RIP Solo queue, matchmaking, and balance?

The Jawbone·Feb 13, 2016·2 votes·507 views

Putting aside the laughable dynamic queue since that's obvious, but did something happen behind the scenes with normal queues? I'm not even a great player, my win rate is barely 51%, and lately I get matched against gold, platinum, and diamond players in games that look something like 35 to 1 by the time they're done. A lot of it even seems to be worst case scenario, where my whole team is unranked like me, and the enemy team is arranged with gold-diamond players.

Other times, its vice-versa and I'm on the dominating team, trying to keep up with everyone else who's far out of my skill range. What gives? I've played for a long time and I've never seen it like this before.

PS. reworking champions to make them godly powerful and increase their overall performance in their numbers is not balancing.

1 Comments

Arf Arf Arf ArfFeb 13, 20161 votes

As for normal games, what you're describing is pretty typical once you get to high silver normals MMR or above (my main was Plat 5 on NA before I moved to OCE 3 years ago and things were the same back then too, this is my AP Shaco troll smurf). Match making works when you're horrible at the game but once you start to learn the basics you tend to get really weird/unbalanced match making. Mainly because Diamond ranked players often don't play normals ever so when they return their normals MMR is still silver/gold.

So take that as encouragement, it means if you play ranked you'll likely end up in mid silver Elo.

Also, honestly, the dynamic queue sucked on launch but it's fine now. Give it a go, it works well nowadays, especially on bigger servers like NA. You'll get much more balanced match making than in normals, apart from the occasional smurf (always a problem in ranked low Elo).