I've had so many people try to argue with me about whether there's a matchmaking system in norms. I get on my level 25 account, do one of my first draft games in forever on it, usually i just play bot games for leveling. THERE'S A FUCKING GRANDMASTER IN MY GAME, TWO DIAMONDS, AND EVERYONE ELSE IS PLAT OR GOLD. Im the only pre-30 in the game, how is there matchmaking, you cannot even pretend lol.
Ofc there is matchmaking.... it's just really really really bad. That's not even debatable. The typical smartass will jump in here and say "but there is normal game MMR", but that doesn't change the fact that the result is really really really bad, so that means the way the MMR is calculated is just not refined enough to give good matches.
Smurf / no smurf and the recent win/loss trend is just not good enough to match players in a queue where they are not separated further by divisions with specified MMR ranges. At the end of the day you still throwing iron players together with the occasional challenger.
There is definitely more Riot could do, a high elo player should not be matched with players that frequently forget to make use of trinkets for example. There are things you can detect to reduce the amount of ridiculous matches.
Well, Riot pretends all the time, so apparently they can.
It's simple: Pre-30 account that can CS? Must be a smurf! They can hold their own against their non-smurf counterparts.
On a side note, Diamond/Grandmaster players tend to play more Ranked than Normals, and since the two have completely separate MMR systems, their Normals MMR will be less accurate than their Ranked MMR.
