Riot, a way to highly improve your dodging system

Wisdm·Dec 29, 2015·2 votes·1,146 views

Remove the LP dodge penalty. I am absolutely not against the idea of punishing dodges as they can easily be abused, I am actually for it, but if you ranking system is truly designed to reflect a player's performance, then there is really no logical reason for you to penalize someone who dodges by taking away their "performance points" (again, if that is truly the idea behind ranking someone). Your concept and philosophy is good, but your application is flawed. It is good to have a penalty system in place to punish people who abuses and exploits flaws, but the way you approached the dodge penalty is just flawed... This is exactly what you are telling a player when he dodges during his series : "You are not worthy of climbing because you did not want to play with a troll/rager/toxic/childish/refusing to communicate teammate/etc./etc." Whether it was intentional or not, that IS the message you are sending to players. There are other things you could do like increasing the time penalty to re-queue, stack up dodging points (like re-roll points for ARAM), grant 1 dodge a day, etc. but in NO WAY must you touch your ranking system IF your ranking system is supposed to rank players as dodging is in no way a reflection of a player's performance. The worst case scenario is when you are in your series and you get a loss because you just dodged. The series should actually be even more representative of a person's performance than the absolute value LP represents. Again, if your ranking system is supposed to represent players' performance, do not touch it with anything else than things that are affected by performance. There are tons of scenarios where someone should legitimately be able to dodge : 1. One player refused to say anything in champ select (which btw, you have literally nothing else to do than talk to your teammates in champ select...) 2. Someone is being toxic already in champ select 3. Someone is already tilting in champ select from previous games 4. Someone is clearly trolling because he did not get the role he/she wants. 5. etc. No one deserves to be forced to play with those players and even less to be told "You do not deserve better because you did not want to play with them." You can not stop those from happening and the only way for anyone to report them is to play the game with extremely unpleasant teammates and risk losing LP and time and gain a bad experience from it then report them after the game, because that is the only form of report you provided us with... Please think about this! You have came up with amazing ways to tune up your games through those many years LoL existed, you can do it again!

21 Comments

TeemoJenkinsDec 29, 20152 votes

By taking away the dodge penalty you say "It's OK you didn't get your lane, you can dodge, or bully someone else into dodging and so long as it's not consistent you'll be fine." The knife cuts both ways.

disregardableDec 29, 20152 votes

This is only true for the next month, though. Going forward you're always going to get your first or second lane choice, and then? I think the way dodges are treated is definitely going to need a revamp- what exactly they should do I'm not really sure though.

WisdmDec 29, 20151 votes

Agree with you!

WisdmDec 29, 20151 votes

I clearly stated that it is not about removing the dodge penalty as a whole, but rather remove the LP loss/series loss and replace it with something else... Does not feel like you read the whole thing before commenting :S

TeemoJenkinsDec 29, 20151 votes

{quoted}

I clearly stated that it is not about removing the dodge penalty as a whole, but rather remove the LP loss/series loss and replace it with something else... Does not feel like you read the whole thing before commenting :S

My response was pretty simple; if there's no LP or Promo loss penalty people will go back to abusing it like they did in Season 2. Very few people care about the wait time penalties, but if you take away their LP - it matters. You're asking to take away the one actual penalty to a dodge in ranked.

WisdmDec 29, 20151 votes

Back in season 2, the dodge penalties were total shit, you can't compare it to that, they basically removed any penalty possible. What I am saying is that they should implement another form of punishment rather than a punishment that touches performance. Which makes absolutely no sense at all. You could higher dodge penalty time to 1 hour for example or make it so you can not play ranked anymore that day, etc. I am just shooting ideas, which I am positive Riot can come up with an innovative way!

We can not improve the system (whether dodging one or any one) by being narrow minded!

Clown ApocalypseDec 29, 20151 votes

Yeah but losing games drops your MMR. Which affects how much LP you gain or lose. Losing MMR AND losing LP vs just losing LP is a no brainer. If it wasn't for the fact that sometimes I just want to play a game NOW because NOW is a good time and an hour from now might not be, I'd dodge every game I thought I might lose in champ select. 3 troll teams today? I'll just try again tomorrow. I went through a phase like that. Dodged promo games and all. LP aint stoppin nothin.

ModKnightsKemplarDec 29, 20151 votes

I honestly think it's okay. You have to commit to a small penalty to avoid a troll, instead of the full penalty of losing the game.

The biggest problem with it, in my opinion, is that you only get one or two of those at a small lp cost per day.

WisdmDec 29, 20151 votes

Yeah the first 3 lp is somewhat "ok", but the philosophy behind it, the idea behind it is super flawed, lp are supposed to represent our performance and dodging does not even get close to rating us... But from your first sentence, I have to disagree though, "commit to a small penalty" "to avoid a troll" should never go in any sentence.

ModKnightsKemplarDec 29, 20151 votes

Disagree.

See, playing with trolls makes you likely to lose. Everyone has to sometimes. So if you get to dodge the troll because he came out in champ select, the system SHOULD correct for that, because other people have to play with trolls that weren't obvious in champ select.

