Balanced Matches

Now, to start off, I'm going to say that I believe that this belongs in the gameplay & balance forum because it does actually deal with balance, just at a broader level then champions and mechanics.

This was brought on when a friend of mine started playing solo queue. He had an account before, but had to stop playing because school got out of hand. When he came back, he wasn't even close to that level of play, so he started over. Naturally, things started to come back to him, and as they did he started racking up wins. It was then he started losing. He lost a lot, and was getting frustrated, when he asked me about it. He did't remember being so far outmatched before, and suspected that there were more Smurf Accounts around now than when he started. Curious, I watched a game from his new account.

From this, I noticed a few things that seem a little... off. Firstly, he was sorely outclassed. His summoner level was 6, but he was matched up with people who had flash. That's not good. That means that these players he was facing off against had at least 6 summoner levels on him, maybe more. Now, I'm sure that a lot of match making is necessary, this was way off balance. I may be remembering the exact numbers wrong, but he was so far behind, I could see why he was losing. He wasn't a bad player, but he thought he was because he was having games where he was going 2-20-5 or something like that.

I also looked at the other guy he was facing off against, and I noticed a lot of... questionable things. The guy was moving like a pro, or at least a tiered player. He was all over the place, definitely not a normal level 12. He was really on the ball, easily switching between aggressive, passive, etc, like he'd been around the block more than a few times. After one of my friend's numerous deaths, I asked him to pan to other lanes, and, lo and behold, most of the other team were doing the same. There was about one person on his team that I could tell was on a smurf account. Now, I get why smurf accounts can be a great thing. While true, they can discourage some players, on the other hand, they show new players more advanced techniques, and can allow them to get better at the game by doing as they do. The other guy wards all the bushes in the mid lane and never gets ganked? You might think, "huh, maybe I should try out this warding trinket thing." The list goes on and on with what people can learn from smurfs, but there is a point where it's less helpful than discouraging, and that's bad.

When the entire other team is almost completely composed of smurfs, then it turns into either a confusing mess of higher level tactics that you aren't ready for (if you also have many smurfs on your team) or it turns into the other team having what I believe could be colloquially on the internet as a "rofl-stomp" on the other team (if your team has very few/no smurfs on it).

Now these are both problems that I feel don't get discussed quite enough, and are holding the game back a little. It's often overlooked because higher level ranked play gets more attention. You could argue that a lot of people getting deterred by the smurfs probably wouldn't really enjoy the full experience anyway, but they should at least judge the game by its own merits and not a part of the community. You'll always have toxic players, but sometimes people aren't as much toxic as confused as to why someone on their team is playing so poorly. For a new player, if their team is calling them a noob, and saying that they suck, while more skilled and higher level players kill them over and over, that can get overwhelming.

Now, I know you guys have a lot to do, and are probably keeping this issue open somewhere, but I figured I could at least bring this up and give my thoughts on it. I think that players shouldn't be matched with players within a certain number of summoner levels above or below theirs. This is especially true at lower levels. At lower levels, people don't have the same summoner spells, and someone with heal clarity is at a disadvantage against someone with ignite flash. I'm not saying it's bad to have spells unlocked as you level up, but there has to be some way to fix this queueing system.

Maybe you could make sure of that level distance, and maybe you could have a hidden "smurf tier" where a lot of the advanced low-level players go, where they can't get to lower players and make them want to quit the game. I guess you would need to sprinkle some of the smurfs in for some of the benefits that they can give to the lower players, but that's up to you what you do about it.

Anyone who stuck around to the end of this discussion, feel free to share your two cents' on the matter. Do you agree? Do you think things need to change? Or do you think I'm nuts, and thing that the match making is fine the way it is?