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Diamond+ normal matchmaking is the poster child for why matchmaking needs to be looked into

Yenn··21 votes·1,527 views

These aren't even good efforts at matchmaking. Almost every game is a complete failure where little to no effort was made to balance out the teams, because it's clearly prioritizing fast matches over good matches (which is maybe okay to some degree, but not as okay at higher levels, and completely not okay in ranked).

9/10 games are either a 4- or 5-man premade vs. five random players, and sometimes one or more random Gold or Silver players are thrown into the games, because why the fuck not? These Gold and Silver players aren't even duo queued or people with a high normal win rate, they're just completely random players that usually ask 'why am I in this game?' in all chat after they check the teams during the loading screen.

This makes every normal game a waste of time for both parties, and it's not even like the queues are that long. I never have to wait more than 5 minutes before the system decides 'fuck this, let's just grab any players we can find.' I'd rather sit in queue for 15 minutes and get a good game than waste 20 minutes on a one-sided stomp.

Can someone at Riot please dedicate some time to improving this massive failure, or at least explain exactly why it's so bad?

EDIT: To people not actually reading, this has nothing to do with MMR. The system is very clearly disregarding it and just grabbing people at random. I'm consistently getting solo queued players who aren't even level 30 mixed with Diamond players.

EDIT: I just had a game where the enemy team was 4x Diamond and one unraked (trio queue + duo queue), while my team mates were one Diamond, two low Gold, and one unranked, all solo queued. The system clearly made absolutely no attempt to create a good match. It could have put either the trio or duo on my team to even it out, but instead, it created a totally stacked enemy team. This makes no sense.

36 Comments

Kythers4 votes

I feel like making a neural net and feeding it Yenn posts so it can create posts complaining about matchmaking

Jamaree3 votes

But Yenn, how would you know about that, you aren't Diamond anymore :^)

Hensetsu3 votes

I'm only plat 3 but my normals are pretty reasonable.

The only issues I run into are players all wanting to be the hero that carries (in normals) so we end up with a no cc no peel no sustain no engage comps a lot.

Other than that, I think people trying new champions and the number of autofilled players makes the games feel less balanced than let's say SoloQ.

The premades are a fucking pain though. Playing vs a random ass challenger flex premade isn't exactly the most fun. Especially when the player pool gets so small that you end up facing them 3 times in a row.

NTrumpWeTrust2 votes

I'm trying to level this account. I'm level 20. My first game I won seemed semi fair. Second game I got placed with a diamond and plat player, and a level 16. The level 16 sona feeds their plat/diamonds all game, we lose ofc. This system is just such a nightmare. I can't imagine there not being enough players around my level that I can't play with. Come on, fix this shit.

Yenn2 votes

I just got into a game where my team is me, a Bronze and Gold player, and a level 22 and level 18. The enemy team is three Diamond players and two Gold players.

Like, what the fuck even is this? How can anyone at Riot think this is okay?

CamilleRule341 votes

well at least you dont have to worry about 4 stacks in ranked

Micbran1 votes

that way, diamond players can have long ranked queue times and long normal queue times!

SarcasticShepard1 votes

Honestly, its just bad all the way down. The only advantage at lower levels is faster queue times.

As for why, I'd have to guess it's due to the whole "rank vs MMR" system they have in place, which is more obvious in ranked for me at least.

ChargeItDownMid1 votes

[deleted]

Yenn2 votes

{quoted}

Nope. Mmr will never improve in normals because players simply don't care. Measuring skill is useless when no one is choosing to play up to their skill level.

The problem doesn't have to do with MMR. The problem has to do with sticking 4- or 5-man premades against a team of solo players, and occasionally throwing in Gold or Silver players for no apparent reason.

NocturnalSheild1 votes

Its normals what do you expect.

Plus tje matchmaker has it tough.

I have alot of.freinds who play leauge we play 5 man normals all the time.

So how would you match this team and yet keep the que under 2 minutes

Challenger Gold 5 Silver 4 Silver 4 Bronze 3

Thats usually how our 5 man premade looks as ive got a few bronzies a few silvers 2 golds and a challenger as irl freinds.

What usually happens is it shoves 5 high plat to low diamond players at us because trying to find a premade that looks even remotely like that is almost impossible.

And all of us think that's just fine.

NTrumpWeTrust4 votes

You're ranked MMR should be used to roughly estimate where to put you in a normal game. Pretty simple fix. If you don't have a ranked MMR then you don't care that much about having a competitive experience in the first place.

Infernape2 votes

Tbh the system should use whichever MMR is highest out of your ranked/normal MMR. If you have no ranked MMR, it should default to your normal MMR.

ChargeItDownMid1 votes

[deleted]

Yenn2 votes

{quoted}

Except a ton of people don't care much to have a competitive experience, especially in higher bracket normal games which is why no mmr system will ever work well there.

There's a difference between a competitive experience and a Silver III AD carry vs. a Diamond II AD carry.

