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[Skyrunner]

Doesn't matter, they fight amongst themselves.  Also are bad.

[IronyOwl]

Are they also doing their promos? Might be going on tilt from that.

I've also heard a few different times that Gold is the "worst" bracket. Interpretations vary, of course, but it seems like more often than not, when somebody's describing how toxic each tier is Gold is at or near the top. Usually something about being a sweet spot for people who think they're good and are trying too hard.

[frostshotgg]

In my experience, low-mid bronze is the most pleasant elo (although I haven't played a ton there), followed by low-mid gold. Most people are just happy to have the free skin and be out of silver. It isn't until you start getting gold1/plat5 matches that they get unpleasant again.

Platinum is the worst bracket, closely followed by silver. Everybody there is an egotistical asshole.

[Skyrunner]

It's always funny when gold 5 people on my team ignore my suggestions because I'm  a silver 1 scrub

[Flying Dice]

In my experience, low-mid bronze is the most pleasant elo (although I haven't played a ton there), followed by low-mid gold. Most people are just happy to have the free skin and be out of silver. It isn't until you start getting gold1/plat5 matches that they get unpleasant again.

Platinum is the worst bracket, closely followed by silver. Everybody there is an egotistical asshole.

Mm, thanks for the opinion. I've been waffling around whether or not I want to do my promos into gold because I've heard a lot of bad stuff about it, to the point where I forgot to do it in time to get the Morg skin. It only took me ~15 matches after placement to skip from Silver III to Silver I, I've got a 70% WR, and the last time I checked my MMR was well above Silver I, so I'm certain I can hack it, but hearing the constant "Gold is super toxic" stuff made me hesitant about wanting to.

That said, I'm def. going to avoid trying to get to Plat if I even turn out to be able to , since I know I'm not good enough or consistent enough to make it to Diamond and I sure as hell don't want to be stuck in Plat.

By the by, has anyone else been playing much jungle on the PBE? I've been hearing good (OP) things about the item that's replacing FF, any substance to that?

[DemonOfWrath]

Regardless of where your division placing is your MMR determines who you play with, so if you have the MMR to get into, say, plat, you'll be playing with people in plat regardless of whether or not your division says plat 4, gold 1, or bronze 5. You may as well just let your placing go as high as it can because you'll be dealing with whatever players and toxicity are at that level regardless unless you deliberately throw games to drop your MMR.

[Skyrunner]

No matter what your apparent league is, the game will match you with actual plats if you're plat-skill.

edit: I hoped it would be different, but my third and final gold promo game of my 4th gold series is also looking to be a loss... always a landslide, too.

[Flying Dice]

Regardless of where your division placing is your MMR determines who you play with, so if you have the MMR to get into, say, plat, you'll be playing with people in plat regardless of whether or not your division says plat 4, gold 1, or bronze 5. You may as well just let your placing go as high as it can because you'll be dealing with whatever players and toxicity are at that level regardless unless you deliberately throw games to drop your MMR.

Bingo. It's a dick move, though. And honestly, I don't think I'd need to, as I doubt I'd climb much higher than mid-gold without going super-tryhard and spending all my free time practicing. What I'm aiming for is continuing to play casually, getting Gold V-IIIish, and getting matched with low Gold/Silver I, since my experience there has been pretty chill.

[Sharp]

In my experience, low-mid bronze is the most pleasant elo (although I haven't played a ton there), followed by low-mid gold. Most people are just happy to have the free skin and be out of silver. It isn't until you start getting gold1/plat5 matches that they get unpleasant again.

Platinum is the worst bracket, closely followed by silver. Everybody there is an egotistical asshole.

Bingo. It's a dick move, though. And honestly, I don't think I'd need to, as I doubt I'd climb much higher than mid-gold without going super-tryhard and spending all my free time practicing. What I'm aiming for is continuing to play casually, getting Gold V-IIIish, and getting matched with low Gold/Silver I, since my experience there has been pretty chill.

This is such BS, Elo-hell is everywhere, the only difference between higher and lower ranks is generally a better knowledge of mechanics and team work but you still get assholes, trolls and QQ, you still get people who will do stupid shit and throw games. Challenger/Master and maybe High Diamond might be different just because your more likely to be known and know the people you are playing with and against.

