Chances of running into someone you know through Matchmaking?

the Anarchit3cht·4/23/2014, 8:55:37 PM·1 votes·801 views

Nothing too important, but I thought it might be interesting to figure out. A while back I queued up and on the enemy team? A friend that I know in real life. It was pretty cool, and it has only ever happened one time, but what are the chances of that? I know the chances increase the more people you know, but what about seeing one specific person? It'd pretty easy math to do, but I don't know the number of players on any given day to calculate this myself, if anyone would be willing to do it for me or provide those numbers to me, it'd be great!

3 Comments

Kaine4/23/2014, 10:40:05 PM1 votes

Low but not Zero.

What is the most remarkable is that you and your friend were the same MMR.

You would have to meet these conditions:

Both be looking for a matchmade game at the same time
With the same MMR
And not have your matchmade be filled by anyone else that met conditions 1 and 2

Generally the friends I meet randomly in ranked... are friends I met randomly in ranked.

The people I know in "real life" that play ranked have a much broader MMR rating and so I would never expect to encounter them in a match made game.

You might see it significantly more at higher ELO's as the condition 2 becomes wider and wider searching for valid games and condition 3 becomes much smaller.

Tsiddique4/23/2014, 10:44:44 PM1 votes

I've seen people that I've played with a game ago, but not people that I know IRL randomly.

Sir ArmaMalum4/24/2014, 6:50:19 AM1 votes

Too many factors (like how many of your IRl friends play League, etc.) to do a legitimate math'ing but I can give you this. I have seen it happen once in my life, and it happened to the same people in the same room (so probably a little bias becasue their pings were compatible) but anyway, if we take that instance over all of my and their combined games within the same building, in my experience the chance is at most....

~1/3000 so ~0.03%

specifically for people within the same room/building.

Not a legit thing though, small sample size and biased conditions so.....eh? Definitely around the same chance of winning something on the lottery though, so gratz!