I agree the visible rating can be misleading, as TheCJ noted — a single number hides whether someone is improving or just playing a lot of team games. League of Legends handles this by keeping a hidden rating behind the displayed rank, so LP gains tell you more about where the game thinks you really belong than the tier badge does. I checked that split recently with this LoL MMR Checker, which estimates hidden MMR from rank, division, LP and recent win rate, and it made the small-player-count point clearer too: with fewer games, that hidden estimate just takes longer to settle.