Also what is going super-tryhard? I always find it weird that people play ranked and then say "oh you try-hard!" This isn't a complex game and it doesn't exactly take a mental or physical strain to play it so what is try-hard?

[Flying Dice]

For me, try-hard would be treating it like a job rather than a game. Normal would be going into ranked while you're wide awake and wanting to win, try-harding would be spending hours every day practicing your mechanics and reading pro/challenger/high-diamond guides religiously (as opposed to occasionally). Basically the point where it stops feeling like a game and starts feeling like a chore. Hence "try-hard": you're not trying, you're trying excessively hard to the point where it's somewhat laughable, even if you do get results. Like, imagine if someone spent hours every day practicing their aim and improving their reflexes in Counterstrike.  Sure, they'd be better, but it's kinda sad that they did that instead of just having fun playing and competing normally.

My biggest motivation for avoiding plat is the fact that the plat border is ugly as sin. Incidentally, ELO-hell is a state of mind. To a certain degree, I'd argue that if you can't carry the occasional game of bad players, AFKs, or trolls, you probably shouldn't be moving up in league super-easily; it's easy to win ranked without the sort of player associated with ELO-hell involved, all you really need is a group of five people that don't quit, feed massively, or argue with each other, because odds are that the other team will have someone like that and the natural response people have is to make the situation worse via infighting rather than just muting and trying to win.

I have seen and heard it stated consistently by otherwise trustworthy diamond players that their worst experience was in plat. That said, I do watch a lot of diamond ranked play (mostly from the commentators who are funny or particularly insightful) and I've not seen anything that would be out of place in silver save for some matches in diamond I/low Challenger ELO. I'd honestly argue that the only meaningful differences between high diamond/challenger and other leagues are conceptual understanding (how to last-hit properly, when how and why to push or freeze a lane, when to fight or take objectives, that your fuckups belong to you, &c.) and the amount of time a given individual is willing to devote to playing ranked. As far as I've seen, poor decisionmaking is nigh-universal (it's just that really good players immediately understand not only how they screwed up, but that it was them and not their team that screwed up), and mechanics mostly improve incrementally.

Just my 2p.

[ejseto]

Also what is going super-tryhard?

"Try-hard" means playing only champions strong in the current meta or using "cheesy" or "cheap" tactics. If you only play Lucian ADC, Thresh/Morg/Braum support, Gnar/Ryze top, or Kha'zix jungle, you might be a try-hard (or you might just coincidentally happen to main champions that are currently strong). If you set level 1 bush gank traps or always 5-man invade at level 1 or have the jungler camp a single lane to oblivion, you might be a try-hard. There's nothing wrong with trying to win, but I guess the perception is that there are 2 reasons to play the game (not counting having fun): winning MMR/LP and getting promoted to get rewards, and improving your skill to make the first one easier. If all you do is "try-hard," the idea is you won't learn as much because you're restricting yourself to a certain champion pool and play-style, and the moment the meta shifts, you'll be SoL. There's also the idea that if you're a "one-trick-pony," you may not deserve your ranking because you just got lucky that your strongest champion was also one of the strongest champions in the game.

Elo-hell is everywhere

Statistically, Elo-hell doesn't exist, because, assuming you're not a feeder/baddie, the other team is more likely to have feeders than your team. To me, Elo-hell is any place where you can't carry yourself out despite being better than everyone else. If you're not significantly better, or you play low-impact roles, you won't be able to clearly carry your way out. You might have a slightly higher win rate than the other players in the game, but when you lose a game you had no control over despite playing much better than your lane opponent and your teammates, a 60% win rate is small comfort. Also, games are often decided both ways by other lanes, so you end up losing (and winning) games you have no control over, and even though it statistically evens out, people have a way of interpreting it as, "I lost games I would have won had I taken the feeder's lane from him, but those freebies where the other team fed, I would have won those anyway because they were bad!"

