How to craft a better Ranked que?

Kai Guy··1 votes·860 views

The most common complaint and frustration is teammates. Is this inherently just part of the game or can a better solution to MM be made? I feel that its entirely plausible to solve this complaint, as well as generate a higher competitive experience.

The concept to solve this is that Riot invests into their Club system to be the core for a Ranked 5 que. By placing teammate moderation into the hands of players you remove the issue of RNG teammates. Some one keeps trolling and throwing games? Kick them. Leader/officers are dicks? Quit the team. Put the power of who your playing with into the hands of the players.

Now at a cap of 100 players per club? Its clear a team of 5 is not going to cut it. I suggest that for every 10 members the team has the ability to create a ranked team with its own independent MMR. Or alternatively they use a resource like BE or a "Club point store" to unlock additional teams.

To prevent "smurfing" Where higher MMR players hop into low MMR teams to pub stomp, a limit is placed where any player whos solo MMR is above the teams MMR is unable to que in that team, with the exception for players who participated in at least 50% of the provisional games that placed the team. They also will need to be an Active member of the team and if their participation drops below a majority of games they lose the ability to play for the team. This is to add weight for the higher skill players on a team to serve as a backbone and prevent the system from just being LETS GO PUB STOMPING BOYS. The goal is to up competitive quality. I feel that accounts who have not placed or participated in solo/duo enough for low system uncertainty are barred from participating in ranked 5s. The intent here is to try and weed out trolls and smurfs.

Now, alone this is an improvement but I feel more can be done to really make this an attractive prospect for players and Devs.

  1. Generate Club points that can be spent on club related improvements and swag. As Riot seems to be learning to Battle pass style $ generation, a club pass for all members could be an attractive draw to participate even if your not into the competitive que. It also allows F2P players to benefit from the folks who are willing to spend $ on the game.
  2. Run a "Semi-pro" Tournament where the top preforming 5v5 team is able to go on and participate for a chance to go pro.
  3. If you have not given up all hope on Clash, its a good opportunity to tie the Club teams into the clash system as part of 2. Round robin tournaments do a good job of helping find skill levels.

Thoughts?

2 Comments

skills of luck1 votes

In a way this is pretty much flex queue.... you get to pick 5 to play with. If u think your teammates are trash you pretty much won't play flex with them again. You also can't block smurfing, most higher elo players have 2-3 accounts. I'll gladly hop onto my silver mmr account which I purposely tank losses on and carry with that. I generally only play 1 game of solo queue on my main a day anyways. I spend far more time messing around in silver.

The true problem with ranked still comes down to people. Someone afking after starting 0/2, flaming a jungler until he ragequits, trollpicking when autofilled. I feel like it's the behavior of teammates rather than the skill of teammates that makes solo queue unenjoyable at times, no one wants to be stuck in a game that feels over at 5 mins because someone is being a 5 year old about it. It's also the most satisfying when you can make a disoriented team come together and pull out a miracle win. Which is why I still stick with solo over flex any day of the week.

Kai Guy1 votes

Its intended to replace flex. The idea is not that you don't see X teammate again but rather that X is a consistent teammate you play with. A set rooster of players is more reliable then RNG teammates. It removes the pain point so many experience of OMG this teammate fked our team by giving you the tools to control who your qued with.

If you exclusively played Flex in a 5 man group accomplishes this but its not the norm far as I can tell. The advantage of a set team is that its rooster directly relates to the teams MMR raiting. With a set rooster, you can start treating Teams as a singular rating rather then the average of each member. Its not all that difficult to implement tools to ensure the team has a consistent set of members. Especially as giving clans multiple teams is part of the concept. Can only have 10 or so allowed members assigned to the team, or make it so only an Officer or Leader can start a Que for the team.

What I want to do is incentivize playing as a premade 5 because that's gonna generate better games. On paper, it should lower toxicity. In practice who knows... reasonable ideas often flop soon as it lands in human hands.

I don't think it can block smurfing, its just to make it harder to create a lower MMR pub stomping team. By having a Requirement that an account has achieved a minimum # solo matches you can weed out some accounts lowering the impact of it. It cant be 100% stopped but it can be reduced.

So between the two, what do you think would be a stronger que type. The Club system or Current Flex system?

More from Gameplay

More by Kai Guy