The 50/50 wins/losses Ranked Algorithm Is Not Fair

Sharpsterman·7/21/2018, 8:26:13 PM·4 votes·2,026 views

Me Get a 6 game winning streak. Log off; sleep. Next day; login. Get 6 losses with feeders, trolls, disconnects and enemy smurfs.

Is an algorithm designed to set you up to fail so that your wins and losses match the holy 50/50 number, fair? I feel incredibly skilled, I try hard. Is my only option to create a smurf account to beat this system? Is that why smurf accounts are made?

I partially don't even want to waste my time, but I've been played this game for 4 years now and I deserve gold...

14 Comments

Vyntrius7/21/2018, 8:58:56 PM5 votes

You've played 350 ranked games, so you're already at the elo you deserve. A 50/50 win rate is proof of this, not proof of an algorithm that's keeping you down. My advice is to choose a champion you will play every chance you can get while having just a couple of backups. If you're serious about climbing, there is no reason to bring 85 different champions to ranked like you have.

SugeMinPikk7/21/2018, 10:39:41 PM3 votes

The algorithm is indiscriminate in its matching. It cares not about the individual. It cares not about you. It cares only about the whole. The whole being the team.

HalcyonDweller7/23/2018, 8:47:24 PM2 votes

The infrastructure required to run the extra code just to calculate all of the extra info needed to forcibly give people winning or losing matches would be far too expensive to maintain as a business. For a single player it wouldn't weigh on the system too much to run the few extra lines of code, but multiply that by every user concurrently logged in and playing on your region's server at any given time. That's a lot of times to re-run the same lines of code. And besides, it would double queue times because the pools of players available to matchmaking would have to be split in two (people owed wins and people owed losses).

50% win rate is the outcome of the system, a byproduct. It's not a setpoint that Riot uses. With setpoints, you can tell the system what you want, in this case, to match players so that everyone has a 50% chance of winning, but it leaves out all sorts of important factors. So it fails to be accurate, and tends to over or under estimate players' skill levels. This leads to unintended imbalances in matchmaking, aka win and loss streaks. If you're playing at your actual skill level with people similar to you, you will have a 50% win rate because your chances of winning against people of the same skill level as you are 50/50.

It's the same as a control system, the system attempts to correct for the changes in your MMR by matching you with people it thinks are at your new skill level, but because your MMR is still changing (be it from a win streak, or a loss streak), it messes up and can over/under shoot, and then wind up putting you in a match you don't belong in. Now multiply that by 10 because there are 10 different players who's MMR may or may not accurately reflect their true skill level. To be honest, I'm surprised matchmaking works at all since things can get ten times as wonky.

Riot should be using PID control to more accurately predict people's skill level instead of whatever they're doing with MMR.

See here for an example of what your MMR would look like compared to your actual skill level. The colorful lines are examples of MMR as it changes over time, and the flat reference line is the setpoint (your new skill level / MMR) after a change has occurred. In reality your skill level is constantly changing and it won't look as flat, but the idea is to show how a system's outputs oscillate when responding to a change.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/PID_varyingP.jpg/320px-PID_varyingP.jpg

ZephyrDrake7/21/2018, 9:03:42 PM2 votes

50/50 is something that will come to every single type of matchmaking system as long as you play enough games. You have to be either way better or worst than everyone for you to achieve anything but 50% winrate over a long period of time

Reaper Soraka7/21/2018, 9:06:59 PM2 votes

It matches you against players around your skill level. Eventually you should lose as much as you win, because the players you're playing against are as good as you.

If you constantly improve you will have a higher win rate than loss rate. If you think it's your team's fault and can't adapt to problems that occur, you will stagnate or fall.

You are silver 5. You are placed against bronze players with silver players because have a history of losing to silver players. You win a lot against bronze players. So. You are placed against silver players because you're beating lots of bronze players. You win a lot still because something improved. Maybe you figured out how to keep an eye on a ward in one bush in the game. You climb further. You are placed against gold players. They stomp you because they can watch three wards, giving them an advantage by information. You lose. It was your teams fault. Every single time.

Congrats, you're stuck in silver 3.

Badgeblitz7/27/2019, 11:58:42 PM1 votes

A lot of people try to say it's fair, but it's a slap in the face to those who use skill, more than the RNG of team matching. Match making is too RNG based for the sake of balance, to be "fair" like normal games, and people don't understand this. In order to keep the matches "balanced" at least 1-2 really good players gets dragged down by 3 mediocre players who noob champs.

It's the game saying "You'll never get the courtesy of playing matches that show your skill. I'll always care more for balance than your hard work to get over 10% of wins", and riot saying "it's fair", but it's not. Noobs should lose 70% and win 30%, while pros should win 80% and lose 20.

Kelg7/21/2018, 9:08:04 PM1 votes

You need to work on improving your play. I don't know what you're doing, you may lane great or get good KDA, but you're obviously lacking somewhere if you are stuck in Silver 4. Watch higher level players play and see what they do. The Glacierr actually has videos where he goes over how you can improve your chance of winning at different elos. Now obviously you can't win every game, and you don't actually need to hard carry every game, you just need to help create an advantage for your team and you will start to win more than you lose.

MrFawknSunshine7/21/2018, 9:28:26 PM1 votes

so question... if people like TF BLADES , and other high high elo players can get to master/challenger again and again regardless of their teammates and this so called "forced 50% win/loss algorithm " then why do you think it exist?