When I first started playing in season 3, I knew my first season that I’d be in bronze. I was bad. I accepted that. Through placements I tried my best and with considerable effort for me back then, I ended my first season in silver.
Next time, I wanted to get to gold. I wanted to claim that I was good enough to get a victorious skin. For the next several seasons I played to win but didn’t really know how and as a result I struggled to get through silver and was overjoyed when I first reached Gold and got my hands on Victorious Maokai.
The same thing for a few more seasons and I eventually decided to start trying to climb and reached my goal of Plat.
This season, seeing emerald, I put it as my goal and worked hard to better many of the mistakes that I had in my gameplay and worked my way up the ranks to hit emerald and it felt great.
That was until I started to realize that so many of the team mates I ended up with are fresh accounts to ranked. Not even accounts that have lucked into a win on their first placement, I’m talking accounts with literally nothing but beginner bots to their name.
For how much emphasis Riot puts on their E-Sport, for how much they push for the competitive integrity of their game with constant patches and clash and the promotion of it in the client, Ranked is obviously the primary focus of the game.
What is the point of trying to climb through ranks when buying a botted account it’s so clearly the definitive way to reach your desired rank? Diamond and elite players aren’t deterred by the prospect of having to play through 50+ games just to get to their rank again so they can happily sink a few dollars on a new account if they get banned, lower players have almost nothing to really strive for and the rewards that used to incentivize so much of the player base they just get anyway.
I’ve got many friends who were hardstuck silver and were putting in all their effort to climb and then bought new accounts to try and see what it was like only to end up with hollow victories.
But they won every single bot vs coop game they played so far!
Well, what do you suppose they do? Make them play in iron at the start? Then iron games will be ruined by people who are too good for iron. You could make the argument that new players make new accounts so they are probably gonna be low ranked unless they have experience in similar games but that doesn’t account for smurfs. Riot probably has much more data than we as players can see and have clearly determined that more games are ruined (or by bigger amounts) by having accounts placed low rank than plat.
My last plat game had me, P4, a P1, 6 emeralds and the other 2 unranked but leveled so likely in their placements. I haven’t climbed high enough to run into the Smurf issue much. But the idea that i climbed to gold last split now climbing to emerald after practice and someone making an account starts in the same place does feel bad
- The prestige of the ranked climb was absolutely demolished after Riot introduced emerald tier which devalued every rank below that.
- When they did the Lp changes which created by discrepencies in mmr and visual rank, aka it caused inflation and thus again devaluation.
- And lastly the removal of promos which just made climbing easier and lower ranked integrity. Something that yet again devalued ranks.
Honestly they are a joke at this point. A gold player in 2016 had a more prestige rank then than a diamond 4 player now in terms of how much effort you needed to put into the game and how much your skill was tested.
oh look it’s another thread on this
You had the solution
Smurf queue
You cried that people who didn’t even play the game had to play some games in it after returning