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Why does ranked/promotion series skew matchmaking so much?

Only Mid Veigar··1 votes·1,566 views

Let me start by saying I'm a gold ranked player, all seasons.

What I mean by this is; I will literally get gold and stop playing because it's not worth pushing harder, and I don't have any problems competing with anyone Gold V to Plat I in a normal game. So far my placements in the last 2 seasons have been 2-8 or 3-7 splits with my rank still putting me up in Silver 2. That's really like a slap in the face because of how close it is to Gold, while other people who I've seen play get placed in Gold with 7-3 splits have absolutely no business being there.

But when I'm in ranked, it seems like the game flips into some backwards reality where everyone who I should be playing WITH, I'm playing AGAINST. Meanwhile the teams I'm matched with either bicker, or refuse to stop repeating the same mistakes over and over after being told a simple solution to avoid them.

What I don't understand is why it's so much worse when I'm doing promotional series games. Normal ranked games go up and down but especially when it comes time to try to rank up, I get a surge of bad players who are just magnetized to my promotional series. I can't seem to avoid this issue. It's always a case of bad mechanics and bad decisions ruining what would be an otherwise average victory.

If you check my history and comment on the Lucian game, I was actually ruining the bottom lane and had a very strong early/mid game, but thanks to Fiora being obnoxious and the enemy team being NOT stupid, we lost at teamfight stage. The team refused to group or push, and the enemy team was literally 100% divecomp. We had a lot of CC but the problem was how none of it ever landed where it needed to go, and the game wasn't ended quickly before their team bulked up beyond immortality. That's another serious problem but that could be discussed in another thread.

tl;dr Why are my promo games always so much harder than regular ranked games? If it's to challenge me and test if I can handle, that's bad logic; A) Pairing one Gold X player with 4 Silver X players who are not as good as 5 Gold X players on the opposite team does not make for a good test of ability. B) One player with good mechanics cannot help 4 players with bad mechanics. C) If it was a true test of ability it would be myself with other Gold X players all fighting against other Gold X players. NOTE This does not extend to people sitting at Gold V with a negative ratio and/or 0 LP vs. people with Gold III+ who are on hotstreaks.

1 Comments

Aithos1 votes

It's all in your head, you're attributing things to "series games" or "matchmaking" that aren't there. There are some real issues with League's ranked system, but not what you're talking about. A few things:

  1. your perception of skill is biased, you think you're significantly better and don't make the mistakes but you engage in the same behaviors your teammates do. You just know the reasoning behind your actions and so dismiss any mistakes while not knowing the reasoning by your teammates.

  2. matchmaking is exactly the same for every game and people are matched only by their MMR. Tier/division/LP are all meaningless, you are your MMR. So 5 gold V players vs 5 silver I players is both possible and fair, why? They have the same MMR, so their skill is the same. The division difference is meaningless.

  3. placement matches are mostly luck and barely affect where you end up, if you were a platinum player you wouldn't be gold several seasons in a row. You are where you are because you've hit your current skill ceiling and you need to figure out what you can do better and then improve before that ceiling is higher.

As for ranked, these are what I consider the biggest issues:

  1. tier/division and LP are not directly tied to MMR and it's confusing. LP shouldn't exist, tier and division should be tied to specific MMR ratings and MMR should be visible. MMR gains should be static and modified only by win rate, higher win % more points gained and less lost. That would be simple, clean, accurate and fair. Also, your promo games would always be against people in their promo games, people a game away or people who just won a promo or are trying to not get demoted.

  2. matchmaking isn't fair, but not for the reason most people think. It's not fair because you queue as a player and not a role. The odds of all 10 players getting their preferred roles are virtually none and the odds of each team having the same number of players outside their roles is also slim. The only fair way to match people is to know their skill at a role and match all the roles evenly, aka role queue. That's why games are more often snowballs than close.

  3. no voice communication. This is a team based action/strategy game where coordination and split second decisions decide games and we can't talk to our teammates. Why? Because Riot would rather have a bad, toxic and frustrating competitive argument than give the less mature players the ability to vocally harass. As if they don't do it in chat now or they couldn't implement a mute function. Oh and whoever said "it would take up too much server performance": stop it. Voice over ip takes virtually no data and league is not a high performance game. The servers can easily handle it along with the rest.

Those are the reasons ranked sucks. If you want it to be better watch my posts for my big discussion on these topics in the next few days and support it. S5 better bring some big changes or I feel League will find itself on a downward path sooner than later.

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