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[Ranking] Riots Rubberband System versus My Chaos System

KingsRight·11/15/2015, 1:10:07 AM·1 votes·656 views

Whether you know it or not.. or believe it or not, the Ranking system in League of Legends is a Rubberband system.

In such a system as the Rubberband system, you will start to win again after you've suffered enough losses, because the game will see the slack on the rubberband and will start giving you wins by stacking your teams against terrible opponents.

The Rubberband system strives to keep people at 50% wins versus losses.. the higher you go above that 50% the more it tries to stack teams against you so it can break you. and the more you are below that 50% mark the more it tries to help you by giving you teams that are better and opponents that are weaker

These types of systems are not fun because it doesn't give much sense of accomplishment, nor much chance to break out of the lower bronze levels.. which is why many great players are stuck in bronze..

The Rubberband system isn't too bad in games where you are 1 versus 1.. like fighting games, but it doesn't work in team-based combat.

You can test this system out by starting many, many matches and not cooperating in the game and purposely feeding.. In time, the system will see your consistent losses from your feeds and will start to boost you up so much that they will find you teammates that are so good that your feeds don't matter and will match you against opponents that very bad. And you will notice your rank returning back up to 50% win ratio..

So, in other words, you don't matter... because, in the end, the Rubberband system will save you and force you into that 50% area.

I've tested this out many times.. there is nothing much you can do about it. So if you want to climb in rank you have to play well and hope that LUCK, and/or cheating, takes you the rest of the way.

The Rubberband system may work in 1 versus 1 style games but not team games.

**For team-based games, like League of Legends, the ranking system should not even take into account the skills of players when deciding team make-up. **

**What should determine rank is your fight against Randomness and maintaining consistency.. ** because in this type of ranking system you are fighting a wide assortment of opponents since it's so much more random.. and your consistency of plodding through the easy and hard fights and still keep winning would highlight you more as a great player.. because the randomness is the same, but your are not.. So by playing better you can more easily achieve Better-Than-Average results and thus climb ranking... so that all of the players that are skilled won't forever remain at the bottom of bronze.

Eventually, all of the best players would be at the top and no great players would be stuck in bronze like the current Rubberband system does.. Because the best players would have the greatest consistency overall.

sure, in such a system there would be bad luck times when you consistently hitting stacked opponents but eventually the law of averages would show you it's opposite effect.. like the flipping of a coin. This makes it seem always fair, no matter where you are on the ladder... and you can never blame the system any more for purposely stacking.

So the hand you are dealt would average out as just as many good teams versus bad teams.. letting you become the defining factor by simply, and consistently, playing better

Overall the game is more enjoyable this way and less stressing as well.. and such a system allows better players to shine because they get to show their consistency of winning off.

It comes down to a fight to see who is the most consistent, which would get rid of all those fluke-players that thought they were so hot only because they had a few good games.

My advice to Riot is to abandon their stupid Rubberband system and don't even factor in elo.. ; don't even assess player's skill and try to determine who is better than who.. and instead, just make teams entirely random.

This would make finding matches incredibly fast because their computer doesn't have to calculate player's skill any more. It just needs to find people.. any kind of people and see what happens.

What will determine your rank is just your consistency to win against that randomness..

  • Matchmaking is faster
  • Riot wouldn't get blamed any more for their faulty calculations of player's skill
  • Less frustration for everyone (players and developers)
  • Players would not get stuck in levels of rank due to a systems faults.. results would rely entirely on the player's head.

In the Poll below, please vote

To clarify what the answers mean:

Answer 1: Rubberband type means the more you win the more the game stacks teams against you and the more you lose the more the game tries to stack your teams in favor of you to help you. This system strives to keep you at the 50% win/loss rate.

Answer 2: Consistency-Against-Chaos type means that the system doesn't try to figure out your skill, but instead, it just makes all your opponents and teammates entirely random. This removes the possibility of faulty assessments by a computer and just pits you to fight against chance so that you can strive to maintain certain levels of consistency of wins versus that randomness and you will be judged solely on how consistent you are, no matter the cards you've been dealt.

1 Comments

UberAffe11/15/2015, 5:46:17 PM1 votes

My biggest problem with your system is that it makes ranked play un-fun for anyone below the middle rank. For every person that wins more than 50% of their games there has to be someone who loses more than 50%. While yes that would give a fairly accurate representation of skill, there are likely to be fewer people playing ranked. I say that because I don't believe the people that lose most of the time will want to continue playing.

It also would change the nature of ranked. Right now rank is based on being better than some bottom line and whichever line you are above determines your rank. Your system makes it a relative ranking, Which percentile are you in?

  • winrate Rank
  • 35% Bronze
  • 40% Silver
  • 45% Gold
  • 50% Plat
  • 55% Diamond
  • 60% Master
  • 65% Challenger

These are just hypothetical numbers but the point is I don't want to play if I only am winning 35-40% of my games. When I stop playing that means that someone else will drop in rank to fill the gap that I left.

This part is my opinion but I think it is true. Playing against better people makes you better, at the same time playing against worse people makes you worse. Play against challenger players and even though you get destroyed, odds are when you go back to silver they aren't going to feel very hard to play against. Play against bots for a while and suddenly silver will feel more challenging. If you mix up the ranking pool so that bronze players are facing off against Challenger players the bronze players will improve and the challenger players will get worse.