The most qqing that I have seen from this forum usually has something to do with elo hell, so for the next few months I am going to take a look at every single ranked game that I ever do from here on out, and I will see if an "elo hell" exists by taking a critical look at every single game. I will be looking at the statistics of the game, how well I did, how well my allies and enemies did, and I will be seeing who raged and who didn't and I'll try and put a statistic on the amount of raging/feeding/trolling/general obnoxiousness there is in a game.

Currently my elo is above 1200 courtesy of a jungle Maokai winning streak, but I do not know what is going to happen in the next few days once elos are reset or how my own performance will go. Thank you for giving my ongoing experiment a look and I hope that some of you can get something out of this.

http://elo-journey.blogspot.com/

Just so you know, I can run a good support. If you want a duo buddy who also has LoLReplay and is down to do some hindsight speculation postgame, add me

I'll make a 100% guarantee that your data will be flawed.

I'm an anti-Elo-hell-guy myself (if anyone is interested in my bias). I don't believe in it whatsoever. Now, from what I can gather, the OP doesn't seem to believe in it either and my be trying to prove what happens to be my opinion to be right.

But the fact of the matter is, you can't possibly see all of the data you need to see.

Here's some comments and criticisms for you.

1) In regards to Swift Hikari's comment, it would be great to have an objective 3rd party looking at LoLReplay with you. This would help make sure you're judging your own play fairly. However, it would not be appropriate, in my opinion, to study "Elo Hell" while duo-queuing. Duo-queuing effects a number of factors, a LARGE number of factors. And in the end, people will be prone to point to your study and simply say "Well yea you can get out of Elo Hell by duo-queuing! No one doubted that!" The majority of the complaints seem to be "There's no way out of Elo hell unless I duo queue with someone from a higher bracket." I can explain the problems of duo-queuing for this study more if you're interested.

2) This should have probably be the first point, but it's not, oh well. You need to define "Elo hell." You need to define it in your blog. You need to probably define it in your post here too. I could tell you that I'm going to disprove magnetohydrodynamics. Open a blog, make posts for a few months studying it, and then in the end, say "There, I've disproved magnetohydrodynamics." If you know what magnetohydrodynamics is, then maybe we're on the same page. But if you don't, you didn't get anything out of my supposed study. And the problem with "elo hell" isn't that no one that'll read your blog has any idea of what "elo hell" is, no. The problem is that everyone has a different definition or opinion of what "Elo hell" is, so you need to state YOUR definition of "Elo hell" so that your readers know exactly what it is that you're disproving. If you're going to claim this to be a "case study," you need to be very clearly on exactly what you're studying and what you're attempting to prove or disprove: very clear.

3) You won't gather all the data. It's impossible. The argument from the people who believe in Elo hell is always that they always have the raging/feeding/trolling/general obnoxiousness teammates on their team and that that puts them at a disadvantage. The argument from the people who don't believe in Elo hell tends to be that yes, sometimes the raging/feeding/trolling/general obnoxiousness teammate is on your team, but assuming you're not that player, he's actually on the enemy team 20% more often. Now, this is a statistical fact. And there are numerous ways of proving this statistically. But to the people who want to believe in Elo hell, the statistical facts don't mean anything to them. Your case study WILL show how frequently the raging/feeding/trolling/general obnoxiousness teammate is on YOUR team in your given Elo range, but as you can not see the enemy team chat, nor can you rely on enemy players accurately informing you when this behavior has taken place, there is no objective, empirical way of measuring how often that player actually does end up on the enemy team. Now, sometimes the chat will spill over into ALL chat and you know then that they have that behavior. But you can't assume anything about the times you don't see that behavior in ALL chat. You can't make a guess one way or another about how frequently it is happening.

Pogo, why dont you believe in ELO Hell? Doesn't low ELO gather mainly unskilled players, making it difficult to improve teamwork and score wins?

^This. I'm glad to see more people realizing that Elo hell hasn't been properly defined.

No one would argue that lower tiers of ELO doesn't make more frustrating games in general as you're playing with more unskilled players.

The arguement is that, those players belong there as they are not any better skill wise. There's actually no factual/logical arguement against this. Low skill level people probably love soloqueue becuase they can always blame somone else besides themselves for their current skill level.

"ELO Hell" is described commonly as some void that you cannot get out of because of your teammates, even though mathmatically this makes no sense. I believe it is nothing more than a psychological coping mechanism for people not able to face reality while venting their frustrations about horrible teamwork/strategy/gameplay that they were probably a part of.

It is no different than starcraft II. I got to Diamond (max rank) within 2 weeks of playing the first time. When Masters came out i was instantly placed in it. When I got free time i decided to start coaching people and I would always ask them about their play and they would tell me they were always playing at a league above their current placement. I would put them against people in that league and they would get demolished meanwhile making excuses or claiming imbalance instead of reflecting on what they did wrong and what their opponent did right. Random team matches were the worst, and the people drawn to this self defeating behavior always seemed to queue up for that game type. Always messaging me about their teammates while they have similar MMR's.

People think way too highly of themselves these days and very few are capable of self reflection that keeps them from progressing.

Define Elo Hell.

Elo hell is commonly defined as the elo range where troll and feeders exist

However this is true in every elo, aka every elo can be your elo hell.

A better case study would be: the origins and original meaning of the common internet term "QQ" and how its use has evolved into its current state...

Extra credit: where did :3 come from and what was its original meaning. (Aka, why I laugh hysterically when I'm told its a 'cute face')

Elo well is all in your head /endofyourstudyandontomine

I'm not really sure how solid a definition there is for elo hell. I think for the purpose of what I am doing it would be best to describe it as the elo range where there is a lot of raging/feeding/trolling that inhibits you from playing. I'm not specifically looking at noobs who play the game, but they may also factor in to cause some of the raging in the game.

Maybe a better description for what I am doing is investigating how much my elo improvement is based on luck and how much is based on personal skill. Perhaps a name change or different focus would be better?