"Am I truly stuck?" Or is it simply a losers' queue?" Is a question that many gamers have. Or in other words “is it harder to rank up on an old account?” If you haven't had the experience of ranking many accounts, you could assume this is simply another internet myth with nothing actual behind it. We at UnrankedSmurfs rank hundreds of accounts each season, and we also run our own elo boosting business, so we know this is 100% accurate.
However, you did not come to take our word for it; you did not believe your friend or a slew of Redditors who have been spamming about this virtually daily this season. Here's a collection of Reddit threads on the issue. So you can see that this has turned into a serious issue, even if it isn't true, it is certainly viewed as true by some.
We decided to conduct our own investigation into the matter. We randomly sampled 317 accounts from Diamond 4. This is what remained from the original 500 accounts after excluding those with a win ratio of less than 49 percent or greater than 57 percent.
The primary objective of this research is to determine the number of games required to obtain Diamond 4 rank. Due to large outliers and the difficulty of building a model for this, we were unable to simply correlate prior ranking to the number of games played. Instead, we are comparing levels to the overall number of games played throughout the current season. Since the level cap of 30 was lifted five years ago, we think that all old accounts are much higher than level 50.
So, here are the findings of our study:
As can be seen, the number of games required to reach Diamond 4 is highly proportional to your level. In other words, the more games you played last season, the more games you must play this season.
If you would like to access the data utilized in this study, you may do so here.
Before everyone grabs their pitchforks and torches and rushes to Riot Games to burn some god-fearing programmers, consider whether this makes sense and is fair.
Our findings indicate that the algorithm considers you to be more of a fit for the division in which you've played the most games over time. Consider this: would you rate a player who played 300 games last season and finished platinum 1 the same as someone who only played 50 games and achieved the same rank?
When you think about it, it makes sense to approach these two players differently. If we increase this by numerous seasons, a player who finished gold 4 is almost certainly a gold player who will not get LP inflated gains to help him ascend the ranks. This acceleration should only occur for people for whom the algorithm is unsure where to position them and requires more data. Which it accumulates by placing them in more difficult games with better ranking people, and if you win, you gain more LP. What's more fascinating is that if you have a lucky streak and win these more tough games, you may wind up outranking your primary account.
All of this suggests that you should avoid spamming your primary account with "experiments" like trying out a new champion or role. Or playing when drunk ;) Limit the amount of noise you make to the MMR system by playing only serious games on your main account. Do you want to play some nonsense? That's what smurfs are for, and why every popular and professional youtuber or streamer has at least one smurf account. Do you want to know why they do it? Find out more here.
If you are set on leveling new account we have two great guides that you might find interesting:
