Why do people think that the system gives you worse teammates to counter-balance a win-streak?

HalcyonDweller·Aug 17, 2017·9 votes·660 views

Why is this what people think? What evidence is there to support that belief? Is it more than just circumstantial?

Practically speaking, it would make sense that the higher your MMR climbs, the lower MMR teammates you get matched with to balance the team's average MMR against the opposing team's average MMR. This is my understanding of the system. I doubt it has anything to do with win-rate, but if there is evidence to the contrary please feel free to prove me wrong.

43 Comments

ChargeItDownMidAug 17, 20175 votes

[deleted]

HalcyonDwellerAug 17, 20171 votes

This is extremely helpful :D Thanks for contributing!

[slayer-pantheon-thumbs]

MoldyCheese1Aug 17, 20173 votes

ive had mmr team ratings differ from like 500 in normal games. but srsly they should just add people of YOUR skill to YOUR lane not just the game,

HalcyonDwellerAug 17, 20171 votes

I agree wholeheartedly. It is unfair to end up matched against someone who is absurdly more skilled than you in your lane matchup.

SujirenAug 17, 20172 votes

Fact is when you lose a lot of elo in short time ,the system, just keeps matching you with teammates that will underperform, till you pull off a couple 1 vs 9 wins, then it will go back to normal matchmaking. From what I heard its hidden anti boosting mechanic they implemented long ago, to deal with people that bought accounts.

HalcyonDwellerAug 17, 20171 votes

That's really shitty for regular players who don't do anything wrong. I wish Riot would implement something different to detect people who are sharing or purchasing accounts.

HalcyonDwellerAug 17, 20171 votes

Additionally as you climb, it is possible that you simply have a higher likelihood of getting matched with and against higher skill players, since your MMR is higher than before. Those higher skill players will have a larger impact on the game when they do well or poorly, thus creating the disempowerment you feel when you don't have an impact on the outcome of your games (due to teammates doing poorly).

Ozag the MightyAug 17, 20171 votes

I've went on a 7 game win streak and on the 8th my whole team was WTFPWNED before the 15 min mark, I don't play ranked just mainly blinds and draft so my situation is prolly different from ranked play.

HalcyonDwellerAug 17, 20171 votes

Damn dude, that sucks. I'm sorry you had to deal with that.

420 gramsAug 17, 20171 votes

Mmr is sensitive

ValyrianBladeAug 17, 20171 votes

Your practically speaking is inaccurate though.

Pretty sure riot has claimed your mmr should be used for matchmaking, such that as it rises you get better opponents AND allies.

What you're claiming is you'd get the same opponents and worse allies. Does that mean a bronze just has to beat silvers with a team full of golds to climb, but a diamond needs to beat golds with a team full of bronze players? It'd make a lot more sense to have the diamond beat diamonds with Diamond teammates.

So what people complain about is they seem to get streaks of games where their allies just outright suck. The only problem with this is that you can never know if X player sucks or Y enemy is amazing . maybe player X is actually as good as you, but player y is better / having a good day.

At the same time though - i get only mmr matters in matchmaking - but there should be further considerations. It's never made sense to me that one team can have a bunch of low gold and high silver against a team with all low plat for actual ranks. I don't care if we're all gold 2 mmr - that's not balanced matchmaking. It proves almost nothing when the plat team wins. Literally just that at least 1 of the players on the gold team has been lucky and doesn't belong at this elo OR one of the players on the plat team has been unlucky and belongs at higher elo. Yet it feels like these games happen a lot and the system uses them to say "okay all of these plat 5s with gold 2 mmr really do deserve plat, and all of these gold 4s with gold 2 mmr really don't even deserve gold 3." Meanwhile half of us played well and it was a close game that was decided by one player having poor late game macro and getting caught every time a major objective was up.

HalcyonDwellerAug 17, 20171 votes

{quoted}

Your practically speaking is inaccurate though.

Pretty sure riot has claimed your mmr should be used for matchmaking, such that as it rises you get better opponents AND allies.

What you're claiming is you'd get the same opponents and worse allies. Does that mean a bronze just has to beat silvers with a team full of golds to climb, but a diamond needs to beat golds with a team full of bronze players? It'd make a lot more sense to have the diamond beat diamonds with Diamond teammates.

I mis-spoke. I meant that you should have a higher chance of being the highest MMR on your team, not that each team's average MMR would be significantly different.

So what people complain about is they seem to get streaks of games where their allies just outright suck. The only problem with this is that you can never know if X player sucks or Y enemy is amazing . maybe player X is actually as good as you, but player y is better / having a good day.

You've raised an excellent point here, this is why I have so much trouble understanding the argument that "the system intentionally gives you worse teammates to force down your win-rate to 50%"

At the same time though - i get only mmr matters in matchmaking - but there should be further considerations. It's never made sense to me that one team can have a bunch of low gold and high silver against a team with all low plat for actual ranks. I don't care if we're all gold 2 mmr - that's not balanced matchmaking. It proves almost nothing when the plat team wins. Literally just that at least 1 of the players on the gold team has been lucky and doesn't belong at this elo OR one of the players on the plat team has been unlucky and belongs at higher elo. Yet it feels like these games happen a lot and the system uses them to say "okay all of these plat 5s with gold 2 mmr really do deserve plat, and all of these gold 4s with gold 2 mmr really don't even deserve gold 3." Meanwhile half of us played well and it was a close game that was decided by one player having poor late game macro and getting caught every time a major objective was up.

I agree here too. Rank and MMR are seemingly completely disconnected and it leads to frustration for players who don't have any real way of determining how they measure up against other players.

PoskeAug 17, 20171 votes

Because it Literaly does that

It values you as the best player in a group and assumes you count as 4 players just because you won 3 games in a row

HalcyonDwellerAug 17, 20171 votes

You're not providing any evidence to help support that claim, I'm asking people to provide evidence to prove it.

PoskeAug 17, 20171 votes

Truth

Here is a problem

MMR is hidden

I can only speak from experience and logic

You see

I would have around 90% Winrate if Riot werent putting strong enemies and weak allies for me

** The system ll do everything in its power to keep you at 50% winrate **

You might ask why?

** To prevent the smurf abuse riot has some systems to value players higher if they stomp lots of recent games or have like a winstreak**

That way those challenger smurfs in platinum are already rated as diamonds

Now granted the system isnt perfect

And you can still boost dia2 player to master with a challenger smurf going duo with him. But the system ll make it harder for you

HalcyonDwellerAug 17, 20171 votes

Perhaps the system has tweaks in place for that purpose. But I think Magewick raised an excellent response to people's use of their personal experience as the sole basis for that conclusion. See the bolded text for the most important bit.

{quoted}

Because they don't understand how probability works.

Instead of finding teammates, lets pretend for a moment that someone is flipping a fair coin 1 million times and observing the results. Technically, after every string of heads, the person will get tails. This does not mean that each additional heads in a string makes the next flip more likely to be tails. However, the people who observe every string of heads eventually end with a tails flip may feel that way. You can look up the monte carlo fallacy if you want to read more about this as a similar situation happened at a roulette table once.

Now imagine what happens when a person goes and plays on a smurf which much lower mmr than where they belong. Matchmaking is not perfect and will occasionally give allies who are better or worse than the player's mmr. Lets say matchmaking will randomly give allies of quality 1-5 with 5 being the best and 1 being the worst. Matchmaking will give something like: 4-3-3-3-2-5-1-4-5-1-1-5-1-1-3-4-4-1-2 (just ran a string in a random number generator). Matchmaking isn't "trying" to enforce a win or a loss anywhere. However, if the player is on a smurf and can carry teammates of quality 2-5, what they see is: w-w-w-w-w-w-l(bad allies)-w-w-l(bad allies)-l(bad allies)-w-l(bad allies)-l(bad allies)-w-w-w-l(bad allies). They observe themselves going on winning streaks which are interrupted by a loss from matchmaking screwing them over. As a result, they think that matchmaking is intentionally screwing them over because they won too many games when in reality, there is no background tinkering of any sort.

