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Matchmaking Problems

GHpanda811·7/27/2015, 7:37:38 PM·1 votes·403 views

So a quick check seems like a lot of other people are having issues with this as well, but wanted to try to put my thoughts into a new thread to try to encourage discussion.

For some background, I am currently Silver 1 in ranked, and finished last season in low Gold. I have not been having as much fun in ranked lately, so I have taken to playing more ARAM and Normal mode games.

However, matchmaking of late has seemed to be particularly strange. It is not at all uncommon for there to be at least 1 diamond player in addition to 1-2 platinum players against my team in normal games. Frequently this level of players is not present on my own team in these games. I have noticed multiple times where enemy team had 1 diamond and 2 plat players, and my team had 1 plat player at best.

While I know the argument of "hidden MMR" comes out quite frequently, the issue is that these players are often so much better than the players on my team, myself included, that the high ranked players skill just outmatches and outclasses our own. For example, the game I just played the enemy Yasuo carried hard. As the game ended, I was glancing over the stats. One that stuck out to me was damage to champions. In a 43:59 length game, our team's highest damage to champions was about 38k. The enemy Yasuo had almost 74k. And you might say Yasuo is a high damage champion, and I would agree. But the level this person was playing and thus the effectiveness he was able to have was just above and beyond what anyone on our team displayed. And as a bit more proof, after seeing how well he did in game and then seeing that cemented in the post game stats, I looked up his ranking, which turned out to be diamond 3. And that particular game I queued solo, so I wasn't having my queue's MMR raised by a high ranking friend or anything.

I don't recall this being a consistent problem in the past, and I'm not sure what has changed to make this a consistent issue. LoL is a game I enjoy, and I assume if you are reading this you enjoy it as well, so it just becomes frustrating and sad when my team (again, myself included. I'm not trying to have delusions of grandeur here) is totally outclassed by better players, which seems to be proven by the data of ranking and post game stats, from the start based on strange matchmaking.

Feel free to articulate your own opinion or issues, and maybe we can get some good discussion going and maybe even a Riot employee response. Thanks everyone.

2 Comments

Deep Terror Nami7/27/2015, 7:39:53 PM1 votes

This is because MMR is separate between different queues.

HOW DOES MATCHMAKING WORK RIGHT NOW? First, the system places players in the appropriate pool - which is basically the queue (normal, ranked, solo/duo, ranked 5-man team, etc.). Once in the pool, the system starts trying to find matches, with the goal of creating teams that are both made up of players with roughly equal skill and have a fair chance of winning. Step 1: Determine strength:

If a player is queued alone, the strength is determined by his personal matchmaking rating (referred to as MMR from here on out) and number of wins for that particular queue. If the player is queued with a pre-made team, the system will adjust the MMR of the team accordingly. In most cases, we have found pre-made teams out-perform teams composed of unconnected players. Players have a separate MMR for each queue, each of which evolves independently from the others. This means that your wins and losses in Dominion won’t impact your MMR for Summoner’s Rift.