@Riot why have 80% of ranked players in bronze and silver

Worst Mid Ever·4/13/2015, 2:23:09 PM·5 votes·7,089 views

Technically players in silver 4 are above average, why have them in a bracket that the community views as complete garbage? I get that you're trying to reward higher elo players by having a smaller division for them but there is honestly not that much difference between mid bronze and high gold, and the league system causes people to become so desperate to get out of "elo hell" that they become toxic when they are losing and seek out cheap ways to win without actually improving, like the current freelo. Why not make it so 20% of players are in each bracket, and push say diamond 3+ players up into master.

11 Comments

ValyrianBlade4/13/2015, 2:57:39 PM5 votes

That many people are there because (roughly) that many people are at that skill level.

Like any ranking system, there's little difference between the average and below average players. There are huge differences between the top rate players.

Look at tennis for example. It doesn't surprise people very much when a 600th ranked player beats a 300th ranked player. It's absolutely shocking when a 30th ranked player beats a top 4 player. As you get to higher levels there are big differences in skill levels.

When it comes to league, I could agree with a "cardboard" tier. Have something below bronze. Part of the problem is that Bronze is around what, 1200 elo? And players can get lower than 600? So players can drop so far below what qualifies as the lowest elo, it makes sense to separate them out a bit more at the bottom. It doesn't make sense to just shift everyone up though. By introducing master tier, Riot acknowledges that there are considerable differences between the few players at the top compared to the differences at the bottom. As individual players we don't notice this because low ranked players are often very inconsistent. That same guy you think was a smurf who carried 26-1-4 against you may have gone 2-14-3 in the previous game. With the aggressive, I must solo-carry, go for any chance at a kill, attitude that many lower elo players have you end up with this. Either the play works and you get a kill lead and snowball or it doesn't work and they kill you and they snowball. Someone's always snowballing so it looks really unbalanced.

UZuDGuot1A4/13/2015, 5:11:23 PM3 votes

This post is pointless, like really. Bronze is such an easy league if you deserve to get out of it, no mid bronze player has remotley near the same skill level as high gold. Ranking means something because it's an acheivement system, you work for the rank you get, you improve and you show progess you go up, if you don't and act like a total noob and blame everyone else then you're bronze, you should stay bronze end of story. TL;DR get good get ranks

Piratedcopy4/13/2015, 2:39:41 PM3 votes

how? you've proposed a concept but not how to execute it. The reason people are in bronze is because it's "difficult to climb out", due to the sheer amount of people in it. And that amount is due to placements. What needs to change to play people in more appropriate rankings?

DropFill4/14/2015, 2:42:23 AM2 votes

After playing in my smurf, I do understand why people are stuck in silver, or even gold.

People don't have any interest in learn something you tell them, nor learn from their mistakes. When I tried to give them a advice of how to build, when or not to go agressive, several "mia" in chat but they still stay at the enemy turret, they ALL tell me I suck, to shut up, or send me to hell. If I am snowballing, they try to hear me, but they forget it as soon as the game end, and continue to do the same mistakes. They are REALLY agressive to ANYONE on their team that is not doing well ; doesn't matter why they are not going well ( camp , bad matchups or simple lack of skill ). But, when someone adds me on my main account ( my main and my smurf are both in brazil, main is challenger, smurf silver 3 ) they are ALL nice to me , tell me how well I played in the game they spectated in the home page and stuff. But when I play on my smurf, and they don't know my true elo, they are just toxic and agressive with me.

If you are bronze, silver or gold, and nice to people and try to learn and stuff, you will climb. It is hard because of the amounts of toxicity, ragers and stuff, but you will. If you are that type of guy who tells someone to go to hell because they are doing poorly, you deserve bronze, forever. Many times I have seen people trying not to help someone who needed help. Sometimes, it is better to not try help, because they are WAY behind. But early on is easy, specially at low elo, and people don't even try.

UltraGigaNiga4/14/2015, 1:58:56 AM2 votes

"not much difference between mid bronze and high gold"

Probably someone who had a gold player in a normals game that fed using a champion they had no clue how to play and then automatically assumed that this was the max potential of all high gold players. There is a HUGE difference between high gold and bronze. Every single smurfer can basically agree that everything up until mid gold can easily be carried on your own. You can basically have a 100% winrate in bronze regardless of how many afks or feeders are present on your team and silver can be passed with 80% at least. Mid gold is when a smurfers winrate drops to 65% or lower because that's when people stop acting like completely braindead players even if they're one trick ponies.

Matthias91194/14/2015, 1:50:40 AM1 votes

In theory the division are about an equal amount of MMR (similar to Elo rating) apart. That is, a Silver 3 is as about as much better than a Bronze 3 as a Gold 3 is better than a Silver 3, and so on up the ladder (although it still compresses a lot at the top).

If you make it equal percentages per tier, a few weird things happen:

It often creates really inaccurate/arbitrary breakpoints in rating. Like there may be a much bigger skill difference between the 60th-70th percentile than 75th-85th, but you arbitarily decided that the rating breakpoint will be at 80%. Assuming that Riot adjusts the breakpoints periodically to make sense, the ratings in a system like League's should be more meaningful.
There will be a huge skill gap between the top and bottom of the "top 20%" tier. This is the same sort of reason that they created Master -- due to hard clamping keeping people out of Challenger, the MMR gap between the "top" and "bottom" of D1 was about as big as between the top and bottom of the entire Silver tier.

BlazinHot64/13/2015, 3:55:26 PM1 votes

SC2 did something similar to this for their ranked system. Except they dropped bronze to the bottom 8 % and through the extra into gold league. So people in gold are the average player and people in bronze are the noobs and have an actual chance to improve.