Must... edit... this...

ELO Hell isn't real dude...or at least...it never gets better.

You'll get leavers, and feeders, and trolls no matter what ELO you are playing at. I've been hovering between 1525-1625 for the last few months. While I'd love to see 1700, I'm going need to step up my game to get there. I am at the ELO that my skill level reflects currently. I rarely have horrible games and I rarely single handedly carry them...that's an indication of a mature, disciplined player playing at his skill level.

I do often get players on my team who either feed in lane, or disconnect, or just don't have a grasp on basic game concepts. Unfortunately you'll always have to deal with this and you'll always feel that you deserve a higher rating because these kinds of people throw your games...unfortunately...that is the way it goes. It is a team game...these players need the team to come behind them and support them. What you maybe won't realize is that other players will often do just this for you when you are struggling. If you really want to help out your teammates, play a jungler with good initiation/strong early ganks.

The real trick to getting to the ELO that corresponds to your skill is playing champions with strong early games that can duel well.

Since these champions can effectively take control of a game by winning their lane and snowballing out of control, your personal skill can impact the outcome of the game most and you leave the least amount of opportunity for your teammates to screw it up.

The problem with these champions tend to be that their late game usefulness falls off OR their team utility is limited. That means if you don't dominate early you'll be very reliant on team mate contribution late game.

If you are really a 1600 skilled player playing at 1200 ELO, then you should take a champion like Lee Sin, LeBlanc, Shen or Olaf who have strong early games and can snow ball out of control (only LeBlance literally snowballs-as in buys stacking items). These champions are capable of punishing enemy mistakes severely and can make big plays to feed them selves and their team mates. If you are forced to support, an aggressive support like Alistar who can also protect his carry and teammates effectively is ideal. An AD carry such as Kog'Maw is ideal since he has decent range and his damage is hard to build against. Kog also can single handedly carry a team late game while his early game isn't awful either.

Most people are where they should be for ELO. They say they are in "ELO HELL" because they think they are good at this game because they can stomp the average pug. Well, the average pug is an 1100 ELO player or worse...not a 1400 ELO player let alone a 1525+ gold ranked player.

"Stomping" the average pug puts you at 1200 ELO...

A lot of people think they stomp the average pug...when really they ARE the average pug. A lot of people have a hard time remembering the 3 games they threw by feeding and losing their lane and only remember the one game when they played glass cannon Garen and smashed the derp Teemo who kept on face checking bushes.

Here is a good indicator. Look at your normal game history. If you've won a major % more normal games than you've lost then you most likely are a pretty decent player. This isn't completely accurate, especially if there is a group of guys you play with. I know with our group we have 1 amazing player (legit 1700+ player), one pretty good one (1550), 3 ok ones (1200-1300), and 3 complete derps (<1100) that we don't want to actually play with but they are RL friends...Because of this, my 3 derp buddies have a lot more wins than they really should and the two better players get dragged down into defeat from time to time.

I'll tell you that the average gold ranked player has 1500 games played or more.
They are competent at most if not all roles, and have near mastery of 20 or more champions.