Boards›Gameplay

Hows does Ranked Placements and MMR work?

Kitsunes Lust·8/21/2017, 9:33:32 PM·4 votes·19,797 views

Litterally as it says. My friend gave me a lil nudge to try and do ranked, so i did (btw most toxic place i've ever seen to the point where it was laughable and nobody was co-operating lol xD) and i did my 10 game placements and it was TERRIBLE.

Game 1: Ahri: 3/5/3 (loss) Game 2: Ahri: 3/8/9 (loss) Game 3: Ahri: 9/5/13 (win) Game 4: Shyvana: 0/5/1 (loss) Game 5: Shyvana: 1/7/5 (loss) Game 6: Xin Zhao: 6/8/8 (loss) Game 7: Swain: 5/9/20 (win) Game 8: Sona: 2/9/21 (win) Game 9: Cassiopiea: 3/6/10 (loss) Game 10: Ahri: 1/5/5 (loss)

but yet, i somehow got placed in Silver V. i would have expected to be like in fugging wood division

So can anybody tell me, with how horrible i did (and i will openly admit it....im expecting the comments to be filled with you suck and all that crap lol) how they placed me in Silver V, and how this placement/MMR system works? because that doesn't make sense to me....

17 Comments

Holy Nocturne8/21/2017, 9:36:10 PM4 votes

Because you start with around Silver 2 MMR going into ranked for the first time and it takes going 2-8 to place in bronze. Since you went 3-7 you placed in silver. It is incredibly forgiving for your first season. Next season it will place you based off your current MMR, so if you didn't play any more ranked for the rest of the season and then played next season and went 3-7 again you would likely be bronze 4.

Zone of Endless8/21/2017, 11:03:00 PM1 votes

holy shit l0l

I played season 3 and got silver 3 after going 7-3 in placements. You going silver 5 with 3-7 I dont even know what to say besides gratz on not bronze.

Quepha8/21/2017, 11:53:29 PM1 votes

There's an FAQ but the gist of matchmaking is. You have a number that is your MMR. "Matchmaker Matchmaker, make me a match" Matchmaker tries to compose a game of 10 people around the same MMR. If your team wins you all get MMR, if you lose then you all lose MMR. It also will be a little nicer about gains/losses if the MMR looks like it would be a hard game for you, and meaner if it looks like it should have been an easy game for you.

When you've only started playing in a queue the matchmaker assumes your MMR is not very well known yet so wins and losses will make big differences in your MMR and this effect persists after placements (and can also start again if your local win/loss ratio seems to indicate you are way off from where you belong). The remaining difference in placement matches is that you are not yet dealing with leagues, divisions, LP, and promos (although even afterwards you should try not to worry about those things too much, MMR is what really matters in the long run)

Mysticman898/22/2017, 12:30:04 AM1 votes

Your actual performance has no impact on your MMR (and hence final rank), just if you win or lose, as someone has probably mentioned already but I didn't see in my skim of the responses.

You'll start around silver 4 ish mmr (rather than S2 as someone else said), and then it'll go up/down when you win/lose, with the magnitude of the changes depending on how your mmr compares to that of the other players in the game (which are generally 'close' but theres some randomness based on queue times and who is available, and duoing can throw things off too).

Where you're placed is almost never your actual skill level, it's just a starting point for the system. For most players they'll need 100+ games to even 1k+ games before they really settle at their 'true' rank, so I wouldn't read too much into where you were first placed.

I do think ranked is a good place to learn though, although the first while is going to be rough as you fall to your 'current' level. Normals aren't the worst for improving, but theres a lot of confounding factors in normals (bigger skill variance, people doing silly things because normals, etc) that can make it harder to assess yourself and so improve.