What happened to Ranked Matchmaking?
So I have played LoL since Beta, and I dont play much. Like, I only have a total of 3000 games or so over the past however many years (8?) and usually I just play in bursts one or two months out of the year. I play around a mid-plat level, but the years Ive decided to do ranked I never played enough to not decay out into gold. I say all this so you know that what I am about to say is not just bronze talk nonsense. Sure, I'm not the best, but between having high skill and many years of experience in the game, I think my opinion is at least worth two cents.
So here goes:
This season's ranked is unlike any season I have encountered so far. Today is a perfect example. In four separate games today I had 1 person on my team that went at least 0/5 in the first 8 minutes of the game. The game was 100% determined by that 1 player who fed horrendously. Their lane opponent gets super-fed, and converts his personal, unstoppable lead, into team gold via towers and kills. Quickly, the game snowballs out of control to where the enemy team has so much gold by 13-14 minutes that I literally cannot farm my way into competing with them. My farm is pretty high as a jungle main, and often I have the highest farm on my team. So I know how to farm, and how to gank well, etc. But the enemy team ends up with such a big lead that most ganks are suicidal at best, and farming is an inadequate solution for getting back in the game. Thus, the game is over by 10-13 minutes every game, and the remaining 7-15 minutes is the enemy carefully closing the game out systematically.
But, this is not unique to me having this terrible player on my team. I have noticed that most of my wins today have come from the same situation. I may be doing a great job jungling, but one of my laners has crushed his lane opponent with 5+ kills in under 10 minutes. So then he and I team up on objectives and generate so much team gold that the enemy cant come back, even by farming. And well...you know...the same story as above but this time I win....yay. Sometimes, if I am particularly keen and lucky, I can figure out the worst player on the enemy team and squeeze out all of those kills for myself, making myself the juggernaut thats 5/0 in under 10 minutes...and same story again.
Not only is this incredibly unsatisfying when winning via this method or losing via this method, it also just shouldnt be happening. I will often look at the "Inting" player after the game to discover they are platinum, or have been platinum for many seasons. So these lanes that regularly get destroyed should technically be equally skilled, as their other games show they are. So how is this happening? and why is this happening?
Roughly, the problem is twofold currently:
1) One player cannot win the game, but one player can easily lose the game. You see this particularly when you get paired against the enemy's best player, so you cannot easily get kills/fed. So even though you are playing with a higher level of skill than everyone else, some random lane gets a free 2K gold boost from Sir Derpsalot and his 7 deaths. Better pray to RNGesus that Sir Derpsalot is on the enemy team and not yours if you want to win.
**2) I spend more time in "queues/champion select/starting action/closing action" than I do actually PLAYING the game. ** I'm in a queue for 2-3 minutes, champ select for another 3-4 minutes, then another 2-3 from game load until minion spawn. This is 7-10 minutes of just "prep time" for this game, then I get 8-10 minutes of actual gameplay before one team or the other is completely crushed and trapped inside their base until each tower is slowly taken down for overall gold advantage and the game ends 5-10 minutes later. So currently, I get to play 7-10 minutes worth of gameplay for every 15-20 minutes I spend waiting for a game to actually start or end. This is REALLY unfun.
Anyways, anyone else noticed these things?
TL;DR (read the number points in bold)
