The psychology of esports players’ ELO Hell: Motivated bias in League of Legends and its impact on players’ overestimation of skill

This paper examines the folk theory of ELO Hell, which stems from the community of esports players. ELO Hell is a causal explanation for the failure to achieve which is prominent but controversial in esports. Within the community, the belief in the existence of ELO Hell associated with lower skill. We aim to explain the persistence of this folk theory despite the debate within the community using psychological theories. We find this folk theory relevant for investigation because the blame placed on other players could escalate to patterns of harmful behavior, known as toxicity. Given the association with lower-ranked players, we predict this could be an operationalization of the Dunning–Kruger effect, a tendency for lower-skilled performers to overestimate themselves, and its associated motivational biases. Surveying 267 players of the esports League of Legends and triangulating the quantitative, qualitative, and mined data collected, we find evidence of lower-skilled players overestimating their skills more so than higher-skilled players. Further, we find that motivational biases regarding causal attributions for failure and success did explain significant variance in the degree of overestimation. However, we also found some players withdraw their effort from competitive play and we use self-determination theory to categorize their reason for losing motivation. Taken together, we show the psychological mechanisms which lead to the formation of the folk theory of ELO Hell and the motivational biases that uphold the conflict about its existence.