Did ranked become a joke? the devil is in the details

so lets get some details of recent changes and why they have/had a negative impact on the overall ranked experience for most of the people i know that play ranked.

• Growing dominance of snowballing.
• decrease in playing Quality
• no real comeback from a disadvantage
• death timers.
• Dynamic Que.
• massive changes to champions with the mage rework (even the minor changes are significant).
• changes to itemization for mages.
• hidden MMR.
• being dropped divisions between seasons.

Lets start with a simple question? what is Ranked all about? ask any rioter and they will tell you this: Showing your Mastery and practical application of your knowledge of the game this means the following

• being good at the game
• have a consistent performance
• make progress in your level

pretty simple right? but ranked currently is far from that. So lets begin at the bottom of the barrel here and work our way up divisions MMR and ranked in general.

so quick history for me i kicked of my ranked career in season 3 and after roughly 150 games i had around a 37% winrate and was at the bottom of Silver 5 by the end of season 3 i had made that pesky 37% into something like a 50% winrate (which meant that i had to win consistently a lot of games) season 4 hits i get placed at silver 5 again but i work my way up into silver 2 at some point and drop again down to silver 4 were i kept hanging till the end of the season.

so up until now regardless of the flaws of the game its not so bad for one specific reason I was making a very slow but steady progress, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. this in itself is key to the ranked experience itself.

now fast forward to season 5 i get placed in bronze 1 and as many other people was pretty pissed of, all that work and our PROGRESS gone. so i play and play and slowly crawl back to silver 4 were i end my season 5. i started playing less because i realized that if you play a lot and have a winning streak you will get matched against much higher MMR people, i suffered a lot from this is season 3 and 4 being placed against a wide variety of people ranging from bronze all the way to plat 4. and if you after lets say win 3 games stop don't play for a day or 2 it happens a lot less. at least it did for me. let the irony of that sink in please

now season 6 hits i get placed in bronze 2 dynamic que, death timers, towers being worthless, game is more snowball then ever now the idea of dynamic que is not bad and the theory is also not bad. the practical aplication is terrible. getting thrown into a 4 man premade with plats who all have 125+ games with their champion when you are trying to practice last hitting with karthus Q in normal draft mode will be nothing but a waste of my time.

you know what you learn when you are getting stomped into the ground? you learn that it sucks being stomped into the ground. can you learn anything from it? well depends my eyes are smashed into the ground its all black i can't see anything.

i don't want to get into too much detail but currently Ranked is a joke, you have basically no way of making a comeback unless the enemy team has less intelligence then a donkey (what does that say about me/us for letting them get that advantage?). the way the game punishes people so harsly for 1 mistake, encourages everyone to JUST GIVE UP, and everyone does. there is no trying your best anymore there is just fail or get carried without doing anything for it. and the Quality of mechanical, tactical and team skill is degrading. this is because you don't really learn anything from staring at a death screen all the time, which you will regardless of the death timers, because of how terribly the game snowballs. and everyone is suffering from this feeling of that their actual skill has decreased.

BTW thanks for finally trying to fix death timers riot.

next point on topic is massive changes during mid season. basically forces us to remaster the game from scratch, the flow of the meta and the way to game will evolve is so huge there is literally no telling what will happen

except that will get nerfed into the ground everyone bitches about the passive.... LOOK AT THAT ULtIMATE LOOK AT IT!!!!! 50% max HP magic damage at max lvl AS BASE DAMAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOLY what!? ow and Q can now refresh E duration and E will still jump to the next target if its target dies? yes will get nerfed into obscurity i believe. unless he becomes riots love child like lee sin was for so long but i highly doubt it.

again what was the point of ranked? to show ones mastery of the game? guess what? everyone starts from scratch tommorow.

and now the one thing that we all dread atm.

the snowball nature of the current game which will only get worse with 6.9 this right here riot is why you are losing players and not getting new ones.

you know what i did when i reached lvl 20-27? i stopped playing because i was getting my face beat in by smurf acounts its extremely unfun and unhealthy to have players to be at the receiving end at so much snowballing. i still remember playing with 5 guys who started roughly at the same time as me all stopped playing after we got horribly beat several times by a bunch of gold level MMR premades our levels ranged around 20-25 at the time and they were all 2 year+ players.

snowballing is your root cause for toxic behavior now i know its a neccesary evil but when 90% of the game is determined by how much you snowball. you got a serious problem.

tl;dr ranked needs to have a feeling of progress to it, which in its current state with snowballing will not do.