NextdoorMMR

What rank are you?

The current allowed range is +/- 1 from the anchor player or party's rank, but there are exceptions at the top (Diamond+) because otherwise they wouldn't find matches.

So if you are Platinum, you can match both -1 (Gold) and +1 (Emerald). So if the anchor player is Platinum, you can have both Gold and Emerald players in the match.

If you are Diamond, you can match -1 (Emerald) but you can also match up to Challenger because population thins out super fast GM+, so Challengers can't play w/o Diamonds. So if a Challenger player is the anchor --- which is common because anchors are usually whoever has waited the longest, and Challengers often wait the longest because of high rank and MMR --- then you can have Diamond all the way up to Challenger players in the match. Though you can't have Challengers with Emeralds unless you have, e.g. an Emerald/Diamond/GM trio that averages to Diamond.

If your rank is in those higher levels though, e...

Those are good suggestions and they are the types of things we discuss pretty often. It's a bit tricky to allow a "wait longer" option because if a given player decides to wait longer, then all the other players who may need that player in their match also have to wait longer. Basically, we have to balance very deliberately any feature that allows one player to force another player to wait longer.

Ironically, it's also the higher-ranked players where finding matches becomes the most difficult because, by definition, there are always fewer of them. The current balance has been allowing many players to find matches who, previous to this patch, could not play at all. So making it more picky at the top would currently prevent many of them from being able to play Ranked at all.

That said, we actually do allow up to 20-minute wait times. But like I alluded to above, when it comes to finding as fair a match as we can within 20 minutes, it isn't so much the difference betwe...

Keep in mind that 70/30 is not the most common, it's just the worst possible. The most common is still 50/50 and then it decreases in occurrence from there.

Also, it's not just wait time we are trading off against, it's position preference. Before position preference, most matches were close to 50/50. When you get a less fair match it's almost always because it was trying to make sure everyone got the lane they wanted. Once it has 10 players within the allowed rank restrictions, it will often prioritize getting you your position over optimizing the fairness. If possible it will still aim for close to 50/50, but it's currently "allowed" to go higher to keep positions.

Not exactly, no, we prioritize matchmaking success. Meaning, we don't want there to be a bunch of players completely unable to play at all.

The Rank gaps are determined by the amount of population in each rank, making sure there's enough within any given gap to find a match in a reasonable amount of time. As you get into the higher ranks, there are of course less and less players by design, so they require an expanded gap to be able to play the game at all.

TrioQ: If you are solo queue and play against a TrioQ, then your team will always also have a TrioQ on it. I see zero cases otherwise in all of yesterday's games. So both sides have a trio.

The matchmaker will grab the 10 closest players by both rank and MMR during the time that you search. If you have one of the highest MMRs during when you search, then it is possible to get put on a team often where you are the best player. Your opponents will have often have a similar composition. There's a team balancer that takes the 10 players found and finds a combination of placement that honors both position preference as well as keeps the fairness within at worst 70/30. We are evaluating whether that 70/30 should be reduced to 60/40, though that would result in longer wait times.

So that's one way to consistently get worse teammates, being better than most during the time you search. To know for sure you could PM me your info and I could verify.

At a high level, if a player's MMR is higher than it should be for their rank, they should be able to rank skip sometimes.

You don't need win streaks or a high-win rate (since neither of those are very accurate).

Actually, the system detects when a player is hard stuck and let's them rank skip more, or gives extra fortitude, to offset the 50/50 sessions.

I would need your Riot ID and as much info about the match as you can give. The date and around what time it was. Send this as a personal message rather than posting here.

But right now, in ranked, if your opponent has a 3q, then so do you.

There's no way for duos to match only duos at all, they need solos or trios to work. Same with trios. That makes the option to only ever allow 3/2 vs. 3/2, which isn't a popular enough combo unless we allow really wide skill gaps in the matches, or really long wait times, or fill up the cracks with solo players.

As far as unfairness, that depends on your definition of fairness. It's 100% possible to make a fair match that includes both solos and duos, or both solos and trios, in terms of both teams having a shot at winning.

If by fairness you mean that the solo players will have less cohesion than a duo or trio, I don't know if that's necessarily true. There has been some evidence that 2 solo players are more likely to coordinate with a trio than a duo would, because the duo is likely paying more attention to each other (being two friends in a duo) than they are to the trio. So I don't know that we can say for sure that having solos mixed in with parties is more or ...

No, this doesn't happen.

5q can only play vs. 5q. I'm not seeing any games in the data that show otherwise. If you have one, please DM it to me.

Soloq can only play against 3q/2q if they have a 3q or 2q on their team as well. It has to be the same party matched up.

This thread probably has the most up-to-date info: https://twitter.com/joshua\_menke/status/1453804648771424257?s=20

The changes in this twitter thread may fix this for you, they are partly to address that experience: https://twitter.com/draggles/status/1450955240413417475?s=20

Sorry I took so long to respond here.

If you've followed me across other games, you probably know that I have implemented solutions that do look at in-game performance, but always carefully.

Basically, looking at variables that the data show contribute meaningfully to winning a match, and only considering them at the level they actually contribute. Using data to determine how much performance mitigates a loss, not just taking a best guess at the value.

I also prefer to make sure winning is always the most important factor.

But, yeah, tdlr: there are definitely ways to do this correctly.

I don't know whether we would see them in Wild Rift anytime soon because we're currently still focused on skill and matchmaking over these next few patches. Once we finish our current pass on those features, we may look more closely at ranks.

It's also possible that some of our improvements to skill and matchmaking will soften issues you are experienci...

Yeah, you are correct, losing will always hurt in the long run.

I believe we fixed one of the main factors that made players think it was worth doing. So now, when you drop back into Masters, your LP gains aren't actually more than they were in GM, given the same current overall LP. This should make it so there's no reason to drop back anymore, and best to just grind where you stand.

That's a variable we tune separately from the ranks. Sometimes it decays, sometimes it doesn't, but we base that more on whether or not players are actually worse than expected after not playing for some period of time.

I think it's currently possible in some cases for your MMR to also decay resulting in worse LP gains on return, but I can't guarantee that it will always be the case.

The LP gain issue where you continued to gain high LP in Master after your LP passed well into GM or even Challenger should be fixed as of 2.5.

So your LP gains should smoothly decrease as you gain LP in Master until your LP matches your MMR.

This should reduce how often Rank can outpace MMR.

But, yeah, it's always bad in the long run to throw matches because your MMR will drop and it'll make it hard to eventually climb.

Whereas if your MMR really is too low, you should have a >50% win %, making your MMR climb, which will make your LP gains higher.

Yeah, that's what the new rank icon will try and alleviate. "An Emerald? Oh, but it says Riot thinks their MMR is as high as ours OK"