[2022] This Problem Is Now Getting Soo Common Dude.

This is a myth that League has also come out against, and I've talked about it a bit. There is no Losers or Winners queue in League or in Valorant. It's an idea that keeps getting brought up or perpetuated because it's an easy thing to blame when someone goes on a streak.

I obviously can't prove it doesn't exist to you, it doesn't matter what I say because you can write it off as "We'll they're just lying to keep it a secret". Instead of thinking of it directly as "Riot is hiding the fact they have a losers/winners queue" we can tackle why would we have it/not have it.

• If winners/losers queue was beneficial to player retention/enjoyment we would include it and not be scared to talk about it.*

I don't see a reason why we would keep something secret if it was beneficial to the game, and the players. It would be very risky, and make no sense, to hide something like this from the players. Retention comes from having a fun game, increasing player satisfaction and having an enjoyable gameplay experience; this is how you keep and grow your gaming community. We now live in a connected age where we aren't dumb, people see through marketing, corporate tricks, etc. This is my personal belief, but often mechanics like gatcha games or gambling games are not about retention but often targeting big spenders to keep spending. Those games are less about retaining a ton of players and only retaining the big spenders(which you could argue are also addicted to the game). Our goal is to have an enjoyable game that players want to play, especially because we are a PvP game and need a healthy community to keep queues rolling! This leads me to my next point.

• Research in the game space does not support the idea that a winners/losers queue benefits the game.*

There are lots of GDC talks you can go find on matchmakers, MMR, etc. Josh Menke is a great resource to google and joined Riot a while ago. In the research done for matchmakers, it turns out players are more likely to stay in your game the more fair matches they get. This is why when I talk about ranked goals I often site "Trying to find you the fairest match" as a goal. Data, across multiple games and genres in the game industry, all point toward fair matches being a huge reason players have a fun and enjoyable PvP experience. Why would we create a system that forcibly sets up players to lose if we know that would force them to leave the game early? It's counter to what we've seen keeps players having fun, and even if we tried to implement the system I would have to show TONS of data and reasons why we should make a winners/losers queue; at the end of the day it would never get agreement across all of Valorant or Riot to implement because it makes no sense data-wise(plus tons of people don't like the idea and a ton of Red flags would be raised). This leads me to my last point.

• Winners/Losers queue, in my mind, is so technically difficult to implement I don't know if it can be done.(this is just me thinking about how you would make it on the tech side)

Given my reasons above, I don't know how you could make a winners/losers queue work without slowing down your matchmaking times to a crawl. You would essentially be splitting your player base in half, winners vs. losers, then you would need every single MMR group from Iron to Radiant to have enough players on both sides to make matches. Those matches would need to be close enough in skill to be fair(stomps are not good for player retention) but far enough apart to guarantee a win/loss. I don't even know where to begin, or explore, doing something like this. Not only would it be difficult to think of how to tackle, but you would also be altering MMR in such a way that I don't think you could keep fair matchmaking. Because the MMR system tries to put you in fair matches and evaluates you based on those fair matches, I think it would struggle to even have an idea of what your MMR is if we were to try and force winning/losing across the player base. Basically, how can we track how skilled any player is when the matches are always stacked, then if we can't accurately track player skill, because we are stacking matches, we would no longer be able to actually stack the matches because we don't know any player's real skill level. Then when our MMR system can't realistically assess player skill we lose the ability to actually put you in unfair matches. If MMR can't evaluate your skill, it would be unable to maintain a winners/losers queue because it wouldn't accurately know your skill and be able to put you into those matches. Again lot's of complexities that I've even barely scratched the surface on.

I know, it can suck to go on a lose/win streak. It feels like the deck is stacked against you. I just lost like 8 of my last 10 ranked games. People have good days, people have bad days, and you can't always be winning. We have no reason to hold you back, because it doesn't make a good gameplay experience. We want a fun game, just like the rest of the community. It would make no sense to create artificial mechanics instead of continuing to build on this already awesome game we have. I hope this helps fight the idea that we have a winners/losers queue, but I know it's something that will always get brought up and lets be honest conspiracy theories can be fun :)

(to be honest I would do much more fun things, like a 1:billion chance that TenZ ends up in an Iron3 match. Or maybe putting a player in a match against all bots, who are invulnerable and just walk up to them and try to trap them in place(spooooooky). That sounds more fun and no one would believe the reddit post if it was rare and only happened once, plus that person would have a story for life..JK... or maybe....)

