There is no such thing as ELO hell.

When people refer to 'ELO hell' I just laugh. I'm a Gold 3 player and decided to get an account at bronze 5, and carried all the way to silver 5 pretty easily, only took a few days of playing casually. I think the main issue with people at bronze is the same with any tier; you need to outplay people at your current ELO to rise the ranks. Some may say that afkers/ragers etc are bad in bronze, but in all honesty I see just as many afks/dc's if not more at high gold/plat mmr.

 

Yeah, I agree in a lot of ways. When I first started playing I was placed in bronze III or something and it took me months to reach silver V and another couple months to reach Gold V. Then I met some diamond players that would play normals with me and after raging game after game about how it was "my teammates fault" I finally realized I was 30-50 cs away from perfect CS. I was frequently dying when I realize I could've backed. Just little things like that. It all adds up. You spend 30 seconds dead you have no idea what you could've done during that time. When I stopped playing I really believed I could've reached Diamond with enough time (part of me thinks D4-D2 is a lot of luck, especially with even higher-level diamond 1 players seeking challenger).

Tl;dr - play with people better than you are. Both with and against. Playing with a diamond/challenger player in voice chat is one of the BEST ways to learn. I could name about three people by summoner name that took me from a gold player to a diamond player. I kinda wish I hadn't gotten rid of my account. I get on my level 10 guy every now and then to play but it's just not the same..perhaps one day I'll get back into it...

(Sorry for the life story )

 

Not enough low levels realize the little things that go in to the game, that 10 cs that would've allowed you to get a ward, grabbing that turret/dragon early game. That stuff adds up to a victory and not enough low ranked players do it.

 

A lot of the time it's the fact lower elo people (being one myself) team work isn't there a lot of the time, people would rather play on their own.

 

A tip to gain elo (not that i'm in any position to talk really), sometimes you have to just bite the bullet. Sometimes I know a fight is just absolutely not going to go well and it's a terrible idea but perhaps your involvement could turn a 0 for 2 into a 2 for 3 or something like that. Sometimes a bad decision that everyone commits to is better than a good decision not everyone executes.