Boards›Gameplay

Normalizing Rank~ Normalizing Player Quality

DizTheGreat·9/1/2017, 12:18:53 PM·2 votes·351 views

This post hasnt been thought out fully, but i wanted to share something i found interesting. I will try to explain this without sounding like im ranting. In my Solo/Duo queue i have been experiencing very low quality games. My play style doesnt differentiate too far from how i play casually in my normal games. I am the type of player that doesnt mind playing the game for what it is. i like aram i like 3s urf all that stuff, and well... one thing i have noticed, is that I am playing with really great people in my normal type games! I find myself in queue with platinum and diamonds, and ive made plenty of friends from my normals. they ask me about my low rank and i dont know what to say. let me explain a little more... so my solo/duo rank is gold 4 with 0 LP, and yes I did under perform in a few of those games. my "bad" games are games where im a nonfactor, where i cant do enough to save the game. anyways, my FLEX rank is gold 2 with very high MMR, again, playing with diamonds. So I would like to pose a question to the boards; Why am I seeing such detrimental team mates in my games, if my casual games have an influx of great and skilled players? Have people taken a hiatus from ranked solo/duo? is flex queue creating an unstable ranked environment?

4 Comments

archerno19/1/2017, 12:38:33 PM1 votes

Well Flex games are generally considered games where people dont really try. Same as normals. You cant really compare your solo/duo rank to those games. Normal matchmaking is unrelated to ranked. You can have 2 diamonds in your team and play against 5 Bronze and stomp them. That doesnt mean you are good. Normal games are bad for people that wanna rank up. They distort your mentality completely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkdoxIOAD2A

Minarde9/1/2017, 10:12:26 PM1 votes

It's often an issue with player mentality.

There's a fairly common (mis)conception that Solo/Duo Ranked is the only competitive queue. Flex Ranked is supposedly meaningless, and Normals are "unbalanced trash." Combined with a lack of knowledge about MMR and third-party look-up sites, it ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Players think a queue has wonky matchmaking, so they slack off or simply don't play that queue, so that queue ends up with wonky matchmaking, so players feel justified in blowing off that queue.

It's hard to say what's happening in your specific case though. Maybe the players in your Normal games are playing less seriously than in Ranked; maybe you're better at playing with/against premades, so you do worse in Solo/Duo; maybe you were just unlucky in your Solo/Duo games.