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Low ELO is infact coinflip

JuiceBoxP··4 votes·2,208 views

In this post i wanted to explain why it is actually true.

Sure, many people got enough skill to carry their own weight and all their teammate's weight and escape silver. For those who don't have the required skill to carry 5 people(including themselves) silver is just going to stay a gamble.

**Why i think silver is infact coinflip: **

Silver IV - Gold IV is made up of approximately 45% of the whole community base. The skill gap within the best players and the worst players of those 45% is ENORMOUS.

There could be someone who climbed to gold 4, just to be matched against a silver 4 that really destroys him. Your division really means jack shit in this ELO. that 45% of the players could have so many random matchups against so many different players with so many different skill levels.

Platinum resembles 10% of the community - that's why the skill gap between completely random players there is not as massive as in silver-g4 and doesn't feel as much as a coinflip because the players there have a certain standard of skill level.

In silver you could have a complete rookie and a veteran who plays for 6 years matched up against each other which results in a massive coinflip.

I think riot needs to do something about this. The match up randomness is just too great and it's really not fun.

You could be matched up against someone who is terribly bad and destroy him in lane and your bot lane got destroyed by someone who is much higher skill than them

We just need a better match making system. Match people according to their skill better.

I don't really know how to do it, but i don't really think it's my job to know how to do it... that's why we have professionals at riot to do it. But something NEEDS to be done.

14 Comments

Thingamajig2 votes

your assumptions about skill discrepancies in plat+ is extremely funny

We are playing in a snowball meta this means that 1 kill turns into 2 turns into 3 really fast macro doesn't exist thus champs that snowball the easiest are the strongest

i don't get why you people expect to have 90% win rate or something just because YOU yourselves are doing ok in your skill bracket once you reach your peak your win rate will normalize to 50-55% after a fair amount of games hf

JuiceBoxP1 votes

My post wasn't talking about anything you said, but...okay. Have a nice day i guess..

Thingamajig1 votes

You are talking about coinflip a 50% win rate means coin flip when your games become coinflip that is because you are no longer GOOD ENOUGH to progress on the ladder

dunno if i can explain this concept to you in a 3rd way but i can try

JuiceBoxP1 votes

Sure, many people got enough skill to carry their own weight and all their teammate's weight and escape silver. For those who don't have the required skill to carry 5 people(including themselves) silver is just going to stay a gamble.

I said that already... but that is not what this thread is talking about.

I'm talking about strictly low elo. low elo, even if you are good enough it's gonna be a gamble to climb.

Thingamajig1 votes

{quoted}

For those who don't have the required skill to carry 5 people(including themselves) silver is just going to stay a gamble.

I said that already... but that is not what this thread is talking about.

I'm talking about strictly low elo. low elo, even if you are good enough it's gonna be a gamble to climb.

and i am strictly trying to explain to you that that is the system in place and it AFFECTS every elo not silver not gold not iron only... ALL OF THEM

A i Bot 01 votes

honestly you are just ranting here. You are saying what Juicebox already said! Your mind is in a completely different place and you want to make your opinion sway when you aren't even talking about the same thing LMAO.

JuiceBox is literally saying there's so many people in silver to gold, that there's a big discrepancy of skill and match ups. It's like the world of fighting. You have professional and then say there's underground. You might see some really fantastic underground fighters. But it is a coinflip. So no reason to impose so hard

Illabethe1 votes

lmfao you're delusional. I'm D II yet have an account stuck in Silver, because Riot manipulates MMR through gimmicks like Positional Ranking (and then removal of it mid season). They also laid a whole heavy hand on the scales when they first implemented positional/Dynamic Queue, because 2 weeks into the season, they reset everyone, made them retake their promos, and most people plummeted 5-6 ranks. It took many half the season just to recover.

Every single champion balance change is a thumb on the scale.

And the important thing here isn't the fact they do it; it's the FREQUENCY at which they do it. If it was rare, people could eventually adjust and the thumbs would be lifted and people would average out to their potential. Frequency means players never reach that point. When they are almost acclimated to a change, a new change comes along and throws a wrench in.

Feral Flame was a heavy thumb on the scale. Duskblade was a heavy mid season thumb. Guardian Angel was a heavy mid season thumb. Titanic Hydra was a heavy thumb on the scale. Removal of Zephyr was a heavy thumb on the scale. Change of Morellonomicon was a heavy thumb on the scale. Kayn, Yasuo, Kai' Sa, Poppy, Kayle changes (champions who immediately are adopted into the meta after a rework) are heavy thumbs on the scale during their adoption phase, and sometimes after. Adding a 50% cooldown reduction during ult feature to 5 champions is a heavy thumb on the scale. Essence Reaver/Spear of Shojin are dramatic thumbs on the scale. Farm bounties, Tower shields are a heavy thumb on the scale.

Furthermore, Ranked gives a decreasing amount of LP/MMR the more games you play. So, you could potentially start out horrible, but dramatically improve over a season, but it won't be reflected much in your rank, simply because your early games matter more than your latter games in determining your gains.

