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Suggestions for Changes to Ranked Queues

UnDeaDCW·10/23/2013, 7:18:20 AM·3 votes·797 views

In my opinion, there are some immense flaws in the current ranked queue system that need to be addressed. I will do my best to outline them here in the best detail possible in the hopes that someone from Riot actually reads this and does something about it for season 4.

  1. Matchmaking - during matchmaking, there are so many problems that can arise. a) you end up with a troll that won't communicate or spams or picks champs that don't belong in certain rolls. b) you end up with someone who is complete inflexible and can only play one roll which messes up team compositions if someone else enforces pick order. c) you end up with someone with a terrible attitude that ruins any team morale before the game even starts. I'm sure there are others but these are the ones that pop up consistently. There needs to be a mechanism put in place that allows players to leave games without penalty if one of these cases arises. Obviously this can be abused if not worked properly but something like 1 leave per day would help stop things like this from happening as often, and help people stop losing LP and MMR for reasons beyond their control. There should also be something in place to require the player who left to report the reason for leaving and identify a person so that the tribunal can review the pre-game chat and punish the offending player. Too many games get lost because of this stuff before the games even start and it's very easy to predict. This mechanic would also help in the odd case where someone has to leave a queue for an emergency. That person nor someone else in queue should have their LP reduced and a time ban because of being someone being forced to leave for an emergency - again the reason mechanic would kick in and identify the cause.

  2. Promotions to new tiers - When a player reaches division 1 of their current tier, clamping starts to occur. This is a much needed mechanic and I think the recent changes to it have made it work exactly the way it should. The whole purpose is to ensure that when being promoted that you can actually play at that level. During those division 1 games, you are generally matched with people in the low end of the tier above you. So for example division 1 bronze players will play division 5 silver players. As you progress and get closer and closer to the promotional series, the ones who consistently perform at a higher level end up getting matched with players from much higher division. For example, a division 1 silver player who is nearing their promotional series would more than likely end up playing with and against people from gold 4 and gold 3. In rare cases, possibly even higher like gold 2. I have witnessed that first hand during my promotional series from bronze to silver where I was playing against silver 3's and 2's consistently. Here is the problem. You work extremely hard to get to where you are, and you're about to get promoted. You win your last needed promotional game and you finally reach the next tier. What happens? You get stuck at the bottom of the barrel with people that don't care, that troll, that aren't skilled enough to really belong there and you just end up tanking. People in division 5 have generally given up hope and really have bad attitudes and develop bad habits. All the gains you made, all the work you put in, for the most part goes to waste because you got used to playing people of a higher caliber and are now forced to play with the bottom of the barrel, even though you have proven that you can play and beat opponents at a much higher level. My suggestion is that there be a little bit more clamping in division 1 so that players can really show that they can play at higher tiers and then when promotion occurs, they get placed in division 3 rather than division 5. This is a 2 part solution. a) this helps players get 100% less discouraged by what they see when promoted to division 5. b) this makes sure that people who actually care and are actually improving actually get the chance to show that and play against people with similar abilities and enjoyment for the game. I went on almost a 10 game winning streak in bronze 1 playing against people 2, 3 or 4 division higher than me (and not just being carried all the time) and when I was promoted to silver 5, I haven't been able to win a game yet (other than duo queue) because of the negativity that dwells there. I proved that could play with higher divisions but I get punished for it and have to toil all over again? This leads to my next point....

  3. Demotions to different tiers – this is something that needs to be implemented. People get placed in divisions because they get carried through their provisional series games and end up not being able to perform properly when they have to carry. What happens is that they get put in something like gold 2 and then end up losing all their games because they just can't handle the skill at that level. They eventually rank down to division 5 and the whole process mentioned above happens all over again. If demotions occurred, this would almost eliminate the need for my second point about skipping divisions upon promotion. People would actually end up in divisions where they belong. Now obviously the risk here is that 50% of League players end up in Bronze, but this doesn’t have to be the case. There can be a mechanism in place to track a player's losses and if they hit a certain threshold, where their MMR just does not have a chance to continue on in that division, then they get demoted. This has a 2 fold benefit. a) people will lose their unreasonable sense of entitlement where they think that they are better than everyone else because they belong to a certain tier. This type of mentality just breeds negativity. b) this could potentially help stop all of the trolling and negativity that happens throughout the league because people that continue to do so will end up so low in the rankings that they will stop playing or they will just be put with like-minded people and stay there until they change their way of thinking and playing. Obviously there is a downside to this in the form of discouragement if players go on a losing streak, but like I said, there should be something in place to prevent demotions from occurring quickly and make sure that the person actually does belong in a lower division – almost like clamping going the other way. I think the positives of this change would far outweigh the negatives.

  4. In-game performance – During a game, sometimes things happen and the game gets lost but no matter how well you do, or how much you try to dig your team out of a hole, it has no bearing on the reduction of your MMR or LP. The problem seems to be that the current system doesn't seem take individual skill or gameplay into consideration. I have played so many games where 3 or 4 people are destroying their lanes, we're winning team fights, we have great communication and we have 1 or 2 guys who are just getting crushed (or even worse, disconnect or goes AFK). Now of course that is where teamwork comes in to play but it eventually gets to a point of no return and even though all the other players are playing well, that one person can become a liability and the game gets lost, especially when negativity gets thrown in. It happens all the time and it is unfair to those that were positive, did well and continued to support the team and try to carry the game. I think there needs to be some other mechanic happening in the background to track players attitudes, teamwork, KDA, tower pushing, assists, and any other feature that shows that a player does not deserve to have a reduction in MMR and LP because of someone else – at least not such a severe reduction in LP as seen in some cases. If a player goes AFK or disconnects, there should be loss prevention occurring to stop the team from losing LP or MMR because in reality, they probably did nothing wrong to deserve it.

