Is Positional MM good for gameplay?
Does Closer Positional MM actually improve gameplay? I know this might seem weird after all the logic chain is pretty clear. With closer skill = closer games = better closer matches! Right? Its pretty intuitive.
What if its not the case?
I know, not everybody is going to be open to this. So lets take a second and talk about a Hungarian Mathematician. Some of you might be thinking "Fucking Kai again with his obsession for Arpad Elo." Well jokes on you! Today I wanna bring up Abraham Wald. During World War II, Wald was a member of the Statistical Research Group (SRG) at Columbia University, The army wanted to have their bombers survive enemy fire better. As the story goes some folks looked over the bullet hole distribution on returning planes and recommended reinforcement of the spots getting hit.
Pretty simple logic. Here are where Planes get hit by bullets the most so lets reinforce it. Wald had a different viewpoint. He said, These are the planes that return to base. Being hit here is the places where a plane can take a bullet but return. Lets look for the spots where you don't find bullets, as those are consistently the planes which don't make it back. For any students (or nerds like me who like this stuff) who might need details for a project or paper. Here is the document he presented. Here is the wiki on him and here is the topic of Operations Research.
So. Context. League of legends gameplay, MM, Positional MM. First up. League is not like a lot of games where you Que as your Class or your Race prior. That information cant get used by MM as it happens post lobby. This makes team comps RNG. This is pretty common in Mobas. Champion selection is considered part of the game, part of your skill. Can you counter pick X. Can you patch a hole in your team comp? Can you support your team synergy? Moba's use that RPG idea of specialized party.
What happens if your hard countered? You do worse. You have to attempt to outplay them to function and that's a spike in difficulty vs being the counter to an enemy. So heres what got me thinking about counterintuitive viewpoints. What happens if you lose the opportunity to outplay your counter?
Why would you recover if MM worked 100% correctly and your both the same skill? If you take 2 equal players and give 1 an advantage and the other a disadvantage... does that not by definition skew the results? So then... team dependence goes up right? Some one falling behind is some one else taking a lead.
Its Easy to see a Mismatch in skill. Dramatic crushed and stomped players show up. Smurfs running games solo. That's blatantly visible impact.
The question is, Does seeing that stomp from mismatches generate a perception that is making us blind to the possibility that close matches can snowball painfully bad due to matchups?
Pretend for a moment your playing vs yourself. You are using 2 champions that you can play at equal skill. One gives you an edge. With that edge do you expect fair results? If your into Fighters, the feeling of losing to some one you view as lower skill because they main a strong counter is nothing new.
If this is the case... How the hell do you solve it?
