Talk:Elo hell

ELO doesn't account for team play
The system has always been designed for individual performance. When used for a 1v1 game, like chess, the system is indeed self correcting. You naturally tend towards your skill. But there are factors that ELO doesn't account for in a team game. If a team is kept together, and rises or falls as a team, then ELO works too, because how well the team works together. it is when you cant' choose and stick with your team, that ELO hell exists. If you are vastly below your rank you can raise it by carrying the entire team. When you are above th ELO hell range, everyone else near you also knows how to team with randoms, so you tend to have a fair win rate then too. But when you are below your rank, but can't carry the team, then is when it happens. In ELO hell, there's a great variability in the ability of players to work well as a team within the same ranking. because you never know if you will get team players or not, even if yo do know how to be a team player, you can still get a team full of lousy team players, be unable to make them work together, and lose. As the game goes on, people who do have that unique skill of being able to turn things around for a lousy team break out, leaving behind the lousy team players for new players to get stuck with. With each person who breaks out of ELO hell, it becomes harder for the next person to do so. People have tested this by starting over and being unable to break out even though they were able to before. That's because the true quality team players have already broken out, leaving the people who don't know how to be team players at their same rank, and with so many of them around, your skill doesn't make a difference and you still can't break 50% win rate, and thus can't rise. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.211.60.216 (talk) 23:40, 23 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Several points to be made here, for one, most matchmaking/ranking systems do in fact account for team sizes in their rating calculation. For another, it doesn't actually change much anyway, as the skill of a team is mostly just made of the average skills of the players involved. (with some synergy factors for people that play together often, also often accounted for in matchmaking systems) Thirdly, you say you get stuck at "elo hell" due to poor team players. Except the enemy team has more potentially lousy team players, so that should make you more likely to win.Rody1990 (talk) 10:59, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
 * That so called irrefutable argument about you being the better player means there is more slots on the opposing than yours for bad players only applies in the long term. In the short run, once you can no longer carry a team singlehandedly, more games are decided by variance than your skill. Even if you aren't going on tilt due to the bad luck with teammates, it takes a much longer time then it seems like it ought to to ride out the variance and escape.  The point at which your skill is no longer enough for you to carry the team and ignore the variance is Elo hell. 24.241.67.34 (talk) 19:57, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Different roles
In a team game, where players have different roles, Elo system does not work. One problem is that the win or loss is determined not by best performing player, or average skill $$\frac{1}{n}(E_1+E_2+\dots+E_n)$$, but by border of least performing. I.e. which team has smaller $$\min(E_1,E_2,\dots,E_n)$$. Another problem is that various roles have different "impact" to the result of game. Often players who are concentrated together in some area, start losing control over other areas, decreasing their impact to the whole result, even if their concentration is obviously meant to maximize outcome of their strategy.37.113.165.244 (talk) 05:59, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

Conflict of Interest In Relation To A Game Creator Claiming That Their Game Is Fair
Both professional players and the game's development studio of whatever MOBA is under consideration have a motivation to attempt to convince players that their game is fair and without bias, and it is described as 'monetization'.

A game's development studio isn't going to openly admit to their ranked system penalizing good players because their allies were unskilled, because that would discourage people from playing (corporations are well known for lying about their services being above criticism, even in the face of the evidence). They are going to encourage people to engage with their product, and what better way to do this than by making them lose on purpose and telling them the issue isn't with the system, but that the player themselves are just unskilled and need to play more to improve their skill (engagement opens opportunity to attempt to get the player to spend real world money on in-game purchases, something that free-to-play MOBAs run on as a business model).

Professional players are granted their position by the system run by the game's development studio. This means that A. they are essentially owned by that studio and have motive not to question them because they're risking their financial position, and B. they may not have experienced the bias inherent in the system because the game's development studio purposely made their path to the top easier (a highly skilled player may find holes in the system and exploit them, which risk the studio's image by revealing how imbalenced the game is and where, while the professional gamer becomes both marketable by the studio and is a kind of ambassador of the product, so they need to be someone the studio wants at the top of their ranked system, so that provides yet more motive for the studio to be manipulating the official ranked system).

Essentially, taking the reports of those involved in the business at their word that that game is completely fair and unbiased is precisely the same as a company investigating itself and finding no wrongdoing, i.e. there is a massive conflict of interest if someone profiting from a business claims that there is an unverifiable psychological condition for why their customers are claiming that their game is unfair, quite apart from the obvious fact that it isn't, as outlined above within 'Obvious and Factual Evidence of Elo Hell'.