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Why Ranked MMR is just not good

SpecOpCow·9/24/2015, 10:05:02 PM·2 votes·1,080 views

Riot games is not a perfect company.

Riot is not a god, however they may have implemented one of the worst things into their ranked systems humanly possible.

Before I go onto criticize the MMR system I will explain to you how it works and it's strengths and weaknesses.

MMR works similar to how the old ELO system was, as you climb through the ranks your overall MMR will go up. To give you and idea about the range Bronze is about ≈ 950 and Diamond is about ≈ 2400, and it scales evenly throughout the rest of the ranks. Your MMR affect you in your rank and division, depending on the average MMR of the division will contribute to how much LP you earn or lose. So generally if you have bad MMR you will be awarded less points and more will be taken away from a win or a loss. That isn't the only thing MMR effects however. When two teams face eachother both teams average MMR is accumulated, If one teams is dramatically higher or lower that will also have a direct impact on the amout of LP you gain or lose. For instance:

Team A Average MMR ≈ 1350

Team B Average MMR ≈ 1400

If team A wins they will be awarded significantly more points, while team B will lose a lot more, however on the flip side if team B wins the match then they will be awarded significantly less points and the opposing team won't lose at much. Is it also worth noting that if you win a game your MMR will go up and if you lose a game your MMR will go down.

Pros:

  1. Feeder dogs that lose their team the game get demoted rapidly
  2. Players that are up against a significantly better team won't get punished as much for losing to them.
  3. Alternatively someone who is so much better than enemy teams cannot simply get lucky going against bad players and get promoted

Cons (Theres a lot):

  1. Consistent players are punished either losing LP with a 50% WR or barely climbing
  2. Rewards lucky winstreaks and Punishes unlucky loss streaks
  3. People that promote themselves rapidly into higher elos will notice their average MMR being significantly lower and the rest and will get demoted for huge LP losses and very little gains (The D5 promotion bug when people would gain 5 lp and lose 30)
  4. 100 LP climbs can last Months or as little as hours
  5. Discourages ranked play AT ALL if you are low MMR
  6. Wastes literal hours of real time for 1 loss
  7. Allows bad. but lucky players to climb higher into the elos and ruin the league experience
  8. Makes ranked feel like a grind more than a true test of skill (Gotta play alot to raise average MMR etc.)

Now I'm going to address many counter arguments that I see fairly often, if your's isn't there comment below

Q1: "If you're actually good and deserve to climb your MMR will stop being shitty once you win alot"_

This is true if you play more and win consistently more your MMR will go up, however playing with low MMR means that even if you win 6/10 of your ranked games you will lose more LP than you gain, making it horribly aggravating to play discourages growth, Also it just takes way too damn long. I've followed my MMR growth and loss over about a month and it averages about 10 per win and loss, which means if you're about 100 below average you have to win 10 games in a row just to be AVERAGE

YOU HAVE TO WIN 10 GAMES IN A ROW TO BE QUEUED UP WITH AVERAGE PLAYERS

DO YOU SEE THE ISSUE.

Q2: "Well if they didn't have MMR how you think it should be?"

Okay well its pretty simple.

Guaranteed more LP on Wins and losses, It doesnt have to be static like ALWAYS 21 when you win and ALWAYS 17 when you lose but it should always be more so that consistent players that win one, then lose one will always climb effectively making it less of a grind. This will also prevent players from exploding through divisions with 100 million higher MMR than those of their elo

Q3 "Instead of wasting your time complaining and elaborating on the system why don't you deal with and just get good enough to beat the system?"

Well that's is a good question. Why shouldn't we all just deal with it and move on, just carry ALL your teams and you will climb.

Not gonna lie it's possible, elo hell does NOT exist in any manner, you have FULL control of your fate in the game at all times. But why should I have to deal with it? Why should the player have to manually adjust to a situation in which presents. The situation only benefits those who can consistently dominate over and over

I for one am DONE with the 1v5 Mentality, I'm done. This is a TEAM game and its current system KILLS that mentality, its only about the people who can shit on their ELO rather than those who would help their team and try to play the game the way it was intended.

I know literally nobody from Riot will see/respond to this because they honestly don't care but whatever I suppose, leave your thoughts below, please leave your criticism to well structured debate, I wont respond if you just call me a bad player and an idiot.

