There needs to be a way to properly set MMR for low level accounts

Aeril·Apr 25, 2016·3 votes·725 views

Recently, I've been introducing a dear friend of mine to LoL. She's new to both League and mobas in general, and generally isn't a huge video game player. I've been playing with her in bots and recently PvP on a fresh account, specifically picking supports and avoiding playmaking champions to avoid carrying her games and unbalancing her MMR.

That being said, it feels almost like a wasted gesture. One massive and glaring flaw has come up when we try to play together: there are SO MANY smurfs! It's a massive issue for her when she attempts to simply learn how to move while autoattacking or how to use her skills, and the enemy laner simply walks up and decimates her with blatant level 30 skills. She's actually depressed enough that she doesn't even want to try playing since she feels she never gets to play against people of her own skill level.

We've been losing games, even against beginner bots, and yet every time we get into a PvP setting it feels like I'm playing against people on my silver main account. And this is with us being level 10.

Riot, please, I beg you. Find a way to fix this for your new players. The people who aren't familiar with mobas, who don't know what they're doing but are trying to learn, are getting unbelievably frustrated because everyone they play with and against who is meant to be near their skill level simply crushes them for half an hour.

4 Comments

FovereApr 27, 20162 votes

The thing is that MMR isn't going to correlate with player experience.

Lower MMR will just throw you guys in with bad players, not inexperienced ones.

You should use custom games to allow your friend to get a feel for things. There may not be ip gains (or even experience?), but there's no pressure either. The free rotation + the 450 ip champs should be enough to learn different roles and basic mechanics until she is ready to bot with other players.

My partner likes to play League sometimes but she has no interest in learning the game. We are talking trackpad on a laptop here. Learned to keep her out of matched games real quick.

ZackattackApr 25, 20161 votes

Isn't what you're asking for a tad hypocritical? You want her MMR to be proportional to her skill level, yet you want to play with her at the same time? How is that possible. Yes there are a lot of smurfs out there, but there are also a lot of non smurfs. If she plays enough games and loses enough games, her MMR will drop to the level with everyone else who isn't a smurf. But if you play with her and win, MMR goes up. win 50% of your games, it stays the same. She needs to lose like 20+ in a row. I have first hand experience with this, I had multiple friends started playing. If she can toughen it out, she'll be better off in the end from playing against better players. Stick with bots until she can beat them easily.

AerilApr 25, 20161 votes

I'm well aware that me even being in the game warps it, no matter how I try to avoid doing so. There is, however, a massive difference between me going 1/5/10 with Soraka versus going 30/0 with someone I'm more familiar with like Zyra. I'm not causing games to be automatically won based on my performance and so some of the games have been lost.

With that said, the fact that smurf accounts are so prevalent at low levels, especially for players fighting bots for their very first time, is indicative of a problem with the systems that determine where people are placed. After losing three games in a row we shouldn't be paired with a teammate who gets 30 kills in 20 minutes against the same difficulty of bots. With that kind of set up it's inevitable that we will run into people who keep ragging on her for dying repeatedly and not knowing what she's doing.

Which has happened. Multiple times.

It shouldn't be mandatory for a new player to lose 20 games or more in a row to be properly placed in MMR. That is literally a broken system that any game designer should be ashamed to have created, much less to have continued allowing to persist in a broken state. I'm not saying it's actually that bad, I'm going to extremes here, but the experience so far for someone completely new to the game is extremely poor.

ZackattackApr 27, 20161 votes

{quoted}

I'm well aware that me even being in the game warps it, no matter how I try to avoid doing so. There is, however, a massive difference between me going 1/5/10 with Soraka versus going 30/0 with someone I'm more familiar with like Zyra. I'm not causing games to be automatically won based on my performance and so some of the games have been lost.

With that said, the fact that smurf accounts are so prevalent at low levels, especially for players fighting bots for their very first time, is indicative of a problem with the systems that determine where people are placed. After losing three games in a row we shouldn't be paired with a teammate who gets 30 kills in 20 minutes against the same difficulty of bots. With that kind of set up it's inevitable that we will run into people who keep ragging on her for dying repeatedly and not knowing what she's doing.

Which has happened. Multiple times.

It shouldn't be mandatory for a new player to lose 20 games or more in a row to be properly placed in MMR. That is literally a broken system that any game designer should be ashamed to have created, much less to have continued allowing to persist in a broken state. I'm not saying it's actually that bad, I'm going to extremes here, but the experience so far for someone completely new to the game is extremely poor.

i agree with what youre saying, but lets face the facts here. this game right now is not the same as it was 4 years ago. I started playing in season 2 when a lot of people were still starting out. I had a friends list full of people who were beginners. Now times have changed, many of those low levels are smurfs, why? there are simply less people out there picking up league of legends as a new game. This is going to result in the "new" player ratio to "smurf" player ratios to be vastly different, favoring the smurf ratio. Back in season 2, the few smurf that there were would win the game, while all of the beginners would lose, then matching you with the proper skill level within a few games. Now, with the beginner ratio being maybe a 3 or 4 out of the 10 players in the game, you have a lot more smurfs losing, repeatedly, perhaps as many as your friend. So it takes longer to match up with your proper skill level. It is not a flaw of the system, it is a flaw of the player base, or rather, the person behind the accounts.