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Matchmaking System (Specifically Ranked)

Aaross·9/16/2017, 2:24:16 AM·8 votes·720 views
Aaross - Summoner search results - League of Legends

I'm sure there's plenty of people that already talk about this topic and just complain about it, so I hope I don't just fall into that kind of category with my topic and opinion, but honestly, something needs to be done about the matchmaking system in the game.

I don't know how it is for everyone else, but in my personal experience I'd say 80% of my games are extremely one-sided without much opportunity for me as an individual to effect the game enough to change it. By no means am I playing perfectly or even close to that, but I feel as though I'm playing pretty well, and well enough that I should be climbing but it just doesn't seem to happen. I understand League is a team game, but when the matchmaking system is set up in such a way that you usually play as an individual, there has to be some way for you to climb to the rank you deserve as an individual without cranking out 100's to 1000's of games. For example, if you take a look at my match history and the champions I've played for the most part I have a pretty good kda and ok cs per minute (that's what I'm trying to work on the most right now cause it needs work), yet my winrate sits at (the moment I wrote this) 50%. The last game I played (before which I had just gotten to 0 LP) I lost trying to carry as hard as I could with a full ad garen jungle. The other team picked a comp that actually had tanks and was actually in the meta so they ended up winning the game despite my best efforts. Subsequently I got demoted immediately after that loss which confused me because in the past I had sat at 0 lp and had losses and not gotten demoted. In fact in the past I've been warned when I get to a level in which I would get demoted. This was a complete surprise and a major setback to my climbing experience. Going back to the game, I wish this was a single event but this is such a common thing to happen to me in my games. Now the reverse does happen that my team and I absolutely smash the enemies and we win the game easily, but in my opinion that's not what games should be like. Sometimes there are really good players on the enemy team that are playing well yet their teammates literally just lose the game for them.

My point with all of this is that the current matchmaking system just seems a little broken. Games snowball extremely hard and it seems like result of the game is known before the 1st turret is destroyed. I've been playing this game since mid season 4. Not a crazy long time but I've experienced multiple ranked seasons. In my honest opinion this has been one of the hardest seasons to climb in. I don't think it's all the matchmaking system but I think it's definitely a part of it. There are other major factors that have been changed to the game that I think has caused this change. Back then it was definitely a lot easier to solo carry games and before season 4 I know it was even easier. That's not to say it wasn't difficult to solo carry a game, but it seemed much more possible. Yes I think it's possible in some instances and in some games of League to somewhat carry a game almost by yourself but it's rare and the result is usually you playing well and stalling the game because you are playing well while you slowly lose the game.

I don't know what I hope to accomplish with this post. I doubt Riot will notice it and even if they do I don't think they nor their balancing team really cares that much. It's become really clear the past couple of years that all they really care about is competitive play, namely, LCS, LCK, LPL, etc. Riot's focus has definitely been taken off of the individual player or even most of the player base to the the small group of people in the world that play this game at a highly competitive level. I don't think it's entirely bad that they've done this, but the consequences to this are that many long time players that aren't professional league of legends players have become increasingly frustrated with the game. I mean videogamedunkey, who for the longest time played this game and got so many people to play it (myself included), has basically given up on the game because of the problem I've been talking about with matchmaking. I just fear that if Riot continues to go down this path, it will lose more and more of their player base to other games that actually care about the individuals that play their game.

I'll just add a poll for kicks. You can let me know if you agree with me or not.

10 Comments

MarcusAnarchy9/16/2017, 2:31:27 AM5 votes

Ranked tilts me so hard. I got demoted back to Silver IV after tons of games climbing to Silver III.

The ConMando9/16/2017, 2:46:39 AM4 votes

Sad so much time is put into posts like this and then they just disappear into oblivion.

GañgpIank9/16/2017, 2:29:06 AM4 votes

Same

GL Getting Gold9/16/2017, 2:48:29 AM3 votes

As a lee sin one trick I completely agree. Trying to climb as a jungler is cancer when all your lanes lose. Like wtf am I supposed to do?

