Boards›[ARCHIVED] Miscellaneous

Is there any chance Ranked progression can be reworked for next season?

Daen·10/5/2015, 6:41:08 PM·43 votes·2,256 views

Some background on me, I'm a very competitive player. I'm having the most fun when I'm against opponents of equal skill in close games, and I love the thrill of winning. That being said, I despise League of Legends' ranked system, primarily for the following two reasons:

  • Promotional series' might be the most contrived progression system I have ever seen.
  • The fact LP and MMR are basically separate is really frustrating.

DISCLAIMER: I am not by any means saying the ranked system is unfair, and I am confident that people do eventually reach their true rank. My perspective here is that these systems make the experience less satisfying and take a lot longer for no real benefit.

#Promotional Series'

I may be in the minority here, but personally I think promotional series' are completely unnecessary and do nothing but increase the number of games required to reach the true rank a player should have. They feel like added stress to me rather than an extra competitive joy of going through a series, which was the original intent of the system. Here are my biggest issues with them:

  • Promotional games are heavily weighted in comparison to the average game. It's disproportionately more important to win a promotional game than it is to win a game leading up to it, and this discrepancy feels really bad in practice.
  • Promotional games require a dramatic spike in win rate over a tiny arbitrary sample of games to proceed. Moving from Division to Division requires a win rate of 75% over four specific games (1 win to get into the promo then 2/3 to proceed), and moving to a new tier requires a win rate of 66.7% over six (getting into the promo then 3/5).

I don't understand why the system forces players to suddenloy and drastically improve like that for such a specific sample of games. The great thing about ELO was that a win rate of 51%+ meant you were still improving and playing slightly better than your current rank, and it meant that no matter what you'd eventually continue improving. A win rate of 51% with the current promotional system means that it can potentially take hundreds of games to progress a single Division. For example:

W L W L W L W L W L W L W L W L W W L W L W L W L W L W L W

In the 30-game sample above, the player's win rate is 53%. If the player starts a promotional series anywhere on this line other than the bolded win, the player will never move forward to the next division while maintaining this pattern. I'm aware this will likely fluctuate due to streaks, but it's absurd that a player's streaks have to line up perfectly with whether a promotional series happens to start at the perfect moment.

#MMR/LP

Again, possibly in the minority, but the general layout here really bothers me. Here's why:

  • It's impossible to see your true MMR, which means you can't actually see what skill level you're playing at.
  • Your visible rank has almost nothing to do with your actual skill level, due to the fact LP and MMR are almost entirely disconnected.

A Silver I player can have the MMR of a Gold III player, but because of win streaks not lining up properly with promos the player is still stuck in Silver. This will eventually resolve itself, but it makes zero sense to me that we have a system where it's inaccurate in the vast majority of usage cases. The great thing about ELO was that you knew exactly where you'd be matching and where you stood simply by looking at your ELO number. You'd match with other people around that ELO, so your visible rank (LP) was perfectly mirroring your matchmaking rank (MMR).

I'm aware that a player can skip Divisions due to his or her MMR being significantly higher than what the visible LP rank shows, but I don't understand why we even want to deal with this in the first place. Skipping Divisions is a compensation mechanism for a system that can't accurately keep track of a player's visible rank vs how they are matchmade, it's not a system we should be supporting or embracing.

55 Comments

TheVoiceofExile10/5/2015, 7:02:22 PM5 votes

Agreed. Drop promotional matches, remove LP, show MMR rating again, and sub-divide the previous MMR ranges for each tier into 5 (or just a range in the case of Master and Challenger) divisions. That would make things nicer overall.

Melondrama10/5/2015, 7:31:16 PM5 votes

{quoted} I may be in the minority here, but personally I think promotional series' are completely unnecessary and do nothing but increase the number of games required to reach the true rank a player should have. They feel like added stress to me rather than an extra competitive joy of going through a series, which was the original intent of the system.

Literally everyone who plays ranked thinks this.

Joe Dredd10/5/2015, 8:29:46 PM1 votes

It's not supposed to be easy to climb. edit: and it still took hundreds of games to increase a division's worth of elo before with a 51% win rate

Koraji yo10/5/2015, 9:12:11 PM1 votes

My biggest issue with the ranked system is the way promo games work. Ontop of the entire silly concept of promo games every division\tier, you can also get really unfair matchups. By this I mean that it's possible to be in games with players who are way above and beyond the skill level your ranking suggests, because your MMR and division\tier are seperate. Story time tl;dr, silver 1 promos occupied by 70% plat players, 20% gold players, and 10% me in silver.

And I honestly never feel like I earned getting into the next tier or division because of promos. More often than not I'm just thankful that one of my promo matches didn't feature an afk teammate. Though that may be more common in my low elo games.

