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Let's talk about "Forced 50% Winrate"

WTBeGirl100EUhr·2/16/2019, 12:55:00 PM·51 votes·20,329 views

What that means is that the more you win, the higher level games you get put into. Your MMR increases each time you win, and will continue to do so unless you lose (for that game it goes down). As you start playing against better opponents your winrate will go down, until it stabilises at around 50%. That's what the term means.

I see a lot "Oh, match making wants me to lose this game because I've won some".

No. Your opponents get better, your teammates get better. At the same rate.

Why do you have to play against plats/dia when you're gold? Because you have high plat/dia MMR and so those are the opponents the system thinks you can beat. You'll climb in that situation with a 50% winrate because that's how LP/gains losses work. Or are at least supposed to work, bugs with positional matchmaking LP gains notwithstanding.

Match-making is trying to put you in games at your skill level. You'll probably find that a lot of you have games just like the ones you complain about your team having, or are making other critical errors in your gameplay and just don't want to admit that the idiot that is 0/10 at 10 minutes into Nasus is the same skill level as you.

MMR isn't perfect and could definitely do with being visible. Invisible match-making systems make people suspicious - especially in team-based games when their teammates don't do well every game.

128 Comments

Asud2/16/2019, 6:57:28 PM55 votes

Of course it's forced. Whenever i am at lower LP (from 0 to 80) i get teams of all types, good, sometimes bad, most of the time average. And it depends a lot on how i play it. BUT whenever i come to one game from promos or in the promos itself. I must by default get literally inting team. Dont let them fool you. Everything is tracked. If they can show you at the end of the season how many times you died to Yasuo and how many times you killed a Yasuo. Trust me they know everything. They know which accounts have tendency to disconnect and go afk. They know lose streaks and win streaks and everything that matters. And when you are near to promote to next division you will get these people from elo hell in your team if possible. The system is not designed to help you climb. They dont give a damn. The system is designed to annoy you and to stop you from climbing so you get tilted and play even more. Thats all thats important to them. That we play as much as possible. Not our climb, not our mental health. Nothing. Only play time.

DrCyanide2/16/2019, 1:36:45 PM23 votes

No. Your opponents get better, your teammates get better. At the same rate.

This is where the experience of those saying "forced 50% win rate" differs from your expectation. They see enemies getting better while teammates get worse - not just for one game but for a series of games. Hence forced 50% win rate instead of natural 50% win rate.

Poske2/16/2019, 1:31:28 PM21 votes

The enemy doesnt get better your teammates just get boosted, you get matched up with straight up bought / boosted accounts because the system notices you are unstoppable

Thats the issue I have with it

Akali Prime2/16/2019, 11:49:02 PM19 votes

"your teammates get better" thats where you lost me

[sg-miss-fortune]

Saianna2/16/2019, 7:17:11 PM17 votes

No. Your opponents get better, your teammates get better. At the same rate.

From my experience my teammates don't get better, or they don't get better even half as fast as enemies.

USG Failsawce2/17/2019, 4:27:53 PM14 votes

Except that this is not how it works at all..

As your MMR gets higher than your rank, you get matched with teammates who HAVE to have low MMR for their rank in order to average things out, even if it's matching you vs higher elos. That's literally what team MMR averaging is, and the reason that very soon you start to see teammates that go 0/10, because their ACTUAL skill level (and mmr) is much lower than their opponent's.

In other words the more you win and win and win, and get major streaks going, the worse your teammates have to be for their own elo, in order to compensate for your crazy win streak. It starts matching you with players who are much worse than their own lane opponents, player who are about to be demoted, or on major loss streaks themselves.

That's how it forces a 50% winstreak, and it's a bad fucking system. The absolute last thing it does is give you 'better teammates' as you increase your mmr, that's a terrible way of looking at it, and largely incorrect. It actually ends up doing the opposite - giving you worse teammates when compared to your enemies, to compensate for your much higher than average mmr.

5050BS2/16/2019, 2:01:26 PM12 votes

Riot does not just give you harder opponents. They give you int feeder and afk team mates. THIS is where the whole ELO system falls apart.

ELO ONLY works in a system where

  1. Teams dont change for a whole season
  2. Players all play to win.
  3. There are no Smurfs

None of these things happen in SoloQ and so ELO will 100% fail to do what it was designed to do.

