SaltyTeemo is my new favorite Twitch.tv stream

So bad, it’s great

The main landing screen of League of Legends has a variety of games for you to spectate, most featuring high-level players in Diamond or Challenger tier. The client chooses which games to display by looking at the average ELO rating (the hidden ranking system League uses to determine placements) of a game’s participants and featuring those where all the players have high ELO. One brilliant individual realized that if the system can find high-ELO games, it can find low-ELO games as well. Enter SaltyTeemo, the stream that only displays matches where the average ELO is roughly 400 or less.  

For context, everyone starts with a 1200 ELO rating, so not only are these bad players, but they’re bad players who have played a LOT of games. Many featured on the stream have 1000+ games played, and for whatever reason, they just haven’t grasped how the game fundamentally works.

What does a 400 ELO game look like? Everyone builds Runaan’s Hurricane, people run around with four Rabadon’s Deathcaps, there’s an absurd amount of trash talking and threats to report, and people generally just mash their faces on the keyboard as they ram into each other and die over and over. Games with 60 deaths by the 30:00 mark are common, and every time you look at the screen someone is attempting the worst Flash of all time. To top it all off, the stream is set to a soundtrack of dramatic orchestral music.

Watching SaltyTeemo is incredibly addictive, and quite frankly can be more interesting than some of the LCS matches I’ve seen. Check it out here, and get ready to laugh.