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I finally understand why people think that the matchmaking is so bad.

X3N0N·11/8/2019, 2:54:36 AM·25 votes·12,708 views

I have been able to hold my own in ranked games all the way up until my Gold 4 promos. I had about a 78% win rate on graves and I was able to work with my team to win easily. As soon as I hit my Gold promos, my teammates turned horrible. For the past 11 games, I have had teams full of negative win rate silver players. I am not able to clear up to level 3 without 2 of my solo laners giving up kills. I wish that riot would take some time and look into what is making their matchmaking so bad instead of making another skin line for Akali. It seems as if they do not care about what the players actually think and their only motive is to milk money out of the players by constantly making skins for the most popular champs. I have been on a huge losing streak and I have demoted to silver 2 now without a single win. There is no way that I just became terrible at the game overnight. If I can get good winrates up to my Gold promos, I should at least be able to win a couple of games thereafter. It sucks now Riot goes silent when people talk about this kind of stuff instead of actually addressing it and working towards a positive solution. [sg-shisa]

Rito Pls help the matchmaking system

35 Comments

Ambitious Minnow11/8/2019, 7:32:34 PM9 votes

The most obvious problem with matchmaking is the starting point. There is another thread where everyone is justifying the start point for these MMR systems being in the middle? Which is insane, the average starting player in these systems is typically quite near the bottom of the skill curve. If they aren't at the bottom of the skill curve, it's because it's not their first account, not because they are some kind of super genius.

LoL has hundreds of thousands, if not millions of players(80 million monthly apparently) playing regularly. Placement should start outside of normal matchmaking, smurf/secondary accounts should be seperated from actual new players in a first round of placement by themselves, and then actual new players should be starting at the bottom of bronze without any fancy lp boosting. Dropping them all into pool assuming any of them can be Gold or better is insanely stupid.

This isn't what happens though. Anyone who plays regularly can show many matches where they get matched, in Gold, with accounts that have only won a single ranked match in their entire account history. That's ridiculous, and should not happen.

Nea10411/8/2019, 2:33:50 PM6 votes

"Working as intended".

And it's not even a joke, it is intentional :D

Skeleton Matrix11/8/2019, 3:48:20 AM6 votes

because they're devs and people are too busy in Story art and sound section. safe areas. instead of dealing with the obvious problem. you're are not the only one. tons of players are experiencing the influx of losses these past weeks. its obvious whats going on.

MitsuruKirijo97711/9/2019, 11:34:15 AM4 votes

The problem with matchmaking is about more then just matchmaking itself. There are many other things to consider when we ask ourselves that question that most of us especially in 2019 do, why is this game im in soo shit right now.

First off lets start with matchmaking itself. As riot has stated multiple times in the past like in articles like this one https://support.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/201752954-Matchmaking-Guide , Riots main goal when it comes to matchmaking design is to create a 50% chance for both teams to win the game they are in. The problem with this is in the mmr system itself and its position to your league rank. https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/community/q/lets-talk-smurfs-snow-and-bans-ask-riot, as they state in this article they do have a mathematical system in place that has actively tried to pull away "smurf accounts" from regular 50% accounts in any elo by matching them with other 55-60%+ accs in games as well. This actually has devastating impact on games because it often creates a very 1 sided environment where 1 team gets a lead and runs away with it and the 55-60%+ smurfs on the losing team will just take a shit on the 50%ers for whatever mistake they made at any point in time. This anti-smurf system has actually gotten so bad this season that i have noticed that instead of it matching me against 60% accs when im say 70 or 75% overall wr, it will instead put those accs on my team, why? I dont know.

(http://www.surrenderat20.net/2013/01/new-league-system-coming-soon-in-ranked.html)How will matchmaking work now? Is ELO removed? If I'm at the bottom of my tier will I only be playing with those same people despite how many times I lose? "Matchmaking will continue to match you based on a hidden MMR (matchmaking rating) that's tracked behind the scenes. If you are continually losing matches at the bottom of Gold tier, you'll start to play against Silver players even though you're in a Gold league. There are a lot of checks and balances that must be passed before you can move up a tier, so we don't think that it will be common for players to be in this situation (with the exception of something like Elo boosting, which we'll be continuing to address)."

