I'm confused by this statement. I don't understand how you can belong at your ELO and not get better. In theory, if you just keep playing games, your skill should rise and you should get better, right?

guess not

well you'll get better and your elo rises while playing, and again you belong to your elo. I don't see your point.

i think this guy answered his own question /facepalm

there comes a point where you don't get better with simply playing more. If this were the case every1 would hit 2k elo eventually

This is actually the case in which someone who never improves will actually go down; the general playerbase skill level will improve over time, and the rating brackets won't be changing much, so the average skill level of a bracket will gradually increase.

However, with Elo decay, occasional Loss Forgiven's, dodges, non-zero-sum Elo changes, and season soft resets, I'm not quite sure how the average Elo fluctuates over time, so it might be possible that my point is false if the average player Elo rises over time.

Actually no, because the people that were better than you are also getting better and therefore your elo would remain constant.

Here is my take on this.

I am currently better then my elo, but belong at my elo.

yes, i am in the area most refer to as elo hell, but i don't personally think it exists. I think elo hell is when people stop carrying you and you begin to think that people are getting worse.

i ran into this early, people stopped carrying me in wins, and so my elo tanked. i practiced, got considerably better and now i make my best attempt to play perfect every game and my elo has shot up nearly 300 points in the last few weeks.

so yes, i am better then my elo but i have no doubt that no matter how many trolls i run into i will eventually get to my elo, and when i do, i will have to get even better or risk running into another elo hell situation where i expect people to carry me instead of the other way around.

good luck

and my advice

if your team needs a particular role don't fill that role unless you have tested it out in normal games, especially the support role.

Ideally your ELO should always be redshifted under the assumption that you are always improving, with a stream of new players always entering the rankings, the average skill level should improve at a rate slower than the individual(ie you)

So you should always be a bit below your 'true' elo for 2 reasons, 1:the closer you get to your ELO the more games it will take to actualize it(due to you being unable to carry games frequently enough when you are 20 points away from your true elo) and because of your ELO being redshifted(your elo determined over 100 games, you will be better when you play the 100th game compared to when you play the 1st game)

In theory, the way LoL manages their ELO for solo queue does to an extent demonstrate your skill. They demonstrate your skill to the extent that EVERYONE in solo queue is paired up with 4 other strangers (imo Duo Queue should be removed.) Even though when you account for Duo Queue, I doubt the statistics are much different in W/L ratio (if you play 1600 Duo Queue, chances are you can play 1600 solo as well.)

However, the ELO system in LoL is flawed because ELO is meant to represent a single player's sole ability in the game (originally chess.) Since LoL is obviously a team game, ELO scores become skewed. Player skill is generally accurately represented within the flawed system of LoL's ELO ranking.