Yes, I know you simply have to take my word which is why I framed it as to looking at why a Winners/Losers queue is actually a bad thing and not a good thing.

I could just ignore these posts and not comment on it. There are things in life that you will never be able to get the true information about, so I think figuring out how to approach it with "healthy scepticism" is the right answer. You can find info on my points above, that fair matches make players play more(not fake grinds). As much as players want to believe we try to make mechanics to "inflate player grind" a winners/losers queue would actually reduce retention and players would actually quit more than they would stay.

If we don't have players, we don't have people spending money. I think we all should be skeptical of what we hear from companies, but again I think we also have to be able to look at the problem realistically. Either way, I'll stand by it and keep telling people exactly how the system works :D

You can go back in my comments to see tons of responses about MMR vs Hybrid ranked systems. Ultimately, there is a reason why we do not have a pure MMR system; at the end of the day we have to weigh the pros and cons and try to figure out what system works better for our game.

In terms of the "Patent", I worked on Call of duty for 6 years and was a core deisgner on Warzone and many modes, weapons, and features. I've never once worked with anyone at the business level, nor did anyone reach out to our designers to implement a patent that activision filed. Not to say it doesn't happen, but a lot of the time patents felt like they were very disconnected from the game process and I never even knew they existed. Again, that's just taking my word for it, but I have no idea how patents in the game industry work or why because I've never been effected by it.

That being said, that patent sounds like it could be a lot of things. That patent could cover a smurf queue, a "troll island" queue(which we are against), potential role queues(like trying to put a sniper, shotgun, ar to balance out team strategy), etc.

I will say, there are a ton of passionate people at Riot; lots of people(like me) who came here because we want to be able to work on games we love and actually make choices with the player in mind. I know that if something that was not player friendly, or really shady, was happening internally people would speak up; and worst case someone would speak out about it. After being in the industry for a while I'm very thankful for the people and support I get from Riot, and yes I agree some studios can be super shady, but I also have faith in my co-workers to have a player first mindset.

None of this will ever be hard facts and again this falls into the realm of "You only see what we put forward to you", but if it helps I've loved and played games my whole life. I'm here because I felt like Riot gives me the best tools to do what is best for players, because that's what I want other devs to do for us as well; and I truly feel that my co-workers share the same feelings. Either way, it's good to be skeptical and you can always complain about things you don't enjoy(we are definitely listening).

Thank you!

I just wonder if it would be able to be kept a secret LOL. I think people give too much credit to a lot of companies who's backgrounds or degrees are not at all based in psychology. I mean, I came from one of the other biggest games in the world before Riot and I didn't even really have access to stats to make design decisions(and this is for simple things like weapon balance). Lots of game studios are not as complex or organized as some players realize, but games can often get away with being an extremely creative process and learning from what games are finding success.

So my first point is keeping it secret would be near impossible. It may not seem like it, but every day tons of people on the dev team are raising issues with things they don't like about the game. There are plenty of people, especially in the game industry, who feel burned by their employers or their voices are not being heard. With how many people work at Riot, or any of the major game studios, all it would take would be one tweet or side comment about how users are being manipulated. There are obvious arguments against this, NDA's, etc. but I think something more along the lines of a "manipulative design" is kind of this grey area because designers talk about previous things they've worked on all across the industry(even myself) so I don't think it would be easy to keep a secret like this. ESPECIALLY because we have so many people who just love playing games and are passionate and do not like these types of practices in the game industry - but this is not true of all game developers I just feel lucky at Riot that we have so many passionate people that also love the industry.

The next would be not knowing how to psychologically make manipulative systems. I think it's much hard to take a study/research on psychology and turn it into an "addictive mechanic". 99% of game developers do not have a psych background, or go to school for it, nor is it covered in their career. I said this in a recent post but I can count on one hand how many times psychology was brought up and tried to be a core design point in my career. The problem is that games are highly creative and you are often grabbing from your other experiences to make something better. Things like "Game A did this better than Game B" and you are trying to figure out how to take that experience and apply it to your game. This becomes less about psychology and more about "what solutions work for my game". So while yes psychology is something that obviously affects how you are addicted to something, or even has ties to motivations, I don't think it's a fundamental discussion point to "good design" or very common. I think companies that also get accused of doing this are just copying other games that did it, or they stumble into something by just making changes and seeing if the data shows players engage with it more; I mean look at matchmaking, we know that fair matches seem to increase player satisfaction and play rates so that's why our goal is to make fair matches.

