An Indepth Idea to Change Ranked
Before you downvote this and just call me another bronzie thinking I deserve challenger, give this post a chance. I've thought a lot about ranked lately and this post started as a question, Why have I been stuck in silver since I started League 5 years ago and yet I've consistently gotten better every year? In fact, when I first started League and could only play old Poppy and literally no other champ I got placed in Gold 5, so I've been on both ends of the spectrum, I've been low silver playing at a gold level and been low gold playing at a bronze level.
Why is this important? It's a real shame that bronze/silvers don't have a voice in the League community. Any time I try to bring up issues with the ranked system I'm just told I need to get better. High elo players will complain all day about the elo system but if you try to express the same sentiment at a low rank, they literally laugh and go “Yeah, getting out of silver is SOOO hard.” I hate to break it to rito, but bronze/silvers are whats paying for their game. You know how many silvers own elemental lux? Literally every single one, there's not a single silver that didn't needlessly buy that the second it came out. Our bad decision making isn't just relegated to our gameplay, it also affects our wallets. And when 70+% of your player base is bronze/silver, without us rito wouldn't exist.
The Plan The center of low elo climbing should be the grading system. The grading system should be updated, Riot should hire Mobalytics to make them an ingame stat tracker with a chart that shows teamfight participation, cs, lane dominance, vision, and more (just check out mobalytics, they already have this exact thing). The lower the elo, the less the matches should be focused on wins but more on grading compared to other in the same ranked. Low bronze should be entirely focused on your grade, not if you win or lose, upper bronze should start to focus a little more on wins, low silver should be around 40% based on win/loss; and so on until the weighted system should be normal at mid gold.
Rigged? “But OP, that would lead to people grade farming rather than participating in the game.” Great! Do you have any idea how many bronze and silvers would benefit from grade farming? One of the biggest issues with League is that there's NO help on how to get better based ony our own gameplay. You have to use third party apps or pay someone to watch your vods to help you. If a player is bronze and sees a chart of their past 20 games and vision, teamfighting, and cs are consistently low now they have a very clear and precisise thing to focus on every game. If you told a bronzie “You won't get out of bronze until you learn to cs.” I imagine a lot of them would actually work really hard to cs. The problem right now is the only help being told to us is “You need to win more.” and most of us don't know what that actually means, so instead of learning subtle strategies it just becomes a case of every player 1v9'ing their way to the top.
The Current Problem The current problem with League's rank system is it rewards people for all the wrong reasons. Half the time people win they don't even know why they won, and half the time a team loses it's because of an afker or feeder who doesn't realize a comeback is possible. If bronze/silver was based off of grade rather than win/loss it would feel less defeating when a player afks. Instead of going “open mid” it'd give you incentive to keep fighting (Consistency is a grading on mobalytics and it determines if you can fight from behind or come back from a bad lane). The reason players are so toxic in League is because one bad player can lose the game for you, but what if that wasn't the case? How much would that change the dynamic of the League community?
Final Thoughts I'm not saying this would work for elo past gold, if it was implemented it'd probably be a low weighted system like 10%, but still, I imagine players of any elo being told 10% of their LP was in their hands regardless of feeders, it'd give you some incentive to keep trying even though bot lane is 0/9. This would change the dynamic of ranked entirely, bronze and silver would be the training wheels area, and players who actually “deserve challenger” would begin to climb. Getting hardstuck in low elo would be a direct indicator of your gameplay, and players could look at in-game statistics to see what they're doing wrong. The player base would begin to even out rather than the vast majority being in bronze/silver and I think would overall benefit players who are actually trying to get better and learn the game rather than 1v9 their way to the top. There's more I can say on this whole thing but I felt I should keep this post to the point. I purposefully didn't add the subtleties of the system and how it should work because I think the idea is the important thing, rito is smart enough to figure out how it should be implimented. Thank you for your time.
