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Mastery Decay

Aír··3 votes·686 views

I was considering what exactly the Mastery levels of champions truly mean for every individual, and I managed to reach a conclusion: we do not really know. The fact of the matter is that someone could have reached level 5 mastery on a champion and stopped playing him or her months ago; on the other hand, that individual could have been spamming that champion for a whole month and got it only recently. Or that summoner has been playing that champion for years. Sure, the amount of points can determine how much that champion was played, but we do not know how recently.

We really do not know.

I believe that a similar effect should be granted to Mastery levels as is for ranked. A Mastery Decay would set in for any champion you had not played for a month, with the decay being higher the higher level that Mastery is. For example, level 1 and 2 Masteries -- just like Bronze, Silver, and Gold ranked Ladders -- will not result in any sort of decay. Level 3 will result in a slight decay. Level 4 will be higher. Level 5 will be the highest decay.

I understand there are a lot of champions, and some of us can pride ourselves at reaching level 5 mastery in dozens of champions, if not most of them. I thought that a month before decay hits would allow enough of those champions that you can truly play masterfully to stay their levels, while others start to decrease.

Comments? Opinions? Complaints? I thought this might be an interesting idea.

8 Comments

VictoryDance961 votes

Effectively the Mastery system would show the amount of experience and relative "skill" that a player has with a particular champion. I believe that having a decay would make the point that the player is losing experience with a champion? The concept just does not make any sense to me.

RookPusher1 votes

{quoted}

Effectively the Mastery system would show the amount of experience and relative "skill" that a player has with a particular champion. I believe that having a decay would make the point that the player is losing experience with a champion? The concept just does not make any sense to me.

I think the OP is saying that Rank 5 isn't an indication that the player is any good, either because they've grown rusty, or because they simply showed up for X number of games.

I get the concept, but I don't put much stock in Rank 5 anyway. Some comfort comes when I see it (i.e. it's not their first rodeo) but Rank 5's can still have a bad game.

The upside I see to Rank decay is to make sure a Main is a Main. In other words, I don't want someone to just run up the Rank 5 flag on as many champions as they can. So decay, in this sense, would prevent that from happening.

Also, to the OPs point, after a rework, your materies should be reset. And by rework, I mean complete overhaul, not "we changed the way your W works."

VictoryDance962 votes

After a real rework? Yes, absolutely, I have little problems with that. It is the idea of a "decay" that I am not a huge fan of.

Valderis Vandala1 votes

Why pride yourself in reaching level 5 mastery? It just means you invested some time in playing that champion, it means nothing else.

Champion Mastery is nothing more then an extension to our Summoner Level, this allows Riot to keep players further invested even after they reach max Summoner level, and they can eventually tie rewards into the system to make it seem even more appealing, a natural benefit to Riot for tying it to champions is that this system will expand automatically with every new champion release. It's just the same old bullshit, give people a leveling system and they'll enjoy gaining stuff over time with it as they see the numbers grow and get "rewarded" or just to show it off, and they will feel more invested and less likely to quit the more time they spent on it due to the investment they have made.

It's just a system for suckers that has no real benefit to us and it can even be argued that it harms the gameplay overall because it locks away basic gameplay elements.

Why would you want to turn it into a insidious system that rewards you for investing time but then punish you for not investing more time? What would be the point of that? What do you hope to gain or prove with this?

RookPusher1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Valderis Vandala,realm=EUW,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=biv983pu,comment-id=0001,timestamp=2016-02-03T15:29:30.160+0000)

Why would you want to turn it into a insidious system that rewards you for investing time but then punish you for not investing more time? What would be the point of that? What do you hope to gain or prove with this?

While I agree with most of what you're saying, I think the main benefit to decay would be to give mastery more meaning. If you can't be rank 5 on everything because of decay, then what a Rank 5 tells someone is that you play that champion frequently.

And everything I've ever read on LoL indicated that if you want to climb, you need to be comfortable with a champion to climb. Because it's about knowing the boundaries of good idea/bad idea. It's about knowing which champs you can bully, and which you need to be smart against. So to that end, decay provides a pretty accurate look at someone. You can see a Rank 5 with decay and go "alright, this guy plays [Champ] pretty often. They likely know that being matched against Renekton is bad news, and should, in theory know to play safe."

The thing I think Mastery shouldn't be is like the TeamBuilder (RIP) role icons where people are just playing them to get free stuff - in thsi case, a Ctrl+6 brag.

Valderis Vandala1 votes

Can't you just look at their Match History? Seems simpler to me, and you get to see other useful stats.

Just because people play a champion often enough to not have their rank decayed away doesn't mean they are any good with them, also maybe they only just picked him/her up and got to rank 5 in 3 days and then didn't touch them for 3 weeks or didn't play at all for all for that time, so I still don't see the point of all this and its not more meaningful.

A decaying point system alone isn't enough to guess a players skill. Maybe you'll be better of using 3rd party sites that track player stats, I can't vouch for them myself as I've only seen inaccurate information myself but that might just be me.

RookPusher1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Valderis Vandala,realm=EUW,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=biv983pu,comment-id=000100000000,timestamp=2016-02-03T16:35:55.320+0000)

Can't you just look at their Match History? Seems simpler to me, and you get to see other useful stats.

Just because people play a champion often enough to not have their rank decayed away doesn't mean they are any good with them, also maybe they only just picked him/her up and got to rank 5 in 3 days and then didn't touch them for 3 weeks or didn't play at all for all for that time, so I still don't see the point of all this and its not more meaningful.

A decaying point system alone isn't enough to guess a players skill. Maybe you'll be better of using 3rd party sites that track player stats, I can't vouch for them myself as I've only seen inaccurate information myself but that might just be me.

You're conflating arguments.

The Mastery doesn't assume skill. It assumes experience. Which doesn't tell me how great they're going to be. It just lets me know that this isn't the first time that player has used this champion. Maybe you're in a decent bracket, and it's less of an issue. But I'm in the B5, and believe me when I tell you, the people who try a champ in ranked, with no concept of build order, masteries, runes, or match-up knowledge is massive.

Valderis Vandala1 votes

Lol, nah, I'm unranked.

Sorry, I used the word skill when I should have used the word experience in my last post.

When you're in B5 no amount of looking at other peoples stats is going to help you though, with maybe the exception of banning their favorite champion, and you don't need a decaying mastery system for that. It's the bottom of the barrel, the rank even 9 year olds play at that have no idea what they are doing, the rank of people that don't even read what their own skills do.

A decaying master system isn't going to get people out of B5, you're simply gonna have to get better at the game if you want to accomplish that, which is probably easier then trying to get Riot to change something like this.

I mean no offense with that. XD

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