I think your big point about quality being the measuring point is interesting, and yes you could argue not all games try to have that quality bar. I think this is probably the case in lots of games where there are executives or stakeholders are pushing things like "Do this thing to make us more money". I think I kind of hinted at it in my post, but often those games are mobile or gambling games and they try to prey on people who are less in the know about games and people that are probably more casual or looking for those experiences. I think that's where my argument that "you have to have a fun game to draw in players" probably pertains more to games that are aiming to have bigger audiences and not play on the more casual user base you may see in the mobile market(which I would also argue is just straight up gambling in digital form but that's just an opinion). SO for us, or those studios that are not trying to make a gambling game, quality is the standard. That's why I pointed out people making good games are usually passionate about games, and you need those passionate people to make good games otherwise you have people making decisions who do not know what's good vs. what's bad; which also ties into my point that people working on games usually want to make a good game(noone sets out trying to make a bad game, and I have yet to find a dev in my career that wants to make something to screw over players).

I think there is a belief, or a want, that people want answers for negative experiences they have. Be it a simple match-making issue, or the perception that X mechanic is addictive for Y psychological reason so it was planned. I think that the game industry is young, and I would argue has not even begun to scratch the surface of understanding the psychology of game mechanics. While trade secrets are for sure a thing, I think there is too much movement in the game industry, and people who play games and are passionate about them working at these studios, where player manipulation to that extent is unrealistic. Again this is all my opinion, but I'm also taking it from the stance that I go home and play games every day and I'm just as excited about them as everyone else in this community; and that's true of devs I work with. I think it's much more realistic that a game steals ideas from more successful games, or just uses data to test if a change is providing more retention/engagement, then trying to keep everything behind closed doors and manipulate the player base and hope they don't find out.

Oh and in terms of match making manipulation being in-effective, I think my point about that being a match making paradox is the best example of why you can't manipulate matchmaking in that way.

In order to be able to "manipluate" match making we need to know a players actual skill. I need to say "You are better or worse then X/Y/Z player" so that when I want to manipulate your match or experience I know what skill level you are to do so. So first I have to find your actual skill, then I can manipulate it. Well the problem is that once I find out your skill, it's going to change; and not only that I need to do this for every single player. The moment we start manipulating your matches, we suddenly reduce or remove our ability to find any players actual skill level. This creates a paradox where we can't manipulate your games because by manipulating games we can't actually know any players actual skill - thus making it impossible to manipulate games. Hopefully that makes sense, it's kind of confusing. We need a completely stable match maker, along with a player base, to set baseline skill levels; the moment we manipulate players we lose that ability to measure the skill of the entire playerbase.

Probably the best matchmaker in the industry, true skill 2, actually looks at players stats using machine learning. It can do fascinating things like understanding a players rank in like 1-2 games - it can look at how that player is performing against an opponent and because of all the machine learning stats it has predicted where that opponent should be(aka this player is performing like a diamond player would perform against a bronze player).

I think it would be interesting to see if you can feed stats that are not PvP stats, but like you said more individual movement/gameplay stats with no impact on other players. Also no problem! I probably wall of text way too often, and I love talking about these things. It's nice to work at a studio that enables me to actually have these discussions(some places I've worked don't like these kinds of interactions).

Even if all players above plat smurfed that's less than 15% of ranked players. We know that not all of those players are smurfing, because if they were you wouldn't be able to find matches over plat :P

We are getting better and better at reducing smurfs, as well as getting them out of low ranks. Unless you are purposefully manipulating an account, by throwing games, most smurfs get out of low ranks pretty quick due to encounter MMR(most under 5-10 games, if it's an account that has been purposefully manipulated it can take longer tho which we are looking into actively).

That being said, we know smurfing is a pain point; in fact almost every ranked design change has made sure that it does not promote smurfing and even tries to reduce it. A great example is the 5 stack restrictions removal, one of the biggest reasons we saw players smurf is because they want to play with friends so we tried to find ways to make it easier to do so. Or the account level requirement to play ranked, not only do players have to spend more time learning VALORANT and maps before stepping into ranked, it takes a lot longer to take a new account and make it "ranked ready".

Again, it's about getting better and better and making sure every time we make a ranked decision it reduces the want/push to smurf. I think it would be unrealistic to say we will ever be able to remove smurfing, no game has solved that player painpoint, but we can do everything to try and reduce it as much as possible.