So when was positional matchmaking sneakily reintroduced to random games?

TesticlesOfMetal·4/16/2019, 5:52:58 AM·1 votes·1,872 views

Just finished a particularly badly matched game a while ago and at the end of the game stats screen, a message pops up saying that the match was tested with positional matchmaking and asked if my position was correctly matched. When was it announced that they are bringing this system back? I deeply disliked the system when it was introduced fully, with matchmaking at its all time worst for a season start, and it just felt like rubbish to see disparate ranks in one game, even if the oh-so-secret MMR ratings may have been level. I sincerely hope that positional matchmaking is not reintroduced.

3 Comments

ChargeItDownMid4/16/2019, 6:41:01 AM2 votes

Interesting, didn't hear much of it. Anyway, game quality has gotten even worse since position based mmr was removed. It is pretty apparently position based mmr wasn't the problem with matchmaking this season by now so I'm all for riot bringing it back. If anything, it probably was one of the few strings keeping ranked playable in NA.

Pokemonred2004/16/2019, 8:21:36 AM1 votes

SapMagic said Positional Matchmaking was never being removed. What they removed were positional ranks.

https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2019/03/dev-state-of-ranked/

From that article:

On the matchmaking side, we’re happy with how positional matchmaking—not to be confused with position ranks—is working. Queue times have improved for many players and off-position win rates have gone up. On top of that, primary position rates have improved, and in many cases, autofill rates have gone down.

From a lower paragraph on positional ranks:

With position ranks, we decided to run a preview in North America and Korea as a way to gather feedback and iterate on the feature before rolling it out more broadly. Six weeks into the season and after numerous bug fixes and tweaks, a significant number of you are still frustrated with the grindiness, low satisfaction of off-position games, and teammates not taking off-position games seriously enough.

TL;DR: They never said Positional Matchmaking was going away, because in their tests it was improving queue times and how often people got the roles they wanted. Positional ranks went away because it was grindy and people constantly trolled their off-role games.