I can assure you that you would rather just not be in the game when the enemy Vayne is 15-1. It's a waste of time and not fun for anyone.

ChargeItDownMid1 votes

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Yenn2 votes

{quoted}

There is a difference between a competitive experience and anything found in normal games. No amount of tinkering will change that for normals because people simply do not care enough in normals.

It's like you're not even reading anything being posted. Silver players being thrown into games full of Diamond players has nothing to do with how hard people or trying or how much they care about winning.

i.e. in my last game, the enemy team had 4x Diamond players and an unranked, with two being duo and three being trio. My other team mates were one Diamond player, two low Gold players, and an unranked player, all solo queued.

This isn't even an attempt at good matchmaking. It could have swapped the trio or duo with players on my team to make it more even, but instead, it came up with this clusterfuck of the enemy team being totally stacked.

ChargeItDownMid1 votes

[deleted]

Yenn2 votes

{quoted}

Actually, it has everything to do with people not caring about winning. How do you think a silver, and a diamon player got into the same normal mmr bracket? Even though there is a huge difference in skill when the silver player and the diamond player try to their fullest, the diamond players are clearly not trying to their fullest to get into the normals mmr bracket they are in. The system simply has no way of making better games when players do not care about winning and do not give an accurate representation of their skill from game to game.

Remember, the mmr backbone is the same across solo queue, flex, and normals. You never see a game of 4x diamond and a unranked vs 1x diamond, 1x plat, 2x low gold, and unranked in solo queue outside of right after a mmr reset. The problem has nothing to do with matchmaking or else you would see the same issues across all 3 queues. The problem is with how players treat normals and flex which makes it impossible for any matchmaking system to give better results.

My normal win rate is around 56%. It has nothing to do with MMR, unless you seriously want to argue that a sub-50% win rate level 23 player is at the same MMR as six Diamond players.

ChargeItDownMid1 votes

[deleted]

Yenn2 votes

{quoted}

And why would that surprise you? Not all games are equal. There are placement type games in normals as well (and that is what pushes smurfs into play and diamond brackets). You can't estimate the normal mmr of any player unless you track back every single game they have played. I had a sub 50% normal winrate on my smurf playing against diamond and play for a while because I initially used it to practice my mains which pushed it into high normals bracket and then started testing new stuff. Which level 23 player are you referring to?

Also, there wouldn't be a diamond+ matchmaking bracket for you to complain about without mmr. You need some sort of rating to determine a skill bracket and you need players to actually try to have a decent rating system.

This entire thread is going way over your head. Nobody is saying that there isn't MMR. What is being said is that the system gives up on using MMR to make even matches too aggressively, and doesn't take pre-mades into consideration.

ChargeItDownMid1 votes

[deleted]

Mephisto32 votes

...hello MMR system discussion partner from the other threat :)

You are unfortunately wrong here: it could certainly be fixed (or, at least, "improved")! There are enough parameters in a possible MMR algorithm that you can use to reflect the behavior you are describing (and most any other behavior)... will the average "I don't care game" (normal) still be a little more, say, "volatile" than the average "I do care a lot game" (ranked)? Most likely yes in direct comparison! But it does not have to be as extreme as it currently is (according to OP).

That is why I said earlier there is a need for an in-depth understanding of (advanced) probability theory to "really" talk about this, since the possibilities are really almost endless :)

xJLx MCHammer1 votes

Agreed

It’s a joke

ModKnightsKemplar1 votes

One of the issues at the core of this is simply how few diamond players there are.

There are only around 40,000 people in diamond+ in North America. That sounds like a lot, but it really isn't once you consider the time differences and people's actual schedules. I would be interested to see numbers on how many diamond players are typically even playing normals at any given time.

Perhaps seeing those numbers would prove me wrong, which is all the more reason for me to be interested in them. I'd wager it's in the thousands, though, which would make matchmaking tough. I'm no expert at matchmaking algorithms, but it's non-trivial to build good matchmaking systems for such a large population of varied skill levels, I imagine.

Yenn1 votes

{quoted}

One of the issues at the core of this is simply how few diamond players there are.

There are only around 40,000 people in diamond+ in North America. That sounds like a lot, but it really isn't once you consider the time differences and people's actual schedules. I would be interested to see numbers on how many diamond players are typically even playing normals at any given time.

Perhaps seeing those numbers would prove me wrong, which is all the more reason for me to be interested in them. I'd wager it's in the thousands, though, which would make matchmaking tough. I'm no expert at matchmaking algorithms, but it's non-trivial to build good matchmaking systems for such a large population of varied skill levels, I imagine.

It has nothing to do with that. Even if it were just that there aren't enough players, it's not feasible that it seriously cannot find a Platinum player to stick into the team, instead of a random Silver player.

In my last game, my team had two players who weren't even level 30.

This system isn't even making an effort, it's just saying fuck it and throwing random people onto a team. Riot really needs to evaluate how this got through QA.

ModKnightsKemplar1 votes

Well, you make good points, but it still has something to do with player population.

