in depth review of League

Riot, i figured out how your ELO ranking system works. I'm standing with a <10% win ratio.

For starters lets review Champ selection & the queue system. Considering how much raw data RIOT has on your account profile, they can make predictive guesses at what the team composition will be. They can also predict what your bans will be. This, coupled with the report statistics, results in a baseline match-determination.

That is ELO.

Champ selection is actually quite important. Not because champs are stronger than others, but because players will "Report Teemo for Teemo". Every report is a strike against your ELO ranking. It wont show up in your LP but it places you in a different queue than people with a "clean" record. This is why you'll notice that grouped-queue's that honor eachother have a better winrate than solo queue &/or honorless matches.

There was a time when I was honored nearly every match. My play hasn't declined much since my return but my ranking has dropped significantly. When I was here in 2014 I had multiple 10game win-streaks & a win ratio of 60-70% which was quite good considering my skill level. I've won 6 of my last 20 matches; some people quit after champ selection, sometimes the game will glitch all match, I've had occassional matches where my champ runs in the opposite direction of where i click, in fact in one match i couldn't free-scroll and i couldn't relock the camera which forced me to hold space the entire match (won).

So champ selection is important because if the manchildren you have to play with dont like you they'll make you "trash" (a very common insult here in League) and report you for anything & everything.

I just played a match where a guy ks'd every kill except 7 saying "I'll carry" then went apeshit on the entire team because we couldnt afford armor. He lost. This isn't unique to league. A lot of you will say this is bronze problems but we had a gold-level Ashe in Bronze5 today, on my squad which means she's slated to lose her account. This isn't a bronze problem, it isn't even a problem; this is how the system is designed.

This is why I'm stressing that false reports need to be a reportable & bannable offense.

I realize i'm not going to be live streaming, and tbf i don't think i'd want to, but when 1 out of 9 matches that isn't player error. That's ranking determination. Which brings me to my next point, my main point:

Players today aren't learning the basics of league. Alot of this stuff is basic to me, and i dont even know the tricks & trade secrets the guys who've been here from the beginning do. But players don't know how to ward; they dont understand the 3layered midlane; they don't understand timers; they dont buy sightstones; they dont understand strategy other than "group mid"; and no one is showing them how to play.

Then they get thrown into bronze league, a place people rarely escape, or worse yet have to deal with angry burnouts in normal matches who report them just for creating an account. Riot if you haven't figured it out what I'm talking about is the implosion of your player-base. If it isn't serious to you, if having a thriving community isn't something you think you need, then carry on like you have been.

Build bigger & badder Champs; enforce standing ELO policies; throw anyone & everyone under the bus for playing Champs they enjoy instead of Champs their random teammates think are special; send gold-league players into Bronze5; allow the trolls to run wild in Bronze; leave nefs in place to entice people to buy RP for new champs; the skins are pretty sweet; and continue making this game miserably complicated.

You haven't even bothered to update Champion profiles to keep keen with their updates; Katarina is listed as an AD champ with AP support but the way you've rebuilt the character shes a pure-AP champion. The rebuild on Zilean was exquisite, i did want to compliment the effort you put into that.

I'm not sure where or how you can redirect the rage players; they stream online, we've all seen them; all of us have played with them; I'm so fed up with it i just walk away from my computer which means i'm gonna be facing a 15 minute penalty per game pretty soon here. If the game isn't fun people won't play, Riot. It wont matter how much money you pour into tournaments or marketing. You need a solid product if you want a successful franchise - Blizzard is a prime example. They've always produced, first & foremost, a Quality product; if the players like the product it gets hugely popular like World of Warcraft, but you need to start with a quality product.

In perspective though, this is pretty much how society functions today. People get together, decide to report some [champs] they dont like, and then have them incarcerated or financially ruined. That's just the reality of the society we live in. What i find most disconcerting is how this is actually embraced by the devs and I'm not quite sure if that's because there aren't enough people to review the matches (likely) or if it's by insidious design (maybe at high-levels) but until you reform the reporting system and find a way to weed out people who report every match, starve their teammates, and then scream at & report those same teammates without getting permabanned you're going to continue having what you have.

I suppose to make any changes would require assessing the percentages, but IMO all you need is a quality product with good players & some decent marketing to make sustainable profits. Otherwise just make this a pay-to-win game and cash in (coming soon).