Does ELO Hell Exist?
Written by: Kaminin
The more you play online games such as League of Legends, the more you hear terms like ‘Elo’ and ‘Elo Hell’, but what are they? The Elo rating system was created by Arpad Elo as a method to quantitatively measure a person’s skill relative to another player. First used as a chess rating system, it was then quickly adapted and used in many other sports. The Elo works under the assumption that if 2 evenly matched players play against each other, they would have a 50:50 win to loss ratio. While slightly more complicated when used the League of Legends’ 5v5 system, the principle still applies. Which brings us onto the idea of Elo hell: In order to increase your Elo, you need to win. The idea behind Elo Hell hinges around the fact that your actual Elo is much higher than both your teammates and opponents; thus, unable make up for the failings of your team, unable to reach higher up the Elo ladder, and damned to endure in Elo Hell forever.
The current meta for League of Legends dictates that there are 5 key roles: the support, the marksman, the tank/bruiser, the mage and the jungler. So can a support carry the game just as easily as the mage? No. The support is a role that focuses on utility, aiding the person he/she is supporting through the early game, but at the sacrifice of their late game potential. In principle having a good support causes his partner an easy time in lane and give him lots of gold to buy items and therefore carry the game. But what if that partner really can’t perform? Certainly it must be harder for supports to carry their team to victory and therefore a good support could be stuck in Elo Hell. But realistically there’s more to a being a good player than simply being good at a role. A good player has good map awareness and good judgement of what to do and when to do it. These features can allow you to actually lead your team to victory.
It is possible for someone to be in a game, totally destroy their direct opponent and lose overall. Most gamers would have experienced it at some point and that is by definition Elo hell. With 32 million active players onLeague of Legends, I would approximate over 10 million of them firmly believe they are stuck in Elo hell. So if such a large number of people believe Elo Hell exists, surely it must?
The largest group of people who disagree seem to be the professionals and semi-professionals. But perhaps their accomplishments are related to their rejection of Elo Hell? Elo Hell doesn’t have to exist among the common gamers; it could just as easily be present at even the professional level. To someone like Faker, arguably the best in the world at League of Legends, playing alone in solo queue could justifiably be considered Elo Hell. Furthermore, player’s like Fabbbyyy have made themselves internationally famous for intentionally throwing games, just to stop someone else from winning.
But ultimately, these professionals decide not to acknowledge it. They decide to criticise themselves for every loss, even if the rest of the team feed, rage and troll and this principle applies to many online games, not just League of Legends. So perhaps that is the way to make it out of Elo Hell? As outrageous as it may seem, self-criticism is the fastest way to improvement, and only improvement is enough to carry you out of Elo Hell. So the moral of the story: stop raging, stop trolling, stay calm and keep gaming. Eventually you’ll carry yourself out of Elo hell the same way everyone else does.