League of Legends Dev Tracker

Because it's meaningless at this point. I understand that we started with diamond being "the best of the best", but now we've added in masters + challenger, and recently grandmasters.

• Masters = the best of the best of the best
• Grandmasters = best of the best of the best of the best
• Challenger = best of the best of the best of the best of the best

It's a little ridiculous. Furthermore I think there's a perception issue when masters+ players are like "UGH why are these DIAMOND players in my games" when in reality, we look at the MMR of the D2 or D1 player they're complaining about... and it's the same elo as them.

Sure there have been legit matchmaking issues this season, but I genuinely think having a more normal distribution of ranks as well as clear distinction between normal divisions (iron to diamond, 99% of players) and elite divisions (masters, GM, chal, top 1% of players) would just make more sense.

Thanks for sharing this to reddit and the kind words - I appreciate it. :)

It wasn't intended that the mission data wasn't available at the start. The article has since been updated but I recognize that not a lot of folks know where to find it or read it. The full mission information with dates is available here:

https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/special-event/welcome-mid-season-trials

There were major matchmaking issues this season. Not contesting that, and especially early S9 had much larger matchmaking issues than we’ve ever had in S7 or S8.

I’m saying the overall ranked distribution of S9 looks much better than S8. Have to click on the sample graphs, but yeah the ranked distributions are different than MMR/matchmaking

First of all, we're not doing this. I don't even work on ranked, it's just a suggestion/thought I had.

Secondly, OW has pretty generous divisions... diamond is like 10%, masters is 3-4%, and GM is 1%. What I'm suggesting is still pretty far off.

I'm thinking diamond is 6-8% (still a "major division", but the smallest with Iron), and the "elite divisions" are the top 1% of players only (Masters, GM maybe at 0.1%, and Challenger at the set number)

yes

I think it was actually 15 or 20%, I misspoke during Listen Loco.

It was the full pro teams vs pro teams. Not tryhard like a scrim, but still somewhat competitive. Goal was to just get a feel for the new system and early feedback.

I did have to sub in and play Top for one team though. I think I played against Seraph’s Jayce?? It was not fun...

Not even close. It was called “Reap”, and it was a beautiful monstrosity.

Also I misspoke. I think it was 15 or 20% at one point during testing.

Yeah IMO we don't always do the greatest job of supporting players on the path to reform and we have made some improvements to give players more feedback when they are reforming. Truthfully it's something that's hard to prioritize improvements for because it is affects a small percentage of players and often we can have a larger impact by making things for all players (this is a common struggle we have with any feature for a small audience). It is definitely something the team was aware of and discussed post-release when I was on the team, so we understand the pain and were always looking for opportunities to improve it. Unfortunately, I'm not up to speed on any recent changes or plans as it's been a while since I worked on that team.

Edit: missed a word

It's also the risk that people start thinking that playing honorably is just about getting higher levels and rewards instead of it making them more effective at playing in a team and creating a better environment for all players. We were intentionally conservative with how we gave rewards and reinforcement to try to reduce the risk of this.

I think the root cause is that feedback on honor level progress in not frequent enough for you. Having an XP bar is one type of solution, we did consider it during development and chose not to use it for the reasons Riot Simurgh outlined. We don't want it to feel like you're trying to fill a bar, but we do want it to feel like you're getting regular meaningful feedback on your progress to higher levels. This is why checkpoints were added in an update. It may be that we should have more so they can be closer together. An XP bar doesn't really match how the system works behind the scenes. It sounds like at some point you lost honor levels? Unfortunately, your progress will also be slower than others until the system is more confident in your honorable play. I do think we can do more for players who are on the path to reform, but I haven't been on the team for a couple years so I'm not sure what current plans are.

Recommend reading through the ...

"A summoner has disconnected."

Clean.

Clean.

Pretty much this. We've thought a lot about this one, and the downsides here (players look at team comps, decide they are GOING to lose and say "its more efficient to afk so we can remake") outweigh the upsides by a lot. Not budging on this one.

Great points. I think for so many years we designed the game around the paradigm that marksmen would be played in the duo lane (itemization/scaling for ADs, support changes and designs like Braum with his passive and TK saving low mobility champs, and even specific champ kit designs for marksmen)... makes it hard to undo all of that at once.

For what it's worth I think the current state of bot is actually pretty good. I like 85-95% of botlanes being traditional marksmen+sup combos, but that spice of a Yasuo or Swain is really nice. I just don't know if in the longterm of League (1 years later, 3 years, 5 years later...) we want to have only 1 class dominating a position.

Alternatively we could also look to diversify the position by creating more champions that specifically diversify the types of situations and play in botlane while still being somewhat familiar marksmen. I'm thinking Jhin (at best) and Kalista (at worst). I think we have some of ...

Loco's and Thorin's arguments here are still valid. They claim some degree of specialization allows a sharper and more focused game, and that just because you have an increase in mechanical or tactical demands doesn't mean it's a good thing (example being playing League while standing on your head and slapping a pig's ass would make it harder and certainly separate the good from the great players...).

Now playing Vlad bot in addition to marksmen champs is far from pig's ass slapping, but I could see the case being made that the specific skill and mechanical difficulty of marksmen warrants it being that hyper-specialized role. Furthermore you could argue that it's beneficial to offer different avenues of success & specialization in League (midlaners can be the super flexible players that play everything and people opt in to that experience, whereas bot players really do want that consistent pool of champions to specialize in). Basically ...

I think this is a great point. At the end of the day it really should be about what’s fun, and you could argue that League games have plenty of variety already of 5 vs 5 champions even when some of the positions have more restrictive classes.

But I think there’s a balance. Maybe 90% of your games are traditional sup + marksmen, whereas 10% you get a little spice. Though I could ALSO see more of your concerns manifesting in that world because it is such an infrequent thing that those lanes become earflicks. It could be that the BEST version of botlane is almost entirely marksmen OR really a huge hodgepodge of champion classes 2x2.... and I don’t think we would go to the latter world soon.