Faker's thoughts on matchmaking / KR soloQ.

If people or Riot don't want to listen to the forums (good reason not to, by the way, but I digress), at least this time, take it from someone who is trustworthy. Everyone's idol, Faker, and Riot's favorite boy, on his stream, shared his thoughts about KR solo Q and how matchmaking has turned out compared to previous seasons. Here are some quoted translated highlights:

Until 2015, queue times were long but matchmaking was balanced. Since 2016, high challengers are getting matched with low masters. So, solo queue ranking is a measure of who is better at carrying the game, not who is better. That's why trying to raise LP is frustrating.

The game becomes less fun the higher you go, I don't know why I play... LoL is supposed to be a team game, it's only fun if you play 5v5 and do stuff with your teammates but everybody treats it like an RPG and plays on their own. Because of the LP difference, it's impossible to synergize with the team. Everybody plays way too differently. The game gets less fun as you raise LP, it's weird. That's why I like the way it was before even if the queue times were long.

Back then, there were fewer games where one side of the map explodes. Starting from challenger, the game is just... [silence]. That's why pros don't try hard in solo queue anymore, it's not helpful practice for competitive matches.

One side always explodes right here [pointing to the botlane]. It's never a 50/50, the game is always one sided. Then what is mid/top/jg? Are we playing League or are we playing slot machines? If other lanes are mismatched, it's still a 1v1 so the difference is not big but because there's two people bot, the gap is too big. How are you supposed to win a game if a 200LP/200LP Masters botlane is matched against an 800LP/800LP Challenger botlane?

That's why when you look at the rankings nowadays, there is a lot of fluctuation. Previously, a player that could hit rank 1 didn't normally fall below rank 50. Because of team luck, the gap increases. In the past, I almost never got matched with Master players. Maybe once every ten games in Challenger. They did this to reduce queue time but because of that this game is no longer fun. Imagine if you were gold but you get four bronze or silver teammates in nine out of ten games, and the same for the enemy team. Do you think that game would be fun to play?

With all those things said, how can Riot still go on and ignore the flawed matchmaking system? It's been quite a long time since the last time I genuinely believed in fair matchmaking. 4/5 games feel like they are already decided in champ select, based on op.ggs. Only one game feels competitive and that's because someone didn't manage to play well enough to get a "small lead" that leads to a huge snowball.

Season 6 flex Q destroyed everything. People got extreme boosts to divisions that they would only dream of, because of the ability to play with a lot of premades, even smurf premade friends, almost deleting any chance of a loss. I "unintentionally" boosted some friends in my attempt to climb myself, and I ended up boosting friends from bronze to gold. BRONZE TO GOLD!! As a player who has played in bronze through platinum elo, I can tell you that the difference between bronze and silver is huge. How is a guy that was bronze for 3 seasons supposed to hang with gold elo? They can't. Guess what. Most people wanted to get to G5 to get the border, and never played another game afterwards to avoid any chance of dropping. Next season, S7, comes along and what to we have? Bronze-caliber players playing soloQ in gold elo! And since the games were becoming coinflips more and more, even that player would get a 4-6 in placements at worst, getting them to what? Silver 4, at worst? A bronze player, even after doing placements is being placed at silver 4 elo!

Fast forward to today, with a little example. I really, REALLY wanted to test how the placement system worked. So I went on a smurf, that ended season 6 as Gold 3, season 7 as unranked. I did 0-10 in placements, and guess what elo I got placed into. SILVER FUCKING 2. An UNRANKED player in the previous season did 0-10 in placements and got placed in SILVER 2! Get a grasp on it.

Which brings me to my next point. Ranks are so fucked up right now. Honestly, Riot needs to do a clean sweep and force players to start over or something, because the amount of players completely out of their elo skill is quite high. Couple that with the fact that Riot matches people with a weird system that somehow considers win rates, MMR etc, the system is flawed, and all that happened for what? So we can have less queue times? Fuck this.

I reached Platinum 3 2 months ago on this account, and then got a huge series of trash matchmaking. I'll let you know, the games I won to get there were actually hard to win. I would win bot lane, but my other lanes wouldn't do so well, so me and my ADC were forced to make plays. Most of those victories were hard-fought. And then, as soon as I hit Plat 3, I get the matchmaking punch in the gut. A long series of games (20 games, 18 losses), where I was getting AFKers (afk at 5 mins), Trolls (Teemo jungle with smite-ignite), extremely bad players that can't hang (the kind of bronze boosted to gold in S6), dropping me all the way to Plat 5, which was the point where I just didn't care about climbing anymore. I lost all the will I had to climb to Diamond and even higher.

As Faker said, pro players treat soloQ like a playground. They don't care at all. They just play to relax, because they know that nothing in soloQ represents, even in the slightest, what happens in pro play. And I'm not saying that soloQ should be like pro play, BUT there are some elemens of soloQ that should apply as good things to be happening in pro play as well.

EDIT: Fixed quoation marks.