Boards›[ARCHIVED] Miscellaneous

Solo/Duo Queue Idea

zilcho88·11/20/2013, 7:36:13 AM·1 votes·11 views

The league system is currently very frustrating for unlucky players. Whether or not you think elo hell exists, it's obvious that some players are put at very wrong spots. Otherwise, you wouldn't have players at Bronze 5 MMR who consistently have very strong KDA's. They may not be good enough to carry themselves out of B5 MMR alone, but they would clearly hold their own in higher leagues. (Imagine a Silver-quality player who, because of bad luck, ends up with a very bad MMR.)

There is an easy way to fix this without drastically changing the league system. In sports analytics, there is a stat called "Win Percentage Added". It's very easy to calculate. You just take a team's current game state, and see how many past teams have gone on to win from that game state. Every time a player changes the game state, you get a new chance to win. The difference between the new percentage and the old is the WPA for that play.

For example, say a team has zero turrets down, the score is 2 kills to 10, and the game time is 10:00. It might be the case that past teams in this situation went on to win 5% of the time. A player on this team downs a turret at 10:01. Teams with that score, with one turret down, went on to win, say, 7% of the time. The player who downed the turret would be credited 0.02 WPA.

Each game, you would simply apply each player's WPA to their League Point change. In a win, you would use WPA x LP. The more you do to help your team win, the more points you should gain. In a loss, you would use (1-WPA) x LP. You'll still lose points, but the more you help your team the fewer you lose.

Why would this be an easy fix? Because WPA is a stat that is impossible to abuse. There is no way to earn it except by helping your team win. How would this help unlucky players? It adds a strong link between player performance and LP change. And the best part of WPA is that it's extremely easy to calculate. It is a memory-intensive stat, because there are billions of game states to remember. But actually performing a WPA calculation can be done in constant time. It is the sort of stat an MMO could handle very easily.

3 Comments

Amak11/20/2013, 10:00:11 AM1 votes

I disagree with your assertion about high-KDA, low-MMR players. I do because I am one of them. My KDA isn't amazingly high, but it's very positive and higher than many of my friends who play in Gold and even a few of the Diamond players I've checked out.

All that means is that I'm good at playing my champion. I know when to fight and when to run away, and I make good choices often. That's great, and if everyone on the team did that we'd certainly win. Thing is, this game isn't about what I can do for my KDA. It isn't about playing my champion well; it's about playing well with my team.

I like the idea of individual performance affecting LP, but it is so corruptible that I can't support it. For example, my best friend loves to main Fizz. He whines to me all the time about how he goes 17-4 in a game and they still lose. Sounds like he's doing a lot to help the team, but in reality he's just getting a lot of kills that don't really change the outcome. What would happen in your system is people who perform really well in their lane would sit back out of fights to protect their WPA so they don't lose as many LP points when the match is over. Or you'd have people constantly trying to backdoor and take down turrets even while the other team is pushing straight to their heart because they want to increase their WPA before the match is over. It's very prone to abuse considering I just thought of those two methods in less than a minute.

The recent I change I made in my logic was to choose champions that allow me the chance to turn the tide of a fight. Much as I love Fizz and respect his power, he's not a game-changer. In a team fight he can take out a target, but he can't stop a team from pushing on his turrets. He's a glass cannon with high escape. My best friend has a great KDA with Fizz, but a low win rate because of this.

Also, support roles do very little in the way of dropping turrets or getting kills. In your system, without extreme adjustments in the way things are scored and calculated, ADCs would benefit the most from WPA if they play well, causing even more competition for that spot.

Solan Stonewhip11/20/2013, 4:20:31 PM1 votes

for one thing, i think you're analysis is flawed about high kda low mmr players. getting kills is only one part of the game as the other guy said.

and you know this isn't an mmo per se right. it's a moba game. but i guess you're point is statistical.

you're right there are a ton of games to reference. but the thing about statistics is that over time, over thousands of games played, it eliminates luck. if you play often enough and long enough. then you'll get rid of your 'unlucky players'

in order to do what you're saying you would need to build a constantly updated and correlating database. i'm the first to admit i know nothing about programming. but i don't think that it would be as easy as you say/think. the calculation might be easy. but because of the size of the database and the realtime calculation you're talking a big increase in traffic. the client may simply not be designed to do that. may not have the memory to do that. also, if you're multiplying LP by wpa that way then you might be decreasing the LP of a lot of players. you would probably have to have it be LP + WPA X LP (for example) or is it your base LP that your'e referring to in your formula

i dunno. interesting idea. but i don't really have a good grasp on the feasibility of implementation. especially since the real solution to the problem you're suggesting is just to play more