Wasabi Kitty9/16/2017, 3:07:24 PM1 votes

I don't really know what you expect. You're a gold player, you duo queue with a silver 4 player, and you're expecting teammates at the same level as you? When you duo with someone at a full division lower than you? That doesn't really make sense.

The garen jungle game you mention, the guy was Gold 2 and it's not like he fed his ass off. He just tried something a bit unconventional and it didn't work, that happens sometimes and you just have to learn to deal with it. Sometimes your team has comp issues, sometimes you get outplayed. This doesn't mean matchmaking is fundamentally broken, it just means you lost a game.

People always want something to blame when they feel like they're not getting the results they expect, and matchmaking has consistently been blamed for the failures of individuals. Because what people don't like is that matchmaking sometimes gives them difficult games, and hard to win games, that they lose. And since this prevents them from climbing to their rating, or at least that's what they perceive (the truth is that they just failed to play at the level they want).

Yea it sucks to have someone on your team have a bad game, but that's just part of the game. If you want to climb and get to where you think you belong, you just need to play better.

GayFluffyUnicorn9/16/2017, 4:18:53 PM1 votes

Idk what is happening right now. Ranked is pure coinflip. Not a single decent game. I get 5boosted shit teams in a row just to win the next three by doing nothing. It has never been so bad. So many "diamonds" who got here by idk how. I don't even want to say much about it anymore. It's only frustrating and im about to quit now. Not one game where i could say "yup, that was fun."

Mathgodpi9/16/2017, 5:14:06 AM1 votes

There is clearly something wrong. Instead of making a new thread I'll post what I was going to say here.

Today I played 12 solo-queue ranked games, losing 11 of them. I dropped from Bronze I with some LP to Bronze III with 0LP.

I know KDA doesn't mean everything, and it can mean different things for different roles, but I want to give you a sense of what I have been dealing with. Here are the combined KDAs of my 4 teammates from these 12 games:

22/37/23 21/29/38 19/37/16 4/17/1 29/40/52 12/28/11 15/34/14 28/32/38 51/48/49 15/26/30 35/37/34 25/26/18 21/28/34

And these don't take into account things like cs, gold amounts, vision scores, etc, which also have been quite a bit in favor of the opposing team most games.

So aside from two or three outliers, I am consistently getting teamed with outright dreadful teammates. This wouldn't be a problem, of course, if the opposing team was also getting bad players and the KDAs more or less balanced out over time. However, this isn't anywhere close to being the case. There is something unfair going on here and it's ruining my desire to keep playing the game.

LXII9/16/2017, 5:33:06 AM1 votes

The system currently blows. It favors only the highest ELO and leaves the rest of us playing thousands of games in hopes to get somewhere that isn't terrible.

The problem is mostly just the way they matchmake. I've wrote on this topic before and it usually gets pretty long so I'll shorten this time. MATCH LANES (rather than whole teams) BASED ON MMR. Top lane is a 1500 MMR player? Great, give the other team one of those as well. Currently they just mix us all up and try to average MMR based on teams, sounds decent, but doesn't work. If our bot lane is the low end of our MMR and their bot lane is the high end of theirs this game is already over. In a perfect world this would work out because top and/or mid could carry, but that's just not the case in the current state of the game.

With lanes matched by MMR only the occasional trade (rarely happens in low ELO) could throw things off. Outside of that you can either win or lose knowing you were on equal ground rather than just "better bot wins LUL" every game.

option paralysis9/16/2017, 9:26:33 AM1 votes

They won't do anything, because they want people to grind and grind as much as they can. Autofill decides games in champ select and it needs to go, but it won't. And matchmaking based on mmr is utter trash, because they mix few divisions that make an equal mmr, but in game it doesn't work. One time I had a d5 autofilled top on my team that went vs. d1 top lane main. Like what the fuck. Of course we lost.