If you are a 1000 game player, and you are 49%, and then go on a 70% win streak of about 50 games, you will only gain 2-3 ranks. If you are a 10 game player, and go on a 70% win streak of about 50 games, you will be in high plat/diamond.

Most Gold players I know climbed to Gold at the first 5 weeks of a season, and then go back to playing other games or playing Norms, because they don't want to risk a long ranked season losing their Gold.

That's the real truth of League.

Thingamajig1 votes

{quoted}

lmfao you're delusional.

Everything you said is true and i have been telling the same things New accounts are at an advantage SINCE THEY ARE NOT ESTABLISHED this means that they are on the Smurf radar and if they do get picked up they will go up really fast thats how you get those sub 100 games challenger accounts but those people STILL need to be winning nearly every game regardless of their elo game and regardless of the smurfs they play against after enough games they will go to 50% win rate in challenger and stay there

He is telling me that just because a high portion of the player base is there there is big difference in skills this is true only in the way that different people prioritize different skills Supports prioritize vision and map awareness rarely do they practice their mechanics since they aren't even 1/5th of what decides whether a kill happens or not bot lane while top laners mainly prioritize Mechanics since their lanes are often ignored by everyone and thus lack the map awareness skill and this is why some top laners caugh hashinshin* caugh* int on a regular basis and there are top laners like fogged that have excellent map awareness and decision making

Are they equal in skill if both are in Masters at the moment? far from it and the part of the climb that makes it interesting is to adapt to the players strengths and play towards his weaknesses

This is TRUE in EVERY elo A riven otp in silver will lack the same skills when playing against a tank as a Riven OTP in Diamond The skills tank players develop are different than the skills of players that play jax/irelia/riven have Once you get good enough the levers equalize and very small timings start to matter thats why in pro play 20 cs leads are counted as won lane while in soloq 100cs leads mean nothing

and i have no idea how you have a stuck account in silver as a d2 player since when i had an account demoted to b2 i got it to p1 in 70 games after like the 10th game i got matched with a few platinum players as a silver 5 Big outliers are also detected (20/0 consistent scores are kind of a red flag for the system) once you go on a winning streak regardless if you have 1000 games on that account your LP gains will increase they won't go to something ridiculous like +30 but they will increase from you needing 5-6 wins to 4 wins for example and that is a massive difference if you keep the win ratio THAT MEANS YOU ARE CLIMBING YOU FIGURED OUT WHAT WAS KEEPING YOU DOWN it definitely wasn't a smurf and it definitely wasn't because you are a nasus main and you keep getting matched against teemos

Peel for my ADC1 votes

Don't worry bro this same person you're replying to told me she can lane 5 man nami bubbles in game , and a few days ago it was d3 not d2 . still waiting on the link to that op.gg

Kai Guy1 votes

The single consistent thing in your games is you and as being better at the game is traditionally acknowledged to consistently advantage your team This makes it not a coin flip but rather favors you to win more then you lose.

By removing the slot you occupied (because you occupied it 100% of games) there is 11.11% value for each slot, That translates into how often The very worst player is going to be on the other team.

So 61.11% odds your team is favored not to have the LVP. Be that troll, newbie, low skill. The exception is, if your the weakest player in a match at which point your team is gonna have LVP 100%.

The coin flip side balances out because highest skilled player is also gonna land on the enemy team. For this to be true thou also means admitting hey that's not me or my team would 100% have the MVP on it.

End result of the two is average players for a MMR tend to float around their MMR with no significant gains or losses and depend on teammates or self improvement. Most players who only ever focus on teammate mistakes and plays are not doing to hot on the self improvement thing, This sentence is my opinion and inherently has some Bais.

The # of people in the systems not to big of an issue (unless it gets very low) nor Is the amount of skill on average because as a statistical system its going to adjust for this. As long as you have enough players to make statistical significance your ladder is fine.
Pretty much 50% of the ladder is always going to be under their starting MMR. For league,I doubt its exactly represented like this for the ladder. Elo was made to be Zero Sum but that does not carry over well for MMR because you need to track accounts individually and that requires independent K factors so that your Adjustment formula can be ran 10 times at a match end rather then just once. So your gonna see some variance, more so with Soft resets.

Now as far as improving MM. It will still be a coin flip for a massive # of players really fast. If your near the 50 percentile your gonna end up at the MMR your expected to be stuck in rapidly.

MMR scores are meant to represent a Mean average for an accounts performance, so its also a range. Its commonly treated like some absolute value and its not, its treated like 2 players with the same score when accurate would be identical in how they preform and they wont because the Good games and Bad games of a player can have the same range but very different impact on a match.

So, a lot of times people use the term Coin flip, then use that to explain why they have sunk down the ladder. I lost X games because RNG teammates being awfully. A high streak of losses however is increasingly unlikely in a coinflip. Put it into powers for the # of potential combinations. 2^loss/win streak.

