I'm level 24

Stop being so good then!

I once played a Dominion game where it was 5 solo players (2 unranked, 2 silver, 1 plat) against a 5-man premade challenger team. Pretty sure we captured the two points for a few seconds in the beginning and the rest was a bloodbath.

Im sorry sir, this games smurf system is f*cked up and even though many great ideas have been proposed by the players, Riot does nothing. My brother is a new player as well and he played with a plat 2 player yesterday

Sad times...

Let's see just how busted this is. Remember that Riot claimed they intended to have ranked influence normal matches to some degree so you wouldn't end up with extreme cases like the one in my screenshot, which I don't believe they ever actually added. Even if normal rank is completely independent it shows that the base rating value of a new player is placed farrrrrrrrr too close to other level 30+ average ratings or is extremely malleable in those first handful of games before reaching 30, or both.

There is no excuse for the rating shown in my screenshot of a double premade + 3 level 30s + 2 golds + diamond + thousands of games in normal vs a single premade and 1 level 30 bronze. The only slight excuse I could see to this which is still absolutely unacceptable is the Cait level 24 with a mere 13 wins...

Just shake it off, shake it off.

Yea, normals matchmaking is complete bonkers. One of the things that actively ruined the game for me, actually. The "core range" of ranked divisions put together in my normal blind pick/teambuilder games seems to lie somewhere between low plat to high diamond, but I'm consistently put into normal games where people's ranked divisions edge from literally anything between silver (even bronze at times) to challenger, a phenomenom most likely related to premades, more lenient normals matchmaking and low queue population (in case of teambuilder/normal draft).

Needless to say, our silver IV first time Orianna going up against their challenger Zed doesn't exactly result in a great gaming experience.

That's so sad.... being level 24 and being matched up against people who obv have more ranked experience than you, how is that even fair?

While irrelevant, the LAN queue is so small that I on occasion, play with Plat and Gold players on my level 20 account.

wtf I swear I saw a sexytaylorswift playing in like frikin diamond

This game's matchmaking is awesome. And Smite is complete garbage just because its matchmaking is so bad. It'll have games that are 5 plat players vs 5 players that aren't even level 30 yet. Why? Well, the good team was premade, and the other players were the only ones to enter the queue. So too bad.

Really the one flaw is that different modes all have their own rating. So someone could have been bronze the last time they played normals, go to diamond, and then when they play normals, it still uses the rating the had in normals the last time they had played them.

Yeah i just played a game with 3 silvers, a gold 5, and a lv 8 friend and we got matched up with a diamond for some reason.

I agree. It is so frustrating having players who are below level 30 in my team while the other team is full of diamonds and masters. IDK what it is but I hope riot fixes it. I think diamond premades or high elo premades make a glitch in the normal mmr system because it can't find them an equal premade opponent. What that means is that they add you to ballance out thier skill and face you vs platinum players. It is really stupid imo. People constantly bitch about ranked mmr but I would rather have an equal chance of winning and not just lose because of unfairness of mmr.

Ikr. When I was level 12, I played with my three friends who were Silver 2 at season 4, one was level 26, and one was level 15 or something. And we got two Gold 5 players and like, Silver 1 players. Shouldn't they even it up and give us at least something like silver 2~5 players? The Gold ones dominated the game. gg.

The current match-making system has to try and balance the level of ability a player has, with finding a timely match with them.

Now if everyone involved typically has similar MMR. You usually get same for same. But when you have people people of different levels of MMR, or their high MMR is mostly ranked (while it takes it into account, it doesn't mean it's a high factor.) and the are playing normals it can make for some weird combinations.

Because while there is necessarily a high pool of people playing. There is not necessarily a high pool of people highly mismatched at that time. So it's either have super long queues, or get the occasional mis-matched game.

A number of people have said there is no excuse, but I'll ask this: what is the alternative? What is the solution, when a highly ranked player queues with an unranked, low level one? Riot could forbid that, in which case the highly ranked player would be forced to use a smurf. This would remove some of their advantages (Runes, Masteries), but may make the skill disparity worse as it would be more difficult to detect. (Not impossible, and from Red posts I know they're very good at detecting smurfs, but still harder than if they are a Diamond ranked account).

So they need to rebalance the matchmaking system. Now, you're level 24. That is a fairly high level. If you are to never be paired with a highly ranked player, than we need to essentially make sure that no one below level 30 is ever matched with a highly ranked player. But recall why we were considering this scenario- there was a very low level player queued with the D1. This means that we now have a low level- 14 in the case of your game, I believe, matched with level 30s. No matter how good that highly ranked player is, the low level player is now going to have a miserable game. They will be an easy kill, either forced to stand back and avoid any risk, or get tossed around like a beanbag, while their team mates try to carry the game. Might as well stay at the fountain.

So while I am open to the idea that matchmaking could use improvements, keep in mind that it is a non-trivial question of how to improve it. Anecdotally, I can say that from my experience, having one highly ranked player in a game doesn't seem to predetermine the outcome. I once won a game against a team with a Challenger player on it, without having one on my team. It happens. Do your best, and there is always the next game.

Aren't you a smurf? Edit: Also looked at your match history and everything seemed relatively balanced....

Been a year or two since it happened, but I did have, in one game, two opponents that EACH had more games won than our entire team combined. The system works for the most part, but there are definitely some not-infrequent abuse cases and loopholes.