In the League of Legends community players will determine people’s success with their rank. It is the only metric in League that can be used to measure a person’s skill. Whenever there is a dispute between players on who is right or wrong, rank status will be immediately brought up. If the ranks are the same players will desperately look for tie breakers. Being gold is way better than being hardstuck gold. Being a Warwick Jungle is better than a Yuumi support. And so on. Whether for right or wrong players will throw their rank around as superiority to those below them.

It is very possible to have little to no progress on improvement. It happens when you are playing the same way. With no attempt to actively improve. Spamming games is not practice. It gives you experience but a player needs more. A player needs deliberate practice to hone in on a few aspects of the game to improve. This allows a player to avoid all the white noise in a live game and focus to improve on aspects of the game they can control. The principle understanding of this makes sense. It’s not a hard conclusion for anyone to come to. However, League of Legends makes this incredibly difficult to do.

Improvement is not meant to happen overnight but in the game of League improvement is especially slow. As a player your options on practicing efficiently are basically nonexistent. A lot of the things to practice boil down to practicing in a live game with deliberate intent. Because you can’t practice Macro plays, lane matchups, jungle tracking, and roam timers by yourself. You are forced to either get 2 teams for a private training session or bite the bullet and play online. Hoping your time won’t be wasted by an afk or inter. The other aspects of the game that you can practice by yourself are drills you will have to put together with practice tool. You have to fight with practice tool to have a proper training session. Things like jungle clearing are easy enough to do. And you can have some level of CS practice. But with the way you have to fight with practice tool, you can tell it wasn’t made to reset a scenario. You constantly have to change the settings, and keep track of things in your head. Because the timer in game keeps increasing along with the CS score.

No matter how hard you train you cannot account for the players on your team. If someone wants they can throw your game. It’s puzzling that after all this time Riot doesn’t seem to care about inters or smurfs. Like why aren’t players compensated their LP when Riot detects that someone is literally running down mid dying on repeat. Even if you were to have a 0/20/0 Zed by 20 minutes. Riot doesn’t kick the inter, and they won’t compensate LP back. Even with an instant feedback report Riot doesn’t give you back your LP.
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Then there are smurfs. If you lose to a gold player and in two days that same person is a GrandMaster player why are you not then given LP compensation. Clearly that person wasn’t a Gold player after all. I suspect smurfs affect a lot more games than people realize. It’s just hard to tell in League because the indicators aren’t so clear.

An aspect of the game that is clear is auto fill. This is one of the most frustrating things about the game. Forcing people to play a role they didn’t select for 30+ minutes. Is not fun. Then those that struggle off role it may as well be an instant loss. One tricks will get crushed by this. People who have never jungle before will be first timing it in ranked. You can even be denied your primary role in your promos. You’ve spent hours grinding away just for 1 of your 3 designing games to be rigged against you. You’re being denied your best role.

Riot has so much freedom on how matches are made because it is all internal private information. The main determining factor they use to match people together is MMR. MMR stands for Match Making Rating. A player’s MMR is completely unknown and hidden. This is the perfect setup for Riot. There is nothing a player can trace to what makes a match fair. So no one is able to call Riot out on anything. There are so many excuses for them to use. Excuses that seem valid. But if their matchmaking was so fair why keep it private knowledge? Why have the LP gains and losses after every game different?
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The beautiful part is that Riot doesn’t even have to rig every game. They only need to intervene enough to make an impact. When there is no one looking over Riot’s practices, there is always room for greed. Some may say I’m pulling conspiracy theories out of nowhere. But I don’t know how else you justify all the bizarre scenarios that happen in an online game.

In League of Legends you are the product. People are needed to play, so Riot still has a game. They will go to any lengths to have people play as long as possible.