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

Sharpsterman·Jul 21, 2018·4 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

VyntriusJul 21, 20185 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.

SugeMinPikkJul 21, 20183 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.

ZephyrDrakeJul 21, 20182 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

SharpstermanJul 21, 20181 votes

I hear you, but in professional sports, that's not how teams are formed. They don't look at your wins and say "Hey, he's really good, we'll have to put him in a team that sucks to balance the game." We don't know exactly how the algorithm works, but why can't silver players just play with all silver players, bronze with all bronze, etc. ?

ZephyrDrakeJul 21, 20182 votes

{quoted}

I hear you, but in professional sports, that's not how teams are formed. They don't look at your wins and say "Hey, he's really good, we'll have to put him in a team that sucks to balance the game." We don't know exactly how the algorithm works, but why can't silver players just play with all silver players, bronze with all bronze, etc. ?

well in "professional" sports you also have a very limited amount of people to play with and you actually have to choose who to play with and either have some form of tournament system to decide who to play against or you chose your opponent for you disregarding skill of teams in every single scenario.

You could put all bronze vs all bronze and whatnot but that instantly becomes impossible the higher up in ladder you go. Challenger cannot just go against other challengers since then it'll take forever to find a match, same with Masters and high diamond players. The higher up you go the less people are in that particular rank. It'll just make queue times for those people be insanely high. It would not make sense to have a group of players only play against those with the same rank but then suddenly throw all that out the window the higher up you go. It would also create insanely lopsided matches since you will just steamroll over everything until you hit a massive wall where everyone in front of you is so much better than you in every single way possible. It would only create more frustrating matches than ever

Reaper SorakaJul 21, 20182 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.

HalcyonDwellerJul 23, 20182 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

SharpstermanAug 10, 20181 votes

What a perfect description; thank you. The over or under-estimation of skill is exactly what I feel during games. I will think of this when I play: The oscillation, as you describe it. It's just so frustrating that I can almost forecast my losses after my wins... That's just a system that is broken in my opinion. If you're right and there is no algorithm, just an MMR that makes up the whole team, then I think it would highly benefit if there was an algorithm that looks at time played, champion mastery, and game ratings (S, A, B, C, etc.), and determine what each players skill is. This math could be done passively on the account (like every 24 hours). Until then, I dispute my right to be furious at this 50/50 nonsensical system, forcing people to play like madmen and snowball or never climb the ranks.

KelgJul 21, 20181 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.

MrFawknSunshineJul 21, 20181 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?

SharpstermanJul 21, 20181 votes

Players get placed in a similar elo that they had last year.

MrFawknSunshineJul 21, 20182 votes

TF BLADES constantly does unranked to challenger

BadgeblitzJul 27, 20191 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.