So the big theme in the comments is people calling me delusional for thinking gm is anywhere near d4/d3, and that they should never show up in the same game as d4/d3.
But they do, for some reason. Ask riot why, not me. Here's a bunch of examples of d4/d3s showing up with gms. Sure, they're not as good as the gm players but the important thing is they handle themselves just fine.
Aka rank worship, a meme perpetuated by league personalities and the solo queue community, either as a joke or due to their actual superiority complexes, that people have started to take a bit too seriously.
As someone who hit diamond 2 recently, which is more or less high elo (with the exception of some idiots saying pLaT 1- lOw mAstErs iS miD eLo) I really need to talk about the amount of gatekeeping and circlejerking over this concept.
First let's talk about gatekeeping "high elo"
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The bar for high elo changes based on what your rank is. If you're plat, high elo starts at diamond. If you're "low diamond", high elo starts at mid/high diamond. If you're "mid diamond", high elo starts at d2. If you're d2, high elo starts at d1. If you're d1, high elo starts at low masters. If you're low masters, high elo starts at an arbitrary lp threshold.
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In d4/d3 games, you CONSTANTLY have people reminding you of how they can't stand "this elo" and how they can't wait to get back to d2 or d1 and get away from "low elo".
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And then you have the smurfs. The extremely toxic ones who think they're hot shit with their bought account and say things like, if you suggest them to do something like group, "are YOU telling ME how to play???" and "do you know who you're talking to?" and "me and my duo are multi-season masters stfu low elo"
Yeah, these "im a multi-season masters stfu low elo, are YOU telling ME how to play???" people actually exist.
Now let's talk about the REALITY of "high elo"
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People kept making it sound like d1-masters-gm players are SO much better than the average mere mortal d4 player. How d1 players are some gods while d4 players are garbage peasants. That's simply not true. For d2 promos I've played against numerous gms and d1s and there are many, many, many of them that aren't actually great players, but got carried there by specializing in overpowered champions at the moment, or champions that require zero macro but are good at assassinating people and thrive in a solo queue environment. They are no better than the average d4 player. They just got luckier with their champion specialization. Want a spoiler list of what champions can artificially increase your rank? Riven, nasus, jax, sona/soraka, hecarim, and the ubiquitous braindead assassin junglers in NA solo queue (kha zix, rengar, master yi). There are more, but these are the more egregious ones. This "conqueror" rune means you don't actually have to be good to win at this game, you just need to be able to all-in people effectively.
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There are a metric shit ton of "smurfs" and "used to be d1/d2/pro/whatever" players that have massively overblown egos as they play in the "lowly" ranks of d4/d3. These people tend to blame their teammates for being so low elo and have a superiority complex when in fact they themselves suck dick. The smurfs in particular think they are hot shit-- just because you play rengar and can stat check enough people to rise in rank does not mean that you're better at this game than a d4.
Tl;DR
All I want to say is that this gatekeeping and circle jerking over "high elo" is literally counting each millimeter in a dick measuring contest.
Plenty of GM players are not much better than their d4/d3 counterparts. All diamond players are generally good and should be considered high elo. D1/D2 is not worlds better than D3/D4 like I keep on hearing. Many times the real difference between a d3 and a gm is which champion they chose to abuse.
edit1: About streamers and league 'personalities'. Streamers and personalities have an audience and a bigger platform than us. But just because someone has a bigger, louder microphone and a twitter account doesn't mean that their opinion is more correct. You should still use your own logical judgement and not blindly listen to what streamers or personalities have to say-- just like us, they are sometimes correct, and they are sometimes wrong.
edit2: I'm not saying that d3 and gm are equal skill, I'm saying that d3's are perfectly capable of knocking games off gms and it's a very common occurrence in solo queue for that to happen. There is way too much rank worship by some people and it's really stupid.