(story time)Back in Season 3(I think, maybe it was 4), I blew through my silver 5-1 with a huge winning streak, by the time I was in Silver 1 promos, I noticed most people in every game was plat, with 2-3 golds across the 5 games. Really, my promo games to enter Gold are being occupied by Plat players? It's very silly that in order to prove my worthyness to be a Gold player is being determined by facing players 2 divisions above me. Just because my MMR was busted really high on a winning streak. That experience just made me swear off ranked. Even though I still played 50-some casual ranked games the following season.

Twëek10/5/2015, 10:04:20 PM1 votes

I would really prefer that your visible league/LP/etc was a direct mapping of your MMR as opposed to this bizarre system we have. It seems silly to say that your visible rank does not matter.

I'm not sure how you'd deal with temporary demotion immunity while keeping the current leagues/division system though. I like the tradeoff that promotions provide - that is, you don't demote immediately upon reaching a new tier. Without series games you basically have the old ELO system which, along with immediate demotions, Riot does not want. How would you solve this?

Dealth10/5/2015, 10:37:37 PM1 votes

Lol @ people not realizing the ranked system is based off of 130 LP, and a series is actually just the remaining 30 that they need to get...

NOTE This is not exactly how it works but you can imagine it like this

Jubbinaut10/5/2015, 10:50:15 PM1 votes

I can see your concerns with the disconnects between MMR and LP, but I don't think that really needs changing. Rather, I think that simply adjusting Promos (or removing them entirely) would be enough to line them up quickly and accurately enough that there would be no need to remove what can act as a great "visualization" of the system.

Sir ArmaMalum10/5/2015, 11:00:31 PM1 votes

Hola Daen, great post.

Honestly, out of all the games I've played the simplest and imho the most effective is Hearthstone's (and other games that use the exact same progression). The incredibly simple 1 step-up for a win, 1 step-down for a loss and 2 step-ups for a win streak makes a lot of sense for a game that is majority RNG based. If you have a deck and decision making that is better than average (that magical >50% ratio) you'll eventually rise and inversely if you're not doing amazing.

Now obviously League is not nearly as RNG based as hearthstone, but no one can deny that between the factors of DC's, crit, ragers and the cumulative team progress of 4 different "mini-duels" that League sports as a game that Ranked does have a significant portion of RNG in its elements.

That exact method doesn't lend itself well to League directly due to the incredibly high amount of games it takes to confirm your place no matter where you end, but it goes to show that ranked procession as a system shouldn't be complicated. Simply because the players within the system create the challenge, and as long as the system allows for progression the inherent competition will keep the numbers relatively even naturally.

Tangentially however that does bring up the point of the end-goal of a ranked system. One thing the current ranked system does do is make sure that the higher ranks are exponentially more difficult to get into. I of course think there are both easier and better ways to do that but it is an objective to consider when thinking of a solution.

Du Ma Mi10/6/2015, 12:17:44 AM1 votes

Awesome post! Just wanted to let you know that Riot has confirmed that there will be some changes in the ranked season in S6. And trust, if they say they'll do it, it will get done - and "soon" too.

Randomonium10/6/2015, 12:37:49 AM1 votes

Fantastic post.

I honestly hope that Riot reworks the Ranked system to include some form of player ranking that adjusts LP gain/loss. I just feel dirty when I get 30 LP because I get carried to a win and I feel like crap when I lose just as much even though I had the highest CS, best KDA, and carried my team as best I could.

I know that people will complain that this system could be abused but I'm pretty sure Riot collects enough data from the games that they could squash most ways this could be abused, especially if they keep the details of the system hidden so people don't know what affects your score.

Karn Bishop10/6/2015, 1:15:57 AM1 votes

It would be nice, but its riot and they ignore our opinions.

Mast3rShake10/6/2015, 2:39:54 AM1 votes

this thread has 567 upvotes to get rid of promos so the community is with you on that: http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/gameplay-balance/jAroXdhq-promos-upvote-to-remove-them-downvote-to-keep-them

but their ranked system is terrible and the MMR/LP makes no sense whatsoever...there system takes a fun game and actually adds a poor experience to it.

OnlyGragasOnlyGG10/6/2015, 10:09:19 AM1 votes

My winrate overall in ranked is 67% rekt

TNHA Baritone10/6/2015, 11:05:00 AM1 votes

PSA : Riot already said they'd rework ranked system in preseason.

Mack The Knife10/6/2015, 1:26:32 PM1 votes

Consider this post my upvote of anything Daen says in this thread. Great articulation of constructive ideas, man!

Sir ArmaMalum10/10/2015, 5:35:22 PM1 votes

Random thought, what if the win that gets you into promos counts as your first win toward said promos? In other words to go up a dividion your "2 out of 3" starts with a win already, so you'd only need to win one more to advance. And to move of an entire rank you'd need to win 2 of the next 4 after that win. That'd still have the needed win ratio to above 50% (counting that 'entry win') but significantly decrease the number of consecutive wins needed.

Just brainstorming some 'quick-fix' possibilities.