A thought on doing casual rank solo queue

Grimraust·May 8, 2014·2 votes·847 views

Some people I know are like me that when they play in solo queue(non-ranked) and raise their hidden mmr, they get paired with people around their skill level. This should equate to something when I decide one day "I think I want to play ranked!" In other words, since I'm already paired with people of certain ranked leagues, I should be allowed to just skip my qualifying matches. It's a bit unfair/odd that I'm reliant on 4 random people of unknown skill/rank but most of the times it becomes weighed on "I can't depend on these people but there is no way for ONE person to carry 4 people." I'm not a really good leader and when I ping or try to give my team advice they don't really care to listen.

I just think it'd be nice to get paired with people who I can play with and have a good attitude towards their team. Like for example when I play jungler and if they follow through with my gank and get the kill, i tell them good job and try to promote team camaraderie. I try my best not to be selfish because usually i don't struggle but when i do i always try to be polite to my teammates. My queue is usually littered with a bunch of toxic people and the other team isn't much help. A lot of those teammates that give into the other team though they decide to leave their all-chat on and don't ignore the people that are flaming them. I feel that if all chat was a privilege to players that have good behavior, there would be a lot less flaming and toxic people in general. however that last point is irrelevant to this topic.

TL:DR, allow people who play casually a game once or twice a day that get paired with players around their skill level to skip their qualifying matches.

9 Comments

ShadowNinetailsMay 8, 20141 votes

Idk about you, but I'm damn glad my Normal games aren't weighted into my Ranked MMR. I remember when I thought Madred's Bloodrazors was a good idea on Vayne (It does %HP dmg that synergizes with my W!) and when I thought wards were a waste of money unless you were playing against Evelynn . That Garen / Sion top lane? That was me. I'm damn glad Ranked doesn't know that.

What you're suggesting is that when you start Ranked, you're judged not just on the 50ish games you've played since you "got good", but on the 100s of games that it took you to finally figure out what you're doing. I don't see how many of us could go into a system like that and not be immediately placed in Plastic VIII.

DesamirMay 9, 20141 votes

What you're suggesting is that when you start Ranked, you're judged not just on the 50ish games you've played since you "got good", but on the 100s of games that it took you to finally figure out what you're doing.

That's not how MMR works.

ShadowNinetailsMay 10, 20141 votes

Oh? Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know MMR is based on the ELO system which takes all of your games into account, starting at 1200 and having every game raise or lower that rating based on who you won and lost against. When I think of a system rating me based on every game I've ever played (including the ones with a group of drunk friends where we would all take Marksmen with summoner 12 / summoner 7 and Zerg rush the mid-lane and hope to win before 10 minutes or we would usually lose), I'm not too keen on it.

GrimraustJun 19, 20141 votes

that's not how it works. if you go inactive for a period of time it goes down, same can be said for your Ranked MMR. so if you were to take a month or so off of league you wouldn't be playing with platinums again if you were playing with them before. the goal of this is to avoid getting paired with trolls/leavers/etc. for your qualifying matches and getting dropped to bronze as a result. when i do my normal games i get paired with/against gold+. Therefore, that gives me the impression that i'm around their skill level so it's bullshit that when i do ranked... the system is so unreliable and a gamble that even if you duo queue you are gambling with 3 players which in my experience are nearly incompetent in any role they pick. I'm not intending to come off as sounding toxic or negative but in my experience in every account/season i've played this is literally inevitable. in the games i actually get my main role i usually win unless i'm camped by jungler, and when i do i usually help my teammates win their lane with TP, but it doesn't matter because they don't farm, know to take objectives, or ward effectively. in conclusion, if i'm paired with teammates that don't ward, i know this is a sign that they don't know how to play, especially mid lane players.

TL:DR conclusion: Trolls/unreliable teammates are a big gamble for those 10 matches. Allow me to skip those so i can be in a proper tier.

ShadowNinetailsJun 19, 20141 votes

And what tier is "proper" to avoid trolls/leavers/ragers? That's something that happens from Bronze V all the way to Korean Challenger I. And has a HUGE patch of people around Gold I-Plat II (which is why a lot of Diamond level streamers like Stonewall constantly talk about how they hate playing in Plat on their smurfs so they'd rather make a new one than push through that hell to get to Diamond again).

Even without this in place, it still is extremely important that the barriers between Normal and Ranked play stay in place. Normal games are supposed to be about learning the game, exploring new champs and strategies, figuring out what's efficient vs. what's dumb and how to adapt your play. If you take someone's performance in Normals (I don't even know where you think inactivity decay came from in my previous argument, so I'm gonna just skip that) and use that to determine their Ranked seeding, then that's naturally going to place much more pressure on games that are supposed to be without that kind of thing. It would suck for new players to get to lvl 30 and find that every mistake they'd made up to that point would be held against them if they ever dared to start ranked which would incentivize smurfs so that they can start their Ranked seeding "the right way".

