Ranked Frustrations- Fair- Yes, Accurate- No, How Riot SHOULD fix

Open post to Riot,

League of legends has been my favorite and most played game ever since DOTA on WC III. I love the game. I love the aspects that were improved upon --like scaling AP ratio's on mages, runes, etc. However I have become very frustrated with the ranking system/game play. I want to illustrate my frustrations using an analogy of another one of my beloved games-- capture the flag.

CAPTURE THE FLAG COMPARED TO LEAGUE

I love capture the flag. It's crazy fun for me. However, there is a difference in playing ctf with your good friends who are in their late 20's, married, have professional careers compared to playing ctf on a volunteer basis at boys & girls club with 8 year old's. It's the same game, but totally different experience. Why? Because of course my fellow late 20's friends have far more game knowledge, intellect, maturity, speed, etc. Where as with 8 year old's i'm mostly teaching them how to play and stuff and it's just a much different experience and not truly how I want to play and enjoy the game on a regular basis.

Ranked System Placements Now let's say I sign up for a ctf tournament and how they have it set up is that everyone is randomly assigned teams from 8 year old's to 40 year old's so that every team is "equal" and has a fair chance of winning. You'll have some teams with mostly kids and a few adults, others with mostly adults and few kids by random selection. Now the only way the organizers seemed to think it was fair is to advance is if your team wins, and if your team loses, you are demoted. Because each team is randomly assigned after a game it should be about 50% win/lose rate. According to these organizers they assume that because I'm obviously better than the little kids I should be able to consistently help my team to victory and advance through to the final stages over time. Seems logical right?

However, it seems they forget that the other team ALSO has other adults on their team at random. As well as the fact that by random chance I may be assigned with 4 kids and just 1 adult while the other team by random chance has 4 adults and 1 kid on the team. But alas, all that matters is if it's a win or loss. So I play over and over again, and I'm even a bit better than most adults that I play against but because each time is randomly chosen each time I manage to win only about 55 of my matches out of 100. Therefore the organizers only slight increase my division by 1 from the starting division (out of 25 divisions mind you.) And again this is after an average of 100 games and 30 min/s per game or 50 hours of my life!

I hope you see here my frustration.

HERE'S MY PROPOSED SOLUTION Consider individual metrics in your LP system. 70% LP win/loss and 30% LP individual performance. That's it. Combine this with LP for win/loss and over time you'll more accurately have people placed. If a win/loss makes up a base of say 70% of LP and your individual score/grade makes up the other 30% in the match then over time you'll see players who consistently performing worse losing more for a loss and winning less for a win compared to a player who performs consistently well in their matches winning more LP for the same match, and losing less LP for the same match loss.

I have heard your statement "We don't want to negate non analyzable plays that help your team win or lose" You implemented the grades system a while back now and have improved it over time. I am not on staff with riot so I don't know the exact calculations that are taken into account BUT it seems pretty accurate/fair to me. IT'S NOT JUST KDA AND CREEP SCORE or at least my proposal is not that. Other metrics should include ward scores, cc scores, healing/shielding,etc. And of course it's not comparing an Alistar stats to a Caitlyn stats. The system compares you to other Alistar's and other Caitlyn's.

I think many players would be happy know that oh shoot, I messed up a couple of times early game and lost lane, but hey I recovered and helped my team come to ultimate victory mid game so I'll still get good LP but not as much as the jungler who did really well this match but more than the adc who got tilted and rage fed a couple of times.

Example LP for a match would work out to something like this: Wins ''''''''''''''' Loss (losing LP) S: +24 LP ''''''''''' S: -16 LP A: +22 LP ''''''''''' A: -18 LP B: +20LP ''''''''''' B: -20 LP C: +18 LP ''''''''''' C: -22 LP D: +16 LP '''''''''' D: -20LP

And now you're statement that "over time you should consistently rise" would work. It separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls over time. Doing whatever it takes for the win (including getting bad metrics somehow) would still be worth it because increasing your win rate still grants more LP than losses.

50% win rate over 100 games example LP differences S grades (~top 20% grade on champion) + 400 LP = (50 x 24) - (50 x 16) = ~4 divisions higher than current system/average B grades (~average performance) ** 0 LP**(50 x 20) - (50 x 20)= lines up with the current system D grades (~bottom 20% grade on champion) -400LP = (50 x 16) - (50 x 24)= ~ 4 divisions lower than current system/average

These calculation are assuming a 50% win rate But according to your current philosophy because someone is "better than silver players" they should have a higher win rate and climb up. But as I showed before in my analogy, it's not that simple to climb up based solely on random team win/loss ratio and taking individual performance into calculation allows a player to rise and still maintain fair matches.

Don't even get me started on my thoughts on the proposed changes to ranked in 2019. Just will even worsen my frustration as it will actually exacerbate the problem even more and make it even longer and harder to advance.