Honest Chat About Ranked

Hello, I will preface this statement by saying that I am bad at this game. I believe that I belong most comfortably in the low to mid tier gold division, the highest I have ever climbed being Gold 1 (failing a few promos into plat 5). I have been playing league for a few years and after many hours and many hundreds of dollars I just want to let Riot know that the game they have lovingly crafted is amazing, the work they do balancing the game is superb and the amount of time they spend engaging and listening to the community is commendable "fingers crossed on this post".

Now that the pleasantries are out of the way lets get down to brass tacks. I feel like one of the biggest failings of league at the moment is its sub par ranked system. Now I know I'm not the best player, I don't have the time or the energy with a full time career and going to school part time to play more than a few games a day. That being said however it is EXTREMELY noticeable when you are playing below your division. So much in fact that I would argue it ruins the experience. Now, when I was in my undergrad and could play 10-30 games a day i didn't really care as getting to my natural skill level wasn't as hard and once there the games were much more enjoyable.

Would also like to preface by saying that I am a business major and work for a very large company so I like stats, stats are everything and noise and variance are what we like to avoid.

The biggest issues with the ranked system as currently implemented

1. promotes a toxic community

2. something that is very much out of your control (winning and losing ) is what determines whether you climb or fall

3. due to new players starting at mid silver we get a huge noisy mess around silver as far as skill [elo hell]

4. due to the fact that the system has artificial catches in place at the bottom of higher divisions you recreate (in miniature form) this same noisy mess [elo hell never goes away, cause its built into the system]

Now to go into more details on these points

1. This system promotes a toxic community, I think this one is self explanatory but I'll go into more detail for you if I must. What will almost every person of a higher skill say you need to do in order to climb in league, "CArrY HarRder" or something to that effect. Now, we all know different champs have different attributes in league, some champs are designed as damage dealers and other as more utility. Now if everyone has the mindset of I have to win this or I will lose it turns ranked into a cluster. You have a yasuo top getting wrecked and feeding his butt off because he wants to solo carry, or a mid leblanc who has never played the champ getting run over because once again they have no idea what they are doing. The simple mindset of YOU HAVE TO CARRY YOURSELF that percolates all divisions creates a hostile environment throughout and causes statistical noise in the ladder.

Now, I have been playing league for a long time, 3 of my child hood friends ,all brothers, who have always been way more into gaming then I have who live a few houses down have all been diamond before, I have friends who I play with on occasion all the way from bronze 5 to a guy I just recently met at a club downtown who is ranked in the top few hundred players (he showed me the proof, its crazy) so I have seen, played with and against and around the full gamut of players. Now, I will say that if you are a major outlier in your games you can be the solo determining factor. I remember when i first got my best friend into league and this was right when illaoi got released and I would literally get penta-kills with her in top lane (she was busted) and solo carried him to silver ez pz. Did he deserve it? No, he quickly fell to the bottom of silver and could not climb to save his life cause he was the reason in a lot of games that his team lost, did I hurt the community by doing this, 100% and I regret doing it, he ended up quitting league shortly after but is now working at a law firm and is happily engaged so were all good but lets stay focused on league. So duo queuing and smurfing creates more statistical noise that you need to overcome in your climb.

Now lets say you are decently close to your skill, within one full division, ONE mistake by ONE person can cause you the entire game. Now you look at a game of league, odds are with the elo system you need to win a coin flip, and since you control yourself over a million games you should be able to influence said coin flip in your favor and climb, but we all know with the amount of variance in a league of legends game that it does not simply come down to a coin flip. Its more like 10 coin flips, each player gets a coin, you can make sure your coin flip is a win, and maybe through skill, luck etc you can determine the ability of some of the opponents to use their flips but at the end of the day league is a team came, no one can truly carry on their own. Outside of a massive outlier. So your in a close game, you got the ten coins and each team fight is a flip, you were able to take away your lane opponents ability to flip for now cause you crushed them, and maybe you helped influence other lanes to have a higher chance of winning their flip by helping get their lanes ahead everything goes incredibly well until the throw, that mid laner you helped drops their coin and misses their big skill shot and your team gets wiped, you did so much to help make sure that statistically this game was in your favor but it didn't matter, now all you want to do is find out where that person lives and run them over with a riding lawn mower (jokes) but on a serious note this feeds into point 1 where this ranked system creates a toxic environment, nothing you can do will determine what people do with their coins in crunch time. All the work you put in was a waste because at the end of the day all that matters is that W or L. So yes the closer you are to your true skill the more noise and variance you as a player will feel, that's fair and true, and the further above or below the more affect you can have on the game, also fair and true, but at the end of the day, the majority of your games and whether you even have the chance to improve which only comes from playing against people better than you, is all the result of luck. Luck in a skill based game is the enemy, just like variance and noise kills stats.

