Tag: elo (Page 4 of 4)

LoL: The reasons for performance-based matchmaking

April 5, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I’ve been on a crazy string of losses recently and I’ve been trying to sort out why. I can point to all sorts of things, but a lot of my problem can be attributed to the new map. I’ve been trying out some weird comps and checking into alternative hero combinations to try to pull out some wins. There have been a few occasions, though, where my defeat was almost surely due to my teammates.

Take my daily lunchtime game today. I was playing Ezreal solo in the middle lane on Summoner’s Rift. Everything was going well. I was harassing Ashe down to gankable levels and, had I not forgotten that my Cleanse was on “D” and my Ignite on “F” and not the other way around, I would have easily taken First Blood. Sadly, the bonus gold went to the opposing Warwick for ganking our Ryze on bottom at level 4.

Immediately Ryze started calling out the team for his death, mostly blaming his lanemate, Heimer, for not using turrets as wards. Though I disagree that Heimer should waste turrets that way, especially when wards are only 90 gold, I kept my mouth shut so as not to start one of those inevitable team implosions that leads to a quick loss. It didn’t matter. Ryze was constantly in bad positions on the map despite our encouragement to back off and before 20 minutes he was 0-6 with less than 20 creep kills.

I try not to call people out too much because everyone can have a bad game, but this is something different entirely. This was a player who ended the game 0-8-0 and spent the entire match blaming his teammates for the loss. I decided to take a quick look at this previous 10 game stats and here’s what I found.

Defeat: 0-8-0
Defeat: 2-5-5
Defeat: 1-7-6
Victory: 6-7-6
Defeat: 1-16-8
Victory: 8-11-11
Victory: 4-12-8
Victory: 1-4-12
Victory: 6-10-13

As I said, I’ve been on a losing streak, so I tried to remain objective, but look at those numbers. 1-16? That’s abysmal even for a new player. His total stat count for the last 10 games is 29-80-69. Now I realize stats rarely show the whole picture, but 29-80 is a scary teammate to have, especially for someone who picks DPS toons a large majority of the time. I think his only non-assassin game was one as Morgana. The rest were Ryze, Anivia, Twitch, and a random Heimer. Those stats suggest a player that doesn’t at all know the limits of his health pool compared to his DPS or someone who is perpetually in bad map position with regard to the rest of his team. The assist count is nice, but again, most of his toons have some form of AOE, so it’s not that surprising.

In the spirit of fairness, here are my stats for my own previous 10 matches:
Defeat: 2-1-3
Victory: 3-2-7
Victory: 7-1-6
Victory: 6-3-8
Defeat: 6-5-2
Defeat: 0-3-0
Defeat: 3-5-3
Defeat: 3-7-0
Defeat: 5-5-3
Defeat: 3-3-6

For total stats we have 38-35-38. Obviously that’s much more balanced, and this is one of my worst losing streaks in months. That 3-7-0 game is ugly, and I admittedly was playing like a jackass that game, but in the context of my other stats you can easily see that it was rare misstep in a string of decent performances.

All of this is to say that the I continue to be unimpressed with the ELO system. Basing a player’s rank solely on whether he wins or loses leads to crazy matchmaking results. I want to post on the official forums and beg for a performance-based system, but the reality is its just too hard. There are too many factors to consider when looking at stats, and you can bet there would be an army of angry players that want more credit for a win that the stats say they barely contributed to. The more reliable solution is to find a group of two or four other players with whom you can regularly premade for some kind of reliable ELO. The rest of the time you’re going to catch a lot of players who have hit the right games and made it into their respective ELO brackets.

Reviews

bad players baddies elo eztreal league of legends matches matchmaking noobs performance-based matchmaking ryze scrubs Strategy team comp

LoL: Should TT have a separate ELO system?

March 31, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I’ve spent all of my game time over the past two days getting to know Twisted Treeline. It’s a very different playstyle, different enough that I don’t feel like I’m even close to mastering it. I’ve been playing with the same friends I played with on Summoner’s Rift, and while some of them have been successful, others have struggled to learn the map and the new game.

A red post on the forums answered the question most people have been asking: will Treeline have a separate ELO? The answer is no. The two maps will share the same ranking system. For now, I can’t say this makes sense. I’m not saying we should start back at ground zero – the first few months would be a total mess. Instead, why not take the current 5v5 ELO and apply it to Treeline and let it update independently of the 5v5 system.

