Ranked & Matchmaking System - Why It Needs A Reform

Dear Summoners,

I hope you are having great holidays and I sincerely wish you the best of luck in your future endeavours in 2017!

The matter I'd like to discuss and share with everyone has been mentionned a couple of times in the past. It's the ranked and matchmaking system.

This topic has polarized the community into many groups, but out of them all, 2 of them generally come out : "High" Elo players (Platinum, Diamond, Masters & Challengers) and "Low" Elo players (Bronze, Silver & Gold). The high tier divisions are currently fine with the current system while the lower ones are generally complaining about it. Now that we have determined their positions, why would the ranked & matchmaking system be an issue?

First of all, the first concrete sign that the North American competitive LoL environment is struggling is the number of players that are playing ranked. During one of his streams ealier this week, Imaqtpie read a tweet that was giving statistics on the number of players playing ranked in all the regions. In North America, there's only 500 000 players. In comparison, the 2 EU servers had, together, 4 millions players.

Another sign that the system needs a reform is the number of players in each division. On those 500 000 players, 82.7% are in Bronze & Silver (http://www.leagueofgraphs.com/rankings/rank-distribution), which roughly represents 410 000 players. Why would that be an issue? Well, the numbers of remakes, deconnections, ragequits, toxic players (name them all...!) are significantly higher than all the other divisions. This, in itself, is one of the main reasons why there's only 500 000 players playing ranked on the North American server. It's not a friendly, enjoyable environment (plenty of topics going on about it on the forums) and it prevents new talents from potentially climbing the ladder and, on the long run, decreases the quality of the games.

What about the higher divisions? How would it affect them? There are so many answers to this question, but here are the 2 main answers : longer queue times and decreasing quality in games, which can eventually lead to a loss of interest in the game due to frustration or any other reason.

Although RIOT makes a lot of efforts to keep the game free of "toxicity" and "ragequits", the creation of the new Flex Queue is not going to solve the issues encountered in Solo Queue, maybe even make them worse.

The solution I'd bring on the table is quite simple. They need to review the MMR algorithm and add the following factors : Total amount of ranked games played (in all the seasons), total amount of normal games played (in all seasons), ratio of reports (For all the listed reasons) per games. They also need to remove the winning / losing streak (STREAK, which means the ratio win / lose remains !!!) factor of the MMR. By doing this, the game would be cleaner and the players would be rewarded for the experience and overall time spent on the game. Giving way more weight (impact) to placement games (giving more MMR per win) by matching you against higher divisions (Instead of Bronze vs. Bronze that we currently see...) would also make these games more interesting and important.

Anyways, this was a very, very long post! I'd like to know all your thoughts on the matter as well!

Merry Christmas for some and Happy Holidays!

TimerClock