FixHealsRemoveGW2/16/2019, 10:05:06 PM9 votes

There are 2 reasons why your winrate can approach 50%. One is that you DID climb or are climbing very fast and eventually you get opponents that are too good or just as good as you.

The other factor is really bad games were one side just feeds incredibly hard and you basically win or lose despite how good or bad you played and i gotta say that the incompetence of players in low elo is getting more insane every season and the skill differences in one match feels astronomical. You play one game where you are not even out of laning phase like 10 min into the game and your team already lost it completely and then next game you are handed a free win and it feels just so pointless. Winning isn't even fun anymore. I honestly get tilted and bored just by winning sometimes.... A certain percentage of games will basically be coinflips and there is nothing you can do about it. If you try really hard and maybe talk to people they will probably report you at best and you get a nice chat resitriction to spice up your already shitty experience.

And then another side effect of this is that people tend to give up way earlier because they expect another unwinnable game and that amplifies it even more. So you basically have a good chunk of games that are 50% games and then a few games where your performance mattered because the match allowed it.

AR URF2/17/2019, 8:11:28 AM7 votes

So what about getting silver teammates vs low plat opponents? Or gold teammates vs high diamond players?

MarkedOfKane2/17/2019, 12:02:18 AM6 votes

It tries to put you in games of your skill level, but the thing is, your actual rank isn't there yet. If I am trying to climb when being matched against plat players, I want to be winning games in plat, not silver.

koshkyra2/17/2019, 2:31:11 AM6 votes

Your opponents get better, your teammates get better

No lol. If this was true then nobody would think that this “forced winrate” stuff is happening.

Zeyphel2/17/2019, 2:33:29 PM6 votes

Still, it is one of the worst concepts I have ever seen. Lets suppose you are a gold player with high MMR trying to climb to plat and you are being matched with enemy diamond players. How is that fair? because we have similar skill level? That player should be placed in diamond then. If you are competing to get out of gold, you should be playing against gold players; that is fair.

And you shouldn't have a forced 50% percent winrate. Riot has never learn that it is a bad concept. People shouldn't get punished for winning, and be forced to loose games. If you are too good to be in plat, then Riot should allow you to climb fast to diamond or master because you don't belong to that league anymore. But what does Riot do? It gives you the worst players when you are in promos and want to keep you in the same division.

Accursêd2/17/2019, 8:05:10 AM5 votes

Assuming what you're saying is true

mostly because I don't know one way or another how it works

that's a pretty shitty system

assuming your mmr is higher than your elo, you end up getting a 50% wr at your current elo when your mmr reaches your proper skill level

this means that assuming your "50% wr" is true, you would be climbing ~6lp or so every 2 games, adding up to ~33 games for you to just reach your promo/provisional

thats pretty trash imo, in what world should you be stuck in an elo you don't belong in while playing against people in your mmr, which is arguably where you belong

øHaruø2/17/2019, 6:44:20 PM5 votes

That must be why I just lot to a d4 GP when Im Bronze 3.

I must be so damn good.

Sobx2/16/2019, 9:29:36 PM5 votes

{quoted} Why do you have to play against plats/dia when you're gold? Because you have high plat/dia MMR and so those are the opponents the system thinks you can beat. You'll climb in that situation with a 50% winrate because that's how LP/gains losses work. Or are at least supposed to work, bugs with positional matchmaking LP gains notwithstanding.

Match-making is trying to put you in games at your skill level. You'll probably find that a lot of you have games just like the ones you complain about your team having, or are making other critical errors in your gameplay and just don't want to admit that the idiot that is 0/10 at 10 minutes into Nasus is the same skill level as you.

Yup, that's how it is and THAT'S EXACTLY why it's stupid. When you try to "prove you can get through X rank", you shouldn't be placed in the game with "X+5" rank just because "your mmr is that high". It shouldn't matter how high your mmr is (in other ways than giving you different LP values), because you're not rewarded for your mmr. When you try to get through, let's say, GOLD, you should be playing with and against GOLD players. If the system "thinks" you're ready to play in diamond, then holding you in lower ranks is plain stupidity. Yeah, the game is "supposed to put you in your skill level". And your "skill level" is supposed to be reflected in your rank. If the system "thinks it's fair to put you in games 2 leagues above", then why isn't it putting you inside 2 leagues above?

