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Let's talk about Win/Loss Ranked versus Performance Ranked.

1800NICECLIENT·8/12/2018, 3:35:33 AM·2 votes·1,619 views

Since ranked is getting a bit of a rework next season I thought it'd be an interesting to talk about the current ranked system versus a ranked system that judges you based on(or partially based on) performance and what benefits it would have and how it would work.

So what are the advantages and disadvantages of each system?

Win/Loss Ranked System: Advantages: -Incentive to do well so you have influence over whether your team wins. -Incentive to pick up teammates slack. -Incentive to try to gel with the team.

Disadvantages: -Incentive to do well can diminish if you or your team is doing poorly.(Effort isn't directly rewarded each game.) -Incentive to surrender or give up on tough games or when far behind. -Personal effort doesn't always feel rewarded.(You could do nothing and get carried, or try hard and lose.) -No guarantee teammates will try as hard as you do. -Lots of frustration if teammates are toxic or want to directly punish you by trolling. -Players with extremely large numbers of games who are 50-50 or slightly worse can still climb even to the highest elos. -Doesn't make clear why you personally are losing or winning games.(Easy to just blame your team on losses.) -Being trapped in games that feel unwinnable is awful.

Performance Ranked System: Advantages: -Your team doesn't matter as much even if they do poorly. -No reason to troll your team since you will only be trolling yourself. -Incentive to do better even when behind, rather than give up.(People will likely care to try and salvage themselves.) -Can directly encourage you to focus on your weakest points each game since you are judged on them win or lose. (CS, macro, objectives, etc.) -Helps remove one of the main core frustrations from the game.(Teammate toxicity, inting, not trying, etc.) -Can negate losing some LP from a loss by a good performance so you can still be proud of how you played even if you lose.(-15 for a loss, but +12 for that S rank. This also helps negate that feeling of "loss aversion.") -Could help make better/closer games. (Players will be better matched against players of equal performance and skill level.) -Performance ranked could still encourage winning to matter or be the main objective.

Disadvantages: -If the Performance Ranked System isn't well designed it could just create a meta of KDA warriors or stat boosting strategies. -Winning may still need to matter as much as you personally doing well.

The more I think about it the more Performance Ranked(or some kind of combination of both systems) seems like just a straight up better way to play the game. The big points for me are: -Helps removes a lot of core frustrations from the game.(Teammate toxicity, inting, not trying, etc.) -Could help improve match making to make better/closer games. -Helps eliminate that trapped feeling you get in unwinnable games. -Promotes always playing your best win or lose. -Promotes a more fun game in general.

I would have no problem with a more complex ranked system if it helped alleviate most of ranked's biggest frustrating factors.

As to how it would work? I'm not entirely sure which is why I decided to post my thoughts here. I could take a shot at it and guess:

-Winning or losing would still result in losing the standard amount of LP gain or loss (about 15-25) -CS, warding, objectives, etc could count as extra LP bonuses at the end of the game. (+2 here, +3 there.) If you did very poorly and then lost the game you would just lose the standard amount of LP, as you did not claim the bonus +2/+3 LP, etc for doing well in those spots.(So you don't lose -2 LP for having hardly any CS in addition to the loss, etc.) The tricky stuff would be KDA, and stuff like tanking damage as a tank. (Tanks like Maokai likely wouldn't have a good KDA.) Perhaps the performance bonuses would need to be on a Champ by Champ basis? Imagine losing a game, but doing well enough during the course of the game to negate a small amount or even all of a loss? Perhaps you even won a few extra LP for coming back from a huge 10K gold deficit at 15 minutes?

So that's just my thoughts on it, what do you guys think? (If any Rioters are reading this, I'd love to hear what they think as well.)

2 Comments

Shadowhawk8/12/2018, 4:12:11 AM2 votes

I really don't think that performance based rank is a healthy way to design a ranked system. That's being said, I'll say why. (Btw why is "No guarantee teammates will try as hard as you do." there? That is never guaranteed and I wouldn't even say its an advantage.

  1. Regarding the trying harder since I referenced that above, there is a difference between playing well (which I define as trying to defeat the enemy nexus) and trying to get good stats. I may not like the strategy too much but the old singed strat where you just proxy is not indicative of getting good stats.

  2. As far as the purpose that League serves, yes the game should be fun, but not as the expense of the competitive mindset. Realistically, League is one of the few games that balances the games at a competitive level (unlike Blizzard, which has contributed to Overwatch's downfall as of recent) and is part of the reason that its a game that's been able to stabilize itself without releasing big content like Warcraft. The reason that this is relevant is because when you define stats as THE defining parameter of doing well, you inhibit innovation and in some way are saying to the public that this is how the game is won. Fundamentally, this is a negative message to send out because that is not the truth and hurtful to a competitive environment.

  3. The main issue here though is that in the most straightforward sense, the only thing that matters is trying to destroy the enemy team's nexus. I know a great deal of players that have obnoxiously high kda's and creep scores and can't get out of silver. This is because they misunderstand the game at a core level. Generally, this is because they don't take risks that lead to them dying (e.i. its better to die and win a teamfight than stay back and not output dps). If something like this is implemented, it will likely negatively impact the game. Examples of this would be people that have a 3/0 kda early but have a 0/10 team would be MORE, not LESS likely to afk to preserve their stats.

  4. You also mentioned people not being able to climb with 50% winrates. Realistically, even if someone were to have a constant 50% winrate from Silver 3 to Plat 2 (first of all that would take extraordinary amounts of games to play possibly in the thousands which isn't feasible) there is almost 0% chance they won't be a better player at the end of that because it is much more impressive to has a 50% winrate in silver than in high Plat. Yes people can climb eventually with these winrates, but the percentage of the playerbase willing to do that is so low that it would pale in comparison to the amount of people that game the system with whatever criteria would constitute "good" play (see 5.) In contrast to the few that play thousands of games, you have a larger amount of stat banking players that can't play the game at the level of their peers, but know how to get good stats.

  5. Again you can't set a parameter to what good play is because that assumes that that people understands the game at such a level where their word is the end all be all answer to how to play the game correctly. Since we don't have any parameters for what that is with the exception of killing the nexus, it is impossible to define. Anyone thinking they know a definitive answer to that has lost their mind, since a new strategy could come out any day that nullifies that hypothesis.