K, some background/baseline knowledge for context. League of Legends ranked queue organizes people into 7 leagues. They are, from lowest to highest, Bronze->Silver->Gold->Platinum->Diamond->Master->Challenger. Bronze through Diamond are further stratified into 5 divisions, the lowest ranking within a league being division 5 and the highest rank being division 1.
http://www.leagueofgraphs.com/rankings/rank-distributionHere, we see a pretty good representation of how many people sit in each individual ranking. Bronze plays host to about 1/3 of the population, or 33.4%. Silver as a whole hosts another 38%. Gold hosts 19%. We've already sorted out 91% of the playerbase, but let's keep going. Platinum hosts 7.5% of the population, and then it drops off drastically as Diamond hosts 2%, and the amount of Master/Challenger players is so low that it doesn't register as a meaningful percentile.
Sounds par for the course for competitive video games, we nearly always see bottlenecking like this. But poll results on the most popular League of Legends forum tell a different story. Here are some highlights.
What division are you in?
What division should you be in?
Why should you be, or why aren't you in that division?
Now, I'm no expert in maths, but something in those results seems a little off to me. Which brings me to my point, which is more of a question- what do you think contributes to the odd results here? Statistically speaking it should be extremely unlikely for a full 19% of the playerbase on the Reddit sub to be in Diamond+. Extend that to plat and apparently we have 45% of the playerbase on Reddit.
One possibility is that people don't take the poll seriously and just kind of answer whatever or answer that they're in a much higher division than they are to fuck with the results. Maybe they're just insecure liars. What are some other possibilities, Sep7agon? Do you guys have any insight into this?
A Case Study in Polling