Reply to Riots Matchmaking Guide

Alright so, I am sure we've all been there and complained about matchmaking. For a few starters, I get queued with bad players, no not talking about

"Finally, both the Dunning-Kruger effect and negativity bias also play a role here in shaping players’ impressions of their matchmaking experiences overall."

here. Where I am talking about is, I could go 5/0 mid or top and my other lanes are going 0/10 by the same time. When you have a nasus power house down mid with 400 stacks at 20 minutes and about 200+ farm and the bot is about at the same level as he is, what can you do really? Most of my higher level friends have questioned how I get horrible randoms almost every game (70% of the games, but I can come back from some of them, not all of them), and a few of the same or lower elo players are saying my account is flagged as a smurf. Which I didn't even think was a thing, but I looked it up and I was right, it isn't a thing.

Anyways, many of us want a better matchmaking system in which games would be more clear and concise, and honestly, I did put in some ideas towards you guys (Riot), however not all of them were looked at or even considered. Which I found a bit funny since it literally answered every problem you've ran into with your little guide. Allow me to post it once again, and to you random people, feel free to improve on the ideas. Criticism is only good if it is constructive, don't know what constructive criticism is, this post probably isn't for you, so you can turn around now. =D

You're response to this question:

"WHY DON'T YOU INCLUDE OTHER DETAILS, LIKE HOW MANY KILLS OR DEATHS I HAD, TO DETERMINE MY RATING?"

was a tad disappointing. Yes I understand your response but 2 problems.

1.) This can be fixed by doing a K/D/A, don't forget the A Riot. the A IS VERY IMPORTANT. It's called assists and this gives us a overall range of something called: "Kill participation" If you are a support who is 0/10/0 then you are in over your head that game. But if you're a support who is say, 0/4/25 in a game where only 30 kills exist, then you are in an elo below your rank. BUT I mean just 1 game isn't enough for it, we need consistency of course. I would personally say govern it to be 75% of games, if you win 75% then you could get a boost up a division or two or perhaps more elo per win, SOMETHING is better than nothing.

2.) By neglecting this method, you are actually hindering people, perhaps this is your idea of strengthening them, however kicking someone off a cliff and expecting them to climb back of isn't exactly a way of making better players. NA is notorious for having one of the worst elo's in the world. NA hasn't won a worlds tournament yet! and we aren't even close to it. So your "Lion" methods of strengthening people aren't working. You want people to get better, you don't give them a handicap, you give them stronger opponents. Which sounds pretty counter productive when you get down to it but in actuality it works. I'm not telling you to advance losers so they get better, no, not by any means. What I am saying is, we have here a different way to advance.

If you took every player who did GOOD in their game and took it as far as they could, minimal deaths, good amount of kills and assists, and they didn't feed and only provided for the team. Why are they punished with the loss of someone dcing, lagging, leavers, ragers, inters, feeders, boosted players, and other reasons for losses. Why does that person deserve a loss when they did everything right, but their team as a whole did everything wrong. League of Legends is a team game and when you don't have a team but the enemy does, you right now count this as fair, which by your own definitions isn't fair. Or else leavers and inters wouldn't be punished. So Riot, I'm giving you a ton of ideas in this post for you to work with and actually improve league of legends in a way all sides can be happy.

So moving on from those, lets address some more disappointing lack of attention to detail in other posts Riot has offered in this guide of theirs.

"HOW DO I KEEP ENDING UP IN GAMES WITH PLAYERS WHOSE SKILL LEVEL DIFFERS GREATLY FROM MY OWN?"

Honestly, I am torn with this. At one point I could win 9/10 games and climbed easy, then at another I lost 9/10 games. And not all of these games were my fault. One game in particular (this happens a lot, but I will only use ONE of these games as reference to a problem.) I was playing Tristana and I was 12/0 18 minutes in, we were doing great bottom lane but top and mid did horrible. My team decided to surrender at 20 despite my being ahead. Because in their minds everything was grim, the enemy mids and top weren't even snowball champions they fell off later, but my team was so bad at making decisions they decided to turn down the fed adc to move on to another game, this was after I aced the enemy team in a team fight nonetheless. Now I want you to give me 1 VIABLE excuse as to how this was my fault or how I deserved to lose that elo that game and all other games like that. I know I am not the only person out there that experiences pains like these. You can easily prevent this with the method above. Though to be honest I was never an advocate for it, but I could at least see it's usefulness and fairness if done properly.

Next one:

"BUT ACCORDING TO THEIR RANKED BORDERS AND THIRD PARTY WEBSITE X, THEIR MMR IS WAY HIGHER OR LOWER THAN MINE! WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN?"

Uhhh easy, because you admitted earlier your mmr isn't based off skill alone but it is based off of win or loss. That's why you have gunk clogging up higher elo's, the horror stories of bads being in plat and diamond are numerous and you can even see it in youtube videos and streams of higher elo players. Sorry Riot, your system is as you said: "That is not to say that our matchmaker is absolutely perfect. " But you can actually make it better if you listen and learn and improve it. Solo Queue is there for someone to prove their own skills to showcase how good of a player they are because you can always have a team carry you to a higher elo than you deserve, solo queue was to remove that and showcase how good you are as a player. Well, start with stats. Stats tell you everything you need to know about a player, and personally, I think most websites are more accurate to how good a player is, than your mmr system.

Next post:

"HOW DOES RIOT FEEL ABOUT SMURFS?"

