Tag: elo (Page 2 of 4)

Finally hit 1500 ELO

September 7, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

It’s been nearly two months since the launch of Season One and, at the outset, I would never have thought I could pull this off. I finally broke the 1500 ELO barrier.

So far, there isn’t much to report. Players do seem to be marginally concerned about dragon, which is a nice change. I even convinced some teammates to take dragon before we went for the tower that had minions pushed right up on top of it. There are still plenty of inexperienced players, though. Yesterday I played a game in which our Fiddlesticks insisted he take middle, despite our having a Vladimir and maybe a Tristana if I remember correctly. It’s not that Fiddle is a terrible champion, but he’s a shadow of his former self and compared to many of the new characters, he’s a lackluster mid. That was also a game in which my teammate first-picked Master Yi (which the other team countered by taking 3 stuns and two exhausts). That game ended very poorly.

The really surprising part in all of it is that 1500 ELO and above represents the top 5 percent of players in solo queue. These are players who presumably outperform 95 percent of the other players in their queue. Am I delusional in thinking they should know better than to take Fiddle mid? Do I misunderstand my own skill? I think the reality is that all of these things point to the complicated nature of a team game with an individual rating system. At any ELO there will be a large number of players who have been misappropriated, for good or ill. Bad players get highly ranked and good players fester in ELO hell because their teams are either above average or below. It is nice to see that I’ve made my way up the rating list, though. There is some hope of improving your own rating.

league of legends

best elo elo elo brackets elo rating high elo mid elo rank up elo top elo

Carry/Feeder adjustments coming to ranked play

August 6, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I don’t think I’ve read better news today (granted, most of my reading to this point has been focused on either games or gadgetry, so it kinda makes sense). I found a thread in which Zileas said he would be adding feeder/carry consideration to the ELO calculations at the end of games.

This. Is. Huge. This is at least a step toward addressing the individual performance in a team setting and the penalties/benefits some players reap as a result. As a for instance, I had a game today in which I played Shaco. I got a slow start, mostly because I was on the phone and not focused on my jungling, so I didn’t gank much early. I did try for one big gank on our 1v2 lane and sent them back to base, so it wasn’t a horrible early game. Well, not to me anyway.

My teammates, on the other hand, would not stop berating me for being a terrible Shaco and a waste of a team slot and on and on. Our Olaf kept insisting I was going to be useless late game because I hadn’t ganked. As it turned out, I went 11-2-15 with two tower kills before the other team surrendered. Regardless of what my team thought was going on, I was largely the reason behind the victory, or at least the very heavy piece of leaden straw that broke the camel’s back. Our Olaf slightly below 1.00 in his K/D ratio and our Mordekaiser was 1-9. For the other team, that can be an extremely frustrating loss. They likely could have beat our team with a different player. My understanding, then, is that their ELO will not be as negatively effected because we had a strong carry. Likewise, my own ELO should receive a slight bonus for carrying.

On the flipside, if Kaiser had somehow lost us the game (which he almost did), we likely wouldn’t be as penalized because we had a heavy feeder on our team. No word on when these changes will come out, but I’m really excited about them.

Development, league of legends

carry carry adjustment elo elo adjustments feeder feeder adjustment ranked games ranked matches ranked play ranked solo

Should ranked games have free champions?

August 2, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

Here’s something that came up today, mostly because I was seeing a lot of Mordekaiser players. Then I realized he’s free this week (I only looked because of the miserable quality of some of the Kaiser players). The question pretty much asks itself. Why do we have free champions in ranked matches?

The question I always like to ask regarding ranked matches is, “will this enhance or encourage more competitive play out of more players?” I have to say, I think the answer here is no. Most champions only come up on the free rotation once every few weeks, some even longer than that. Should ranked matches really be full of champions that a player might use for a few days at a time, once every few weeks? It seems to me that if you’re going to use an ELO system that doesn’t account for individual player performance, I would think a primary goal would be minimizing the attrition from bad players and maximizing a good player’s ability to carry a team. Having teammates who don’t know the champions is a huge problem in that system.

Granted, there are exceptions to this rule, but I think the only thing holding it back from being a great idea is the current 14-champion requirement to enter ranked play. Reduce it to ten, which will be an increase for some players, hopefully forcing them to play more games at the level cap rather than less before jumping in to ranked play.

Champions, league of legends

elo free champions free rotation matchmaking mm ranked games ranked play season one

We need more Season One disclosure

July 19, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I was really excited for Season One – maybe too excited – and I think that excitement led to overblown expectations about the changes to the game. I do think my expectations would have been held more in line, though, if Riot had been more transparent about all of the features/changes to the game and client with the advent of the League’s first competitive season.

Consider a recent thread in which a player asked about the required number of champions for Ranked Play. What’s that? Yes, you are required to have 14 champions unlocked in order to play ranked playlists. I was actually thrilled to find out, but why didn’t we know more about it before? It wasn’t in the patch notes as I can remember (and I tend to read those pretty carefully), nor was it in any of the previews.

The ranking system also includes anti-dispersion code so that a high player and low player can’t queue together to bump the high-ELO player’s rating (this still doesn’t explain how the top 5v5 solo player was more than 200 points above the next player, even though they were known to play with each other (this has changed since Saturday)).

All of this would have been great information for the community. I can understand withholding a few things for the element of surprise, but these little, behind-the-scenes mechanics actually disperse a lot of the rage players stir up with uninformed speculation.

league of legends, News

elo info season one season one info season one leaks season one tidbits

Why did they reset ELO

July 13, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

Season One splash I seriously cannot fathom the answer to that question. Originally it looked as though Riot was going to let players self-rank for the early games. You would select a box, as it shows in the pic above, placing you with players who had selected similar ranks. Apparently that didn’t go through, though. I’ve been paired with people in their 20s in both games I’ve played so far. I’ve also had rage quitters on the opposing team in both games.

This really doesn’t make for a fun initial experience for everyone. I hate to be the guy crowing about ELO, but as mentioned previously, I’m in the top 3000 player base, potentially as high as top 1500. There’s no way I should be playing with level 22s. It’s not fun for me. It’s not fun for them. One of the things I love most about this game is the competitive environment and it’s totally out the window with an ELO reset.

There is a chance ELO has been marginally reset, meaning they may have just normalized everyone’s ELO a bit to give some players a fresh start, but still try to pair you by level and some measure of your skill. I will say, judging by the players I’ve seen thus far, it doesn’t look as though that’s the case.

Are you guys experiencing severe skill gaps?