SO I Have An Honest Question For Riot...
I've been really active this season, and around the time I hit b1, late February I think, I started to notice a substantial decline in the matchmaking system's success at matching players of same/near to one another skill level. I've been playing ranked and normals on/off as circumstances permit since 2014 and this is the first time it's been so.... well, bad at it. I used to play ranked because my experience in normals was nearly 100% of the time an absolute stomp, be it my team winning or our opponents, it was rarely a close game. After doing my placement matches in ranked this year everything seemed to balance out fairly well and I usually got the experience I came for. Since February however, that has rarely been the case. Suddenly I'm seeing absolute, undeniable stomps again and again and being a bronze-level player, the stomping is usually on my skull. I just dropped to b3 thanks to some Darius rage-quitting the first time he died to a Tryndamere and I'd be lying if seeing that lp go down almost every game didn't sting a bit, but that's just the way ranked is set up, if you can't win 50% or so of your games your chances of climbing are minimal in all brutal honesty, but that also worsens the problem I'm seeing. Matches aren't anywhere near as close as they were at the start of the year and I'd really like to know why, or at least hear some ideas from Riot and the community as to how this sudden lack of balance in the matchmaking system might have occurred and (hopefully) what the company plans to do about it, as I for one can testify it's rather thoroughly ruining my League experience. In case this point hasn't already been made, this is a problem occurring for me in ALL the modes I've played (minus limited-time modes as one can't play them anymore and ARAM, because that one's always pretty random based on who gets what champion and if they know how to play them in a constant teamfight or not). I've scoured the boards/forums/whatever we'll be calling them when the reader sees this several times now, and seen a LOT of people complaining about similar experiences. Some of their theories stretch from; "It's the autofill feature causing it to try and shorten queue times at the expense of accuracy" to questions like; "Why am I only seeing complete noobs vs pros in ranked?" to accusations such as; "I think a bunch of people are boosting/smurfing, no WAY that B4 with 20 mmr wrecked our team of silvers!". To be frank, None of these have given me the Info I'm after, and firing off a question in one of those feedback surveys that pop up on the home screen from time to time got me no reply, so I'm hoping a Riot employee/moderator with some answers for me sees this and posts something that could at least explain what, exactly, is causing this? As well as how I can hopefully avoid it. I don't really care about climbing, I'm bronze for a reason after all, but I would like to play those somewhat close/actually fun matches again sometime soon.