Also, you can prove that matchmaking doesn't intentionally give you worse teammates simply by looking at queue times. If matchmaking gave you any ally good-neutral-bad when you are not on a streak but only gave you bad allies when you are on a winstreak, then matchmaking would have a smaller potential ally pool to select from when you are on a winning streak and therefore need to take longer to queue you onto a team. Also, when you are win neutral, you should observe a ton of games where you are matched against a team made entirely of players who are much better than your elo (i.e. when you are selected as the "bad ally" for another person on a win streak).

General Esdeath Aug 17, 20171 votes

Because it literally does. I've had games with one plat player on the enemy team with 2 golds and 2 silvers vs a team of 3 golds and 2 silvers.

If you ever go on a winstreak you'll notice it. You suddenly get some guy on tilt, who tells you in the chat and flames all game. I never see those guys at all unless someone on my team is on a super winstreak.

HalcyonDwellerAug 17, 20172 votes

I mean no offense by this but that is all correlative evidence. And correlation is not necessarily causation.

If a red car is driving by my house every time I make pasta for dinner, is my cooking pasta the cause of that car turning down my street? Probably not.

What we need is Rioter input on this issue, they have access to the code of it and should know how it chooses who to match together.

General Esdeath Aug 18, 20171 votes

Except Riot doesn't send us any data. And anecdotal evidence in the amount we've had over the years? more than enough

HalcyonDwellerAug 18, 20172 votes

It is easy to develop misconceptions about a system when one does not know the actual methods by which the system acts.

Anecdotal evidence is all based on a limited viewpoint of the system. It makes it very difficult to properly confirm or deny a hypothesis, or even attempt to perform an experiment, because without knowing all of the factors that are used, it is too easy to attribute a change to the wrong factors.

If you want to pull data for many players, and specifically their match histories for like 25 or 50 games... be my guest. If you can cross reference their win-streaks and loss-streaks to show that there is an overwhelming correlation, I would be inclined to believe you. But I cannot accept anecdotal evidence as the sole basis for a claim.

Case in point about anecdotal evidence, there was a guy who took aspirin and died. Does that mean we should ban aspirin? Maybe, but we should probably investigate first, maybe confirm cause of death, and see if the aspirin could have affected his body in a way that could have triggered whatever killed him.

Later it was found out that he had had a bleeder stroke because his blood was too thin, and once we knew that aspirin thins blood we would know to not prescribe it to patients with already thin blood or who are at a higher risk for strokes.

General Esdeath Aug 18, 20171 votes

Except it';s not based on a limited viewpoint. We can view our live match team mates/enemies and their MMR on LoLNexus. The only reason this wouldn't be concrete is because premades exists and we can't see who is premade. Someone ranked Gold 4 with an MMR of Silver 1 can play in Gold 2 because they're premade with their Gold 1 friend with Plat 5 MMR.

HalcyonDwellerAug 18, 20172 votes

Did you seriously just only address my first paragraph? Are you reading in order to understand or are you just reading so that you can prime a response and fire it off?

Gonna be honest it's a little discouraging when it looks as if you read my first sentence and then gave up reading because you already had a response formulated.

We can see much of the outcomes, but we do not know the actual rules by which it reaches those outcomes. There are a number of different ways it could make it's decision. It is erroneous to assume that it attempts to control your win-rate and keep it at 50% because we do not know if that is a rule that it uses to make its decisions about who to match us with and against.

Off the top of my head, you could just be getting matched at a higher level, and getting other teammates who also have higher MMRs than their rank. Just because somebody on your team gets snowballed against and also happens to be a low rank does not mean that they are consistently a feeder, just that they are tilted or having a bad game.