The problem here lies in the "checks and balances" within matchmaking system itself as stated in this quote. These "checks" and "balances" are a series of mathematical algorithms that are constantly seeking to keep your mmr within your current league rank. If you are having an overall 50% wr then the matchmaking sees no problem and will continue to match you in a normal manner. If you are all of a sudden winning too many games after being at 50% for a long time then the matchmaking recognizes that there is an anomaly in your current w/r and will seek to match you with a team whose overall mmr is slightly lower then that of the enemy team(this is automatically done in any series and was also implemented to once again prevent smurfing or boosting). Lose too many games and the matchmaking system will do the same again because riot wanted to prevent people from climbing ranked by purposely losing a lot of games but not dropping divisions so they could have games in lower elo that they could win more easily(later also adapted in the point gain/loss as well). This again creates the same unhealthy game environment mentioned earlier where games essentially turn into 1 sided stomps that leads to afkers,inting, and trolling.
Speaking now only from personal experience this usually has devastating impact on the game I am in as i have noticed many times throughout the years of playing that whenever i was in a situation like this and i would look up the average mmr of our teams before we get into the game and my teams mmr just happens to be the one that is roughly 20-40mmr lower(back in 2014-2015 there would be an actual disparity between the 2 teams in terms of elo), the game will usually start off with the score being 0-7 or 0-15 before the first 10-15 mins very often. Try going to https://na.op.gg/ and seeing the mmrs of your teams there and see if you start noticing a similar pattern. Of course this doesn't happen 100% of the time and sometimes things just "work out" your way but there is a system in place within matchmaking that actively tries to do this.

THE 2ND problem with matchmaking is MMR and the ELO system it uses. The elo system was never designed to function for any team games where you are rating an INDIVIDUALS rating and was originally designed for 1v1 based games such as chess, true rts like WC3 SC2, or fighting games. Within a teambased game the elo system is always going to be flawed because it only calculates your wins and loses to give you your rating and thats it. This flaw obviously creates a negative competitive environment within which someone who is diamond ranked may not be a diamond player because either they got boosted there or are stuck in the lowest division which often leads to their game play being no better then that of a gold player(this applies in platinum 4 or 5 as well). A better system would be a rating system that obviously rates you based of your GAME PLAY instead but riot has never bothered experimenting much with this (role queue omegalul) which would have been understandable 7 years ago but now that they are a multi million dollar company with a franchised esports scene it is honestly an insult to its community that they haven't, just like its continuing shady practices of buffing popular skin sales champs and then creating more slutty skins for them or champs altogether.

THE 3RD problem is the evolution of the game itself. Back in 2014 I strongly believed that no game was unwinnable regardless of how much a fuck up your team is or how well the enemy team is playing and with this mentality i have always found solutions to win any games that eventually lead me to being d2 playing in d1 0-50lp elo. This is because up until 2014 this game had very strong individual styled game play that did not rely on team synergy to win games, be it through lane dominance/teamfights/other strategic means. While modern day team based styled gameplay that relies heavily on your team being on the same page with you is in a lot of ways more interactive game play, it also has many negative drawbacks on solo queue itself. One drawback specifically is that loss of finding solutions to any X problems. You could be in a game where you do everything right and you pull your team out of a gold deficit abyss and everything starts going your way and you make it to that 30 min mark only for some clown thats lost his brain cells years ago to get caught out somewhere which leads to you losing baron. Once the enemy team took baron they played their cards right and they played well and you are left standing there helpless behind your towers knowing that there is nothing you can do to stop them from pushing in and ending the game. An example of a situation like this one was not something you would see often pre 2015 at all but now you will see it in many different forms(the most popular 1 in 2019 being of course a players poor mindset leading to int/troll/afk which is often the most devastating in the way the game plays now) I quit this game after 2016 to come back 2 years later and i feel like in 2018/2019 ive done nothing but waste my time as after getting banned numerous times by that infamous riot automated review system ive re climbed many accounts into plat1 sometimes with 70% wrs only to find the same inters/afkers/tilters(and all riot has ever done about this mental illness is making a you tube video that is suppose to be comical?) that create one sided loses and spirals your account into a mindless and pointless grind over and over again. Its the flaws in the ranked system itself,lack of any real learning tools from riot, and zero encouragement from the community and riot on how to teach others how to play a team game that often ruin the individuals mental focus which in turn degrades their game play or leads to them becoming 1 of the inters/afkers/tilters. And in conclusion that is why these flaws within ranked exist today, to keep you playing at a 50%wr for over a thousand games a season, so that you keep padding the active playerbase stats and buying their slutty skins they are making. I for one am not gonna waste my time playing this coin flip simulator with no real reward anymore but someone like Niggel Wessom will tell you blah blah this and complain about that instead of focusing on improving but i remember back in 2014 50%ing your account and spending over 800 games to get gold was never called improvement, its just mindless spamming. And no amount of improvement past high platinum is gonna help you win games in which you are getting trolled or inted on.

