Hello LoL Community, I've playing League for a long time now, and I've never exactly understood how the ranked placement games determined your rank. I have a few ideas, but i'm not 100% sure on how it works. Do they determine it based off of your wins in the placements games, how you play in them, how your team does overall? I'd love some feedback if anyone knows, thank you everyone for your time!
Wow, I came here hoping someone posted a Riot link but just 2 comments that provide incorrect information are here :/
"The only thing that matter is win/loss ratio" - ABSOLUTELY NOT We know this since players can win 10 out of 10 games and end up in Silver 3, or they can end up in Bronze 5 with the exact same 10 win placement performance.
"Wins only, as far as any non-rioters know. Since the removal of the ELO system we don't actually know if our mmr changes based on performance." First, while the "Elo" system isn't used, that doesn't mean performance isn't tracked through MMR. They use MMR, it is just a different equation in use than the Elo system but they achieve the exact same goal. This I have a link for: https://support.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/201752954-Matchmaking-Guide Where you can see that MMR is directly based on performance. This performance is basically based on percentage of games won, but weighted towards recent games although from this link there is no indication that the algorithm ever "forgets" a game and as such every loss seems to affect you permanently to some degree.
I don't have a concrete answer unfortunately, however I can tell you this:
MMR must have a role, otherwise it seems that every season would be complete madness.
How you play in the games doesn't matter at all, only if you win or lose and as such affect your MMR. This is because League is an emergent strategy game. They set the goal, but they do not know the optimal way to get there so it cannot be algorithm-ized in the first place. At the same time, even if it could be, doing so would ruin the game as far as skill rating goes. If you could just perform certain actions in game to boost your rank, outside of winning or losing the game, then Riot would just be rewarding whatever behavior in game that is giving you this MMR. This means players would not care about winning and would only try to satisfy this criteria. The best players would then be those who abuse the algorithm instead of the ones who prove it by winning more games.
While I theorize that MMR must have a place in placements, keep in mind it actually is not related to rank. Specifically, your MMR determines who you play against. NOT YOUR RANK. This means you could in theory be Bronze 5 rank, yet be playing games against challenger players due to your MMR being top tier. However, you would still have to climb out of Bronze by attempting to beat these challenger players. If you succeeded in climbing then your MMR would get even higher from winning even more games which means that if you manage to re-reach actual challenger rank from this position then you probably will have the absolute highest MMR in the entire game. This is very interesting and means that performance and Rank do not necessarily coincide without some other mechanism which is exactly why I am lead to believe that MMR must be the determiner of placements. If not, then there would be no point to "rationalize" the system. To make it so that the ranks are actually balanced, MMR and rank must meet at some point and we know from the link I posted on the matchmaking guide that matchmaking is never the place where rank matters, nor any other piece of information other than your MMR for that Queue.
Wins only, as far as any non-rioters know. Since the removal of the ELO system we don't actually know if our mmr changes based on performance.
The only thing that matters is win/loss. Another factor is winning your first few games, they will effect your placement much more than the later ones.
