Can the placement matches be reset?
After 10 games of placements, I was moved from Silver 3 to Bronze 4. Now I know what everyone will say, if you're there, then you deserve it. But I really do not think that I deserve Bronze 4. You are welcome to look at my game history all you want for the last 10 games. out of 10 games, two were all but auto-loss from having afks (one game afk, and another 80% afk), 4 others from feeding/intentional feeding/helping the other team. i don't care how good you are, when 3/5 teammates had a kill/death ratio of 0-8/0-10, it is all but impossible to carry a game. Now maybe in season 2 or early season 3 a game could be hard carried, but since around mid season 3, the game has become much more team oriented and much harder to carry solo. Out of all the things I have read, it seems people are still stuck in the mindset of being able to solo hard carry a game so much, that feeding doesn't matter, when RIOT has stated before that they wanted the game to be more team driven.
What am I saying? I am saying I have already read horror stories of of placements for Season 5. Plat players getting silver, gold players getting Bronze 3 and below.....the list goes on. I calling for RIOT to seriously look at teams and matches in a game that "is team driven" and solo ranked based. Am I saying that I deserve to be Challenger tier? NO! absolutely not! I am saying that I spent my time climbing out of the bronze hell hole and at the very least deserve to be placed in the same division I earned through many games last Season, even if its Silver 5, where i was expecting.
What RIOT said:
As usual, you'll have ten placement games to fight through before settling in to your tier and division, ready for the climb. But this time, they work a little differently: in previous seasons, placement games were way more impactful than regular season games. Challenger players could lose all ten games and end up in Silver during the 2014 placements, while Bronze players could go on lucky winning sprees and end up in Plat before getting their butts kicked repeatedly until they fell a few tiers. Neither of these are good experiences, so while this year’s placements are still important, they won’t cause established players to swing as far up or down because of good or bad luck. Your placement will still be heavily influenced by where you ended up last season. If you've never played ranked, then your form in your placements will be all that matters!
Finally, with the pretty substantial changes that preseason brought, we figured that everyone should have a fresh opportunity to rise to the top. Because of that, we’re again running a soft reset to player position with the start of the ranked season, meaning you’ll likely place lower than where you ended the previous season.
As you guys can see, they said their selves that placements won't be as important as in previous seasons. But then they said that players would be lower than last season, which is understandable since there is climbing and challenger/master tier is lowers down to diamond/plat level automatically. Now one would think that as the auto-drop went along, it would become less and less of a factor based on lower rankings.
Let's take my rank for example: Silver 3 (OK maybe silver 4 if you look at it, but finished the preseason at 100lp and 1 win for promos to silver 3, and 3 promos in about 20 games, so close enough to be silver 3 (which i was at one point also)) last Season. If the ranking was done right you would expect to be Silver 3 this season with a 5 win/5 record in placements, meaning you have a 1:1 win ratio and that's where you should deserved to be placed. Now with say a 8-2 record, one would expect somewhere around silver 2 or silver 1, 10-0 would get you Gold 5 or so (meaning you definitely should be higher). Now if you get say a 3-7 record as I did, one definitely wouldn't expect to be moved MORE than a full division lower when it was silver to bronze. maybe from Plat 4 -gold 5, because you are expected to play better, but not from top 30%-40% of players to bottom 20% of players.
Now this brings up another issue: The single most complained about thing in LoL, AKF's. Why RIOT would choose to include placement games that had an AFK in them is beyond my understanding. They are placements and meant to judge your skill level to place you categories of skill based on play (this is already bad enough being place in a solo fashion based on a 5 person team game). I know for a fact that they record and can see games that had an AFK in them based on my experience with RIOT Support and the fact that the name is red in the after action report. ***So why, and I am asking for an official RIOT reply on this, is AFK games factored into placements.
In my case, 2 of the games had AFks in them, which are all but auto-losses unless your other 4 teammates are that much better and the other team just isn't good. With a 3-7 record in placements, those 2 games could make my record 5-5, which I would expect at least Silver 5 and would be happy with and not bronze.
On to another point, I distinctly remember last season placements where a few friend where ranked around silver 2 before, won only 2/10 games, and still got placed Silver again. So how does RIOT say "In previous seasons, placement games were way more impactful than regular season games..........so while this year’s placements are still important, they won’t cause established players to swing as far up or down because of good or bad luck. Your placement will still be heavily influenced by where you ended up last season." when I know for a fact and person have experienced the contrary.
Why did I take the time to type this?
Because I love this game. Its MOSTLY competitive, I have made good memories, and I have spent much more money on it than a normal game.
Because it's for the players. Yes that's right, not the top 100,000 players that RIOT seems to only care about and make the game for. but the other ~95% of players that are stuck in an endless cycle of trying to improve and have fun while being competitive.
What do I ask?
For an official statement from RIOT proving how luck and other factors did not contribute in the same or more "heavily impactful" way as previous seasons. And a call to reset the ladders if they can't do that.
PLease guys, post your placement horror stories here, I want to see if I am alone in thinking RIOT completely goofed this season's placements. Thanks for reading my word vomit!