cQaAlma11/9/2019, 2:12:41 AM3 votes

It's not the matchmaking that's bad it's the excessive cheating that goes unpunished because they're too busy banning people for chatting in the chat box.

Great Ozymandius11/9/2019, 5:13:27 PM3 votes

It's not just that matchmaking is bad. It is also that the game is so snowbally. You might have a teammate who loses a close 1v1 in lane early and then loses lane hard after that due to the snowball. He becomes useless, dies a lot, can't initiate teamfights, can't effectively follow up on ganks, etc. He looks bad when you watch him either blow-up in a fight or sit in the back of a fight in not contribute anything, but it's really that he is stat-checked into being useless.

Games snowball harder at higher elo, so you have more one-sided laning outcomes, and hence a bigger chance of having a "bad" player on your team.

In prior seasons, if you got behind in lane you would just build tank, which kept the other laner from snowballing kills off of you and made you useful in teamfights as a damage sponge. That doesn't work anymore. Now, even if you are behind, you often have to build damage, which means you blow-up in teamfights and you are vulnerable to being turret dived in lane.

Darkdemon65311/8/2019, 3:43:38 PM2 votes

{quoted}

There is no way that I just became terrible at the game overnight

Probably not, but it is plausible you got a lucky streak to get to the promos or an unlucky one to get to where you ended. Play more games. If you deserve (based on your level of performance) to climb, you probably will. If you don't, you probably won't.

WalkingInACircle11/8/2019, 3:29:25 PM2 votes

Yes, it can get very streaky. I suspect Riot has something in there that flags you as a Smurf if you win too much.

Astrovert11/8/2019, 6:43:20 AM2 votes

You haven't seen anything until you see higher tier people intentionally losing ARAMs because the automatic Summoners Rift to MMR setting set them higher than they wanted to be.

Fella Air11/9/2019, 12:15:03 PM2 votes

If you devote some time to mastering a particular champion and eventually a particular role, you will almost certainly be able to get Gold IV. I know people complain about ELO hell but honestly, the mistakes people make in bronze and silver are so incredibly easy to exploit that even the smurfs you run into will have a hard time carrying the people who actually belong there. Promos are always annoying, and like many people have said I'm pretty sure riot does that intentionally - NO IDEA WHY, it makes the game way less fun... But that's just how it is and we kinda have to suck it up and deal with it.

Getting out of gold is a bit trickier, and getting out of platinum is a full fledged nightmare which I have embarrassingly enough never been able to accomplish in over five years of playing this game. At the end of last year I got to two wins in my series from plat 1, at which point I happened to run into TFBlade's smurf account twice in a row. After losing both those games (Super fair for a random pleb like me to be fighting one of the best players in the world, who by the way plays this game for a living . . . glad riot doesn't wanna do anything about their cash cow smurfs) I took a break but was still so tilted that I couldn't carry the usual promos feeders who showed up for my last game, and I quickly fell back into mid plat and have been trying to get back ever since.

I've noticed that generally the morons tend to start showing up in force after you go on a win streak longer than three or four games. I really hate the way that it seems like the ladder is designed to punish you for success. It really sucks. Getting a duo kind of helps, but honestly with as screwy as their matchmaking is that can also mess you up because now it's trying to account for two different MMRs at once and the results can be weird. It is just nice to have someone who you can trust, though.