LP doesn't represent your performance. It's just a number that dictates when you are eligible to change ranks. And if you get to dodge games that are not in your favor, you get an advantage over people who don't. So if your lp weren't effected by that advantage, the system would be worse at correctly predicting the better player.

alasarcherDec 29, 20151 votes

"Ok i didnt get mid, dodge" "Ok i asked guy to pick support thresh, he picked Kennen, dodge" "Look this top laner lost 3 games in a row,dodge" "My adc Vayne has 30% winrate with her, dodge" "This guy has low CS stats in his match history, dodge" "This support doesnt ward very often, dodge"

Can we make competition who can think of most ways to abuse it?

WisdmDec 29, 20151 votes

Did you read the whole text before commenting? You'd get another form of punishment, not no punishment at all.....

Clown ApocalypseDec 29, 20151 votes

You can do that as it is now. There was a point in time when I did do it. My MMR was also double what it is now. I stopped doing it and haven't been past bronze 3 since I quit. When I was doing that every game I made it to promos for b1. I even dodged promo games. Having a high MMR is a lot better than having LP. The LP you lose from dodging you can easily make up by having a high MMR.

ValyrianBladeDec 29, 20151 votes

It is representative of performance though...

If you're able to dodge without an LP penalty, then you're able to exert some level of control over what games you play in. So, you can avoid bad games and only play good games (e.g. avoid all games where your win chance is less than 45%).

The point of an LP penalty on dodging is you should theoretically have LP gains when you're at the appropriate ranking if you dodge the correct games. So the penalty cancels it out.

The penalty during a series? I agree that's not fair. You should gain reroll points for dodges in your series. That makes sense (and I've suggested it too). However the promo helper will probably result in a similar outcome so I'd wait to see how things go before saying it's unacceptable...

Clown ApocalypseDec 29, 20151 votes

You can avoid bad games and only play good matchups as it is. You might get a low priority queue, but this won't affect your rank. There was a point in time i was dodging pretty much twice a day. Eventually your MMR will be so high you'll be getting 25+ points for a win and move on. Might even skip a division. There was a point in time where I did that, and went from like b5 to promos to b1 in short order. Then I got 8 afk's in 20 games ( I'm guessing the system didn't like me working around it), tilted, went on a brutal losing streak and was b5 again. The funniest part was I climbed from b5 to almost b1 while even dodging promo games. This was before they gave you a win your second time around. I would have made silver easy by dodging every game I thought was a loss with this new system. You don't lose MMR when you dodge. My MMR is so bad from playing games I should have dodged right now that I get 13-15 points for wins in bronze 3 and 4 right now. But I lose like 25. Losing a game at this point literally takes me two wins to make up for. So everytime I get promoted....I get demoted in just a few games because I lose so much more than I gain. I went on like an 18 game win streak. Took me from b5 to promos for b3. 18 back to back wins moved me one little level. All because my MMR is shit. MMR is way more important than LP.

WisdmDec 29, 20151 votes

How is that representative? Something would be put in place to stop you from abusing to dodge so the control you'd have would be so insignificantly small that it would actually not matter at all, and it would be so much better to be able to dodge when paired up with trolls then to be forced to play with them... I find the latter to be a worst experience.

The promo helper is like for Gold 2 and less... what about the rest? :S One could say "well they should be able to carry themselves if they are diamond", but that is a childish way of thinking, it is not because someone is good that they deserve less than the rest? (not targetting you, just putting this here in advance in case someone childish says that...)

ValyrianBladeDec 29, 20151 votes

Pretty sure the thought is that there should be fewer trolls/ragers/afk'ers etc... once you get to that elo. They had to get there too.

And while it may be small, the dodge penalty is small too. And it's only to your LP, not your MMR (so as was pointed out elsewhere, you'll get larger wins than losses if you dodge enough games, which will make up for the lost LP).

KorilloDec 29, 20151 votes

LP is not your "performance points" - MMR is. When you dodge you lose 0 MMR. So in reality the penalty for dodging is very, very small - perhaps even insignificant in the long run.

WisdmDec 29, 20151 votes

Your ranking depends on your LP, not on your MMR. I do know what you mean, I do think that MMR is actually more important than LP, but whether we like it or not, LP is what determines what rank you are, not MMR. Whether we like it or not, ranking is the only form of performance comparison that we have in this game.

KorilloDec 29, 20151 votes

{quoted}

Your ranking depends on your LP, not on your MMR. I do know what you mean, I do think that MMR is actually more important than LP, but whether we like it or not, LP is what determines what rank you are, not MMR. Whether we like it or not, ranking is the only form of performance comparison that we have in this game.

Your MMR determins how much LP you gain or lose. So yes, it's true if you dodge you lose a small amount of LP, but since your MMR was unaffected, you'll just gain more LP the next time you win if you dropped below the your MMR rank.

So like I said, in the long run it would likely have no affect on your rank because you'll eventually get to where you're supposed to be. This is why dodging is so common at the higher elos. They understand that the penalty for dodging is much, much smaller than the penalty for losing a game, so if they think they are likely to lose they just dodge.