Boards›[ARCHIVED] Miscellaneous

the LP system and a couple things about it that need fixing

TheIronKhan·2/26/2014, 5:00:25 AM·3 votes·838 views

Hi everyone,

This is my first post here, but Ive been playing league for a solid period of time now (since early season 3). My entire ranked experience has been during the "League System" era, focusing on LP to determine ranking. While I don't have much insight as to how this system compares to the old one, I still have to wonder about the way the current system is implemented. While I think that, overall, the concept is a good one, there are some glaring issues that need to be addressed.

  1. LP gains/losses do not account for time between play

It's common knowledge that failure to play ranked for a long period of time will result in a decay of LP and potentially your division. This makes sense as it is likely that skill will deteriorate as a player falls out of sync with current metagames, patches, etc.

However, there is no consideration for people who DO play regularly. I played ranked constantly through s3, the s4 preseason, and now still in s4. I can't think of a period of more than three days when I didn't play. Now in the s4 preseason, I managed to finally drag myself out of bronze and all the way to silver 3 and was well on my way to climbing even higher. With the s4 soft reset, I got places into silver 4, and shortly after had a bit of a losing streak (lost about 7 games out of ten, very frustrating).

As a result, I found that my MMR dropped so drastically that I was gaining a meager 11 or 12 LP while losing whopping 22 or 23. I essentially had to win 7 out of 10 games just to break even. And for the most part, I did just that, but I had to play dozens on dozens of games under this kind of pressure in order to boost myself out of a hole dug by a short losing streak.

My point here is that given the fact that I play so regularly, it is extremely unreasonable to think that my skill just flew out the window in such a short time, but the system has no way to account for that. I had to truly struggle in order to get back to where I was before all because of a fluke of a losing streak. There needs to be some sort of measure in place that stops players from being forced down so hard in these situations. A short losing streak should not force you to win 21 of your next 30 games to even have the HOPE of moving up again.

2)There is no automated system for forgiveness

Loss forgiveness was an excellent idea by riot and I'm sure has saved thousands of people from losing LP as a result of region-wide issues. Having a simple "on or off" mechanism is a convenient way to make sure people aren't punished for circumstances out of their control. The problem is, it has to be manually activated and only affects situations that are massive in scale that the issues can be immediately brought to Riot's attention.

Especially in light of the recent DDoS attacks riot has been suffering from, it's nearly impossible to have someone press "the button" on time. Just the other day my entire team disconnected from the game all at once and I got to sit, unable to move, and watch as the enemy team (completely unaffected) shoved down two mid towers and then pushed to kill the nexus. this all happened in a span of about three minutes, yet completely threw the game. As a result, I lost a whopping 19 LP, the enemy team (completely undeserving of their free victory) got full points, and loss forgiven was turned on not five minutes later, which did absolutely nothing for us. This is only one example. It happens regularly now, and often so sporadically and in such small doses that riot cannot possibly know and manually enable loss forgiven in time to save players.

The other huge issue is with people who go afk (whether it be a dc, ragequit, or whathave you) or even worse players who never connect in the first place. In situations like these, its usually just one person, or maybe two, who are unable to participate in the game, but the effects are still disastrous to the team and chances of winning. Sure, it's possible to win the 4v5, but is sure isn't likely. Especially in cases where a player doesn't even load into the game to begin with, the game clearly recognizes as much (as noted by the red font for their name in the postgame stats). Would it really be so difficult to realize that a player has been disconnected for more than 10 or 15 minutes and cut the rest of the team a break? When bot lane has to 1v2 because the support never loaded in so the jungler has to camp bot and top lane gets angry that the jungler cant gank because hes too busy helping bot lane just survive and the whole thing spins out of control, what's the result? A full loss of LP (again, in my case a potentially substantial amount).

There was a time when afk's were something of a rarity and it just something you dealt with. The theory being that while you may get an afk at some point the enemy would too and it would all balance out, but that ideal no longer stands. The sheer mass of players leaves far too much likelihood that someone is going to have connection problems and with the increase in DDoS trouble, it's entirely possible it isn't even that players fault they can't connect.

Now I'm not saying there should be a full loss-forgivness policy in the case of one player being afk, but since the technology for tracking whether someone is in game or not is already there, it should be easy to perhaps halve the LP lost for the 4 man team, or not have an AFK game count towards your promo series. Give the winners their full LP if you must, but don't dole out the full punishment for the team playing a man down, it's just not fair.

tl;dr

  1. If someone plays often enough, a short-term losing streak shouldn't have such drastic effects on MMR and LP gains/losses.

  2. There needs to be some sort of automated loss-forgiving system that saves players from excessive LP loss resultant from events outside their control. It might have to be complicated, but given the current environment, it has to happen.

Thoughts?

4 Comments

burdluver902/26/2014, 2:41:54 PM1 votes

I really agree with your post and a lot of people don't have sympathy for the position you're in after the losing streak.

During/After placements I went on a bit of a losing streak and went from Silver 1 promo in season 3 to Silver 5 0 LP season 4. I was playing fine in Silver 2 last season and still winning about 25 LP and losing around 15 (so I deserved to be higher than that), but after the reset I am now silver 5 and losing more LP than I win (and now i've lost 2 promos thanks to the DDoS, trolls, and just bad teamplay) :(

Every game that I have an afk in (which ironically only happened in my promos) really makes a difference. I am trying to climb back up to where I was less than a few months ago and it's fucking hard. Every unneccessary loss sets my MMR gain back even more. I know over time I'll eventually get back up there (my goal is Gold), but it sucks that a small losing streak (it was around 7 wins out of 15 games) tanked me down so far that I'll spend most of the season just getting back to where I was rather than actually moving up. And then hoping that the next reset doesn't do the exact same thing.

If you are where you deserve to be then an afk every once in a while isn't a big problem. With the weird ass mmr system though, and how streaks count more and the resets and promos - even a few afks at the right time can really mess with your rating and makes it really frustrating (3 of my placement games had afk'ers on my side and 1 on the enemy and I went 4w/6l (so I was 3w/3l on the games that were actually fair))

I think the problem is that while a lot of people cry "I'm only in bronze bc teammates" - very few people are actually in the position we are in.

For the vast majority the system acutally works rather well. And if we keep playing eventually we'll end up where we should be and our mmr will even out. It just really sucks that some of us have to fight that uphill battle because of weird circumstances. It may be more common now because of the reset and the DDoS attacks. I doubt Riot is going to do that much about it though, since most people who complain about it really are where they belong.

Pyrrasu2/26/2014, 9:02:25 PM1 votes

If you really play so frequently, I really don't think you should be gaining/losing 20 LP per game. I haven't played ranked since Season 2 so I cam't really speak for myself, but if that's how it is, that's definitely not right. I get where they're coming from with the emphasis on streaks (it feels great to go on a winning streak) but the effect of losing streaks really seems too harsh...