League of Legends Dev Tracker

I love Hearthstone personally, so I'm pretty familiar with their ranked system! It works very well for a 1v1 game, because you can resolve differences between skill and rank really easily when you only have two players facing off.

Let's say a given player is Rank 2 skill, but currently Rank 6. In Hearthstone, they'll play other Rank 6 players, and on average, be better - so they move up! Their opponents, as average Rank 6 players, will probably lose when they hit the Above average player, but that won't be the norm and they will even out over time.

In League, we have to worry about teammates. This means that if you are Plat Skill but currently in Bronze, and we match you into games of Bronze Skill, you probably win more. But so do 4 of your teammates, and 5 of your opponents lose a game they had no chance at winning. The amount of disruption each of these games creates is 9x what Hearthstone experiences, and means that the system destabilizes much faster as players...

I'd love to see a clip of your Flowers mode if you have it.

Azael was very much a caster before he came to Riot, although he didn't start at Riot as a caster if that's what you mean.
Mark doesn't really want to cast AFAIK, he much prefers his analyst, content and production roles he has outside of Riot.

Crumbz likes doing a bit of everything it seems and he's been great fun to have alongside me for Academy games.

I say the same thing to everyone: practice, practice, practice.

If you want to be a caster, but have zero footage of you casting anything, you've missed a step. A lot of people have the desire to commentate, few continue to follow up on that desire with action.

Getting noticed is difficult and I can say from personal experience that I got extremely lucky to be where I am now, but it's impossible to get noticed if you have nothing for people to take note of.

Be still my heart.

Not drunk, but definitely jetlagged. He landed and came straight to the studio to shoot dive and then this. He hadn't even eaten. Gotta love his commitment.

Doubt a Team consisting od Huni Froggen Aphro and Sneaky who were all good on international stage would end 10th, idk what this circlejerk of people saying DIG even without Sneaky is a 10th place team

Were all already there xD

Great question - I'm trying to find out. Used to have it, but it sounds like new reddit caused some issues.

I do want to be fair - a number of Rioters have been working for years on enabling us to do things like this. We wouldn't be able to launch Forge without the years of work internally on the IP

Normals can be a part of the puzzle, but they don't perfectly correlate to skill in Ranked. It's probably a good thing for us to consider, but it's not the solution all by itself.

We match based on MMR, not Rank, so starting placements lower rank-wise wouldn't matter. If we started at a lower MMR, as I mentioned in the original post, it just ends up moving the middle downward and destabilizing more games along the way.

As for account age vs. climbing, I may be misunderstanding your example, but let's say you have a 300 game account that is settled in at Gold III. Then, you make a new account and play some games, and rise quickly to Gold III - much faster than the 300 games you played on the last account.

What you're not taking into account is that on the older account, you weren't necessarily at Gold III skill the entire time. Over the course of those 300 games, your skill changed and improved up to Gold III, and your MMR and Rank changed to follow. Now when you make a new account, your skill is starting at Gold III, and your MMR will adjust to that very quickly. Since you weren't the same player when you started the second account, you shoul...

We don't plan on bringing visible MMR back - when MMR is working correctly, it does a lot of things that feel bad when you look at it in isolation. The biggest one is that for half the population, MMR only goes down, because we start people in the middle and then naturally, half the population has to be the bottom half.

As a side note, the API was not sending MMRs out to third party sites, that was a separate estimation done by those places. Part of the reason we asked for it to be removed was that it was often substantially wrong and led to a lot of false expectations.

Winrates are a very fuzzy metric, because they don't take into account who you won against. A lot of new accounts that eventually reach Diamond+ will start with 70 or 80% winrates, because they're a Diamond skilled player facing off against Gold skilled opposition. But as they move through the ranks and face harder opponents, their winrate will go down. That doesn't mean they've gotten worse - it means we've gotten enough information to give them more fair games.

So provisional games aren't meant to mark the best rank you can achieve, just where you're starting your season. From your particular case, it sounds like you ended right on the threshold of Silver I and Gold IV, so as you won more games, it makes sense that you'd move upwards.

So generally I agree, but tuning those kinds of models is not super easy, and can run into issues where once you've tuned it, you may promote strategies that focus on convincing the system you're good rather than actually winning the game. We are experimenting with some options along these lines, though, and they show promise.

So MMR is meant to measure your skill, and that is all it's meant to care about. This means that we want it to be able to adapt quickly, be fine with overestimating, and move around quickly as we get new info.

LP is meant to be more steady and certain, so it moves slower and is less responsive to small trends. This is why it takes more games for your LP to move upwards and sometimes catch up with your MMR - it's effectively waiting for a larger sample size.

Also, if you are making new accounts (which I'm inferring from your post), it's going to take longer for your LP to catch up, because again, we're starting over from new info each time.

Normal games may be part of the answer, but results in Normals don't necessarily correlate 100% to results in Ranked. People don't always have the same competitive intent in Normal mode, so a player of average skill who tries hard may be slightly above average in normals, while a player of above average skill who messes around may end up below average. Then when those two players go into Ranked and start both trying hard, their Normal MMR wouldn't actually reflect their relative skill.

It is a good starting place, though!

Yup, get where you're coming from on this, and it's a cool idea! But it's operating on the assumption that new players fall between those two points. We don't necessarily know that to be true (and in the specific case of saying they should be between average and somewhere below average, we actually KNOW that isn't true - many new accounts are above average skill).

There's probably a version of this where you could pick a point below average and a point above average, and execute the same function - but this would still constrain players into that range for their first few games, and do a poor job of handling outliers who are either really good or really bad. And for players who are really good, we'd be dropping them into below-average skill games for much longer, which makes those matches feel unfair to the players who really fit into those games.