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Balance in all Ranked Solo/Duo Queues, Rioters, please look here I'm begging for a red post.

Ruloh·7/9/2015, 3:10:20 AM·1 votes·663 views

I've never understood the point of having 5-1 tiers in every division. If you're 1, you're more skilled than other players 2 and lower. The opposite can be said in a reverse order. That being said, and to hold these labels true to their expectations... why should any division be put in the same match with a higher or lower division when the division they're already in has those standards set for them to overcome?

It is completely redundant to think, much less call yourself a "Gold" player when you're stuck in the same game with Silver or Platinum players for a ranked solo/duo match. If I'm Gold 5, and I'm on a hot streak in wins, I want to face strictly Gold division players labeled 4 through 1. No platinum or diamond, and certainly no silvers. That way when I succeed with my promos, I'll rightfully be put into Gold 4 and so on, and continue playing with people actually on my level of skill until I get into platinum, where I'll play against only platinum players.

I understand that LOL promotes playing together and sportsmanship, thus the duo or premade 5's option. But please, for the sake of reducing stress and toxicity in a community you CLAIM to value, fix this issue. I'm sick and tired of hitting a series to get out of my current division only to be pub stomped because my win streak is telling your system I should actually already be fighting people in a higher division, while stuck fighting said people with players far below their skill, thus resulting in this never ending cycle of stress and senseless matchmaking hoping I get carried by someone else or pull a miracle myself just to ascend into a higher tier. The very fact this game demands you to commit roughly 30 min of your life you'll NEVER get back per game is already taxing enough, and demand even more of your time just to stay in a higher division so you don't drop. It's completely unfair to put forth the effort and time all players sacrifice for "fun" or "progress" when really more than half the time their games are up to chance either because one team got a smurf/godsend of a player to carry them, or because your own team is stuck with someone/people who simply doesn't belong in that game and are holding the rest of the team back.

Duoing is fun, I'll give it that. But I personally don't approve of cross division duos and believe they should be completely neutralized. If you want to duo, duo with someone in your own division, not a division higher/lower so you can get free wins via your friend smurfing who's actually a diamond player. Bronze with Bronze, Silver with Silver, Gold with Gold, etc. MAKE THIS HAPPEN AND PEOPLE WILL ACTUALLY FALL INTO DIVISIONS THEY "DESERVE". And no one will have to worry about getting more/less IP based on the differing skill level of enemies, that's why we have 5-1 already, right? So if I beat a group of tier 1's, I should get more LP than I would against tier 3's anyway. That's why you have tiers, right?

If you can't do this then at LEAST reduce the number of tiers to 3-1. 5 tiers on top of series? The MMR is already screwed up enough that advancing 5 tiers is pretty much pointless and worsens the community's stress level when striving to succeed.

And if none of these requests for change are even doable, reasonable, whatever you want to call it... tell me why you guys refuse/can't/won't make the change? What's stopping you from actually changing the solo/duo system scene to make more sense? Because this is just senseless struggle currently.

2 Comments

Matthias91197/9/2015, 3:24:17 AM1 votes

They match on MMR and not "division". Division/tier is just a pretty label system on top of MMR. The objective of the matchmaker is to create matches where it thinks each team has as close to a 50% chance to win as possible. The best way to do that is to match on MMR.

The reason for this is that you can go up/down divisions MUCH more quickly than you can significantly raise/lower your MMR. You can argue that they shouldn't have "tiers" and just put people in MMR bands, but that can start to feel really grindy (since you need a lot more "tiers") and causes different kinds of ranked stress/anxiety.

The other reason for not matching solely on division is that it's VERY hard to drop between tiers. They want it to feel meaningful to go from, say, Silver to Gold. It would be kind of silly if people near the edge bounced back and forth all the time. But because of that you can't say you'll only match people in G5 with other G5s. If someone gets into G5 and then starts playing badly it has to match them up against players in Silver or the matches won't be fair.

Ruloh7/9/2015, 3:50:43 AM1 votes

First, thank you for the explanation.

Second, if your basis for the reasoning behind why tiers and MMR exist for the purpose of making a game be as close as 50% for either team, how does that not obscure the lines between being a skilled player versus someone who just got lucky with the right teammates? The fact there are 5 tiers in each division that require a best 2 out of 3 before the next or series, which then becomes 3 out of 5 is daunting enough to already make the experience feel grindy. I have a friend who's been struggling to get from Silver 1 into Gold 5, but after 2 consecutive losses right after being promoted from S2 to S1, he gets dropped back into S2 and the pressure to get into S1 continues. What's worse is I know for a fact he cannot be the only person struggling with this setup since I myself am also struggling with MMR. People feel good about their games from simply winning, and admittedly it's nice to claim you beat a few players who're higher than you in rank. But when it comes to consistency, odds are you're not actually on that level and therefore the MMR system we're supposed to trust is deceptively setting us up for inevitable failure on occasion. Again it doesn't make any sense. If Tiers are pointless to begin with, it'd be much more honest to simply remove them and tell the players this is how things actually are. If nothing else, it'd remove the toxic commentary of people insulting others based on rank differences. "Bronze scrub" to name one.