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Is the ranked ladder too bottom heavy?

Constantine III·4/21/2016, 12:54:17 AM·3 votes·1,352 views
http://www.leagueofgraphs.com/rankings/rank-distribution/na

I wanted to ask the community their opinions on the ranked system break down, specifically looking at the distribution of players within this system in terms of divisions. Furthermore, if you've ever wondered why the upper tiers are so restrictive, I believe I have found the answer. The wild link will lead you to a graph that shows you the rough breakdown of what % of ranked players are in each division.

First and foremost, I don't know if these numbers are, to the T, 100% accurate, but I am confident that they are accurate enough to give us a general feel for the distribution of players in ranked.

When I first saw this graph, I had a sort of knee jerk reaction and I was a little taken aback at how bottom heavy the distribution was. Now, before you jump to any conclusion, I'm a diamond player, so this isn't going to decay into a rant about "Elo hell" or some such nonsense. My point is that almost 3/4 of ranked players are silver or bronze. In this sense, less than about 1/3 of the divisions categories take up about 3/4 of players, which seemed tremendously disproportionate to me. Furthermore, the percentages seemed rather wild and didn't conform to any sort of unity to a system (AKA; the numbers were all over the place). After all, the top 3 divisions only make up less than 2% of the ladder, which seemed absurd to me.

I then endeavored to even out the distribution a bit by playing with the numbers. First off, let's establish that, for the vast majority (literally 99.9% of league players) there are five ranks; bronze, silver, gold, plat, diamond. I'm excluding master and challenger because those tiers being so small is necessary because they are reserved for top top level players.

But for all the other mortals that play the game, I asked myself, "Why aren't the divisions just sliced up into chunks of 20% with each division being 4% of that 20%? That would make a lot more sense to me as it would be significantly easier for players to compute exactly where they sit on the ladder. Furthermore, it shrinks milestones for them to climb to, meaning that rather than having to crawl through almost 40% of the community to get out of bronze they can beat half as much and actually feel legitimately rewarded for their efforts."

Now that's certainly one way to see. However, I spent more time analyzing this "more even" break down of players and came to a few realizations.

First off, expanding diamond would kind of create the inverse problem to the one I mentioned in bronze at the top, where there would be a sort of choke hold in diamond one. Because, if you go back to the graph, breaking everything up into chunks of 20% and each division being 4% of that 20% would mean that diamond five up would actually be 50 lp + in diamond 1, meaning that winning a match would pretty much only reward players with something around 3 LP in order to halt a flood of players entering master tier. Furthermore, it would really degrade the accomplishment of getting diamond in this game, since getting d5 in this imaginary system would be the equivalent of getting to about_ gold 4 now_. Actually, let me re-phrase that. Using this system would annihilate any significance of being in the "diamond elo" what so ever. Not that getting diamond 5 makes you a God or anything (not even close) but the entire feel of the rank would evaporate. Is that a problem? Maybe, maybe not, that's up to the eye of the beholder.

What I found really interesting with this ladder breakdown is that Riot has, clearly, chosen to favor the competitive players at the top level as opposed to the bottom. As I explained, it seems that my system would be "more fair" to bronze and silver players, but the current ladder is much more progression focused (with way smaller player # gaps at the top) for more competitive players, essentially those in the top 20%. Obviously I'm a little biased being on the top side of things, but in the end I decided that the way things are now is better.

But enough of me rambling about numbers. Do you guys think the ladder is too bottom heavy? Should Riot try to shrink the gap at the bottom to even out player distribution? Is preserving the prestige of getting a rank more important than making a more "even" ladder? Thanks for reading, and I hope you found my food for thought at least a little bit interesting!

10 Comments

Sneakyy XD4/21/2016, 1:36:28 AM3 votes

No, it's not. What you're seeing is because there is nothing below bronze. It would otherwise be a standard bell curve.

DrDiaga4/21/2016, 1:14:05 AM1 votes

Its. Because the ranked system is garbage. And by that I mean their method for drtirmining rank.

90%(ish) of players fall in the last three divisions, 70% in the last two.

But people often say the last two, and sometimes up to gold even, is all basically the same.

But the skill disparity in bronze-silver (don't know much about gold) is so wide. There are a lot of players who are actually pretty good at the game, and a lot who are pretty bad.

And I mean consistently.

But unless you are that top their level of good, where you are good enough to overcome some of the truly bad people who play, you are stuck in the system because its based off win/loss, not actual skill.

Being good at the game doesn't mean you are so good you can overcome heavy weight from heavy players. But it doesn't mean you are bad and need to be trapped by them.

Yes you can climb, but to a point there is a huge amount of luck in matchmaking involved.

If there was a chart that showed distribution based on individual skill level, I think it would look vastly different.

GenghisEmo4/21/2016, 1:32:44 AM1 votes

The differences between Bronze and Silver is about the same overall, in that players are inconsistant.

However, there are some who are clearly great mechanically while others genius tactically.

Bronze and Silver have too many people. As it is now, elo hell is real. The game rewards me up to 35 or 40 LP for a single win, and i have lost 6 LP for loss.

The system does try to compensate LP gain/loss, but matches me with straight up newbs who dont get keystones, dont upgrade FREE TRINKETS, or cant perceive a simple tip as a good thing.

Due to this, Ranked needs fixing.

It isnt hoeribly busted, but needs some fixing.

A bubu fix could be an added rank, like "Unranked" for sonething that is basically "Wood" division (obviously, wood too demeaning). And Unranked as we now know it can be called "provisionals" (0/10 or 8/10 depending on games left).