Sandiha already explained it above, but I’m still tempted to create a new, more visible topic for this. The issue is really quite simple:
The teams’ ELO brackets are too wide nowadays (and it’s especially bad in 5vs5), yet the ELO calculation was not altered to take this into account.
It compares your individual ELO against the opposing team’s combined ELO, and since half of them will be hundreds of points below you, you will gain nothing on a victory, but lose a lot in case of defeat.
This creates a situation where it becomes mathematically impossible to climb.
I took a look at a friend’s ELO statistics, and he would need a 70% win-rate to move up. At tier 5.
He’s constantly being paired with players on their first ranked game, and people so clueless that it looks like trolling. That’s 300-400 points below him, and I don’t see how it would be possible to win games on a 2:1 ratio under these conditions (unless you are a high-tier smurf).
The system is broken, and it needs to be repaired. Badly.
