We missed two weeks due to my move and my unpacking, but I’m finally settled in the new place and ready to get back into some games with everyone here. Monday night, 9:30 EST, anyone and everyone is welcome to come along and play. Depending on the number of people we have well either spend some time in the queues or play some in-house games. Whatever the case, we’ve had fun in our first two outings so hopefully the third will be the same.

If you’re interested in playing, log on around 9:30 on Monday night and join the chat room. I think we should change it to Fearless Gamer for simplicity’s sake. Just click on your friends list, hit the door icon at the bottom of that little window, and type ‘Fearless Gamer’ into the box. I’ll still keep the FG LoL Mondays room open until we’ve made the switch. You can also add me in game at “The Wiggin Boy.” Hope to see you Monday!

Despite the short notice, lack of an advertised time, and general disorganization on my part, last night was a lot of fun. We started with just three people and ramped up to five by the end of the night so we stayed in the regular matchmaking queues.

The first game was myself, zebano, and bojamba in threes. We played Tryndamere, Garen, and Poppy respectively and utterly dominated the game. For the next game, the three of us went into a 5v5 match as Amumu, Ryze, and Nasus. We were getting torn up early game by the heals on Taric and Janna, and our opposing Gragas was getting pretty thick. It didn’t take long, though, to turn things around. Sometime toward level 15, the Amumu/Nasus/Ryze ult combo became way too much for them to handle. We started winning every team fight and eventually just pushed straight to nexus.

For the final game we had a full five and went Galio, Blitzcrank, Twitch, Fiddlesticks, and Garen. MVP for the game went to Zirze with his Blitzcrank grabs. He was all money, all the time that game. Imbri also had his time to shine when he got caught alone as Galio against three opponents. Somehow he stayed up for what felt like a year, got his full ult off, dropping three of them below 50 percent health. By that time our whole team was right behind them for cleanup. The surrender followed shortly after.

Matchmaking has long been one of the hottest topics of discussion around LoL. For most players I’ve talked to, the system is hit or miss. You’re either paired with a team that does reasonably well usually against a team that’s not so good, or you get the reverse, stuck on a team that has some less than skilled players playing against people that know what they’re doing. In rare (sometimes even not so rare) circumstances, you’ll matched with someone who has no business playing in your games, someone like the level 3 I was matched with just a few days ago.

The Garen patch brought with it a bunch of changes to the matchmaking system, including some optimization for level balance alongside the current ELO balance. There were also some changes made so that 5-man premades would be placed against other full premades more often. While all of this is good, I have to ask, now? We’re just now getting these changes and also getting word of them? Why hasn’t this been a part of the forum discussions for months. No doubt one of the highest contributing factors in the number of forum posts lambasting the matchmaking system is the lack of a Riot response. There was very little indication that these things were being worked on, and the general sense was that it just wouldn’t be fixed.

Now Zileas has stepped forward requesting feedback on the new changes, and he uses language that I think points at some of the design attitude around matchmaking. Take a look at his last point: “4) Any other weirdness that is obviously very bad, not just subjective “this guy really sucked’ type stories.” While a player’s assessment of another’s skill is subjective, there is also some empirical data we can look to for determining whether matchmaking is doing its job. A while back I cited a player who had a significant number of losses in his last 10 games, nearly all of which included stats to support the theory that he’s not a very good player. I’d hardly call that amount of data subjective, and it took me a total of three minutes to discover without any analysis tools.

The bottom line here is this – if you want a more accurate ELO, you need to find four friends you believe to be of similar skill level and premade, premade, premade. Riot’s matchmaking system will never be able to account for individual skill in the midst of unskilled teammates unless it moves to some sort of performance-based system, which is unlikely at best. Until then, its probably best to just keep quiet and enjoy the five to ten percent of your games that turn out to be a decent match.

One of the hottest points of contention in LoL is the utter lack of a competitive ladder system. The longstanding response from Riot is that “it’s coming,” but without any timeframe players are starting to get restless. Solomid.net popped up some time back as an alternative for high-tier players looking for scrimmages. It has since continued to grow and is now offering an ELO-based league for anyone that’s interested.

Signups are simple – they’re using Quakenet IRC to run things with a bot to set up games based on the internal ELO. One of the big benefits to Solomid is that they use a draft system for official games, which is really the only way to have a skill-based competitive match in my mind. The downside, though, is that you’re playing most of your games in practice so you’re receiving reduced IP. There’s also the potential for the same kind of elitist community to pop up as did with TDA in DotA.

The good thing is Riot is embracing the Solomid community. Whether it will fail or fly, it’s the best solution for players looking at a competitive option until ladder season starts.

You’ll see me talk about solo queue games a lot here because that’s where I spend at least half my time. Being a freelancer, I can split my play time throughout the day when a lot of people are at work or elsewhere. When I have the chance, though, I’ll always choose to premade.

If you’re new to the game, pay attention to the people you play with. Chances are, if you’re playing a few games in a row, you may end up with a few of the same players. Try to pick out the most coordinated players with the best communication. As an example, I was on a 5-game losing streak today. Fortunately I pulled a big Anivia play and beat a team of decent players with support from a good Mundo. That decent team, the guys I beat, wanted to friend up and play together.

What happened next almost shouldn’t be talked about. We were stomping people so hard there were multiple rage quits most games we played and it was all because of coordination. Having Vent or Skype only compounds things.