Riot and Season 6 Changes

_ I am a firm supporter that larger companies create forums for the sole purpose of creating an outlet for unhappy peons to express their issues in a way that is not harmful to the overall company and can be completely ignored with the exception of a few minimum wage contract employees who manage the forums and keep the environment somewhat contained. Even then this is being replaced by community self management with community mods. _

Anyway IMHO Riot failed terribly with this new mode. Now I do not have an RL friends who play league, and I am not part of any of the cliques or 5 man teams here in ATRS so I almost always end up playing games by myself. I have to say the new system is a huge disappointment to me and is another move in the wrong direction since Riot came under new (finished total buyout) ownership. League of Legends even before its creation when it was DOTA in Warcraft, was and has always been a competitive pvp game with leader boards, teams, and tournaments. 

With this most recent Season 6 change I can not tell you what identity League now has. On the one hand the game has years of history as a pvp competitive game with team tournaments, competitions, and a professional scene which makes millions in revenue off the backs of professional ranked teams. Today, there no longer are ranked 5's. To me ranked 5's has always been what this game was, and while a majority of players were not able, or chose not to participate in ranked 5's (I have alot more on this subject, but I will spare you the words) it was what the game was about. The goal of having a strong 5's team which performed well and your placement on the leaderboards. Think other games like WoW with your guilds, your raids, and your WoW progression rankings. There are other things to do in the game (plenty) but this was supposed to be the top. 

Back to Riot and League with the removal of ranked 5's they have now completely removed and justification for their professional scene. In one fell swoop they have completely removed all amateur ranked 5's teams, all amateur tournaments (no teams remember) the college tournaments, team rankings. Virtually everything this game was built around in one move. Just terrible. Now lets assume you are a player who wants to be competitive, today there more challenger league scene. Riot just killed it. The only way an existing or future player today can ever become a professional player is by playing solo queue (ignoring how broken the new system is) and pray that you get picked up by an existing team. 

Next if we take a moment and analyze Riot's reasoning for the change from their post. http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/developer-corner/XvqbAgrF-letos-talk-about-dynamic-queues-and-ranked-play 

In their post they explain the change as something players have been asking for and this is their response to player feedback. Personally I dont recall a single post asking for the removal of ranked 5's, but that is just me.  Last year, we investigated why players didn’t play ranked, and a huge number said they didn’t want to abandon their friends to do it.  Ok I get it they want to expand the ranked system in a way that allows us to play with any number of players that we like. Cant play ranked with 3 or 4 people. So they created the dynamic system to let you play ranked with 2-4 players. Which could or could not be a good idea I dont have access to the data to tell you one way or the other. What I can tell you is that players want ranked 5's. 

In summary if you read Riots entire post it is hard to walk away with any other verdict than Riot really jumped the gun and released (even if just US) a system that had many flaws for  I like that you are allowed to queue with any number of people to play ranked”, about 55% of players agreed, 20% were neutral, and 25% disagreed. This kind of feedback level from their poll. In reality if Riot wanted to create a system in which I could queue with 3-4 of my friends for ranked, they should of added a 3rd system instead of removing one and replacing it with another. 

Look at their result numbers from premades vs. solo queues one in 5 of your games, you are all solo and the other team is a premade. Keep in mind this is just ranked and is not normal queue in which this percentage is likely alot higher. In the past educated players with access to the full league API were able to determine the percentage of premades vs. solo queue and to what size because they were able to collect and publically post data about duo queue. Today Riot has quietly forbidden sites from posting group queue information. So in the past you could go to a site and look at your game and it would tell you who is a group and who isnt, today you can not do that. At the best you have to look at a players "recently played with" to determine if there might be a duo queue. That is the best you can do. Some people might side with Riot on this and say that it somehow creates an unfair advantage knowing who is a duo queue and who is solo. Well in that regard my response would be knowing another players stats on a certain champion, their runes, and their masterys are just as influential if not more so than knowing who queued together. No I suspect the real reason was some users were analyzing Riots match making information and Riot (just like every other large game) didnt appreciate users holding a microscope to their processes and systems and publicly sharing this information. Same thing happened with Bungie and Destiny when a user was able to somehow dig through public information and could predict what Xur would sell in advance. Bungie released several public statements explaining that Xur's loot was completely random and that they could not change his loot. In reality they obviously made the game and can changed anything and everything, but this one user publicly posting loot in advance was proof that Bungie was publicly lying to their player base. So once their idiot designers figured out how, they updated how the system worked so the user (Riot user Megaman) could no longer predict what loot was going to show up and what was on the loot table. They created 2 tables that Riot could change at any time. 

I assume Riot was on the same path when they made their group queue change. The idea that someone could take the data, analyze it and say "hey I queue as a solo queue and 40% of the time I get matched against a premade of 3-4 players in normal 5's. Basically if someone really wanted to they could prove that Riot doesnt really have a MMR system. When you queue up in a game in normals and you and your 4 other random teammates are silver and gold and the other team has Diamond and plat players. You likely think to yourself either A. they boosted or B. there really is no match making system except for group matching. Last thing Riot would want was some analyst coming in and saying "in the last 6 months in NA 90% of all games with a plat or a diamond player in the game, played against a team with no other player of equal rank. Or in 25% of all normal 5's matches, one team had premade of 2 players while the other team was all solo queue". They dont want the magnifying glass. 

Now sure Riot has likely said that your ranked tier is not how they base their "MMR" on. However, any logical person should be able to come to the understanding that a player who is diamond or plat statistically is a better player than someone who is in silver, bronze, and some of gold. For whatever reason, it doesnt matter how the players got to diamond or plat other than boosting. The fact that they are there means they statistically a more skilled player. So the ability to go in and prove that there isnt a MMR (I personally believe there is no sophisticated MMR equation that Riot has. I believe there system is extremely basic. I believe there are 2 systems, one for ranked and one for solo queue. For Solo queue I think there are 2 parts, one is your Win/Loss streak in which some sort of score is determined, and your party queue size. That is it. Player skill, rank, etc have no weight. For ranked 5's I believe your Win/Loss streak again, your party queue (solo or duo) and your existing tier in which you only play against players 1-4 tiers above or below you. That is it.) 

This was supposed to be a short post but quickly turned into my rant about how Riot with their new ownership and direction has lost their sole and purity of design for the all beautiful corporate greed and stock price. I dont think this is the end of the world. I think Riot will revert the dynamic system and either expand it to include 5's or add ranked 5's back and have a 3rd system. Also I do sleep in my aluminum hat. Thanks.