You say in this you need to find a better way for them ect ect. I have an easier way. Have it like a mmorpg, make multiple summoners per account, and you can link different accounts to 1 if it uses the same computer. You can easily put in some flag in your settings to identify a players computer and the accounts it uses, you can easily link the accounts automatically, or if you discourage smurfing, then you can delete any account not linked with it. And if you link the accounts you can identify who it belongs to, family, or alternate account. I personally don't like this myself, but I mean it is an idea and brainstorming is a vital part of any company. Put up a little bubble with this in there and then surround it with more ideas.

Next post:

"WHY DON'T WE JUST PUT TOXIC PLAYERS INTO A DIFFERENT QUEUE?"

Alright -cracks knuckles- I've been playing since.. ROUGHLY September 15th 2010 the time Miss fortune came out. And I've made this for years and years and brought it up many times. -cough- Well, you missed something in this.. Let me Quote a few parts you missed from your own post:

"Not only does it go against our goal of reforming toxic players, but it also feels extremely negative in the rare case someone is incorrectly sent there."

I cleared this up with my solution you guys seemed to ignore. Allow me to repeat -clears throat-.

You can still have the reforming of toxic players, my idea was like ranked queues. When a person is toxic, they are automatically put into a different "elo" but this "elo" would be this different queue.. It doesn't change servers like country servers, you can still play in NA you just are in a different queue because your account is flagged toxic. But i offered a solution, once you are in this queue, you can get out by showing good behavior, if a person isn't report for being toxic after x amount of games, then they are placed in normal queues with nicer kinder people, and if they stay there as long as they aren't toxic OR if they get honored x amount of times by nice players. Finding a queue where there is only 1 toxic player on each team with a bunch of "nice" flagged players might increase queue times, but don't do the crime if you can't do the time right? A longer queue time is much better than the issues you may face in the other suggestions on it.

There is more though, you can increase how many games they have to play based on how long they are logged off. kind of like Elo decay, because they could just be going onto an alt account to get into non toxic games queue, so you can combat this by increasing the amount of games they have to play. Again, you can flag their game files, so it tosses all games into that queue on any account they log into on that computer. So if you have a problem of "What if he borrows a friends laptop or a siblings computer." Well don't loan your computer to your brother or friend when they have one of their own they could be using, also you can have the persons name flagged with a toxic symbol so all his friends known they are in the toxic servers so if he asks they can choose to have their accounts in the toxic server until they get out of it. I mean you need a way to alert people and that's a good way to alert people.

"Finally, since League of Legends is a free to play game, prisoners may opt to just abandon their account and transfer their toxicity to our newest players."

Sorry Riot it's already happening, have you not made new accounts lately? I watch my friends who are under 30 and their games are toxic, as much as ranked games are. Trust me, been there, seen that. haha. But again, with the above, flag the computer or internet or something. If they want to say they have siblings or family that plays, they can show some proof of it (only if you go the IP route.) I had to go through that with a social media site, they didn't allow multiple accounts and watched the IP, so me and my gf at the time had to take a picture holding up a piece of paper with our screen name on it, and we got the ban lifted. It's crude, and a way I absolutely hated, but when dealing with IP's that does work and is absolutely effective. There are many other ways though.

Also another way I feel might be a bit productive, is, if someone leaves mid game there are 3 ways to handling this.

Way 1: You give them a leave and everyone else a loss forgiven. ONLY under the circumstances they are not duo with anyone, if they are premade with someone, then everyone will still suffer the loss. That way they can't boost friends accounts at all on crappy games or enemy is severely stronger. Though if someone has to go to those lengths, then it probably is an unbalanced game anyways.

Way 2: If you are doing really well that game and your score is good, you lose LESS LP than you normally would. It doesn't matter if you lose a lot or win a lot, but how much you lose or gain. If you do really well in a losing game, you should lose less LP than you would in normal losses. Lets say you are winning 20+ LP a win, but losing 14 a loss. Well if you go 7/0/11 as a carry role or even for support you go 0/5/20 (for examples) then instead of losing 14 you should only lose like 3-8. It's not fair you lose a lot in a game you weren't the one to lose in. But to make this balanced WATCH THE KILL PARTICIPATION, make sure they ARE fighting in team fights and not just cleaning up and backing off. KDA as well as Damage to champs could easily be monitored.

Way 3: This one is a bit far off I know, and probably skeptical to many, but it can work. I feel if there is someone intentionally feeding, or a leaver, that you should implement the "pause" button that has a 45 minute pause, that can only be one when voting or when someone leaves giving them a chance to get back into the game. Don't make it 45 minutes but you can make it like 5 minutes maybe 10 tops so it isn't so killer on time. Or if someone is inting and feeding then you can have the team vote, and it kicks that player and they incur the entire loss in lp as well as a penalty like a timer or something. And then a pause timer takes place, where it can find someone of that role to come in and take it, they have to play that champion, but all items are refunded to gold, in which case the new player could take any items they wanted as well as fix their runes. This can be listed with a checkbox if you are willing to fill in for a role that you are looking for (one of your two desired roles), and then you can have it where he gets loss forgiven if they lose, but like a 50% LP raise if they win, incentive for them wanting to win the match, rather than just feed and leave, or you could have him lose everything all the same. Pedantics can be changed, it's the concept at hand.

I have a million and one ideas on everything, I just expressed my preferred ideas in a relatively manageable length.

I know for a fact you can put it in the user files though, it's just whether you WANT to or not. Which only shows us the players if you are actually trying to improve things or if you're just being lazy.

Well that was a long post, maybe I might get lucky and Riot will actually sit down and read it, or perhaps i'll get the "Toxic" community only reading it. Thanks either way. =D