I think that all of the above-mentioned changes would do wonders to improve the current ranked system and make it more enjoyable for all players at all levels. Please let me know your thoughts on this, as I would love to hear other people's opinions on my suggestions or other things that I may not have thought about.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Happy gaming to all and good luck on the fields of justice. May season 4 bring us some exciting developments.

16 Comments

Josiahfied10/23/2013, 11:44:53 AM2 votes

Giving people one leave a day just means trolls have more fun trying to get people to use them. I think when Team Builder comes out it will most likely fix some issues, and then have issues of its own lol.

You're basically asking to jump to Silver II from Bronze I.

There's no sense punishing the 80% that are just having bad luck in games or something like that. The 20% still made it to gold just like you when you get there. Challenger gets demotions when a new challenger approaches!

Making it a personal skill based level is impossible to do well. If you knew that if you had a bad KD or something else that you'd lose points... I don't know about you but I'd say "Screw you carry if we're losing this game I'm taking the kills to get the points later." This isn't CoD, it's LoL. Although I do like that last bit about if you have a disconnection you don't lose points. I doubt it would happen though, if someone disconnects then your whole team just starts to not care and do stupid crap. 4v5's are still possible to win if you can get a stroke of luck. XD
RiotRiot LilyHaze10/23/2013, 6:01:12 PM2 votes
  • 1

At the beginning of season 3 there was no LP penalty for dodging queue occasionally, though leaving a game still had issues. This led to many people having to go through the long draft process many times before getting into an actual game.

The problem with any system that allows upstanding players to legitimately not lose their LP because of toxic players can easily be used by toxic players to further abuse upstanding players.

For example, at 20 minutes in a game the other day my jungler wanted to surrender. Every lane was losing or going even, but not by much. Additionally, our teamfight synergy and potential was much higher than the enemy team, who had a lot of strong laners who had very little synergy. If your free leave was an option, he could have just used it then when we would not surrender. Now 4v5, we would have likely lost. Instead, he was forced to play out the game, and much to his surprise he found that winning was easy once we grouped up and started winning fights.

And he wasn't even a toxic player. He was a normal player that likely would have left a game.

  • 2

Your MMR will determine who you are matched up with and against. If you are playing with Silver 2-3 players consistently before your promotional series, you should continue to play with or against Silver 2-3 players consistently after your promotionals are successfully completed. MMR and league tier are loosely related, but not directly tied to one another, as seen in this case.

  • 3

Though demotions may need to be an option, his scenario is also fixed by MMR. While the player's division will never go lower than Gold under the current system, their MMR will continue to tank, and they will be placed against weaker and weaker players.

  • 4

While an ideal world would judge each player on a large number of criteria, trying to do so in League now is unfeasible. Tracking KDA will hurt top laners and supports, who tend to have smaller KDAs than roles that are around for more fights and have more kill potential.

Tracking player attitude without human review is awkward at best, and nightmarish at worst. There isn't a really good method for the system to track in real time the attitude of people without resorting to something cheesy and abusable like a word filter / search function.

And if you tie this to honor, which could be argued to track attitude, then you cheapen the honor system because people will just start looking for reasons to trade it for MMR / LP reasons.

Solan Stonewhip10/23/2013, 7:46:58 PM2 votes

The current system is imperfect. Team builder is Riot's next attempt to try and fix it. it may well do so. we shall see, but i don't think it can be applied to draft in its current format, si think they're taking a wait and see approach to see how it does in testing and then try to apply what they learn to draft mode.

i think they could institute some changes to ranked that you're sugggesting such as reduced lp/mmr loss for players who remain in the game when one of your teammates dc, that said i'm not certain Riot knows when that occurs. i'm not necessarily terribly keen on allowing so much movement between different tiers, but it would be better to allow demotions to lower tiers to deal with players getting rushed to diamond just for the border by their friends, i mean that's b-s, but it happens. i don't like the idea of players getting moved up several divisions just by qualifying for promotion, but your own measure COULD be self correcting in some ways. i don't know, personally i think the whole promotion series needs to be revamped and a demotion series needs to be instituted - whereby when you hit a certain number of losses in a row in the division you're in at ranked, you'd be up for a demotion series in which you would play with players from the divisions below and then fall appropriately, but it would have to be more like 5 or 7 games rather than 3, i dislike this whole 3 games b-s. odds of leaver/flamer too high.

but to actually fix the fundamental flaw which you have articulated in such detail. requires a fundamental paradigm shift. in order to change what you suggest you would need to recognize that league is more of a team sport and then create statistics that can to some degree of accuracy be used to measure the intangibles that you're suggesting be taken into account. because short of having observers taking notes like that, there isn't a lot that they can do.

since that's not a viable option. how would you measure such intangibles?

SmokingPuffin10/23/2013, 10:33:31 PM2 votes

One dodge per day is a huge number. Most players only play a couple games per day. If you're going to do this, it has to be on the ARAM reroll system.

Historically, most ranked trolls trolled in order to get you to dodge for them. Troll picking in ranked for me is at least 10 times less frequent now that nobody will dodge when a troll pick comes up. If you add free dodges to the system, the tactical troll picks will come back, and I hate those.

I think the costs outweigh the benefits here.

Elliots Girl10/24/2013, 4:48:27 AM2 votes

I whole-heartedly agree that something should be done for the ranked match making queue.

I frequently run into trolls and people who either refuse to communicate or flat out argue with the team and troll positions they want....Rather than waste my time and play a game with them I have no choice to but to be punished for their poor behavior and dodge.

My suggestion is this. A vote of no confidence system. The ability as a team to completely vote out that person. And also the ability to report the trolls beginning game so that at least they see repercussions for their actions.

Really hope Riot does something SOON!