From what I’ve seen, some people will pick up Treeline very quickly. Others are going to take a very long time. I’ve seen so many ridiculous comps it makes me wonder how we’re at the same ELO. Granted, I solo queue a ton, but I’m more than 60 games above .500. The best explanation I see is that the game is completely different in a 3v3 setting. People who quickly migrate between those systems shouldn’t be matched against players that think Fiddle/Gang/Anivia is a strong comp.

Development, league of legends

elo matches matching system matchmaking matchmaking system ranking twisted treeline

LoL: Matchmaking or Solomid

March 14, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

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.

Development, league of legends

aon arranged team dan dinh dota elo emphatic match making matchmaking messiah mm phreak reginald solomid solomid.net top elo top players

LoL: My frustration with matchmaking

February 9, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I hate to make this post so soon after my “avoid your matchmaking woes” post, but I’ve been in some seriously frustrating matches lately, and it’s worth stating the reason. I think matchmaking prioritizes finding a game within the estimated queue time too highly.

Here’s the deal: I queue up in Arranged Team with two friends, both of whom have less than half my games played. As a long time DotA player, I’m also willing to assume that my ELO from solo queuing is a bit higher than theirs. Because matchmaking can’t find a perfect match for our composition, it instead attempts to account for my high ELO by placing someone with very low ELO on my team. As a for instance, I played a game last night in which my opponents were all around their mid twenties. My friends and I received a level 11 as a teammate. She played Annie. She went 3-14 and cost us the game. Consider also the image I used for this post. This was an actual game I played. The other team didn’t have a player above level 12. In case you’re wondering, I’m “The Wiggin Boy.”

I understand that fast games are better on the whole. Players want to experience the game as quickly as possible, not sit in the lobby waiting to find a match. As ELO improves, though, I think it’s fair to assume that players are more invested in each game, more concerned with winning. To put those players at a disadvantage just because a match couldn’t be found in 60 seconds or less doesn’t make sense. I would gladly sit in queue for 3 minutes before each game if it improved matchmaking results.

For a game that has been downloaded over a million times, LoL has a long way to go before it provides a smooth playing experience.

league of legends, PC

bad matches bad matchup elo high elo league of legends low elo matchmaking matchmaking problems skill cap skill ceiling

LoL: Is top 500 play worth it?

February 1, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I found an interesting post last night that asked what it takes to be a top-tier player. The consensus is that somewhere around 50 games over .500 you’ll start to see names from the top 500 player list, provided you’ve played a couple hundred games. I’m not quite to that 50+ mark, but I know from the way my losses go that I could get there if I was willing to play someone like TF or Twitch repeatedly to carry teams over the edge. For me, though, it’s just not worth it.

A big part of the reason I play LoL is for the competition. After graduating college it has only gotten harder to put together a competitive game of basketball or volleyball. Most of the time pickup games degenerate into friendly matches among less-than-fit friends. It’s not a bad thing, but it doesn’t fulfill that competitive desire. There are rare occasions, though, when a friend brings a friend and suddenly we have a really solid game going.

LoL is the same way for me. When I have those 70-80 minute games I have a blast, but they are the exception. Most of the time I’m watching teammates feed 1-5 and leave (happened to me like 25 minutes ago) or try an AP Gangplank build because a friend said the ults were lolrape. So much of the competition in this game is out of my hands that I’m content to be happy with the good games and just try to play well for myself in the bad ones.

There is one thing that could change my mind: matchmaking. I know everyone is always bitching about it in the forums, but this is really the thing that keeps me from caring about top 500 play. In the past week I’ve been paired with players under level 15 on multiple occasions. I’ve been level 30 for at least a month now with more than 400 games under my belt. These aren’t smurf accounts either, where players have boosted ELO by trashing new players. These are players who, like the aforementioned, try building Ashe for AP (not kidding, this has happened to me) or spend 15 minutes building a Heimer turret nest in a remote patch of brush and then luring the overleveled opponent and promptly dying (again, actually happened). As long as I’m getting paired with this type of player there is no incentive to get to higher play. The landslide will likely be that much worse, if only because higher tier players are better at exploiting the unskilled.

I’m also put off by the method for achieving the ELO necessary for top tier play. When I first started, I played a lot of TF. He was fun, felt strong, and helped me win a lot of games. I’ve since stopped, mostly because it just isn’t enjoyable for me to exploit a broken toon for gain. I really do like a challenge, and nothing about his playstyle feels challenging to me. The same can be said for Twitch, who can easily roll over a team with very little farm. For me, it’s not a fun way to play (okay, every now and again it’s pretty fun), and if the end result is bad matchmaking of a higher order, I’m going to stick to playing toons I enjoy.