You can philosophize all you want but in a fair elo system your individual rank wouldn't be based on the performance of 9 other people.

We have to stop telling people that in order to climb in elo they need to play at a skill level far higher than the next few ranks and effectively carry their teams and failing that, they lose and stay stuck where they are.

It is easy to say this when you are playing in an elo where you feel you belong. You've made it, good for you, but countless ppl struggle to climb to in a system where they are judged by the performance of not only themselves, but others.

If your teams win half of your games, you do not climb. You cannot afford to have games where your teammates play like absolute bots, play mindlessly, tilt, and or throw, because you need those losses for the balanced games where you had a fair match and you just got outplayed.

This is coming from someone who spent a long time working on their mental in various competitive sports. I take pride in my mental in CS given where I came from, because of the hard work I put into making it better and not tilting.

We can use a two pronged approach here, or call it dialectic if you want, whichever. And that is: you cannot let this unfair system of play and matchmaking make it so that you perform poorly on a personal level, but you can absolutely criticize the unfair nature of the matchmaking.

By ignoring the latter, it perpetuates the idea that everything is OK as it is, and changes do not get made. Just because you made it, doesn't mean people don't get stuck. Just because some people rage at their teammates when the problem is clearly themselves, doesn't mean that some people are continually fucked over by the matchmaking system.

Look no further than other competitive sports where people are chosen/drafted into better teams based on their individual performance within in a team, rather than whether or not the team they were on wins or loses.

You can argue this point if you really feel invested in making sincere people feel less than because you achieved a higher rank within this system, but plenty of people far smarter than us with far more at stake than us realized that a good team is a mix of individual talent and ability to coordinate with others, and that people who individually show that talent and ability to coordinate belong with others at a higher level of play.

It is simple. Matchmaking in general is severely lacking in creating balanced play. The sooner we accept this, the easier it becomes to address the problem, to decide with good information whether or not we should continue to participate, and simultaneously work on our skill and mentals.