In closing... Yeah, matchmaking is bad. idk how you didn't realize that until now but welcome to the world, man. Keep plugging away and you'll reach your goals, some day. [slayer-jinx-wink]

SniffleMuffins1/17/2020, 5:42:02 PM2 votes

Every year they send out a survey saying "what can they do better?".

And every year I tell them to open source their match making engine. Myself and other programmers out there would be happy to use MATH AND STATISTICS to make something that doesn't carry stupid bias and hidden variables.

But stupidity rarely recognizes itself.

Niggel Wessom11/8/2019, 4:28:10 PM2 votes

If you were at gold skill level you would get gold. If you can't carry despite your team you're not at the skill level necessary for promos.

Chocolate Cake11/9/2019, 4:33:25 PM1 votes

tthere is no such thing has "holding your own" in league..its all dependent on your team you get placed with

Neko Siren11/9/2019, 7:28:47 PM1 votes

The answer to bad matching making is to get a good duo. You know what I mean?

Linna Excel11/8/2019, 8:15:46 PM1 votes

{quoted}

I wish that riot would take some time and look into what is making their matchmaking so bad instead of making another skin line for Akali.

Completely different teams and disciplines.

Getting to your point, your elo is also an issue. You've got silver players, who are notoriously inconsistent, facing up against low golds who are starting to get their act together. If you want to keep progressing and keep climbing, you've got to take more and more responsibility for being able to carry your teammates because you are going to be facing better and better people.

Poppy is AFK11/8/2019, 3:21:57 PM1 votes

I just quitted a game where "my" "team" "mates" went 7-2 in 5:50 minutes. No need to play rigged games like these. I wonder how the MMR of these noobs can be so different to the enemies? A absolute sign of miss-match, caused by a bad "matchmaking". Anyone with a bit of mathematical sense knows how rigged this garbage is - either the "matchmaking" is manipulated or the MMR is busted because of those manipulations.

Håppy11/9/2019, 2:22:09 AM1 votes

It's this all the way up the ladder. I've become hardstuck plat 2 because there are so many afkers, so many junglers level 1 7-10 minutes in. So many people that just sit in base after dying 3 times. I've had a game end at 11 minutes- on my side, of course- because my Garen top built 3 executioner callings in to vladimir trollbuilding and everybody except me gave up. This game is broken.

Baby Ghoul11/9/2019, 3:08:45 AM1 votes

I don't take matchmaking that seriously anymore. I've always heard matchmaking was bad, but never experienced it until this season.

I usually just make it to Gold, and then quit doing ranked because it's really toxic if you play support, but this season I wanted to give it a try and maybe get to Plat.

I've been bouncing around Gold 2-1 the whole season though, occasionally dipping back into Gold 3 before I quickly get my promos again. I wouldn't mind that so much if I didn't get such weird teammates. The other day I had a game where I was hard camped bot, which isn't unusual, but our jungler flat out admitted he was going to sacrifice our lane to get Jax ahead.

Generally, I think that's a bad idea unless bot is losing lane already, but what can you do? He was against a Vayne top, so I thought that's gonna be easy to break. I'm fine with holding out if they can make a dent in top lane fast. We're getting constantly hit with 4 man ganks, enemies are blowing all their spells and ults, and what happens?

The enemy top lane and our bot lane break at the same time. The difference is a Vayne top is holding her own against a Jax, a Gragas camp, and Ahri occasionally going top. Oh and rift herald was called on us, and they're still all top trying to kill this poor Vayne and failing miserably. She wasn't a smurf either, which blew my mind, but I didn't say anything about it the whole match. Obviously we lost, but the Gragas had the nerve to say "GG this bot was hopeless."

[sg-lulu]

There's so many examples I can pull from like that and it's such a unique experience for ranked. Players like the Jax and Gragas have no idea what it means to be part of a team, and the system rewards them for that mindset too. That mindset creates a strain on the game when they get outplayed or can't make a play and we just end up spiraling into a loss because they won't work with the team.

The system wants you to hard carry people in a team game, which doesn't seem logical in my opinion. We should all be working together. I don't think we should all be higher than we are, but games would feel so much better under a different system, especially for a support main like me.