TL:DR It's always going to be a big gamble going into ranked. Trolls, ragers, Mordekaiser supports and the like aren't just a Bronze thing. You're going to have those couple dozen matches that (almost) genuinely weren't your fault, but over the course of a couple hundred or couple thousand games, that should even out and have you end up in your proper tier.

GrimraustJun 20, 20141 votes

what would be "proper" would be having the match be considered loss prevented in the first place seeing as how it's important enough to have in normal games. people don't start at normal games to learn champs, they go play bots and when they understand the character's dynamic then they start playing normals to see how they can use that dynamic to influence teamplay. however, most people in normals have the champ and know the dynamic but are unable to influence teamplay so their fed lane that can't take a turret does nothing for their team. granted if you have somewhere around lets say 700+ games won... it's safe to assume you at least know the basic of league and aren't just playing the game still to learn it. I own every champ and have played every champ at least once. I'm familiar enough with how to play at least half and do alright or better. strategies are more based on team effort opposed to solo effort. i highly doubt that most people will listen because even with pings i get people in my matches that don't pay attention and yell at teammates saying "you didn't say MIA even though it was pinged and in chat!"

what i mean to say is that if it decays and there is the requirement in order to skip into a ranked league would be at least +1000 games played, this isn't suppose to be meant for people that just got to 30 and want to start ranked. this is intended for people who have played the game for a while and don't want to have to get stuck in an unreliable queue only to end up in some low tier and stuck into having to play like 100+ ranked games to get into like gold league. either that or just remove the rewards for climbing leagues so less people would elo boost/get elo boosted and just play the game.

TL;DR: People's placement matches seem to have no way of balancing out the teams. Let people who've played at least 1000+ normal games and have at least 500 wins to go directly into a fitting league based off of people they are paired with. If not, just remove the after season "rewards/incentives" and just give them to people that have played a certain amount of matches or have made it into the tier of gold+. this will most likely stop elo boosters.

ShadowNinetailsJun 22, 20141 votes

Ok if you're gating this to only 500+ normal wins, then that's not so bad but still has the potential to undermine the whole system. Yes it sucks to be stuck in a tier you don't think you should be in but from what I've learned climbing out of the Bronze Abyss two seasons in a row, it's that if you really don't belong there, you won't stay there for long. Take any real Plat+ level player and give them a Bronze V account. They'll be at least to Silver V within about 200 games. Are there going to be bad games there? Probably. Are there going to be troll teammates? Probably. Will that matter in the long run? Not at all.

As for boosters...let me tell you a story about Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. So waaay back in the day I was in a clan on GRAW. It was a tight knit group of about 50 people who all knew each other really well. One day, some of us decided to run on the Ranked server just because. As it turns out, one guy on the group was lvl 24. I have no idea what that means as I still have no idea how the ranked system worked on GRAW, but it must have been incredibly high as the 2nd highest rank I'd seen was 8 and that guy killed....freaking....everything... Not to mention the amount of people who screamed when they saw the 24 and either said "fuck that, I'm not going against that" or "fuck this guy, has to be a booster. HAS TO BE!"

Now here's a game that has absolutely no rewards for playing ranked at all. None of the achievements required you to be in a ranked lobby, there were no special weapons or mods or costumes as there were no unlockables at all, the leaderboards didn't separate ranked from unranked, you could literally play for years and if you never went into ranked, you didn't miss a thing. There were still boosters. As long as you have a system where performing an action X number of times gives you a rank, people will game that system. Hell when I play Rocksmith's Guitarcade games, the top names on the leaderboard use machines programmed to play the game for them to get a higher score. That's not something you can stop. Ever.

GrimraustJun 22, 20141 votes

The point of this post is to address a casual rank queue. Since it's summer, currently I work full time but when i'm in school i go to school full time and work full time. I usually just play to blow off stress but the fact they make these end of season rewards seems rather inconvenient for people that are ok at the game and don't have the time to get trolled and climb out of bronze. I don't have the time to play +200 games that'd equate to an estimate of 200x40=8000 minutes/60 minutes =133.33 hours/24 hours = 5.5 days. According to what you said, that's only the amount of time dedicated to go up ONE league. That's fucking ridiculous. I really woudln't mind if they did their end of season rewards better like how they're doing them for team ranked.

ShadowNinetailsJun 22, 20141 votes

Can't nest any more replies, so I have to do it like this I guess.

You're aware that seasons generally last 10-12 months, correct? If you're serious enough about the game to be jealous of ranked rewards, I can't see you not being serious enough about the game to play less than 200 games a year. You're not the only one that has a life outside the game (I'm a full-time job, full-time student, and full-time caretaker) and for those who make LoL their full time job and are able to attain higher ranks because of their dedication, they deserve to be rewarded. It would be one thing if Victorious Janna's shields were stronger than Hextech Janna's, but that's not the case. All of the rewards are purely cosmetic and for (well deserved) bragging rights. If you want them so bad, get better and go get them. Don't have to change the system to make a "participation award".