Irredeemable moron strikes again!

Let’s get this out of the way right now; if you take the advice of someone who played almost 1000 ranked games of LoL and only moved up a single beginner rank (Silver 3 to Silver 2), you’re an idiot. There are no ‘alternative facts’ to this; if that is the person you go to for useful advice, you are beyond hope and likely to see as much ‘success’ as Gevlon himself experienced. That said, much like with EVE, most of Gevlon’s traffic is from people like me, who enjoy the unintentional comedy he provides rather than take anything the insane one says seriously. In that regard, the linked post is a masterpiece.

Also before we dive into the madness, let me set a baseline for you. My own account started in Silver 3 this season (3-7 in placement matches, good times), and is currently in Gold 1 (I’ve finished in various levels of plat the last 3 seasons), and that’s with a fraction of the games played compared to poor Gevlon. I went through silver extremely fast (20 games?), and lower gold also went quickly. I haven’t purchased a skin in months (long before this season started), and I’ve never bought a champion with Riot points. I also know one of the top devs at Riot via Inq, who a few years back now gave us some additional insight into the game and the business behind it. I’ve shared some of that in previous LoL posts + comments, but it was mostly around what people buy (skins) vs what they don’t (champs).

Another baseline is my wife’s account, which is currently in Silver V, and has recently made skin purchases. Her account was in gold, and has been as high as plat, but with far more limited playtime, she hasn’t been able to get back up to those levels. I toyed with the idea of player her account with just Warwick to get it higher than Gevlon (would likely take me 20ish games, if not fewer, since jungle is currently the most powerful role in LoL), but never got around to that, which I now kinda regret.

In short: everything that Gevlon has stated about game rigging, about boosting buyers and keeping free players down is in reverse across those two accounts. There is also a reason Gevlon didn’t buy a skin for WW to further his ‘test’; because by doing so he still wouldn’t move up in rank, and all his tinfoil nonsense would collapse on itself and he would be left facing reality; he’s a terribly, terribly slow learner who can’t accept responsibility for his own shortcomings (his goal was top 10% in LoL, which is around Gold 3), and due to being a thin-skinned closet-social who can’t help himself via his blog, he comes up with wild nonsense to try and explain away said failures. His EVE page is another good example of this behavior pattern, only that failure hurt him far more as he had invested 4 years vs just a thousand+ hours in LoL, hence all his additional post-quit rage posts about Lenny.

Baseline established, let’s dig into the post itself.

“I played only one champion, the undertuned and no-skill Warwick to exclude personal skill from the research and to stay in “average player range” (according to op.gg Siver 4 players are around the median of ranked).”

First lie: Gevlon’s original goal was to reach the top 10%, yet here he is saying he now wanted to stay in the ‘average player range’, even though just a few days before that he was claiming he was going to climb even beyond gold with his ‘exploit mode’ (this was the result of a very normal win streak he went on, which happens to everyone who plays LoL).

Also Warwick is an easy champion to play, but to say he is ‘no skill’ is also a lie. Gevlon’s own match history shows this, as multiple times he refined his summoner spells, masteries, and items as he learned the champ and the game better (just very slowly). A more capable learned would have had gone through this at a much faster rate, and would have benefited sooner, but the point remains that even with an easy-to-learn champ like WW, there is plenty of room for growth in LoL, and when you don’t grow, or grow very slowly, that will reflect in your ranking. Gevlon not advancing much confirms this nicely and shows that the system is working as intended.

Gevlon then mentions ELO Hell, and he makes the common uneducated mistake most new or unaware players who don’t understand the system make and assumes it’s a set range. I have explained ELO Hell in this post, so if you are curious how it actually works (or want non-moron advice on moving up in rank), give that a read. Again his account is proof that the system is working, as his understanding of the game was so slow, he simply didn’t advance to progress much beyond his own personal ELO Hell.

It’s also worth mentioning that since he got his account flagged early on as toxic (frequent queue dodger that wasted 9 other peoples time), he was being placed into games with other toxic accounts more frequently than the average player. This is a feature that Riot added to the game years ago, and once again, is working as intended. Toxic players like Gevlon who don’t mind wasting their own time queue dodging 3/4^th of every game should be put with other morons so they don’t waste the time of normal players.

His classification of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ players is also meaningless, both because he has no way of knowing who recently made a purchase (remember most purchases are skins, not champs, and he didn’t track which players showed a skin on a champ in his game, which is something you can do even just off the loading screen), and also because someone playing a champ often or not isn’t a great indicator of ability. Case in point: Gevlon should be a world-class WW player with the amount of games he has with him in such a short amount of time, yet he is almost always the weak link on the team at just the midway point of Silver.