Not like I care a lot, but the current system is just a double ranking, which places you in games according to one -"invisible"- rank and rewards you according to another rank that forces you to go through promo series for pretty much no reason. I also don't think people care that much if they get 19 or 23 LP, but it sure is frustrating to get these 50-50 games during promos. And why is it putting you in games like that? "because system thinks you belong higher, but not really, so have fun".

Nea1042/17/2019, 7:50:29 AM4 votes

{quoted}

What that means is that the more you win, the higher level games you get put into. Your MMR increases each time you win, and will continue to do so unless you lose (for that game it goes down). As you start playing against better opponents your winrate will go down, until it stabilises at around 50%. That's what the term means.

Technically, this is how it works. Naive. Point is, it doesn't actually work this way, and that's the problem, obviously.

No. Your opponents get better, your teammates get better. At the same rate.

False. You can check pretty much every match history to find out stomps are so more frequent than balanced games. You usually get a far better team, or a far worse one.

It's pretty easy to check, looking at personal experiences, friends' match histories, streams of every elo (more reliable in a Gold-D1 range), and so on:

  • Since stomps are far more frequent than balanced games;
  • since games often are one-sided since the beginning, before snowballing effects can happen; and, most of all,
  • since there is no gradualness at all in the difficulty of the games you find (far better opponents - far worse opponents),

their matchmaking must either be rigged, or just incredibly awful beyond every level of incompetence in coding.

Karfuss2/17/2019, 7:56:22 PM4 votes

The biggest issue is that it doesn't consider YOUR MMR.

I'd ordinarily be fine with a system like this, if it didn't decide to average the entire team and place them against an averaged higher MMR team. The way it accomplishes its forced 50% win rate is to put lower MMR players with you, to bring your MMR down.

Rather than simply placing you, and you alone, in a higher MMR game... Everyone on your team gets screwed. You're not proving that YOU belong in that MMR, you're praying to God your other lanes don't collapse in the first 5 minutes.

Zoukeeper2/16/2019, 8:31:54 PM3 votes

I though this was a meme until I actually played ranked seriously. I can predict my winning and losing streaks with good accuracy now. Every time I advance a tier I get a losing streak for a couple games, then I win 3 or so to get up to 60-80 LP then I lose until I get to zero, and then proceed to get free wins until I get to 60-80 LP and repeat, or go to promos and lose and then repeat. Eventually I'll win the promos. Since i'm gaining way more LP for winning than losing I'm still climbing so in the end it doesn't really matter.

iPooUnicorns2/17/2019, 6:43:14 PM3 votes

Although this isn't from ranked, matchmaking is overly aggressive in trying to "balance teams out" by putting bad players on your team in all queues.

In Nexus Blitz, I had a 60% winrate with 500+ games, so naturally I had a high MMR. So how did matchmaking accommodate for this?

By making me play games like this, all the time. https://i.imgur.com/YaFBYUa.png

Ahri a Stark2/17/2019, 3:58:05 PM3 votes

It is forced. Whenever i have a winstreak, a losestreak follows with noticeable worse players. You already can see it at their masterie points. Enemie: at least 2 or 3 with main champs and 200k points and good winrate my team: 4x no main played, around 10.000-30.000 masterie points, autofilled supports or "they want to test champ in rankeds". It's alwayst the same since 3 years. they want to force you to 50%.

And what a bullsh.it "your enemies get betters and your teamates too" no lol, just no

HopeStartsWithU2/16/2019, 10:56:01 PM2 votes

Everything you said is right, except for the point of "Your opponents get better, your teammates get better. At the same rate." This is simply not true. You can force a 50% with many other factors. You can play against the same skill level you are right now and get worse teammates in your promos, meaning you have to carry 4 worse players while beating 4 who are playing just like you do.

Teammates get better with climbing divisions/ranks but only if you have the right winrate for it. Having a winning streak of 5 games doesn't change your MMR drastically to the point where every enemy has to stomp your mates into oblivion. You are in a losing streak simply because you won too many games in a row, bringing your "current" winrate out of proportion. And the system tries to match that "rise" in skill by either giving you mates who are on a losing streak (or are too bad for your elo) or giving you opponents that are too tough for you to handle. Or you get both, too good enemies and too bad mates. It happens all the time and to everyone.

I do think that this system is fine though because the ones who really deserve it will maintain a higher elo and win games by force. (People don't like that system but on an objective perspective it's the easiest way to determine the good and the bad players otherwise nobody would reach challenger)