Riot's Match Making "Special Sauce"

Gilles·5/31/2016, 11:00:27 PM·1 votes·439 views

(This is my first post so please be respectful. Not sure if Gameplay is the right board to post this to so please tell me if there is a better suited board and I will re-post this there.)

Riot uploaded a video to YouTube today with several people from the community discussing the state of Dynamic Queue. The main point I took from the video is that there are three main values rioters consider when coding the match making algorithm: match quality, primary role prioritization, and queue times. Lobster, the lead developer for dynamic ranked, repeatedly mentioned the difficulty his team faces when attempting to balance these three values since sacrifices must be made to at least one value in most match making situations. A question was posed to GBay99 and Scarra asking which of the three values they would be willing to sacrifice the most, and their responses could not have been more different with Scarra saying he was okay with foregoing prioritization of his primary role for higher match quality and shorter queue times while GBay99 said primary role prioritization is the most important value to him.

Since the ranked system means different things to different players as demonstrated by Scarra and Gbay99, I wonder if Riot has considered implementing a dynamic algorithm for dynamic ranked which presents the player with the opportunity to mix their own "special sauce" of values before entering the queue. I envision three sliders on the "Assemble Your Party" screen labeled something along the lines of Queue Quickness, Skill Equivalency, and Primary Prioritization where the party leader can choose which values his party is willing to sacrifice before jumping into a game. Perhaps each slider ranges from 0 - 100 and a player is allotted 150 points to allocate however they want so every value can have equal prioritization of 50 points if they so choose. In an ideal world these sliders would not be necessary and every value was met to the maximum capacity every time a player queued up for a game, but that simply is not practical. If Riot really wants to be as transparent as possible with their ranked system, I think they should let the players control the ranked match making algorithm.

Feel free to comment with any potential problems you see with my idea and present your own tweaks or an entirely other system you think might improve the current dynamic ranked system.

TL;DR - I think players should be able to declare how much they care about skill equality, receiving their primary role, and queue times before entering the queue to tailor the match making algorithm to themselves.

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