That aside, anecdotal evidence by its very nature is a limited viewpoint. It comes from a limited group of people who have had a similar experience. It is based off of the experience, and not the methods by which the experience was created, and it is extremely easy to miss key factors due to not knowing which rules are used and to what degree they are used or what priority they are used in.

General Esdeath Aug 18, 20171 votes

Reading the first paragraph and responding while I wait in queue :^)

jk your entire post falls apart at that one line. It's not so much limited, it's just that there's a flaw. It's not so much anecdotal when we CAN get 25-50 people for this but we can't see premades, ruining the entire experiment with one variable.

HalcyonDwellerAug 18, 20172 votes

My point is that anecdotal evidence is even worse than that. It has no basis. Just experience, which takes into account even less factors.

For the most part you could account for premades, you could tell if players tend to play together often, and that would help identify most of the cases of that.

General Esdeath Aug 18, 20171 votes

Except if it's only one game together we can't. Not to mention they may party up after winning a game together, meaning one game factors the premade it while the other doesn't.

HalcyonDwellerAug 18, 20172 votes

{quoted}

My point is that anecdotal evidence is even worse than that. It has no basis. Just experience, which takes into account even less factors.

General Esdeath Aug 19, 20171 votes

Because a website stating MMR and match history is just experience. Makes sense to me!

HalcyonDwellerAug 20, 20171 votes

<sigh> Basing a claim off of one user's history is not good evidence. The singular experience is anecdotal in nature and cannot be used as standalone proof of the claim.

If you cannot cross-reference and confirm it then it remains unsupported.

bloodybadger1Aug 18, 20171 votes

i think its because it happens to an extent. as you go on a win streak your mmr raises, say 100 points, but your rank is still relatively the same. in my not so humble opinion, your rank tethers you to a team mmr close to your rank. So if im gold 5, at 1500 mmr (team overall) and i go on a win streak and am now considered 1600 mmr (individual), but my team mmr is still around 1500 mmr, then my teammates must be worse than usual to balance me out. right? before the winstreak i was at 1500 mmr and my teammates coulda been 1500, 1500, 1600, 1400 but now they are 1400, 1500, 1500, 1500 and i am at 1600. Avg before for teammates = 1500, avg after winstreak = 1475 which is a solid decrease among four teammates in my theoretical example.

But its just my theory. No real evidence since i dont document it. just realized you basically said this in your post...

HalcyonDwellerAug 18, 20171 votes

Like you've said, it's a theory. it's a good one, and one that deserves testing, but it's difficult to test without MMR data.

I think it would explain what is going on if your theory is correct. But that can be said about other theories as well, and until they have been tested and confirmed we cannot know for certain which is the case.

ForFoxSakesAug 18, 20171 votes

Ever go on a win streak to pass a promo then get totally fucked for your next few? Rarely will you pass a promo then keep that win streak going because then the system will need to heavily adjust you to jump several divisions. I got to gold here then worked on my alt to get to gold so I dont have records of the games just prior to getting to gold, but I just started up solo queue again here and look at the broked AF matchups

http://imgur.com/g7dj5Nr http://imgur.com/BXGU5TA

it's more extreme from one tier to another rather than a div to another since you need to get at least 4 wins out of 6 rather than 3 of 5 to move up.

Armored YokaiAug 18, 20171 votes

Matchmaker is indeed flawed there is too much evidence that win streak then loss streak is no coincidence there are diamond level players that cannot carry silver games/bronze games comepltely

HalcyonDwellerAug 18, 20171 votes

What evidence? You can say it exists as much as you want, but I'm asking for concrete proof.

LyingOnLineAug 18, 20171 votes

Because they're idiots.

HalcyonDwellerAug 18, 20171 votes

While I appreciate your show of support, this type of statement is not helpful.

