Ranked System is Rigged and MMR is a scam
Yeah, I don't know what the fuck is wrong with ranked in season 10, but the skill disparity of players in EVERY elo that belong in the same rank is quite immense. A lot of it is due to bought accounts/boosted players/players that got lucky and got carried in their placements to the next tier-- however, this season feels particular bad with the match making. It really started going to shit S8, but S10 is much worse...
They changed their"hidden algorithm" for the match making. Like whenever I smurfed in low elo in previous seasons, the matchmaking seemed to just randomly pick players within the same mmr range and thus all the players in the match were usually very equally skilled and if they lost lane they didn't int 0/10 at 10 minutes. But now when I'm smurfing, it seems to actively try and balance both the average team's mmr to account for the decrepancy of MMR anomalies, aka smurfs. So it will give you worse teammates, and give the enemy teams a high mmr player or two/higher average mmr players than your teammates/duo's.
I was reading a couple posts on their reason for a hard reset on new accounts having a starting elo of Iron IV....It was to prevent/discourage smurfing in order to "protect" the playerbase's experience in ranked, which makes no sense since there will always be smurfs/boosters wanting to smurf since they destroyed their mains mmr and can't climb, want to do unranked to diamond/challenger challenges, boost, for fun of destroying low elo...
It is a fact of League Ranked life. You can't get rid of it because smurfs are the hardcore playerbase that have grinded 1000s of ranked games. Spending an additional 30-50 games in low elo will just add like a week of grinding, which is not that big of a deal, BUT now way more low elo games are destroyed from smurfing from before. It's simple logic to see that, and what Blizzard does with Dota is actually detect if the player is a smurf and just try to increase their ranked as much as possible to get them to their proper elo, which is tried and true and completes BOTH missions of getting the smurfer to high elo and saving a lot more low elo games.
So what it all boils down to is TIME and MONEY. They want you to grind more games to get to the rank you think you deserve. But not only that, the meta has significantly changed and has become more sink or swim, essentially forcing you to play the meta. So what ends up happening is YOU GET THAT NEW CHAMP SINCE IT'S META AND EVERYONE KNOWS THE NEWLY RELEASED CHAMPS ARE GOING TO BE BROKEN SINCE RIOT WANTS YOU TO SPEND MONEY ON THAT NICE SKIN. Why the fuck was Aphelios so goddamn broken? Sett? Senna?
These recently released champs have the most overloaded kits. It's nauseating. But now if you OTP non meta champs you will suffer, forcing you to adopt new meta champs into your champion pool-- of course to the high elo otps, they've mastered their champs so their skill and complete control of their champion will mean they won't suffer as much, but lower elos will, so it forces majority of the playerbase to accommodate meta champions, and thus upon picking up these champions, getting freelo and realizing how nice it feels to stomp with them, buys their skins and RITO makes money.
It's not over yet, though. Riot also realizes if players either:
Reach their previous rank
OR
- Reach the 4th division of the next tier, D4/P4/G4, players will stop playing and only play decay games once a month-- thus not worrying about buying the new champ and buying their accompanying skins.
This has always been the case, but it has gotten MUCH MORE AGGRESSIVE S10. It's like they're shoving it down your throats. Think about positional queues. Do you really think that they made that to make fair and even match making? Just like how they are destroying even more low elo games with lowering new account placement mmr. Positional queues were designed to force you to learn new champions and pick up those new meta champs and buy their skins, since they know people want to only play what they're comfortable with, so they tend to stick to their main role and a select few champions.
Autofill is basically their plan b after positional queues was a disaster. Autofill performs the same function of position in the sense that it forces you to play other roles/champs because you're eventually guaranteed to be autofilled/get a secondary every so often. If they really cared about giving players quality matches they'd give you two options-- fast queue times but you have the chance of getting autofilled, or long queue times with the role you want.
But this defeats their business model and this will cause the player to:
rank up quicker since they are playing their main role, and thus stop playing,grinding as much
Not be exposed to different roles and new champions, and thus reducing the chances of selling skins/new champs to those players.
Now there seems to be an abnormal amount of griefers/inters/afks than ever before. I think it all started when Riot decided to change their match making algorithm for "faster queue times", thus allowing the "hidden mmr range" to select the players for the match to widen and allow for anomalies. Basically what's happened is the matchmaking algorithm has become more MMR based than ever before.
And since their MMR + matchmaking system is hidden from us, this allows for complete control of the match making because the system wouldn't be restricted by a set ELO range as in Chess, you could essentially create conditional procedures based off certain statistics of the players.
From my experience, and countless others I've read through posts, matches now seem like there's one or two good players on each team trying to carry their inting teammates that obviously don't belong in said elo. I've had multiple previous S9 Diamonds hardstuck plat 4-upper gold with SHIT sub 50% and even 35% winrates...
It really feels like the system is trying to make good players carry scrubs so the scrubs don't demote and can climb to the fancy division they crave. Otherwise they would get turned off by their inability to climb and quit ranked and league altogether-- or not be happy with their performance, and thus be less prone to spend money on their champion skins.
Games just feel like which team has the worst inter and who could snowball first/harder. It's like a mixture of the system trying to cater to the quick paced internet cafe gaming style in China and Korea, as well as force win/loss streaks on players to keep them playing.
I've read countless articles on this, but the main consensus is League of Legends active ranked pool/player count has been dwindling down ever since 2015. They are double downing on the whales-- the players who will buy new champions and their skins, the meta seekers, the smurfers, the ranked grinders, and the chinese/korea internet cafes.
The MMR system is a scam. To get more money out of you, and it's why you're experiencing the skill discrepancies in your games...
