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Why I feel ranked restrictions is terribly designed

ploki122·3/28/2015, 5:00:58 PM·1 votes·760 views

TL;DR is in bold.

First of all, I do agree that a punishment is meant to feel negative to the punished. However, I think it's necessary to split the concept (punishment) of the imlpementation (ranked restriction). Personally, I feel like there are a few reasons that make Ranked restriction inherently worse than bans for both punished players and neutral/positive ones :

  1. Ranked restriction forces you into a different reward system. The reason I play nearly only Ranked games is because I like competing and seeing actual results come from my games (be it positive or not). By forcing players into the normals, which has irrelevant results, you take that part away from players.

  2. Ranked restriction actually applies more stress to players. Ranked restriction is really comparable to the old Elo system which was ditched because it applies unnecessary stress onto players (or to a lesser extent, promotion series). Basically, the chat restriction is applied or 75 games, but the Ranked restriction is 35 wins. So this means that every single one of your games matter if you wanna go back to the game mode that you enjoy. In Ranked, whenever I get a shitass team I just think "It's bound to happen 50% of the time" and heavily skewed matchups ends up negating themselves for the most part. However, in restricted mode, every single shitass team is a 25-35 minutes wasted toward clearing my ban. It's even worse since Platinum+ players have a time limit to win those games before decaying.

  3. The overall experience of Normals is terrible for a restricted player. First of all, both MMRs are mostly (if not totally) split apart. If I'm a Diamond player that gets Ranked restricted, I will go into normal drafts and face bronze-plat players. Not only will I have less fun since there's no opposition, but my opposition will have less fun getting utterly destroyed. Otherwise, there's also the fact that if people learn that you're chat/ranked restricted, they immediately have a diminished esteem of you.

  4. Ranked restriction creates somewhat of a prisoners' island. Basically, since all Ranked-restricted players go into normal draft to clear the restriction, there are inherently more toxic players in that game mode. This means that the chances of someone reforming are inherently lower since he's in potentially the worst environment of multiplayer LoL.

Honestly, I never thought much about that restriction, but now that I actually am forced to think about it, I think it's potentially the single worse thing Riot has done throughout its history as it goes against a few principle they have always defended (no prisoners' island, contagiousness of positive behavior, making the matchmaking as reliable as possible).

If we apply this to my very specific case, the ranked restriction is really more of a handrance than anything else. I'm a Poppy main and I sometimes run against people that main Olaf/Darius top or running against an Annie/Corki bot lane and in those cases, I'd much rather not play Poppy. So, I've always wanted to try out other things and going in normal drafts does that for me. I tried Alistar top (I think it was fine) and Ezreal support (I have no ideas whatsoever of how good/bad it was) yesterday... cleared a few games. Also, I've very seldom been reported in normals afaik, since not giving much of a shit about the result makes me not give much of a shit about what my allies do.

What do you guys think?

3 Comments

Aazzlano3/28/2015, 8:19:32 PM1 votes

there is a solution

don't be toxic, or not enough to get yourself restricted. lol?

also, in any given game, assuming you yourself are not bad, there is only a 4 in 9 chance of you having the bad teammates. take a situation where every game, 2 of your other teammates are worse, and 2 are better, than 2/2 of the enemy team. if you are better than the last member of the enemy team, you have an advantage. if you aren't, then don't complain about "shitass teams". thinking that the blame is on other people is 95% of the reason most people rage, when they are a huge part of the problem to begin with most of the time.

and if you were to be playing against bronze-plat players as a theoretical Diamond player in normals to remove restriction, and you can't win consistently, then how are you blaming your "shitass team" in ranked Diamond games for losing? either way, thats not how MMR works, if you play an even decent amount of normals, your MMR will raise (assuming you are good enough to win them) and will start matching players who also win that much in normals, making it more balanced. If you don't play enough normals, you should probably play more instead of just raging and losing in ranked, you will get better without any risk of losing LP. as a Diamond player for 3 seasons, I have about 1k wins in normals, and my games are full of Diamond/Master players almost exclusively. There is a random Plat that might pop in as a duo or that just has high MMR, but its not every time. so normals aren't so much of a cakewalk (easier than high Diamond ranked games since people are taking it more seriously, but still)

honestly if someone is so toxic in ranked that they are raging and tilting, maybe 35 forced wins on normals is a good break for them. pretty sure no one wants a rager/tilter on their team, especially in ranked, so it's a GREAT break for the rest of the community in that elo that they don't have to deal with that person for a time. and this person can reevaluate their position and get some practice, before going back into ranked.

honestly with how toxic so many people are, it would be better if they were to just be time-lock removed in addition to the wins, from being able to play ranked, or having a harsher restriction in order to make their time away longer (or a bigger deterrent from them being bad) so I think it's pretty mild right now as is.