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Matchmaking

OldDirtay·7/26/2017, 7:19:07 AM·3 votes·204 views

Does anyone else think they need to somehow rework elo/mmr/matchmaking ....aka whatever is matching people with other people?

idk about other people, but i wouldnt mind if they just took a whole season and reworked it, idc even if i had to wait 20minutes for a game if they were of better quality games then they are now

and speaking of matchmaking, can we make the ladder a ladder? what kind of ladder have you ever used properly and started 40% up the ladder to begin with? you dont lol, you start at the bottom and work your way up....so why exactly are new accounts given silver2-gold5 mmr to start with?

if you did it for smurfs then let me explain why that doesnt work....you did it so smurfs get a "head start" and dont ruin "lower elo games" as often....but what you actually do is throw everyone into that smurfs position, ill go out on a limb and say 50% of new people are smurfs....

so they jump in their first rank games and they either get a ringer to help win the game or just some dude who has no idea what he is doing but just hit level 30?

personally, id rather climb from the very bottom....ladders even out....if you belong higher, you will eventually climb... Even if smurfs did join they would get in the game, win, then move up while all the trash stays at the bottom.....but right now its like we filter the trash down to can and they once we get nothing but cans you come in and throw trash back into the semi sorted pile...and thats kind of dumb

to all those saying matches are balanced, i question you to put your money where your mouth is and answer both what a balanced match is exactly and if you agree there is uneven games, then how often does a fluke have to happen to not be a fluke anymore?

Challenger=search league matchmaking and look at images, tell me what you see...or shit look at just some of the posts on here, shit theres one in gameplay right now https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/gameplay-balance/luOzehbF-well-im-confused-on-how-this-guy-landed-in-this-game

Does that look even to you? do you see no problems with that picture at all? Take a sit and think hard on it before you call me some salty player, my opinions are that of my own, but facts are facts, that picture with that game, happened...fair has a definition and so does fluke, ladders generally (always far as i know) start from the bottom up....

so what do you think and why? keywords, AND WHY

no sense in saying its fair without coming with facts as in why its fair, thats like saying well the skies blue while someone asks you why and you reply with "it just is/just because" except you dont even leave the just because lol

2 Comments

Mojihito6667/26/2017, 9:25:24 AM1 votes

Yes i unisstalled until ranked system changes.

Aterpater7/27/2017, 8:30:47 PM1 votes

Okay. We could do the usual and have a debate over each mathematical nonsense of the system or myths based on personal experiences and such. But let's approach it differently this time and ask: does the system work or not after all? We don't have to dive too deep as several people - who didn't miss their math classes - already ran simulations of the system and even wrote very serious papers about it. You can find them or videos about them if you are really interested but the conclusion is:

In a theoretical sense, the system works. As after enough time played it managed to sort players by skill in the simulation. It isn't a suprise for most of you I guess. The suprise is that "enough time" as for accurate results what you need is 10.000 hours per player. Ridiculously insane. But don't worry, the system already give acceptable but pretty inaccurate results after 700-1000 hours per player. You could say it's awesome as you - and everybody else in the matchmaking system - just have to waste your whole lives playing LoL and everything will be nice at the end. But the truth is even more sour as 1000 hours is a damn long time, you can learn a couple of languages or even graduate at some schools. We can suppose that a player's skill will significantly change in this time, so, we have a ranking system what is unable to judge your skill faster as your skill changes. A ranking system like this, we can simply call useless.

There is a reason why no real competitive environment ever use systems like this (before somebody starts it: yes, the Elo system used in chess has very significant differences). And sadly there's a good reason why this system is used in almost every F2P video game. And probably this is the reason - beside some psychological effect - why the league and LP system is there, to hide how bad the MMR system is. And this must be the reason behind the MMR system being hidden - as nobody can say any reasonable way to "exploit" it (as this was the main argument...) and on top of this, one of the primary requirements for any ranking system in any competitive environment is to be perfectly transparent (for obvious reasons...). And the piramid-like structure what the league system tries to force on the playerbase is already manipulated in a sense, with about 50% being bronze and so on. A fair system would result in a different distribution. Just drawing a comparison with chess players' Elo ratings, more than 50% of them are around the 1200 middle ground, most of them are between 1000-1500 and just a few below or above this. That is a very nice curve. So, in reality LoL leagues would look like without manipulation that more than half of the playerbase are in gold with just a couple of challengers and bronze 5s.

But look this from a different point of view: LoL - and similar games - aren't sports with real competition and ladders but profit oriented businesses. From this point of view why is this system so good that apparently they would rather rework ever single aspect of the game than touch this?

  1. It forces you to "grind". It's good as it boosts the online players count at any given time (Btw this is the reason too why smurfs are tolerated. A smurf count as a "player" in those fancy statistics. Based on the popularity of smurfs, I wouldn't be suprised at all if that sweet 100.000 would be rather 20-30.000 actual players in reality...)
  2. It gives you enough success to keep playing, enough frustration to keep grinding and enough failure to spend money on the game, but hopefully not enough failure to bad players to quit.
  3. There is an illusion all the time that just a few divisions above you everything will be nice and balanced - just to realise when you're there that it's the same crap, but just a bit above... So, you always have some motivation to log in and grind. And there are some more like these. As you can see, the aim isn't a fair ranking but "user experience". To make you play a lot and probably pay but don't quit. Sad, but we're living in a world like this...

A common misconception that people like to treat the system as it was perfectly accurate except judging their own skills. But the truth is that it's the same crap for everybody. This is why there's no reason to count how much bronze, silver, gold or plat you had in a game or even what was the MMR difference as it's very likely false data compared to the real skills of the players. But the result is well-known to everybody: things are mostly random.

Solutions: There are many better approches to design a good matchmaker. Some takes more effort from the developer, some takes less. And the possibilities go way further than what people here usually take into consideration. I don't want to get into it deep as I already wrote a wall of text (sorry, I tried to give some proper reply). But if you are really interested, this thesis can be an interesting read: Rating systems with multiple factors, M. Stanescu. In Master Thesis. School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 2011 (tried to link but I can't...)

Oh, and one more thing: The problem isn't really that you start a ladder from the bottom or not. Elo and Elo-like systems use a starting number in the middle ground (like 1200 for Elo...) and they work as good as the other. The problem is that the current system is unable to measure players' skills in reasonable time, hence it's unable to do any good matchmaking.