The majority of players, once a new season has settled, are in their correct location, with movement being fast or slow based on player skill and learning rate. Smurfs happen, but even for that Riot has added a system to progress them much faster than the average player to their correct rank (I personally skipped multiple ranks on my way to Gold 1 recently, again showing the system working as intended). If you are a Gevlon-level player, you might need 1000+ games to move up a single rank. If you put in a bit more thought, don’t gimp your understanding to a single role/champ, and take the time to understand the game, you will move up much faster. The reason I played a lot of jungle when I was in Silver and low Gold was because I could carry the games playing the most powerful role, while as I get closer to my real ranking, I transition over to roles like mid and support to continue to climb at a much slower pace.

Let’s talk about Gevlon’s ‘exploit mode’, which worked so well for him he moved up a whole rank in Silver ! It’s practically magic! What’s really funny about this is that Gevlon, basically by accident, was playing better in those games, and surprise, he had a better win rate. It’s fairly common knowledge that boosting a single, winning lane is solid strategy in LoL, as is roaming often at lower skill levels (silver). At those levels players don’t ward often, don’t have good map awareness, and aren’t skilled enough to generally handle pressure, so moving around and upsetting the normal flow of a game works. It’s not something you can keep doing once you move out of the beginner ranks, but down that low it most certainly does.

Gevlon is a slow learner, but even someone who is slow will progress, especially if they no-life the game and rack up as many games as he did in such a short amount of time, and this slow growth is on display in those games with his higher win rate. Now granted, even in those games he makes basic mistakes (watching his replays on op-gg was rapidly becoming my favorite part of LoL), but at least he isn’t playing AS POORLY as he was when he was playing normally and was basically sitting in the jungle 95% of the time. This is why he didn’t progress, because even after all his time with the game, he was still below-average for his rank, and because he was taking the most important role in the game (Riot is tuning down jungle overall, as they have recognized jungle is too influential right now), his personal influence on a game was especially strong.

If we dig further into this, in games were Gevlon was one of the higher ranked players on his team, he lost most of those games. In other words, when he was expected to carry more of the weight, he lost. In games where others were expected to do more of the work, his winrate was better (though still not good enough overall to progress in rank). This again shows the system is working as intended, because a player SHOULDN’T move up in rank when they aren’t getting better, and overall Gevlon didn’t get noticeable better when he wasn’t playing in ‘exploit mode’ aka not Bronze-level Gevlon.

“How do people climb out from ELO Hell? One way is by being very good, this case they win fair games by a large enough margin to compensate for rigged defeats. Please note that this needs 70+% “fair” winrate, so you don’t just have to be better than people in your league, you must be much better. The other way is taking the advice of “pros” and learning lot of champions. Then you’ll win and believe you are winning because you learned lot of champions. The truth is that you are winning because you purchased lot of champions. Remember: you win when you are New champion user. After you learned the champion, you become Good and no longer have good winrate without exploit.”

The above is the punchline of the whole joke. In a post crying about yet another set of devs keeping poor Gevlon down, he writes that if you play well, you will advance. Imagine that! Stupid Riot rigging the system to only allow people who play well to advance, the bastards! I do like how he basically repeated my ‘how to climb post’ linked above as well. Wonder where he got that huh, though he didn’t get it enough to understand what real ELO hell is. Slow learner being slow on display yet again.

Beyond that idiocy, it’s also funny that Gevlon doesn’t see the connection between playing well and playing multiple champions, which again shows how slowly he learns things and how useless his analysis and advice really is. Of course playing/understanding more champs results in a better player overall, while someone who gimps themselves to only one champ is going to continue to struggle. That’s not rigging, that’s just common sense.

Compound this with the fact that owning a new champion isn’t linked with spending (most spending is on skins remember), and his ‘analysis’ goes even further down the drain. Ask yourself, if Gevlon actually believes buying a champ = free wins, why didn’t he ‘prove’ this by spending a few bucks on a champ? Is it because he is too poor in real life to afford it, or is it because had he done it, he would have staying in Silver, and would have to accept the reality of the situation; he is simply a very slow learner even at beginner-levels of play in a game like LoL?

I’m actually really sad Gevlon has rage-quit LoL. I knew it was coming, because even someone like Gevlon can only run face-first into a brick wall of failure for so long, but it was great content/comedy while it lasted. I’ll miss laughing at his game replay playing on my PC screen while playing CoC or CR, I’ll miss checking op.gg and seeing him rage-play a dozen games in a day and make zero progress, and most of all I’ll miss checking his blog and seeing him twist around trying to explain how someone could spend all day playing a competitive game with millions of players and not being able to climb above the average, casual gamer (anyone down in Silver is either a casual gamer, or a Gevlon, as even any semi-serious player is at least in gold, if not higher). It was a fun ride, but like all good things, it has now come to an end, and our tinfoil-hat wearing closet-social has moved on. Sad!