Positional Rankings
So after playing games on fresh accounts, and a couple on my main account, I think I finally have an opinion on the new positional rankings. I think overall, they have the possibility for becoming healthy for the game... BUT.... I do believe that they have some major problems right now. Please keep in mind that I play mid and top, but I have seen this many time over, and it works almost every time. It seems after first turret or the 17 min mark, the problem becomes fixed, but the game moves too fast for that to happen 100% of the time. I average about 24-30 min games, so that's the current sample size I'll be using.
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Macro Limitations - I think it's pretty funny how if you walk towards mid to swap the wave, and collect the xp while taking the lane for a solid 5 minutes (in the first 10-15 min of the game), you'll get a mid positional ranking even if you queue for top. :) If you're moving towards the mid lane from top to catch that wave, while your team is making the dragon play or bot lane play or your mid Laner is rotating top to collect the wave you gave to save a wave mid, you basically lose the whole point in playing that ranked game. You get a new positional ranking and splash +4 lp for your main role. So if you want that full lp, it means you have to stay in your lane for a good 15 min and hope your team doesn't get out macroed or outmechaniced in the bot lane...
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Lane Swap manipulation - I think this might be the biggest part of it... When you lose games, you're supposed to typically lose anywhere between 10-30 LP, but it seems like you can abuse this tactic. If you're in a position when you know you'll lose, you can just swap lanes with someone else before 10 min and ff at 15, then you probably lose 4 lp for your main role but 20 lp for your fill role. Lets say my mid Laner is 0-3 and I'm 0-2 against a snowball team. I can just swap lanes with him and we'll both lose very minimal lp. The rest of the team will lose the same lp, but definitely not us. I'm wondering what happens in a lane swap where adc and support go top, and top Laner goes bottom.
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Uneven Distribution of Rankings - Now I don't think everyone is smart enough to do this, but I feel like if this gets out of hand or doesn't get patched, it's decently easy to pull the bottom tier of a rank like D4 into the upper tier like D2-D1 because they can just use their other positional rankings as proxies as a sort.
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Punishment for Lane Swapping - I don't like to be punished for being smarter than the enemy team. The system punishes you for knowing what the better match-up is. i.e. in my solo queue game, Urgot and Vlad is a match-up you can even find in top lane. It's a lot more favorable than pre 9.3 Akali in fact, but I ended up getting a mid positional ranking for trading with my top Laner. I don't know if that's the intent for Riot, but I think it really isn't fair especially for the people who use their head before the game even starts.
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Too Much Climbing - Now I don't know what the positional distribution is, but it'd suck to get your secondary role 9/10 times. That just makes way too much grind where those 9 games would be from P2 to P1, whereas you gain 20-30 lp in your main role and 2 ranks on your secondary role all the way down in G4.
While I do very much enjoy these positional rankings and the idea of it, I think it becomes a bit too far-fetched at times. These problems honest can just be fixed by determining the amount of time you spend on/around your lane in the first 6-7 minutes of the game. I'd like a Rioter to enlighten me on how they determine what positional ranking is given, but I'll leave a link of my game where I queued top and received a positional ranking for mid... and yes I did pop off. That was literally my 2nd game with Urgot mid. I've always played it top.
https://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/NA1/2963987183/215371785?tab=overview