Proposal for new placement system.
Dear Riot,
Let's talk.
The current environment for placements is garbage. Before you dismiss this claim, allow me to provide some reasoning:
It's an anti-fun mechanic. It leads to faulty expectations for where players are going to be placed. It also creates a hostile game environment where players are stressed out even more than usual over ranked games. Players, in my experience, react with hostility over any mistakes because "these games matter the most." But that's false.
The simple solution is to provide a mechanic where (1) players know what to expect; and (2) creates a friendly environment (or at least one that isn't inherently hostile) for players that encourages cooperative play. My claim is that the current placement system fails on both accounts.
Here is my solution and it should be very simple to implement. Simple is good.
- Place everyone at the same level. Something like Bronze II should be fine. Everyone will hate it at first, but if players are really as good as they claim to be, they should be able to climb rather quickly.
- Do your soft MMR reset for anyone with a Bronze II MMR or higher.
- Do a hard MMR reset for anyone with a Bronze III MMR or lower.
I believe this will lead to a better game environment overall. Everyone will know exactly what they are going to get and they can hit the ground running. The soft MMR reset will allow players to be matched with the players they should be matched; this will prevent plat players from being matched with actual bronze players.
To share my own experience, I won all 10 of my placement matches. I worked very hard for those wins and I personally carried for most of them. However, nothing is more dissatisfying than winning all 10 of you placement matches and being dropped significantly lower than your expectations. Granted, some of those expectations are from misinformation that exists online. But the honest truth is that placement matches don't matter whatsoever and the end result is just infuriating for many players.
Please consider the complaints of your players. I've been tempted to leave over this and after educating myself on how the system works (in theory at least), it's alleviated some of my anger.
May all your games be GG
