Why do Ranked games start players in Gold?

Sure! In simpler words, looking at the bright side of it, it gives the players met with this person in his placements a chance to raise their mmr, since the system may retroactively account for this matched game by accounting for how the players placements went. If they went poorly and you won that inital game as a higher ELO player, your mmr would later adjust itself favorably for that early game. If the same conditions were met and you lost, you might get an uncertain buffer for your own losses in the future. This is of course speculation of how a MMR system works.

But what is there to fix?

I think the real issue is that there is not a specialized game review mode exclusively for your placements. A different client environment, for doing placements, with a better display of post-game information sewn into a VOD, would be the most beneficial thing for the game, since it would also create a sense of accountability in the player before taking these matches for granted. If it were made to force players to watch 2 of these VODs before playing the rest of their placements, the statistics system would, over time, observe it's own improvements and create an even better telemetry system for the VODs- seeing what players improved in relative to their earlier mistakes, be it pathing, power play around spikes or obectives, etc. It's very complicated but i'm sure the best minds could come up with a way to make this work.

/r/leagueoflegends Thread Parent