No matter what the actual numbers are, it's easier to find the right people as you have more of them to choose from. That's a simple statistical truth.

I'd also like to see numbers concerning how many games this actually happens in. All I see right now is anecdotal evidence on the Boards; we really don't have statistics on just how widespread the problem is.

When you're talking about matchmaking for this many people, you need the numbers to really discuss particulars. They aren't ever going to have a perfect system, so the failure rate needs to be balanced with the queue time at the end of the day. It may not be in good shape now, but this has everything to do with big numbers and large amounts of data.

Emelie Cauchemar1 votes

{quoted}

One of the issues at the core of this is simply how few diamond players there are.

There are only around 40,000 people in diamond+ in North America. That sounds like a lot, but it really isn't once you consider the time differences and people's actual schedules. I would be interested to see numbers on how many diamond players are typically even playing normals at any given time.

Perhaps seeing those numbers would prove me wrong, which is all the more reason for me to be interested in them. I'd wager it's in the thousands, though, which would make matchmaking tough. I'm no expert at matchmaking algorithms, but it's non-trivial to build good matchmaking systems for such a large population of varied skill levels, I imagine.

You forget of 40,000 of those players about 20,000 of them are boosted accounts that go play aram for the rest of the season, of whats left about 6-8,000 of those accounts are smurfs.

That leaves about 12,000 of the 40,000 as actual players lol. OF that 12,000 about 5k of them only log in to play once a month to prevent decay, and 3k of them only play one-two games a day. 2k of them only play ever so often due weird college schedules, and another 1k only play at really janky hours to snipe people that they can easily exploit to inflate their elo via duo q cheesing autofillers.

So all around you're working with a pool of about 1k active diamond-master-challie players.

Do note these are arbitrary numbers, but to give you an idea when you're in d5, if you win a single game you go up by around 15k in population. So, let that sink in. These numbers are pretty close to accurate as sad as it is.

ModKnightsKemplar1 votes

Good points. I think you're on to something, and I'd really like to see the real numbers because I think it would generate some interesting discussion (not that I think we ever will see numbers).

Zone of Endless1 votes

iirc normal matchmaking prioritizes getting people into games over finding players of similar skill level together.

Quepha1 votes

normals lul

Malcha1 votes

While I agree it's a waste of time for the higher elo players. I've learned a lot from being thrown into games with superior players.

Some of the habbits, and generally important tactics I've picked up in those games made me a much better player and help get me to gold. I know this is an unpopular perspective but I actually value the games where I get stomped by plat+ players. Since I'm usually S2-G4, most of these things work in my own games and tend to give me an edge.

Khristophoros1 votes

Maybe there would be a larger player pool in high MMR if we could start every ranked season at our normals MMR instead of having to climb every season.

And normals matchmaking is just fucked because you can have any mix of people playing together in premades/partial premades so yeah there's no way to fix it.

GigglesO1 votes

{quoted}

This makes every normal game a waste of time for both parties,

And this is why people smurf and ruin the days of players that aren't also smurfs, which makes it even harder for their system to make matches because of the boosted players.

Sohleks1 votes

It does feel like 4 our of 5 of the matches up there are Hard Roflstomps that tend to be very unenjoyable for the losing side and it's often very predictable because of what the matchmaking did. Like, it was shocking how many 15-20 minute games I played the other week. Made certain missions more annoying than they should have been.

The mish mash of high rank players playing their OP comfort champs, others which may be trying something different, and random lower level players [sometimes literally lower level sub 30] getting filled in make it the most volatile league of legends experience you can possibly have. The fun can seep away fast. Most games are bite sized and almost too random.

The distribution of players on an mmr ladder is like a parabola...

http://puu.sh/ye5uU/cd37bd6722.png

It used to be you had REALLY atrociously long queues at the super high normal ranges. And that's not the case anymore which is good. I don't think it came at TOO much a penalty to matchmaking because it was always kind of peculiar. It probably was less peculiar though. But in the past you could still get roflstompy matches after waiting 20 minutes which is definitely no better so tilted I used to think " why the hell does it take so long if it's worthless?" So cutting out the unnecessary time wasted not finding a good match is fine.

I have a biased idea. What if, in normals only, there is a matchmaking ceiling where it stacks the tail ends of the parabola there making like a wall. Your rating can go over that to a point [otherwise some people would climb above the softcap forever and get that account stuck there] but for matchmaking purposes everyone above top 1 or 2% is pooled up and diluted across the above average ranks instead of pulling random players into the shark pit.

SilentBomber1 votes

Quality > Quantity

I reached Gold 3 after a good winning streak and suddenly started getting afk players,hard flamers or junglers that had no idea how to jungle.Talk to me about the mmr system or rather explain me how in hell these guys that have no idea about the basics of the game,get matched with me.

I understand this topic has nothing to do with MMR or ranked.It points out the quality of normal games.

However,if ranked's matchmaking is not fixed do not expect the same for normal games. :)

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