Ranked Is Not Friendly Towards Players With A Life
This is not a rant thread about how Elo hell sucks. You can go through my match history and see that I'm climbing more than fine. In fact, if you don't count the games where someone AFK'd, I have multiple win streaks of over 5 games and no consecutive losses. I got placed in bronze because I did my placements with my younger brother, who belongs in rock bottom bronze. Given my win rate in the past 15 or so games, I clearly don't belong in bronze.
I've been lucky enough to get in as many games as I did in the past week. I am in medical school and it just so happened that I am not busy this week. I am currently gaining or losing exactly 19LP per game. It takes approximately 6 games to get into promotion series, and then an additional game per series lost, in addition to the promotion games. During regular weeks I'm lucky if I can get 5 wins in, and that's assuming I don't get the rare AFK or troll. Before you say that I wouldn't be able to maintain my standing in higher tiers, keep in mind even in challenger you're only obligated to play one game every ten days, and even after that it is a gradual decaying.
The issue, as stated in the title, is that the current ranked system is incredibly hard to climb for players with other responsibilities and commitments. While the vast number of games required to climb makes the system much more accurate, drastically reducing the population of players who are misplaced higher (or lower) by luck, it has an adverse effect on players who don't have large samples of games.
While I'm not trying to propose a rework to the system, I want to simply state that it is possible to design a system that is more accommodating for this issue. I played StarCraft II back in my undergraduate days, and their ladder system is extremely well designed. Keep in mind that StarCraft II also has a 2v2, 3v3, and recently even a 4v4 ladder I believe. They implement a bonus points system, where you begin the season with a pool of bonus points that will cover your point losses while doubling your point gains. These points regenerate ridiculously slowly - they might as well not regenerate. This bonus pool offers multiple advantageous effects:
- Players have a chance to fix the error created by the small sample of placement games (10 as well in StarCraft)
- Players who can't play many games essentially have every win worth more, to make up for that fact
- Does not benefit active players in any way, and causes no adverse effects such as inflation and abuse
What if you use the points to boost your rank at the beginning of a season, then don't play anymore? Decay will hit you. If play occasionally to circumvent decay, losses will hit you because you're higher than where you're supposed to be.
What if you use the points for a mad dash at the end of a season? Bonus point maximum can decay to 0 over the span of the season, so you don't have enough points to do this by then.
Active players still have an edge over less active because they get the same points. Active players will use up their bonus pool much sooner, and the amount of games covered by bonus pool compared to their total games will be quite insignificant.
Again, this particular system is merely proof that accommodation is possible, not necessarily a suggestion.
Thank you for reading. I'd also like to add, on a personal note to Riot, that the players with real life commitments probably make up a large portion of your revenue. We actually make money that we can spend on your game.
TL;DR People with a job, hobbies, and a social life don't have enough time to climb the ladder within the span of a season. This is easily fixed.
