Why matchmaking is the real problem of the game
It's clear. The game has changed. The increase in damage and lowering in defensive capabilities of towers and teams is a fact. This leads to faster paced games. But also, since the damage scales a lot through items, to snowbally one-sided games.
And it's simple to explain: https://www.leagueofgraphs.com/rankings/win-stats , if we look here , win after first tower is 70%. 1 tower tips the balanced by 20% in favor of one team.
I want you to stop and picture what happens when every lane is nearly balanced in skill. The game will progress slowly. What happens if one of the lanes is heavily outmatched? Well, it creates pressure for the objectives.
All it takes is a little unbalance to tip the game. Now pair this with the damage that is currently in-game. It will simply accentuate the problem. An outmatched lane will die more often tipping the game even further into chaos. Remember, early, when a laner dies, they will not only feed the gold from the kill, but also will give free CS to the opponent.
**Ask yourself, have you experienced this? : Being in an engaging lane smartly battling your opponent, where neither you or the opponent gets a definite advantage, only to get a push from a lane that is 5 kills ahead and solid CS on which you feel helpless to completely destroy your lane **
And yeah, shiet happens. But how often were you either pointing 'gun' or in front of the 'barrel'?
So why is matchmaking the real problem then?
First, let's look at this old post from Zileas, VP of Game Design http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=12029 . While things have changed probably, most likely the structures remain somewhat the same. 2 lines draw the eye:
- Once in the pool, the system starts trying to find you matches, the goal being to get a match where the teams are equal and both have a 50% chance of winning.
- We use various proprietary methods to identify players that are significantly more skilled than a typical newb, and boot their rating up a bunch behind the scenes when we notice this.
What can we extract from this: the matches are made with a 50% odds of winning, but if you are performing well the system boost your rating.
All is fine, except if we look on stats from various matches we can clearly see that they are not lane paired on skills. So a top lanner of skill X will not be matched vs another top lanner of the same skill. Statistically this should be compensated by other lanes. Except here comes the problem with _ boot their rating up a bunch behind the scenes when we notice this._ If someone that was overperfoming with a champ/lane gets on another lane, he will def lose the boost up rating advantage. And it happens. A lot. Just look at players match history.
Bottom line is, if Riot wants to keep the snowbally pace, it's fine. But they need to tweak the matchmaking accordingly. The current system worked fine in a slower envirounment, but now the limitations are starting to show. They need to balance the game based on laner skills, not based just the overall team MMR. An unbalanced lane will trigger a snowball fest. And people are getting super frustrated.
