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Do Solo Queue Rankings Actually Determine Skill?

JC DarkOmen·12/12/2016, 10:25:43 PM·1 votes·1,561 views

Have you ever realized after a win that you had almost nothing to do with the victory? That your only real impact on the game was to not feed and let someone else carry you, which is to say do enough that your absence isn't detrimental, but not so much that your presence is detrimental aka have as little impact on the game as possible? Does it happen to you a lot? Like more often than not you only won/lost because one of the teams is just totally and completely unable to fight on the same level as the other? I'm not saying there are Diamond level players stuck in Bronze because of bad teams, I'm just saying there are Golds stuck in Silver and Silvers boosted to Gold because of the luck of the draw (no, not their skills as TF).

Specifically in my last game where I ended 6/3 as Udyr and my first 2 kills were from camping top, my Nasus went on to completely wreck the entire map given that small lead. He was losing top and Illaoi was pushed up, so I did the minimum required as a jungler and from then on no matter what happened we came out on top. Get killed 3v1 in bot and lose drag? Doesn't matter, Nasus got top inner turret. Took a dragon? That's nice, but doesn't compare to Nasus' triple kill in mid followed by two turrets going down. Killed Caitlyn twice while she was split pushing alone? She was probably going to die in one of those two teamfights Nasus bulldozed through in her absence anyway. Got Nasus killed in a 2v4 and flashed away to go clear razorbeaks? Since it took the entire team to fight the two of you, your other teammates got a free inhib turret. Died taking bot turret? Nasus got a kill taking top turret and then took top inhib. I could have done anything and it would have never made any difference to that Nasus. Jhin was by all definitions behind and unintentionally feeding and it didn't matter. Vel'Koz supp was stealing all of Jhin's kills and it didn't matter. Their Lux was horrible and it didn't matter. No one's skill level really mattered that much, because Nasus got 2 assists. I was about 8/1 a couple games ago and I had an Ekko with 200 hp E into me with no backup while I was full hp. When you have someone with that little common sense on your team how are you supposed to win that game?

Then there are games when every lane is pushed up and feeding. If you try to give them advice they just flame at you and tell you to gank, which you can't do because they're pushed. Or games where they have an Ori/Wu/Annie/Amumu/Sivir comp and your team just doesn't have any tools to deal with that. Or sometimes your teammates just don't seem to have some of the basic skills, knowledge, and common sense that you'd expect of people in your rank (top if you've died to Irelia 5 times, play safer and build some armor; bot stop complaining about being camped when are there no wards anywhere; mid you can't roam while Ziggs is in lane alone) and there's just nothing you could have done about it.

And in games like that, where despite trying your hardest you still had little to no impact on the game, you still get awarded/deducted LP as if it was a team effort and everyone fought valiantly but in the end your skill was able to secure the victory/ doom the entire team to failure. Shouldn't individual skill and contributions have some kind of effect on your rank? Like if I get an S+ on a game where we lost before 20 minutes should I really take as big a loss as our intentionally feeding Disco Nunu? I know there are factors that can't/don't get taken into account with those scores (what if support Nami's shot calls saved the day?) but not taking anything except for victory and defeat into account seems off.

And the way MMR works is a little suspect. If I'm Bronze 5 and I win 10 games in a row and now I'm Bronze 2 98 LP, why do I need to beat a team with a bunch of high Silver/ low Golds to get into my series for Bronze 1? I should only have to prove that I'm better than players in Bronze 2 to get into Bronze 1. At the most I should only have to hold my own in a match with all Bronze 1 players.

11 Comments

BluePolarizer12/12/2016, 11:05:11 PM3 votes

I think you misunderstood.

Once Nasus gets going, he is very hard to stop.

All you had to do, was get Nasus going, and you did your job.

If you didn't, Illaoi would've gotten going, and Illaoi is a 1v5 champ when fed.

So you absolutely did contribute to the win in an extremely important way.

Not everyone is a late game 1v5 carry. In fact, very few champs are.

Igotlazy12/12/2016, 10:32:07 PM1 votes

Your skill will shine through given enough games.

It's nearly impossible for a blind computer system to track individual skill throughout a game. The Mastery Rank system is just comparing your average gold and kill/assist contribution versus the average on that champ. It can and has been abused.

HongChongDong12/12/2016, 10:32:46 PM1 votes

Yes skill does matter. It will always matter. Your issue is that your lack of knowledge of the game prevents you from understanding what the next level of skill is like so the rest of the game that's completely unseen by you might as well be non existent.

Whenever you think that there was nothing you could've done better always remember the same thing that I do "A challenger player can consistently solo carry 100% of all games all the way up to atleast low diamond".

If you start to believe it's out of your hands then you won't learn to recognize any mistakes or learn at all and just stagnate in the same place.

A Gentyl Sodomy6/23/2019, 5:58:59 AM

I’d have to say no. The game mainly depends on team comp and cohesion. Everyones champs or players doesn’t synergies the same. With league you’re rolling the dice. That’s why dodging is so important.

Example playing on a new account with friends just got to gold. My team 3G & 2S vs their all gold team. The kicker is their solo Q was 3 diamond and 2 gold. How are you about to match my team vs theirs... we ended up wining do to objective control and late game scaling.

I haven’t reached challenger or up so maybe its a bit different when you’re generally playing the same people but I personally feel like team synergy is mainly what wins games and there’s no consistency unless you flex. That being said imo flex shows more true skill on a whole level compared to solo/duo that’s why solo/duo players who want a free boost typically just play support.

If solo/duo was based off skill why doesn’t every sport have 1 player who can win the game regardless of the team he plays on? The reason is because theirs no one. Sports/games are based around teamwork. To perfect teamwork you need to practice together to understand how one another will react and you will never get that consistently with 4 random people.