Its inherently made to be a less competitive gamemode. So "fair" is not the main metric used for normal. If your assumption is normal are going to be fair matches your in for a bad time.
Far as improvement for normal experience. I don't really know of any that work effectively or wouldent punish players for being good at the game or just wanting to play with friends who have a skill gap.
I will take some time here. Lets go over it, Is there a better option?
Here are the ways I can think up and some of the issues/gains.
Splash MMR from Ranked to normal.
I did bring up Splashing MMR over but theres issues with that if you don't have a good class interval estimate for some ones assumed skill trying something new.
With out replacing it with something like teambuilder or Quickplay HOTS you don't have the ability to run MMR by champion. So... normal Blind might be improvable via reworking it, adding a estimation spash of MMR for a base line expectation built around recoarded data points on player performances on new champions. It wont ever be very accurate thou... I expect the returns for effort would be fairly low. It might lower the fringe case games you run into the top skill players but I doubt it would ever remove that owning to premade MMR values impact on MM when the skill gaps massive between the group.
So possibly viable improvement to overall match accuracy and quality, I lack data required to really try and gauge how healthy it would be,
MM Values Experience higher In normal Ques.
You could put more weight on MM for Experience. Have it spend a bit more time or value # of games/uncertainty more when building games. That might lower smurfs in dedicated normal que players due to them traditionally being higher uncertainty due to lower # matches. It wont help with Premade issues on MM much. It also makes basically no impact on tryhard vs learning new skill caps.
Remove MMR From normals
The removal of any kind of MM metric from normal would still result in you having to face that challenger player. So 0 MM is unfair especial as premade challenger players could just go pub stomp games and smurfs become eternally locked at their rank regardless of wins due to the removal of MMR.
We can rule this one out as just a bad option right?
**
Ranked MMR = NORMALS MMR. AKA The Full splash.**
Making it identical to Ranked MMR is pointless because it creates unfair matches at higher frequency's. Effectively current Normals MMR separates Try hard normal mains or higher MMR players who want to stomp on their mains into higher Skill brackets, In Elo's system they are called class intervals.
You just end up with a ranked que that's even more lopsided because any game some ones not being competitive they harm their team. And duo has a massively wider range and MM has to compensate for that. Just makes worse games. So its a net loss of match quality rather then any gains for players. Far as I can tell.
This is accurate to reality right?
break up friendships.
ould prevent the class intervals you expect 9 to 1 odds to win from queing in normals under the assumption its to protect your "average" player. Something like that would look like Players above Diamond are unallowed to play normal. That will slow them down all of the time it takes to make 1 smurf. You know, like The Flex que does when theres to big of a gap in premades.
Then we just have a funky duo/flex hybrid with players completely RNG how well and how much effort they are putting into the que. I don't think it makes any quality gains overall... also smurfs sneak right by it.
So... Those are options I can think up. Only 2 of them might make any positive impact imo.
You got any ideas on the topic?