Now enough complaining, this is all common knowledge right, it is what it is, just play more and climb. To be fair that is an accurate statement, if you play enough games to drown out the luck and the noise you will get to where you need to go, but its just not fun getting there, and it feels meaningless and empty especially when the games just aren't fun or fair. A stomp or a route is not enjoyable, we want to get to a state of close games, because close games are fun and where you have the biggest chance to learn new things.

To avoid this feeling like a pointless bitching post ( already know im gonna get down voted to oblivion but that's fine) here are some ideas at possible solutions to create a healthier ranked environment for all players.

Remove the artificial catches at the bottom of tiers, I remember when I first got out of bronze 1, or when i first broke silver 1 and both times the games immediately following felt like a mess, i felt like i had actually deranked due to the noise around the bottom of the individual ladders. If a player cant hold their own in a specific spot they need to fall, end of story.

Start all players off at the bottom, no if ands or buts, everyone starts off at bronze 5 elo (i know this doesnt work with the current system, but im getting to that)

Individual player contributions HAVE to affect your climb.... this is the big one, the one that RIOT seems afraid to touch. Look, at the end of the day, if a player can go into a game and have a 2-3-4 hell maybe even more to 1 kda ratio that guy should not be punished for the loss, he clearly is of a higher caliber than those around him. Now the argument is bound to come up, what about split pushing, or what about supports or what about ect ect ect.. look at the end of the day we can find a way to work it into a system that works. Take everything into account from kill participation to kda ratios to gold per minute to objectives what have you it needs to be considered, but having a skill based system whereby your individual skill actually has very little effect on the outcome (Unless your an extreme outlier) creates a very toxic game play environment. Hell i do it too, I tried to force my self to play lee sin to skip over the mess but i sucked at lee sin and ended up being the reason my team lost, or when i tried to force myself to play riven, some games i stomped but losing match ups i got dunked before going back to my tried and true picks.

It should be clear that a support who is 0-3-10 is doing better than a support who is 0-10-4, now if the crappy support wins, I would argue that they shouldn't gain any elo for that win, they did not play well, and the support who lost should not lose elo cause they did their job well. Maybe its not even gaining or losing but gaining or losing less depending on your contribution.

I know the argument will come up that this system will favor ksing and assassins for climbing but i argue that ksing is going to happen regardless, this is solo que, and whether or not a specific play style works is clearly dictated by the patches and the meta, bruisers on the cleaver patch and assassins with lethality.

I don't claim to have the answers, I just want to start an honest dialogue in the right direction,

You cant tell me that CS:GO, another game that I play and love (and am better at because ive been playing that since 1.6 days) can come up with a system whereby individual player contribution goes into effect and RIOT cant. I can remember countless times where I would lose a CS go game but because of my individual performance vs my opponents the system actually ranked me up. There has to be a way to include it.

Maybe its after a certain point of dieng you dont get points for a win, or it makes the win less effective, and maybe deaths that yield an assist create a net positive so that tanks dont get left out in the cold, I know that this system would be EXTREMELY hard to create, I dont doubt that, with all that noise in the system already with how it is bare bones and all, trying to dissect it so that your individual contribution doesnt feel meaningless will be difficult, but it will be hard fought to continue to move forward one of the games i love, and I cant believe that we dont have the community to do it.

Please, this post is meant to be a conversation starter, I would love to get a discussion going, I love this game but seeing so many people leaving because of or complaining about the ranked system lets talk about it collectively. Hell when pro players complain that its bonkers and have even said that at the end of the day luck has way more to do with it then people give it credit for we need to work on a solution.

Thanks for reading, Cheers