So I guess you could say half of Elo-hell is mental (victim of your own confirmation bias), and half of it is being "near" (though this is really subjective and dependent on specific circumstances and could be as much as an entire tier) your peak. You're good enough that statistically you win more than a player at your MMR should, but not so good that you get there quickly, which makes sense since if you could reach your "peak" that quickly, it wouldn't be your peak in the first place. Of course, having to play tons of games to reach something you're sure you deserve is tedious, and I could certainly envision a hell where you're forced to play League continuously, surrounded by toxic players, yet never able to progress in rank. The amount of butt-hurt in this game is certainly greater than anything a pitchfork could inflict.

poor decisionmaking is nigh-universal

Decision-making doesn't exist in a vacuum. You're gambling on the other guy being stupid (relative to you). Bluffing can be a significant part of lane dynamics. The stupidity (or brilliance) of a decision depends on the result. That stupid Baron throw? That would have been a brilliant call had it worked. That Trist/Kat/Kha'zix who jumped into the enemy team for the kill? Would have been brilliant if he got the kill and reset all over their faces. Why didn't he anticipate the shield and heal? Initiative and the element of surprise are powerful weapons; maybe he thought that would be enough. The decision was stupid because the other team knew what he was going to do (jump in for the kill) but he didn't know what they were going to do (heal in time). That's not something you can know for sure until after the fact, because it requires getting in the other guy's head. The difference in a Diamond's bad decision vs. a Bronze's is that the Diamond has a much better grasp of both what the Bronze is capable of, and what he himself is capable of. Their actions cannot be taken in a vacuum, because that Diamond will stomp all over the Bronze doing things that would get him annihilated against a similarly skilled opponent.

It's like hitting a skill-shot. He knows you're going to try to hit him. You know he knows. He knows you know that he knows. Do you aim at him? Do you aim at the side? Do you simply walk up to him while he's wasting time trying to juke you? It's a mind-game. Hitting that skill-shot means out-mind-gaming your opponent, same as any other decision in the game. If you aim to the side anticipating a dodge, you'll look just as bad regardless of whether he was a Diamond and expected you to predict a dodge, or a Bronze who simply didn't react to it. You'll also look just as bad as a cross-eyed Bronze who can't hit a stationary target.

Going back to the "bad Baron call." You gambled; you lost. If you had it to do over, would you do it again? It looks bad in retrospect, but maybe things really were that desperate. It's not a throw if you weren't in control in the first place. There's no point in slowly, hopelessly bleeding to death if there's even the slightest chance that gamble could pay off. There are so many little things that need to be considered that calling a decision "poor" is really unfair, unless you're merely taking responsibility for your own failure. The things you learn from the "bad Baron call" are also extremely subtle. Some might be obvious like, "Don't Baron before 20 minutes unless you aced them," but even that has exceptions like, "unless you have Nunu with max consume." And going back to the mind-game concept, the flip-side of this is that people learn to not check Baron before 20 minutes because it's a waste of time and wards. Of course, this is precisely what makes the early Baron gamble viable. Really, the only bad gambles are those whose expectation value of return is less than 1. You can't even be sure what the expectation value of return is in a game like blackjack (you can increase your odds by counting cards), how would you know whether that Baron call really was a poor decision, other than superficially from the result? And even if you were counting cards, even if you remembered precisely every card dealt and calculated the exact odds of winning each hand, you could still lose, and you'd look no different than a noob who played every hand as if from a fresh deck.

TL;DR A "poor decision" means you got outplayed. Someone has to lose and it's disingenuous for an observer to call it a "poor decision."

[GreatJustice]

It's worth mentioning that "decision making" can actually rely partly on knowing how skilled your teammates and opponents are, and playing against people weaker than you can lead to some pretty big mistakes. For example, if a Plat or Diamond starts playing in Bronze but makes plays as though he could rely on his team to follow up, he'll die a fair bit and get called out (though generally they'll figure out pretty fast how reliable their team is rather than running in repeatedly, hence how they made it out in the first place). Also, someone in higher elo instinctively expects their opponent to try to dodge skillshots and will lead the target, so when a low elo chump just stands there he looks like an idiot when he misses the stationary target completely.

[Flying Dice]

4.20 is out. Time for jungle funsies.

[Arcvasti]

I hope Shyvana still works. I've been having lots of fun with her because she's a fucking dragon. I don't want to STOP having fun with her because "balance".

[frostshotgg]

Everyone who worked before works now, they just have to back at level 3 to get the better item.

Everyone who "worked" before can't get away with it now, which is probably for the best.

Actually, I should go see if karthus can still clear, it'll be pretty close.