6 Comments

Genuwhine9/24/2015, 10:17:16 PM1 votes

Riot thinks they are always right so they wont change anything, For example and diamond 3 on one account carry most of the games and yeah the players suck. Then on another account where i played alot of games duoing and messing around when i try hard i still get stuck in an elo because it puts me with lower skilled players that horrendously feed so i go on winning streaks and it doesnt matter because the 2 losses i cant control loses me all the lp. This is why players laughed super hard at jatt for saying solo que matters even a little because shit you have diamond 3 players that can be stuck in plat 5 and win on the higher account and lose on the lower account because the matchmaking is totally bananas. I have 9 wins out of 14 games recently on the plat 5 account in the 5 i lose every single player on the team besides me had an extremely negative kda and it wasnt just 1 player it was 3-4 players and these 5 losses all came within 6 games.5-6 games had 3-4 players extremely feeding (2-6 3-8 type stuff) Yeah but matchmaking is spot on right? honestly anyone trying to argue that matchmaking is fine hasn't actually played the game enough

SmokedAlmonds9/24/2015, 10:35:08 PM1 votes

{quoted}

snip

Q1: "If you're actually good and deserve to climb your MMR will stop being shitty once you win alot"_

This is true if you play more and win consistently more your MMR will go up, however playing with low MMR means that even if you win 6/10 of your ranked games you will lose more LP than you gain, making it horribly aggravating to play discourages growth, Also it just takes way too damn long. I've followed my MMR growth and loss over about a month and it averages about 10 per win and loss, which means if you're about 100 below average you have to win 10 games in a row just to be AVERAGE

YOU HAVE TO WIN 10 GAMES IN A ROW TO BE QUEUED UP WITH AVERAGE PLAYERS

DO YOU SEE THE ISSUE.

This specifically addresses streaks, win or loss. You might get lucky and get carried in a bunch of games in a row and land an entire division above your ability or you may get unlucky and dragged down. Those short streaks aren't necisairily representative of your ability changing drastically. Thats why it takes time for your MMR to "catch up". So ya you may stay stagnant for a time to prove that you belong there but if you maintain that 60% winrate you will climb.

It is slow, ill give you that. And that is probably the biggest downside of a win based ranking system.

Q2: "Well if they didn't have MMR how you think it should be?"

Okay well its pretty simple.

Guaranteed more LP on Wins and losses, It doesnt have to be static like ALWAYS 21 when you win and ALWAYS 17 when you lose but it should always be more so that consistent players that win one, then lose one will always climb effectively making it less of a grind. This will also prevent players from exploding through divisions with 100 million higher MMR than those of their elo

Ill never understand why poeple think that you should always be going up. If you are winning 50% of your games you should be staying exactly where you are not moving up.

Q3 "Instead of wasting your time complaining and elaborating on the system why don't you deal with and just get good enough to beat the system?"

Well that's is a good question. Why shouldn't we all just deal with it and move on, just carry ALL your teams and you will climb.

Not gonna lie it's possible, elo hell does NOT exist in any manner, you have FULL control of your fate in the game at all times. But why should I have to deal with it? Why should the player have to manually adjust to a situation in which presents. The situation only benefits those who can consistently dominate over and over

I for one am DONE with the 1v5 Mentality, I'm done. This is a TEAM game and its current system KILLS that mentality, its only about the people who can shit on their ELO rather than those who would help their team and try to play the game the way it was intended.

The system doesn't do anything to kill it. People just suck at working together. You are right that the 1v5 mentality is terrible, but that isn't a result of the system. I would say that is mostly a result of people thinking they are better than they are. Everyone else lucked into their rank or got boosted but feel like they not only earned theirs but are being held back by others.

The way I see there are 2 major downsides to the system.

1, As I mentioned is that it is slow at initially ranking people properly. I think they said it takes between 100 and 150 games to really get where you belong. Which is a problem because every game on the way to that has had matchmaking somewhat degraded because there was an inaccurately ranked player in the game. This is especially a problem in low silver and high bronze where there is a high number of unranked players entering and playing out those first 100-150 games.

2, Individual games aren't really representative of anything. The system very much works on the law of large numbers. Sure there's gonna be an afk that causes you do lose and that will lower your rank and it has nothing to do with your ability. But some day there is gonna be one on the other team. Also your rank being essentially your performance over the last ~150 games then 1 just isn't very impactful.

I think its important to remember that your rank is a measurement, not just some XP bar to be grinded out.

Matthias91199/25/2015, 2:15:27 AM1 votes

YOU HAVE TO WIN 10 GAMES IN A ROW TO BE QUEUED UP WITH AVERAGE PLAYERS DO YOU SEE THE ISSUE.

It matches you with players around your MMR. The matchmaker does not consider "rank" at all -- it doesn't make a difference if you have a low MMR for your division or not, you still get "fair" matches.

The way they have it set up can be frustrating if you're in a "V" division and lose a bunch of games (but don't get demoted). Then you have to win more than you lose for a while to get your MMR back up high enough to be able to climb. But the only way not to do that would be to make it demote you much more quickly between tiers, which many players find even more frustrating and a source of "ladder anxiety".

...but it should always be more so that consistent players that win one, then lose one will always climb effectively

It cannot work this way unless they completely revamp the ranking system. If winning at a 50% rate caused you to gain rank, eventually everyone would be Plat or Master, which would be silly. Then it would just be a "grind".