Now im not a math guru but far as I can if see your looking for 1 specific combination that's only possible 1 time. So for a 10 game streak that's odds of 1,024 to 1. For a 15 game streak that's 32,768 to 1. For 20? 1,048,576 to 1.

This is why I harp on players treating 3-4 games as a "streak. That's 8 to 1 and 16 to 1 odds. Anyhow point being after a point its pretty clear a positive or negative streak of any significance is not likely because of luck as a factor but skill and a lot of people don't quite understand why that is.

Now, op about your comments like

We just need a better match making system. Match people according to their skill better.

Yea I agree. First up, Reworking Duoing will go a long way. Make it off MMR not Tiers. Restrict the duoing MMR to be the same as MM considers to be Fair. Honestly completely removing it from Solo que would be better but Most the issues with Riots system are there because players like them or feel better because of them. The effort to keep players happy and content often is what makes problems. Promo helper and demotion protector can result in an account who is sinking having a much higher Tier then MMR. MM should spend a bit longer looking for a more fair range, MM should have a priority to put players with similar K factors into a game. Duoings the stand out issue imo because you see it make negative impact on a lot of games.

JuiceBoxP2 votes

I generally agree with what you're saying, But theoretical math and real world is different.

Partly due to mental state, emotional state and pure luck.

One player could have a bad luck streak for 2-3 games where he got bad teams and then in his next 5 games play bad because he was tilted and angry.

It's a bit more complicated than that pure math. If match making was better then maybe said player wouldn't be so frustrated and not as tilted and he would be in a much better mental state.

but yeah, i generally agree with all your statements.

Kai Guy1 votes

Yea but if your mental state is so fragile you tilt and throw games I consider that a reflection of your skill. You don't have the maturity to aim for a win each match your in? You deserve every loss you earn going into games being a handicap for yourself and your teammates.

I don't mind back to back losses, it happens. But if I notice i'm playing tilted time to stop. This prevents you from bleeding out massive MMR from tilt.

So... when people call it luck I give them pure math to show how clearly that there is a human impact. Understanding there is human impact, that the only one you control is yourself, and bringing the right mentality to climb will help people improve then climb.

If you flame? your hurting yourself. If you tilt? your hurting yourself. If your Toxic AF? Hurting your self.

If your breaking even at 50% win rate with a bunch of climb harmful behaviors it should be pretty self evident that lowering said behaviors that hurt your ability to win will increase your win%.

Some one recently told me they are annoyed with riots system because its possible to lose 100 games in a row from nothing but luck of the draw and teammates. This made them view riots system as flawed.

2^100 is 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 to 1 odds. That's 10 commas. That's an Insane number to consider relevant, realistic, or get upset with. Possible? Yes. Realistic expectation to ever see? No.

Numbers get abstract. People don't always get a good grasp of scale. I like this one for powers of 2. As I cant reasonably expect everbody to open links lets talk about how much impact a comma makes. A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years That's 2, 3,4 of this lil guy (**, **) and the number listed in my last paragraph has 10.

JuiceBoxP1 votes

Of course no one argues with the numbers. As i said earlier, i think you are right. But this thread is more about the match maker and skill discrepencies.

You agree with the fact that in low elo there are MASSIVE skill gaps in games? If so, that's what i'm trying to say, that the match maker is not good enough.

If someone in s4 beats someone in g4, How are not the other way around rank wise? Somehow that g4 got there, and the s4 who is much better than him didn't... Math doesn't explain this.

Bad match making does.

Thingamajig1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Kai Guy,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=aUTMiIEj,comment-id=0002,timestamp=2019-04-19T19:07:36.189+0000)

The single consistent thing in your games is you

Well thought out and true until the ending

Riot did try to remove duo queue and pro players stopped playing soloq this smashed the competitive level of games at the top of the ladder due to insanely low sample size as you said the games need a big enough sample size and removing duo queue just makes that sample size too small

I don't agree with the Tier over MMR when deciding your games The matchmaking entirely depends on your MMR this is why fast climbing smurfs in silver get to paly against platainums and diamonds and this is why when you are in d4 and are on a losing streak you suddenly start playing with platinums Your Rank is only there to visualize your climb and make it prettier The MMR of your account is perfect to visualize your place on the ladder but it wasn't really fun for the majority of players since a bad day meant going down 200 points and was really difficult to implement rewards for the players that hovered around the reward breakpoints

Also you tried to explain the Martingale problem :) people should learn about it and start ignoring streaks.

Coin flip state of your games just means you reached your peak To start making your games not a coin flip you need to increase your contribution to your teams The better you are the more your contribution can sway the game in your favor (not only a 61% as you said) since champions matter and there are too many other factors that decide the games outcome as proven by smurfs going with 80-90% win rates and over all consistency it doesn't matter if you went 10/0 with rengar one game when in the next you don't get jungle and you go disco nunu on your team

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