You have an in game grading system. Why don't you use it to help build teams? If a player consistently is scoring an "S" grade why do you pair them with people who consistently score "C" grades? Give good players a chance to rank up based off of their merits and bad players will have to stay put until they get better. @riot you can do this!
BloodyTompon1 votesThen people will focus more on attaining whatever they believe to generate a score S (e.g., kda) than winning the game. By having winning the game the only means of progression for matchmaking/ranking people are forced to put most of their energy into that if they wish to be matched higher.
Having said that, it is possible to use it as some proxy for rank or individual skill. I posted something similar in another thread.
The Mastery system does tend to measure time investment much more strongly than ranked does, but the nature of needing S does give it some relationship with individual skill. It'll be interesting to see where Riot heads to with future updates on this (and what they consider to be the problem space they want to solve with it). When they first introduced Dynamic Queue I thought they were heading towards making the mastery a replacement of individual rank. However, they could just as easily have the goal of alleviating the feeling of ranked stagnation by making Mastery akin to level progression.
