As the title says, I can’t think of how many posts we made so far in this community speculating how MMR, LP gains and rank system actually work. But what if all of a sudden we all know with accuracy?
Will Riot reinvent how they calculate MMR? Will it make any difference to players? I can see so many ways this will be exploited. Any opinion from more experienced players?
External link →They are not as accurate as the actual system.
Knowing exactly which factors count into MMR will help people knowing how to mislead the system, either for personal gain or for damaging other players.
There is also the problem that knowing how the system recognise patterns will help players avoid the detection i.e. back in early seasons, if you were a OTP you’d very likely get matched with someone who had high chances of picking a counter champ to stomp your promos.
Other than that, I can only think what happens if players find out they are being ranked with incredibly silly factors.
I can just tell you - you gain MMR by winning games and lose MMR by losing. The amount you win or lose is related to a few things, like the MMRs of both teams. In other words if your team has more MMR, so you're "expected" (and I really need to emphasize that "more MMR" and "expected" are extremely thin margins before you pounce on me for rigging matches, in almost every case the MMRs of both teams are close enough that the difference is not really significant) to win, you earn less MMR than in the opposite case. It's also related to how confident we are in your the MMR you have today, for example win or lose streaks can be an indication that you are farther off from your MMR than expected and we'll move you more per match as a consequence.
back in early seasons, if you were a OTP you’d very likely get matched with someone who had high chances of picking a counter champ to stomp your promos
wut
And what about certainty of MMR in regards to how many games played? Can you"loosen" the certainty if you start playing very well all of a sudden? The opposite feels to be the case at the moment.
You can through winstreaks or losestreaks (doesn't need to be X wins/losses in a row, it's X wins or losses out of Y recently played games), we're not looking at any in-game performance metric right now.
I'm impressed you bother to explain the matchmaking stuff to clueless people who don't want to hear answers lol.
I'd tell them I am rigging their next ranked match because of complaining on reddit
I tell people I'm putting them in loser's queue all the time, and the reason I can make those jokes is because I can't because it doesn't exist :)
https://web.cs.ucla.edu/~yzsun/papers/WWW17Chen_EOMM peer-reviewed study warning
So an engagement optimized system isn't being used?
- We're going to ignore the high prevalence of extended win/loss streaks in modern seasons which very closely match trends found under EOMM-based matchmaking?
- Are we going to ignore the consistency in the high prevalence of recent performance discrepancies between two teams? If you don't know what I'm talking about, seeing a team full of 50%+ WR, and the other full of 49%- WR, rather than a relatively random distribution that would be expected.
These didn't happen often in early seasons. Win/loss streaks and recent player performance on each team would appear relatively random in a normal system.
Are you saying Riot would have zero motivation to use a similar system after all of the past /dev posts talking about wanting higher player engagement, despite doing nearly nothing for players on that end season after season?
So an engagement optimized system isn't being used
Correct, it's not
Where are you getting your stats on streaking and team performance distribution compared to prior seasons?
We have a pretty straightforward strategy for increasing engagement - put out cool stuff that the players want to engage with and build long term trust that we're gonna be straight with you, are in it for the long haul, and are committed to all of those things because we're players too and those are all pretty fundamental things everyone wants.
We could juice all sorts of ranked engagement metrics with EOMM for a while, but how long are you going to stick around with League if we were to actually start rigging the ranked system? If we were, I wouldn't be out here telling you we aren't because that'd be pretty slimy. Would you trust other Riot games? There's all sorts of downstream consequences to violating trust like that.
There's versions of this that are probably reasonable - like if we had bots that were good enough, matching you against them in normal games if you were on a losing streak to give you a break. But if we were going to be doing stuff like that we'd be pretty upfront about what rules are there, and wouldn't do that in ranked games, where our promise to you is that we're always going to be making the fairest matches we can in a reasonable amount of time.
It just seems like matchmaking in general feels worse compared to up until season 6-8 or so. Games feel far less stable, and far more often one-sided.
Is this just a symptom of role select as people solely grew more specialized and less versatile, you think? Is it just people being less experienced in secondary and autofill roles, and leading to relatively frequent lopsided experiences? I'm still of the mind that role select feels great for players, but was bad for the game overall.
Or do you think its a symptom of where meta has shifted, where coinflips commonly happen before a jungle even finishes first clear?
As far as "stats", its just noticed trends (could be anecdotal), but its also something that others seem to mention somewhat commonly as well. I remember people thought 5+ win/loss streaks were crazy unless you're playing far outside of your actual MMR back in early seasons. Now it seems like 5+ isn't uncommon in comparison even for plateau'd players, and it usually swings in the other direction after, rather than returning to relatively random, spotty outcomes. Again, could be anecdotal, but there seem to be way too many parallel observations from streamers who end up looking at match histories/op.gg lobbies.
Role select did a lot of different things. Like you said, it's led to players becoming less versatile because it allows you to hyperspecialize, but it's also made a lot of players really happy for that reason. "Feels great for players but was bad for the game overall" isn't a rare opinion internally, but it would probably take a lot if we decided we wanted to unwind it.
Gameplay is absolutely something that can affect how fair a match feels. If the meta shifts from "farm and scale for late, mages and ADCs are the strongest" to "early game hyperaggro invade junglers every game", the latter games probably feel more one sided even though nothing changed with matchmaking.
On streaks, humans are pretty bad at recognizing randomness. It'd be more likely we were rigging things if streaks weren't frequent. On a pure 50/50 coinflip the chances of you getting heads 5 times in a row are 1/32. Then consider how many players per day are flipping those coins, you're actually going to have a lot of people with streaks like that. And then consider that it's not in reality going to be exactly 50/50 given that not everyone is always playing their best champion, or has a consistent amount of focus, or is at their correct level (if you lost 5 in a row undeservedly, if you're playing well you probably have a slightly better than 50% shot of winning because you're under the MMR you should be), so there's plenty of different factors to inject here.
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