Yasuo main now only plays normal blind pick and instant locks Yasuo mid every game, regardless of what's picked, because "ranked is shit".