Every single game I have played recently I ended up having lvl 30 account in the lobby. Most of the time it was botted account that have been sold with hundreds of Intro games that suddenly decided to swap their flash binding key before going into ranked.
These account make the matchmaking impossible to balance as you can stumble upon either a GrandMaster on a smurf or a legitimate new player completely lost. As someone who have always stagnated around Gold/Platinum elo in the previous seasons and now Platinum/Emerald, it’s really demoralising to try to grind when the matchmaking is usually the win-factor.
Riot really need to take actions against bought account and smurf as they are the biggest reason games are unfun and unfair to play. I know they will never touch it as it makes them some nice money and stats for the game, but it really made me stop going into ranked.
Even if you don’t stick to the same champ and OTP, I would recommend staying in the same role and picking 2-3 champions to play.
This is no exaggeration, but if you can hit 6cs/m that alone will be enough to probably get you to like high silver.
Really low elo players struggle to keep their cs up after lane phase ends as they tend to just 5man mid and fight on repeat.
If you dip into a sideline, not only will you have more gold than everyone because you aren’t splitting it, you will be way ahead in exp because you’re getting SOLO exp rather than sharing it 5 ways.
If you follow the above, you’ll be able to easily carry teamfights when there actually is a reason to teamfight, like when drakes are up.
Don’t feel bad for not being there for unnecessary teamfights 24/7, regardless of what your teammates tell you. If they were right about anything, they wouldn’t be in that ELO.