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Riot, I think the League system is flawed and here is why.

Maximum Viktor·3/10/2015, 12:19:45 AM·5 votes·437 views

Gonna repost this from General Discussion because I think it's relevant.

So the League system has been out for a few years, and while I don't think it's bad, there are some problems with it that require looking at. Its biggest problems are that:

  • It is confusing because it's almost completely detached from MMR, the thing that actually matters

  • It fails to provide that sense of small scale accomplishment between players that share a league

  • It replaces demotion anxiety with promotion frustration, which isn't much better.

Let's start with the first point. Everyone's probably familiar with this because they have probably seen threads asking why their LP gains are so bad, or why they're in Silver III but are getting matched against Gold players or vice-versa. This results in others explaining to the person what MMR is, why it's invisible, and why it matters more than the thing that is supposedly supposed to tell them where they belong on the ranked ladder. I never understood this. Why is it that MMR is invisible and instead a system is introduced that only loosely correlates to it?

Quote me if I'm wrong, but I remember it being explained that one of the reasons for the League system is to provide players with smaller accomplishments. You have smaller groups to compare yourself to, and you move through your tier in increments, from Division V to Division I. I believe that Riot completely failed to accomplish the former, while the latter largely works, but it can still work a different way.

Since one of Riot's reasons for the League system is to allow more, smaller scale accomplishments, each division in each tier has a mini ladder, with people that have more LP being higher. Riot said that it feels better for players when they're ranked 3 in Renekton's Demolishers, Gold Division IV, instead of being ranked 539492 in NA. However, I think this is false. Nobody cares that they're rank 1 in Champion's Nouns, Bronze Division IV, because there are literally thousands of people that are rank 1 in their division. There is no interaction between players in their tier, so surpassing them is utterly meaningless. However, only I am rank 2,421 in NA, in the top 0.26% in the region. If I win a few games, I will surpass a couple dozen or even a hundred players. This is actually meaningful.

However, despite one flaw which I will touch on shortly, the division system does work. It gives players smaller goals to work for that feel great when you reach them. Instead of having to climb an entire tier, you can instead take smaller steps, working on reaching Division IV, then III, then II, then I. Promotions feel good, especially when you reach the milestone of a new tier. But what if you can't get promoted?

Another of Riot's reasons was that reaching a milestone felt great, but falling from it felt awful. So once you reached a new tier, it was impossible to fall from it. This created quite a few issues, such as extreme clamping inhibiting the perception of progress, and boosting. Now, you can fall a tier, but only if you more then deserve it and then some. However, to compensate for the difficulty of demotions, you now have promotion series. This exists so that you can prove to the system that you deserve to rise up in the ladder. But by doing this, Riot has made some games arbitrarily more important than others. Now instead of gradually climbing up your division with a 55% or 60% win rate, you suddenly have to win the next three out of four games to rise a division, or the next four of fix games to rise a tier (one win to reach your series, then 2/3 games to pass your division/tier). So demotion is less frustrating, but promotion is more frustrating. This just shifts the bad feelings from falling to climbing.

How does this all get fixed though? I propose that we do what Riot had already done at the end of Season 2. Remove the promotion series, make MMR visible again, and have it directly correlate between tiers, similar to what they had here right before Season 3. You still have small goals to strive for, and although you can drop divisions and tiers with no safety net, you can get back into that tier with a single win, since you no longer have to win a series of games that were deemed arbitrarily more important than others. You can see where you really belong on the ladder with absolute certainty, instead of speculating based purely off of your LP gains and losses.

Some people might not agree with the region-wide ladder, since seeing that you're rank 925,000 and the bottom 99.5% of the region can be discouraging. A possible but not necessary alternative is to add a ladder based on the entire tier in the region alongside the global ranking. Instead of being the bottom 80% in NA, you're now the top 1% of Silver players in NA. I feel that this is sufficient to accomplish Riot's goal of smaller accomplishments, without making it so small as to be meaningless.

tl;dr: I suck at closures so here's a tl;dr. League system is confusing and doesn't accomplish most of Riot's goals with it. Remove promotions and clamping, keep divisions and tiers, and have it directly tied to a visible MMR.

1 Comments

I am Pacman3/10/2015, 3:50:48 AM1 votes

I agree with most of what you have said and your ideas for a new ranked system look good. (Be warned, most of my numbers are just made up on the spot but the theory still stands)

It is confusing because it's almost completely detached from MMR, the thing that actually matters

The Lp system, (If i remember correctly) was added to

create the smaller divisions and to create a sense of smaller accomplishment (which it does as you stated),

but also for Riot to punish people who dodge champion select and games. This allowed them to drop your Lp as a punishment instead of your Elo/MMR. this i a minor point and after a quick skim of the original League ranked release i may be pulling things out of my ass on the second point.

Original Riot post http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=33523499#33523499

I like your idea of keeping the divisions and only using the MMR to determine them, however I would like to keep promotion series. As useful as MMR is, I don't go up to my friends saying I am 1900 (ballpark guess) MMR, i say I am Plat II. removing the series would remove the sense of accomplishment from going up a division and potentially make divisions pointless.

To expand on my above statement, promotions NEED to be changed.

  1. Removing both divisional and tiered promos
  2. Removing divisional promotions and keeping the tiered promos
  3. Keeping both and changing them (say number of matches)

I personally think 3 is the best option and would like to see division promos have 3 out of 5 games to win, and tiered promos would have 4/7, 5/7 (can-t think of a good number at the moment)

If the go this route they would have to have promo games have no affect on MMR or Lp and losing would put you back to 80(division) and 60(tier).

It fails to provide that sense of small scale accomplishment between players that share a league

Completely true, I could not care less for the people in my division or tier and I never bother to look or care to see if i have passed anyone. Your idea of creating a % of tier would be great. It would let me strive to become the best in that tier. maybe also add the % of all ranked players as an option to be shown. This idea would be incredibly rewarding if i was in the top 50% and i moved to the top 46% in a session of games.

It replaces demotion anxiety with promotion frustration, which isn't much better.

I sorta said my 2 cents on this earlier but unfortunately haven't seem any system of ranked play where there isn't at least one of these.

Overall i agree with you and I hope you get a rioter to discuss it.