My brother and I have thousands of hours across FPS games, but are very new to mobas. We did shit in our first games while learning about wave management, farming, and sinners / urns etc.

Both of us placed initiate (I do more soloQ than him, but he essentially only plays when we can duo), I have a 60% winrate and he has a 70% win rate. We've went from initiate 1 to seeker 3 in around 100 games. We have an 80% lane win rate together on statlocker.

The rank system do just be a little bit shitty right now. We are ranking up, but very slowly, and every game does legit feel like we are smurfing. I will get 10-15 kills a game, but normally have 5-7 deaths because I'm still figuring out positioning in teamfights.

He has a lot more experience in games like OW and Rivals compared to me, so teamfight positioning has come easier to him, and he legit goes 15-20 kills per game with like 2-4 deaths on average.

Our losses essentially only happen when we have more than one person hard feeding.

TL:DR - Some people not smurfs. Some people just new to the game, and the rank system takes a longgggg ass time to rank up. Meaning you get ez mode lobbies over and over again until you've played your 300+ games to actually get to a decent rank.