Champion Mastery: The system which will fix elo hell.
Riot clearly does not care about the issues with climbing the ladder unless you play copious amounts of ranked games. This is a given based on the statistical model they employ. Common wisdom from players is to grind it out, yet few look past this for ways to reduce the grind necessary to allow you to play with people of your skill levels. The grind of the ladder more often than anything represents your willingness to give money to riot or your ability to spend hours upon hours playing to slowly make your way to higher levels. As a person who no longer has the free time to play 30 games of league per week, and a software engineer I have put a lot of thought into fixing riots problem with troll games, fortunately they did most of the heavy lifting I've just put two and two together.
Lets take a step back, clearly I have a bias, I play at a higher level than the people I queue with on a regular basis, I continue to attain silver 4 and instantly get MMR trolled down to s5 and sometimes even close to B1. How much higher? I don't know, I make mistakes and I am not good enough to carry a 3-12 bot lane, or a mid with 10 deaths at 15 minutes so I don't think I'm LCS material just yet. There was also little I could do to prevent those lanes from collapsing the way they did, as I spent time analyzing each game. This situation has me thinking of quitting this game, despite enjoying immensely a good match win or lose. The problem is the bad matches far outnumber the good matches, and I find myself wondering why I bother because I do not get the enjoyment from the game when I lose 21LP from an AFK for the whole match after working real hard to gain those 21LP, and that represents a large portion of my very limited free time investment. Frankly I'm rather sick of getting S/S- and 3 turrets, a couple dragons, and double KDA while pinging entire teams away from leeroying into an obvious trap watching helplessly on the map as they are quickly obliterated. I internalize as much of the blame as I can, but as a competitive person with limited free time, how do you not get frustrated at teammates you have no control over losing you the match and ruining the fun?
The motivation here is simple, maximize enjoyment and ranking / matching accuracy and reduce the negative games, and maximize the close matches where everything comes down to the wire.
Champion mastery has already done a statistical analysis of your gameplay compared to those who play your role and champion, and riot now has a number value they can assign to a dynamic formula in order to reduce LP losses due to trolls, and lower your LP gains to being carried. They have now created the perfect means to fixing elo hells at all ranks, the question remains will they actually implement this to safegaurd from trolls, afks and unskilled players? By adding this value to their calculations, they could reduce by a great deal the times where being carried will result in bad players being carried too high, and good players from being pushed too low. This value is the perfect way to bolster the MMR system which is incredibly broken at the lower levels, and pits players in downward spirals as sequential losses (regardless of cause) absolutely chews through your MMR rating.
This fixes the major problem of matchmaking that riot faces, B3 + S3 != S5 + S5 (Insert whichever tier you want, the point is still valid). There are generally large champion pool, play style and game awareness differences when you go a full tier apart (b3-s3). That does not mean that by averaging MMRs for matchmaking, you are likely to get a great matchup. This is unfortunate for everyone because the S3 might be a support with low chance to dramatically impact the games victory, while the MMR system matches you against a team of players lower than you, causing a very large LP loss penalty on defeat and a very small LP gain on victory. Similar issues on the other side of the coin present themselves, you are beating a team with Bronze 3 players on it, therefor the victory is worth less, but loosing to a bronze 3 member team, so the lose is much worse. These are facts of the matching and ranked system for LoL, acknowledge them or not.
This is how they fix it. Riot is correct to prioritize for a short queue time because you can't have any enjoyment if you can't get a match, but the penalties for a bad match up through the system far outweigh the benefits. How often do you get a match which is so one sided because the match system decided S1 + B4 = S5 + S4, its very likely if you were on the S1 side, it would be more beneficial to have a full game 4v5 than to have the B4 in your match feeding the enemy team kills. Enter the savior of this all - Champion Mastery, there is a value which can be used to adjust for the loss with a B4, or increase the value of the win if you did really well because you carried a boulder the whole way. The same is true in this scenario with your MMR, matchmaking needs fixing, but also needs to be prioritized for creating matches, not perfect matches and if you can't have a perfect match you need to have an OK match, but you can adjust the resulting changes to those values according to the individuals performance in the match, not solely based off of a win or loss.
tl;dr - Riot now knows how well YOU did in your match, they could apply this number to adjusting MMR and LP algorithms to better suit the entire player base with a more accurate model.
If you want to say "No", show me a better model because averaging out over hundreds of matches is NOT the best solution. It works, but its painful and very long if there is a better way, tell me why not to take it.
