Riot is a fair company and League of Legends is a fair game. With the hard reset at the beginning of the season, many players see themselves dropping far below what their original rank was. Silvers turned into bronze, golds turned into silvers. Some did manage to keep their original rank, dominating their promotion series so that they never really dropped in the first place. But, like with every year, new bronze and silver players began to get stuck in their leagues. They were in the infamous elo hell, its cursed name whispered by thousands of bitter players.

Except that elo hell doesn’t exist.

The original idea was that a player was perpetually stuck within their league, not because of their own playing, but because of their teammates. Riot’s matchmaking system unfairly throws them with bad players in some evil attempt to keep them down. Now, people over the years have done countless studies to find out the mathematical probability of success in ranked League of Legends. That occasionally the system will mismatch players and some people will end up losing a hopeless game. No one denies that fact. Losing is almost as important as winning. However, mathematics doesn’t account for everything, and most of the time these facts hardly comfort those who cry from the depths of what they believe in elo hell.

If someone has been consistently losing, it may take another set of eyes to realize what the problem is. If a bronze player asks a higher ranked friend for help, it will almost always be in some sort of sentence like, “carry me out of elo hell,” or “duo with me out of elo hell.” But at the same time, these people begging to be carried out of their league usually believe themselves to be the best of the players in the game. Why would the best player begged to be carried? The best player can carry themselves out.
And that is one of the largest problems with the mentality of being stuck in elo hell. This is hardly a guide about climbing the ladder, or talking about some archaic mathematical statistic that will surely give hope that better games are on the horizon.

This is just addressing the fact that believing in elo hell puts a block on a player’s growth. It is impossible for someone to grow and become better if they do not reflect on themselves and think, “I could have done better.” Instead, it is always, “I am better. My teammates were just bad.” That is not healthy.

Sometimes, a player has to step up and be the carry for the team. To shoulder the burden of four other people and try to do their best to make sure that they win. It has won hundreds of thousands of games, and sometimes being the carry is what everyone dreams of. However, with an elo hell mentality, they are no longer trying to carry the team. They are trying to carry themselves. And as the losses begin to rack up, and the creeping anger of having victory snatched away starts to claw at the brain, they can’t even begin to carry themselves.

Elo hell does not exist. Elo hell is, at best, an excuse for personal failure. It promotes indulging in losses, because it has to be someone else’s fault. It advocates a toxic mentality that every game will have people that will feed, and so if that happens then everyone will surely feed. Everyone except the player thinking they are the best. People begin to loathe their teammates, and they haven’t even played with them. All because they are mad, not at themselves, but at their teammates, and ultimately Riot’s own ranking system.

It is easiest to point fingers at everyone else, and the popular pick is definitely Riot. It is Riot’s fault that their matchmaking algorithm clearly messes up every time. It is Riot’s fault that people are matching with bad teammates that lose the game. Someone might go positive every game, but that doesn’t mean anything if they can’t translate it to the rest of the game. The mid lane LeBlanc that is 7-0 shouldn’t be flaming the feeding top. They should be trying to figure out what to do to make up for the lost lane.

Laning phase doesn’t dictate the game, unless someone gets on tilt because they happened to have a poor laning phase. There are extreme situations where every role loses horribly in lane, and then that is clearly the end of the game. But the bulk of League games are easily salvaged. It’s just that once people begin to believe in the thought they are stuck in elo hell, they stop trying to get victory. Victory stops being something they earn. It becomes something they believe Riot owes them. Being so set on the idea of victory inhibits personal growth. There is only victory, nothing else. Personal growth doesn’t matter because they are the best player stuck in elo hell. They deserve the victory based on nothing other than the fact they play the game.

The idea that elo hell exists is a burden on the majority of the League community. Sadly, it is something that many people indulge in. They willing chain themselves up, like a League of Legends Jacob Marley, cursed to stay in an elo that they want to so badly get out of but refuse to really try to escape But unlike Marley, it is possible to break the chains and ascend to a higher rank. All someone has to do is start realizing that it isn’t everyone else’s fault. Elo hell doesn’t really exist. People just pretend it does and use the name as a scapegoat for their failures.

Riot is a fair company, and League of Legends is a fair game.