Silver.

*A more skilled player should win more than a less skilled player, assuming that matchmaking is fair, lane matchups are otherwise equally matched and that the bad player is unable to hinder his team to the point of throwing a game.

1: The game and its state being good is subjective and not entirely true.

-To be subjective myself; I agree that the game could be good, if the devs put as much thought into tightening matchmaking and cleaning up overloaded designs and modernizing dated ones as they did with fancy skins and event passes. We’ve watched ability creep, mobility creep, builds be increasingly codified into one ‘right’ way to avoid a guaranteed loss. The ability and mobility creep are somewhat subjective as well, but I think it can be agreed that mobility does not need to be on a checklist on nearly every champ that is released.

-Of course, do not mistake popularity for being good; smoking was incredibly popular, morphine and cocaine were/are incredibly popular. Those of course are more hyperbolic, so let’s make a better comparison: Fortnite is a massively popular battle royale game, which has taken its place by a combination of being the most accessible and and least janky option available, plus an massive amount of advertising via actual ads to having musicians host concerts and crossover events. League is in the same boat, except that the field of MOBA games is arguably narrower than battle royale and that it spends a lot more on advertising the game via books, spinoffs and esports. For another comparison, look at the looter shooter genre; there is Warframe, Destiny and not a lot else that matches the level of polish. This is a genre where the options for what one can play are pretty slim and even if none of the options are that great, people will still flock to the shiniest ball of dirt.

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2: The game is not as balanced as you want to believe. It is also not as imbalanced as you think.

-You’re challenger, up there in the golden castle and pretty close to the people playing at worlds, relatively speaking. Of course the game is going to feel balanced to you; you’re playing at the level that the balance team absolutely cannot allow to fall into any semblance of being unbalanced, lest they court very public blowback. On the other hand, the lower one is on the ladder, I’d argue that balance is less of an essential goal apart from curtailing outliers; after all, no gold or silver is going to rack up huge twitch viewership or a place in worlds. When top tier players complain en masse about issues, they get fixed. When a new champ is released before a major event, they’re disabled in that until they get past a balance patch.

-The not unexpected part of your statement is that a chunk of your statement on balance has the subtext of “if you’re lower ranked, your opinion on balance has zero value”. Frankly, I’m not surprised to see it here, and I’m not going to make any other points on it other than it being a pretty childish way to throw aside complaints about the game without actually listening to them.

-The argument of being weak in the midgame means nothing if the early game strength allows enough gold income to outrun the lane opponent. If a champion is strong in the early game, then one has to put oneself at a disadvantage in order to not fall victim, and thus end up with less gold to go into the middle game than the champ that is weak early on. The game is designed to snowball leads; regardless of whether one hits the middle or late game, the early game decides how the game will end about 60-70% of the time.

-There are 165 champions currently, correct. So why not push back a release for a few months to spend some actual time to work on balancing in that complex web? Well, I can’t guess at why, but they have chosen to not allot their resources on doing so. I have every right to be mocked when I spend more time having fun when I should be doing something that I actually need to be doing.

-For a much more visible example of jank that has remained unfixed, consider how skillshots function when crossing into or out of river, base, or anywhere else where the z-axis of the map changes.

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3: Does Elo hell exist (Numbers are not going to match from here going forward, OP had 2 twice)

-I have yet to see sufficient evidence to either disprove or prove the infamous ‘elo hell’. My personal take on it is due to shoddy matchmaking controls even in ranked and matchmaking really not trying to match equally ranked players in positions. Until matchmaking improves, the only judgement I will pass is that matchmaking is very poor in normals and marginally better in ranked. From personally collected data, I will say that silver players should expect to see matches where there are both gold and bronze players present in the same game on a regular basis and having a skill range that wide is a recipe for trouble.

-Claiming that elo hell is used to rationalize and hide personally bad performance assumes that only people who perform poorly use it as an excuse. If the devs and players actually are interested in disproving the existence of such a thing effectively, then there needs to be some very thorough evidence shown.

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4: Toxicity is inevitable

-I agree; competitive segments of games inevitably garner some level of toxicity, especially when both the veil of anonymity is available and where one person doing poorly or doing very well has an outsize effect on the game.

-One argument I would like to make is that shortcomings in the core of the game likely do contribute to toxicity. If a player is placed on a team due to lackluster matchmaking and as a result does poorly and drags their team toward a loss, they will likely become a target for toxicity from their teammates and may lash out in kind. Similarly, a player placed above the others on their team may lash out at them for perceived intentionally poor performance. League and MOBA games in general have a much larger issue with this than Halo and shooter games due to the smaller team sizes and the core mechanics of the game.

-I do not agree that attaching some form of actual identity is the best way of fighting toxicity; I would argue that more active policing of toxic behaviors and more visible punishments are a more effective means of deterring others, in keeping with how real world crime reduction actually has been found to work. As said; “it is not the severity of the punishment that dissuades, it is the certainty that it will not go unnoticed”.

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5: The idea that anyone can hit challenger is a delusion

-Ignoring the fact that challenger is a limited set of slots, there are actual practical considerations to consider: how much time does one have to spend, what role is picked to climb in, where the climb starts in, and to an extent when one plays. Different people will have different ceilings of reflexes, ability to extrapolate positions of unseen foes, and to take silent cues from allies on what their course of action will be to ensure an ideal outcome. On the more luck based side, there’s the things we don’t like to admit as much; want to play only support? Best hope for competent teams and to get that essential early lead. Can’t adapt to the shifts in how the players play or the essential champ pool at higher levels, tough luck. And then there’s just the people who don’t want to be condescended to by higher ranked players as they try to climb.

I don’t know, according to the devs, losing a series shows that a player clearly isn’t deserving to rise up in ranked, so their own design philosophy for a decade says it is the case.

Maybe they should change up how tournaments work