Solution to High Elo Matchmaking, Reducing Smurfing, and More Money for Riot Games

Dear Riot,

I am a very low elo player who is very bad at this game. Currently I am stuck in Silver 1 so I am not really great at giving suggestions for balance changes and the likes of that. Not that I do not have any ideas, just that you should probably get the opinions of balance changes from higher level players. However, what I can tell you about is a problem that I myself do not have to deal with. As of right now, I probably have no chance of getting to Diamond to even deal with this solution but the current implementation you have concocted is an idea that makes me wish I never reach Diamond if I had the option to. Between reducing Dynamic Queue randomly to 3 people, as well as autofill, I think you are only making the problem worst for all parties in both Diamond and Bronze. Hopefully, you will read this (and give feedback and thoughts on what your thought is of my suggestion!!!) but that is entirely up to you guys.

Okay, without further introductions, let me talk about the current problem with high elo. The biggest problem with high elo is that once you reach high elo, there is more reasons to not play at high elo then there is to keep playing at high elo. Since high elo is already a small amount of the player base with Diamond and higher being the top single digit percentage of players, you want these players to keep playing at that elo instead of playing at a lower elo. However once you get there, players want to make smurf accounts for fun, to pubstomp or to help a friend climb. They can also be doing to for streaming purposes. Some people just want to take a break from a higher level of gameplay at that level. There could be other reasons that I'm not explicitly thinking of but you get the drift of it.

However, once all these people leave, high elo now gets even smaller, which causes a new problem: longer queue time. Everyone who haven't made a smurf yet is now further encourage to make one. And this just gets longer and longer as more people ditch high elo to play smurf so they can have fun/climb/wait less in queue. Your problem has gone up drastically just because a few people wanted to play at low elo.

Now your current solution to match making is to reduce groups to 3 as well as autofill. And there lies your problem. People who want to play in bigger queue will now make smurfs so they can do so. Likewise, autofill will reduce the amount of people who want to play at high elo as well with one trick ponies and other players who are only good at a few roles making smurfs too. You have now made the problem even worst and time will only make it worst.

Instead of that, what you need to do is encourage people to keep playing on their High Elo account. I am not saying to ban smurfing because that is hard. What I want to suggest is something you are already doing in fact: increase the rate of rank decay. As of right now, high elo decay begins after 28 days for Diamond and Plat while Master and Challenger get 10 days. This is an unnecessary amount of time, especially for a game like League of Legends. Even after not playing for a week, my skill level will have decreased for a while. Instead of 28/10 days, make it decay of 4 days for plat, 3 days for diamond, and 2 days for Masters and Challenger. Of course the decay won't be as big as it is currently with drops of 35/50/250 but more likely based on an amount that is based on how many days you played.

Of course after that comes the next part. What if people go on vacation? What if people have something to do? We can easily solve this problem by having Riot sell something that will prevent decay for up to a certain amount of time using RP/IP. Of course there will be a max amount of time so people don't just buy 3 years worth but if you go on vacation, you could probably buy 2 weeks to prevent decay for not playing. This will probably even make Riot money.

I really hope you considered this idea and I will also be posting it on Reddit to hopefully garner some attention.

With regards and hope that I hear back from you

Shit tier player