Introduction
In this article I’m going to cover 5 reasons why are you losing more lp than you are gaining. Out of my experience of playing league for over 10 years now I think I have a logical explanation on this. However I’m not relying only on my thoughts there’s several times where Riot has chimed in the topic despite keeping it as a blackbox sitting in a vault that no one really knows the secret sauce for.
In League, your LP (League Points) represents your skill level and standing in a particular ranked ladder, such as Bronze, Silver, Gold etc. When you win a ranked game, you gain LP and move up the ladder. When you lose a ranked game, you lose LP and move down the ladder. The amount of LP you gain or lose after a game depends on a variety of factors, including your performance in the game, the difference in skill level between you and your opponents, and the game’s outcome.
1. You Are On A Losing Streak
If you’re losing more LP than you’re gaining, it may be because you’re on a losing streak. When you’re on a losing streak, you’re more likely to lose LP even if you perform well in your games, because the system tries to “catch up” and adjust your skill level to reflect your recent results. This can be frustrating, but it’s a normal part of the ranking system and is intended to help prevent players from getting “stuck” at a certain skill level.
2. You Are Not Performing At Your Rank
A losing streak basically tells the system to start matching you with lower skilled opponents so lets say if you are Gold and you are playing in a game of silvers and still lose it this is an indication that you do not deserve Gold as a rank. So losing to silver players means you are not performing at your skill level so League tries to adjust your LP by lowering you down in ranks and potentially hitting you with a higher LP loss.
3. Your Account Is New
When you make a new account the League ranking system is trying to learn about your skill. At the beginning there may be some fluctuation on how you lose and gain LP, over time this will adjust and will reach equilibrium. This means that at the very beginning you may notice a few hiccups but over a long period of time this will not matter. The reason for this is that you get matched with either much better players than you and you win by getting carried (this is actually bad for you as your ranking score will be low) or you get matched with really bad players and you lose by a mistake. Don’t worry about this one too much it’s only going to last a bit until League learns about you as a player.
4. Your Game Performance
Your ranking in the game such as scoring (I link an article on this below) matters on how much LP you gain. For example you may lose a game and get an S+ rank the system basically knows that you did well and even though it’s penalizing you with a loss of LP this will be lower than usual. Inversely if you win a game and you get a C- rank or lower the system knows your team basically carried you to win. This in consequence will have a negative impact in your LP and in your next loss you have you will be losing more LP than usual and also gaining lower LP when you win and getting carried.
5. Luck And Bugs
Yes luck can be a reason for this, obviously it does not happen frequently but it does happen. In one of the seasons I was so unlucky that I kept getting matched against boosters and duos that were ranking up accounts. Eventually things did balance out and I reached the rank I deserved but in the short term it was very annoying going through that phase of losing more LP than gaining.
Similarly there’s bugs in League’s ranking system. In season 6 particularly I believe the LP gaining and losing in such a way that people didn’t deserve their rank got it simply because they played a lot of games and just spammed wins over time. The bug at the time was that the more you played no matter what your skill was you would win more LP than losing. Riot eventually fixed it but during that time things weren’t pretty to put it simply.
Conclusion
No matter what of the reasons above you go through just know that eventually you will reach the rank you deserve. There’s definitely going to be periods of time that there will be frustration just hold tight and keep playing and know that it will balance out. Luck is only a short term effect in this game and you will shine where you deserve.