riot, please get unranked and low-confidence-mmr players out of ranked queues
win or lose, ranked is amazing when the teams are reasonably matched..
However, when the team skills (or non-afk player count) are different, the game is toxic, and frustraing, and sometimes - a waste of time.
In silver, nearly 40% of my queues pop with unranked players on my team.. and if I stay on that team, the enemy team will often not have unranked players.... I believe this is contributing to an environment where savvy players dodge games with unranked teammates, causing them to "double stack" into other teams, where they get 2-3 unranked players per team. Sometimes there might be unranked on the other team, sometimes not.
Please, Riot, get these unranked (and low confidence MMR) players out of the ranked queues. They are toxic for games.
How do we do this?
Force them to solo-q for normals in a special "qualify" phase, so they can get a provisional MMR while playing normal games.
Matchmaking can use these normal queue games to give a player an estimated MMR... once the MMR has high enough confidence (over ~10 games), then they will be allowed to play ranked with that provisional MMR. If they AFK during this period, their MMR quality resets (aka, they will have to play a minimum of another 10 games).
Of course even after this provisional "qualify" period, the system won't have a perfectly accurate MMR, but at least it will be better than throwing completely random MMRs into the ranked queues -- unevenly on the two teams.
Why is this a win?
- players who only play <10 "ranked" games a season will never actually be in the ranked queues
- players who afk once every 10 games will never actually be in the ranked queues
- players who have not played 10 games last season will need to actually play a bit before they can be in the ranked queues
- new players will need to get a provisional MMR before they can get into the ranked queues
All of these things will reduce noisy MMR and increase team equality.. which will increase the quality of games and fun, while reducing toxcity.
