So I played my 10 games. I won 6 and lost 4 but got placed in Bronze 2. I had a buddy who won 3 games and lost 7 but got placed in Silver 4. How does this work exactly? It doesn't make sense to me. A red post would be nice. I would appreciate the confirmation from a trusted source.
Basically it's based on your MMR when you go in (which would be based around last season/pre-season MMR or Normals MMR if you've never played ranked) and then it is based on who you win against and who you lose too.
You might have lost your first few games when they were pairing you with S4-5 and so they started pairing you against B3-4 and you started winning so they put you in B2 or your friend might have had a G4 MMR and have lost a lot of games so he got placed in Silver. It's not just 'how many games out of 10 did you win'.
I doubt you'll get a red post on this topic, but your placements are based around your skill level and your skill level is determined based on the skill of the players you're beating and the skills of the players you're losing against. Riot's matchmaking will adjust itself throughout the 10 games based on whether you won or lost.
I'm not sure what the provisional games do for Riot in determining rank, but I'm pretty sure they use other statistics to decide where you are placed. Matchmaking Rating (MMR), or something Riot uses similar to MMR, is a hidden value used to determine who you are matched against when in queue. (I'm pretty sure). So although you won most games, your MMR dictates that you are still probably not yet ready for Gold or higher. I also read somewhere that everyone gets placed low initially (maybe someone said that just to make someone else feel better haha).
Last season I jumped around from Gold 5 to Silver 1-4. Just back and forth, due to poor games here and there and AFKers and intentional feeders ect. It's frustrating. My friend was only Silver 3 last season. So I don't know what the deal is...
Your " buddy " lied to you . I can smell it from a mile away .
Riot gives you a new provisional MMR. We conjecture that provisional MMR is equal to (your MMR + 1200) / 2; with 1200 being the server average MMR, somewhere in the silver band.
You then play 10 games against opponents around your provisional MMR. Based on your results, you are assigned to a division that is, on average, about three divisions lower than your expected true rating. If you go 10-0 you'll end up in about the same division your provisional MMR was in, while if you go 0-10 you will end up 5-6 divisions lower.
Based on the information you gave me, I estimate that you ended last season in silver 4. Neither lolking nor op.gg have a feature for looking up previous season rankings, so I wasn't able to independently verify that guess.
I can report my personal experience -- I was in D5 to end last season, went 4-6 in placements, and was placed in P3. I played some games over the weekend and acquired 55 LP for winning 50% of games, so clearly my MMR is higher than my current divisional placement by a fair bit.
