Thursday 25 July 2013
Many people believe in an Elo hell that is largely a myth. There is a real phenomenon, but it is not what they think it is.
It is true that many players would play at a level where they would see their teammates play badly, sometimes intentionally. They would rage, and feel there was no way to win. They watch competitive players cooperate with teammates, and think, "If I just had teammates who would play better, or who would work with me, then I could win."
Part of this is that some new players with provisional ratings are on the way down. It's bad luck to get such a player on your team. However, this happens more often on the opposing team than on your team, since there are 5 open slots on the opposing team and 4 on yours. This is a poor excuse. It does not cause people to get stuck in Elo hell.
The people complaining are mediocre, just like most of their teammates. Time and time again, professional players have shown that it is easy to move up rapidly through the Elo levels when you actually have professional skills. Ratings are meaningful. Perhaps there are 10-20 critical skills: Last-hitting, positioning, executing combinations, counterpicking champions, map awareness, communication, coordinating without communication, denying resources, deciding when to go all-in 1v1, deciding when to fight as a team, capitalizing on advantages, choosing good sacrifices, setting minion waves to push when it helps you, using wards efficiently, keeping team morale high, etc. The complainers are pretty good at 2-3 of them, and think they are good at 5, and they fail badly at the rest, particularly at keeping team morale high. They don't notice their own failures. They notice their teammates failing. Then they rage and start playing the blame game for any setback instead of having fun and seeing what they can do to try to win. Some teammates respond by trolling because this is the only way they can feel in control with some jerk blaming them--even a win wouldn't feel good because they don't want the jerk to win.
Remember, people with inadequate skills often think they are among the most skilled. They don't know enough to realize how much they don't understand. This is true in many areas, not just games.
The result of being blind to your own faults, and blaming others, is that you stay at an appropriate Elo rating far below what your ego demands. You might have good team fighting skills, but you waste huge amounts of resources by failing to last-hit, and you don't turn won fights into won games, so you don't deserve diamond or gold status. Then you lower team morale so that your team gives up after one bad fight, so you don't deserve silver, either (or the analogous Elo ratings, now that these are separated). Your Elo reflects the fact that you aren't a great player, but you don't accept responsibility for that because you see that your teammates haven't mastered the few skills you think you have mastered.
Now that we understand what Elo hell really is, what can be done?
As a player, take responsibility for playing well. Accept that you will often lose, but you can always look for ways to improve. When your teammates started to troll or flame each other, could you have distracted them with humor? Did you give up when a teammate disconnected, not noticing that an opponent also disconnected? Even when you win, what could you have done better? What opportunities did you give your opponents even if they didn't take advantage this time? If you play at the level of someone 200 Elo points above your rating, you won't always win, but your rating will rise rapidly to the new level. This can come from playing better mechanically, or by being a nicer person in game.
As a game designer, it is complicated. There is value in letting strangers play on the same team, but this causes problems. It's important to take player frustration seriously, both in game and at a rating system. Sometimes the right thing to do is to hide the rating system. Sometimes you need to gamify behaving well. Sometimes you need to set clear community standards and enforce them. Sometimes you need to have auto-mutes on chat, so people who want to say something really offensive have to spell it out in wards. I think Riot has improved a lot in these areas. Players who spend money on the game, but who try to ruin the game and cause dozens of others to quit or to avoid spending money on the game, are not good customers, and they should be eliminated, or set to play against each other until they redeem themselves. I don't think Riot has done well here; they seem to have been far too lenient. When someone gets banned for the 9th time for raging with racial slurs in chat, I have to wonder why they got a third chance. Then a fourth. Then a fifth, with each ban coming from multiple complaints. Then that account is permanently banned, but they are encouraged to start another. These few bad apples cause large numbers of players to get frustrated, and some to emulate them. Game designers should not tolerate these pests who try to turn a fun game into hell.
