Hey Riot, can you publish evidence of expected game behavior as a function of MR?

Z Statistic··1 votes·206 views

Basically, I want to know: The probability of winning as a function of time with these given scenarios:

  1. Team MMR is matched and both teams have low variance in mmr.
  2. Teams are not matched and both teams have low variance.
  3. Team A is balanced in mmr and is matched with Team B which has large variance.
  4. Teams are matched and both have large variance.
  5. Team A > Team B, Team A has large variance and Team B has low variance.
  6. Team A > Team B, Team B has large variance and Team A has low variance.

I would love if you guys with access to the raw data instead of simulations would publish this kind of information. Knowing how games behave based on disparities in matchmaking would be nice to know if only to see whether matchmaking is working in all 3 purposes:

  1. to promote games of equal skill.
  2. to promote games that start relatively quickly.
  3. to promote games that are fun to play.

If there's no one at Riot who has time to take up this side project, I'll be happy to do it in my spare time using R. I'd like some input for my model to try to accurately reflect decision making in League as accurately as possible though.

3 Comments

Sozan51 votes

You could've skipped last 2 points, since they are absolutely identical to 5 and 6.

Z Statistic1 votes

yeah, you're right.

Matthias91191 votes

I don't know what the actual adjustment factors are, but Riot adjusts team MMR by:

  1. Premade groups get a bonus, scaling with the number of players in the group, based on the assumed better coordination/communication.

  2. When there is a large MMR spread within a team (which is typically due to the presence of a premade group with a big skill gap), the team MMR is not a straight numerical mean, but skews towards the MMR of the stronger player(s).

They adjust those factors based on recent matchmaking results. e.g. if they find that 5-man premades in Normal queues are regularly winning at a >50% rate, they can bump up the "premade bonus" until it evens out. Or if a high-skill player grouped with newbies wins too much, they can cause the MMR of teams like that to skew closer to the high-skill player's MMR.

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