The real ELO hell sits at 2000 SR, let me explain why.
I've been in competitive games since season 1, with SR peaked at 3980 in S4 (I KNOW FUCK!)
I one tricked with zarya all the way to near GM, then I decided I need to learn all heroes better, so I started trying heroes in comp, dropped all the way to around 1500 and climbed slowly backed up to 2000, believe it or not, I got stuck here for the LONGEST time to a point I decided to throw the account and bought a new one so I dont need to deal w all the bs happening in this league.
When you search for ELO hell and how to get out of it, you see top 500 players explaining how it does not exist and he'll demonstrate by going from bronze to master like in this youtube video , well that's just misleading! You're able to carry because you really can play the game a hell lot better than 99% of the players out there, but there's ppl like us who can play the game decent but just cannot carry as much as you do.
So during my miserable time at SR 2000, I found these commonalities among the players
Toxic to the max - Blame team mates for everything, talk shit and think being a healer/tanker means its never their fault. If they lose the game, its SHIT DPS.
Lack of Trust - As soon as a player picks hanzo, if nobody can convince him to change, you see team compositions like Widow/Hanzo/Torb/Sym/Sombra/Junkrat, and lets throw like I give a fuck!
High expectation - I think most commonly when opposing team has pharah/mercy, if you picked 76, they better be taken down instantly, else you're team mates, especially the ones taking fire, will go "WTF 76 DEAL W THAT PHARAH AIGHT????? IF YOU CAN'T AIM LET SOMEONE ELSE USE IT". Or scenarios like going healer and your tank yells "I NEED HEALING" every second when there's a team fights going on with 5 critical allies you just can't heal fast enough. He dies you'll get an earful cus you didn't heal him fast enough, you're supposed to make him invincible to all enemy attacks!
Fail to understand the objective - When the objective is to push the payload, people flank from all angles possible trying to make a hero play, POTG is like THE true demonstration of how good a player you are.
Medal is everything - When something is wrong with the team setup, say we have a junkrat and nobody can deal w enemy pharah, you're the only healer so you can't really swap.. don't even try talking sense into this guy though, most of the time I'd see replies like "WTF I HAVE 3 GOLD I AM NOT DOING WORK?????"
Ultimate combos do not exist - Lack of communication is the main problem, but also they don't seem to understand how most of the combos work. Obvious ones like zarya grav + dps ult maybe they get it but don't do properly. You see weird combo ults like enemy soldier ults and your zen ults right away and lucio ults 2 seconds later? But generally, you see hero plays going solo ulti almost 99% of the time.
The way I see it is that in fact a lot of the players in the league really deserve to be in higher leagues, but they're surrounded by these toxic players, its just super difficult to move up. Maybe really do consider buying a new account if you think you deserve to be in higher ranks and stop wasting time buried in this misery! Happy overwatching!
Yup, very true. Its hard to move up around gold. It has the most players, therefore has the most casuals that pop in and out with low skill and don't know the meta. They never tank out of the rank they just pop in and throw matches or get carried.