bizarre matchmaking behaviour

Hi all,

@riotsupport on twitter asked me to create this here.

PREFACE: This sounds like the whining of a bad player. I assure you it's not.

I've been seeing some really odd behaviour in matchmaking as of late last week. After taking some time on some other accounts I returned to an old bronze account of mine to rank it up and began stomping, 10:1, 20:1 KDAs, 85% winrate preffing mid/top. Then some time around maybe Thursday, all of a sudden my queue times blew out. I would regularly wait 11 - 16 minutes for a game (sometimes up to 20 minutes), and my teammates are, to be perfectly blunt, awful.

They're dying faster than I can get fed, like 0/5 1/7 0/9 1/6 at 20 minutes. This is stuff worse than I've seen in Bronzodia. A perusal of the queue times graph from the Dynamic Queue Update post show these kind of queue times reserved for Master matchmaking.

Now I'm not going to claim to be anywhere near Master level, but to me it looks like the system is finding super low MMR players and pulling me in to balance out the teams against players around maybe 1000 MMR and then calling it a day.

I don't mind losing, you can learn something from every loss. What I do mind, is games that had 0% chance of being won minute zero. The game has literally become unplayable. My winrate on that account has dropped to 40%. I've got accounts in a bunch of regions around the world and I've never seen anything like this.

What gives?