What you have stated here is an oversimplification and it does not actually hold true for every person who thinks that. Also it is likely to piss them off.

Please refrain from making inflammatory remarks on my post. I would like it if you did not antagonize the people I am trying to communicate with.

LyingOnLineAug 18, 20171 votes

I like your attempt to communicate with them.

I just don't believe that people that deep in the confirmation bias mire are capable of actually being convinced otherwise.

HalcyonDwellerAug 18, 20171 votes

Thank you for understanding.

That may be true, but on the off chance that I do draw the attention of someone who is not deeply in that mire, I want to try to persuade them. In order to do that I need to not position myself as their 'enemy.'

Hence why I did not want someone to draw their attention as an 'enemy' by commenting as you did initially under my post.

Pandemic PunchAug 18, 20171 votes

{quoted}

Practically speaking, it would make sense that the higher your MMR climbs, the lower MMR teammates you get matched with to balance the team's average MMR against the opposing team's average MMR.

This is it. However, just like real world politics, when people are upset with something they will blow it out of proportion to attempt to have an argument. That is all that is going on. IMO Riot's system is in a great spot. Especially since they hold our hands through promos with free wins :D!

I have gone on long win streaks with immediate losing streaks several times this season. However, I knew I could have won the majority of the games I lost if I was mechanically good (I tend to play support-like champions in every role). People just want to outrage about everything these days.

HalcyonDwellerAug 18, 20172 votes

Thanks for contributing! I was wondering if others thought similarly to me.

The DeckownerAug 18, 20171 votes

It's very simple. Lets use an example with made up numbers, say you have 1000 mmr. You then match into games that average 1500 mmr, containing players in the range of 1000 to 2000. You skill is better than that of a 1000 mmr player, so you win because you are performing in a high mmr level, while only taking up low mmr portion in match making, so you can get good teammates. Then as you climb to 2000 mmr, you end up performing around your mmr level, but matched with other players much lower than you. The claim of getting worse teammate is actually some what true, since in a team ranged from 1000-2000, you started at 1000 with good teammates and win, then you eventually take over the mmr portion of the good teammates that you once had, so you will feel like your teammates get worse after a winning streak.

If this climb of mmr happens in a longer period of time, then you won't feel like the change in quality of teammate that drastic. Whivh is why you usually only feel like you are getting much worse teammate after a winning spree.

HalcyonDwellerAug 18, 20171 votes

That would make a lot of sense, thanks for explaining this!

Mysticman89Aug 18, 20171 votes

I reckon magewick there probably has the primary reason to it.

Another contributing factor though (that's probably more confirmation bias than to do with the actual matchmaking), is that people tend to put more stock than they should into 3rd party mmr estimates/ranks. If you're at a gold mmr, and you see a silver 4 in your game, people tend to assume that's riot giving them relative trash to carry, and not a silver 4 that actually themselves has a gold mmr (or at least high silver). Occasionally people will go a step further, and look them up and check the silver 4's MMR according to some third party. If the silver 4 has silver 4 mmr according to those sources, then people tend to freak out and see it as evidence that yes, the system is working against them.

Theres two reasonable explanations for such a player to end up in a gold mmr game. The first is that they actually do have an approximately gold mmr, and the third party is simply wrong. The other is that they're duo'd with someone, and that other someone has a high gold or even plat mmr to counter balance things such that the duo is on average gold mmr. Since ranks don't always correlate with mmr, that high mmr player may not even be obvious at first glance, so people won't realise and only see the bad.

People also are quicker to look up people in losing games and be all "Aha, see, he was low rank, of course that's why he lost", when even fair skill match ups lose sometimes (50% of the time in theory), and not notice when the low rank players win, which contributes even more to people feeling that their theories about the system working against them being confirmed.

HalcyonDwellerAug 20, 20171 votes

That makes a lot of sense, thank you for offering such sensible explanations!

Hopefully someone who has been thinking the system is against them will see your response and think a little harder before judging their teammates next time.