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Positional ranks might destroy the ranked experience (Long Post)

Cait Main·4/30/2018, 8:36:44 PM·4 votes·1,388 views

The main concept of positional ranks are sounds. I know for a fact that I play Jungle significantly worse than ADC and could be a liability to my team but placing me in different MMR based on which position the game places me in is not the solution for 3 big reasons.

  1. Position swapping will be nonexistent. Player control in champ select is something that I will always advocate despite its flaws. The ranked before dynamic queue had many players holding champ select hostage for their role which was fixed with role selection. Now, players can choose to trade roles if they have concerns for their teammates performance. Even if I'm playing a game where I'm confident I can play a role at the same level as my opposing laner, I may have a teammate who simply doesn't want to play the role given to them. If someone just doesn't want to support and I'm fine with supporting, I could not swap with them because they could either over perform and be essentially artificially boosting the MMR of a different role or under perform and harm the MMR of a role I'm comfortable with. The former reason is the main focus of concern as placing someone who can be fact checked easily in a bronze game can lead to far more uneven games than before. I could be a diamond ADC with bronze MMR Jungle and then just trade my ADC after they check my op.gg and give them the freest win of their life causing the main issue to still be relevant.

  2. Ranked is no longer about improving as a player If I'm playing a game where I'm filled I have no reason to even try. If I lose a game of support it doesn't affect my main roles MMR so I have no reason to really care if we win or lose. There is a loss on my secondary then I don't care I'm still Gold in my main. There becomes pretty much no reason to care since players only care about the highest rank they achieve and never talk about their secondaries. One of the biggest points of players climbing into the highest ranks is being able to be carried as well as being able to carry. If I am unable to get carried in a secondary role, I shouldn't be in high ELO. Changing ranked to this would also encourage queue dodging. Why would i spend 30 minutes actively playing in a game that doesn't matter when i can just do something else for 30 minutes while I wait for queue to open up again. I wouldn't even lose LP in my main rank since i wasn't place in it. Old ranked was about how well a player could play League as a whole not how well they do on 1 of 5 preset positions. Players are going to lose some LP for being filled because they aren't as skilled as an overall player. The same would happen during a meta-shift where champs they excel on are weakened and being filled should be treated as such. Finding champs you can perform on in an off role is just as important as maining a role.

  3. Climbing will literally take FOREVER I play a game of Support and gain 20 LP in Support. I play a game of Top and lose 16 LP Top. I play a game of ADC and win 21 LP ADC. I've played 3 games and only 1 actually affects my rank at all win or lose. While Support players will climb at essentially the same rate due to low demand, Mid Laners will play practically 50% of their games in the desired role. The worst players of all would be the few who play fill. Climbing as fill is quite literally impossible which sucks because some players like RossBoomSocks made an entire series about climbing from Unranked to Diamond purely picking fill. Every game of ranked should count towards improving as a player especially for those who have less time to play. Some players like Heizman had to climb initially by playing fewer games because they had mechanics but needed to avoid tilting. In those players scenarios, they are forced to play more games to improve their rank as some games essentially don't count from the get-go.

I don't support the new system but if it is implemented I ask for a few things. Make every game of ranked affect my MMR for every rank even if it is minuscule. For instance, I win a game as top and gain 20 LP top lane and 4-5 in every other role or lose the same for each one. The goal would be for an off-role to be worth a 5th of a game at least. Give players an overall rank, whether its just your highest rank or an average is up to the team but I want to be able to see my skill as a player not as an ADC. Finally, Please find some way to disincentivize role swapping such as swapped players receiving no LP gain on a win. I enjoy the trials and tribulations of ranked and would hate for it to be taken away.

TL:DR 2019 Ranked will make ranked as bad as 2016 cause it will take too long to climb, ranks will mean nothing, and people will troll if filled.

Sincerely, A Filthy Caitlyn Main

4 Comments

Baka Red4/30/2018, 9:12:36 PM2 votes

Concern #1: I have no idea about that one.

Concern #2: You could use the separate ranking to learn about the other roles and develop your skills that way. In that way it would be quite powerful tool to improve yourself as a player. Also, you could more easily see how high you can go when your weak role(s) aren't a burden to your main role(s).

Concern #3: I would suspect that your concern number 3 could be easily taken care of: Cannot Riot simply make each role to climb at five times the current ranked climbing speed? That way you would climb as fast as before within each role.

Imo the idea Riot has, has a lot of promise for people who play Ranked.

haaaaaaalp5/1/2018, 12:11:56 PM1 votes

Here is the thing: autofill is already screwing up ranked. It should be removed altogether but if it has to stay, position based ranking will help some of the problems autofill generates.

mvmlego8/23/2018, 10:37:44 PM1 votes

I agree completely. Ironically, the positional rank system was designed to increase the number of roles played by each player. The problem is that, since players will care about is their top rank, the ONLY thing they'll want to play is one position.