Tag: matchmaking (Page 3 of 5)

LoL: We’re just now getting the MM fixed?

April 28, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

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.

Reviews

arranged team at elo fix mm matchmaking matchmaking broken matchmaking by level matchmaking fix matchmaking sucks mm premade zileas

LoL: Finally getting some wins

April 25, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I promise, guys, I’ll stop bitching about my extended losing streak soon. It’s actually starting to look like things might come around. I had a really nice string of games tonight, highlighted by an exciting Kennen victory in which I picked up a quada-kill. It was good times.

Bitching aside, I am curious what your experience has been lately. For a long while there, and I mean 150 games or so, it seemed like matchmaking was treating me just fine. I was getting the occasional player I thought was probably out of his league, but for the most part games were won or lost based on errors and poor judgement, not a complete lack of skill.

Lately, though, it’s been a wreck. I had my bout with seriously noob teammates who were still level 30, but my experience since has been punctuated by anomalies like a game earlier tonight in which my team’s Warwick had played just 33 games. As someone with approximately 1500 games under my belt, I was more than a little surprised. We dominated that game, pushed to nexus in 20 minutes legitimately, but it still made little sense considering my opponents were all level 30.

A good friend also reported a game on TT recently where he was matched against two level 1 characters, both of which had zero wins. Granted, they were a premade with a friend, but even then, should they be paired up against a guy I regularly play and win with? They were beaten soundly, 13-0 in 18 minutes. That’s hardly even fun for the winning team, much less the losing side.

So how have things been – average, good, or much worse than normal? I know my ELO is headed back in the right direction, but even the matches I’ve won have had their share of what I would call mid-tier/average players on both teams.

league of legends

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LoL: I won’t play TT without a premade

April 22, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

A couple weeks back I decided I was going to take a long break from Twisted Treeline. I like the map, but when I wasn’t playing in a full premade the huge variation in game quality was frustrating. One game my team would win in 18 minutes, the next my team would feed for 18 minutes. I assumed people just didn’t know the map and needed more time to learn.

I made my foray back into the winding woods yesterday and quickly remembered why I had quit. My first game had a feeding Nunu so we lost. The next I had the same Nunu on my team, and though we won (which took far too much “can we please group up” from my end) it was a long and arduous process. The next several games were leaver after leaver, feeder after feeder, save the one game in which I was paired with a duo that had beaten me the game before. I got one leaver who had 10% of his wins in leaves. There should be some pretty harsh penalties for that crap.

Despite my long losing streak from a few days back, I had turned things around. I was back up to 68 games above .500 and winning a decent mix. The TT experience took me down to 61 games but created an even bigger problem. My ELO has now dropped to the point that I’m playing with some seriously inexperienced players. My most recent game was host to a TF that was 0-6 at 15 minutes and a Jax that had 8 creep kills by 20 minutes. There is just no way I can possibly carry that game.

I’ll be spending my time in game over the next week or so trying to get my ELO back up in the hopes of playing with some decent teammates once again. It’s been a rough few days.

league of legends

elo elo drop high elo losing losing games losing streak low elo matchmaking noobs twisted treeline

LoL: Snowballing on Twisted Treeline

April 12, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I decided to stay up last night and grab a few solo queues on TT to see how I would fare with Kennen. The first game went pretty well. I was holding my own, not necessarily dominating (they had a Shen/Poppy/Warwick so it was tough to burst a target down) but I wasn’t dying and I was picking up the occasional kill. Our own Shen wasn’t using his ult early enough, though, and we ended up losing a long game after some intense teamfights. Overall it was a lot of fun.

Unfortunately that kind of game isn’t the norm for Treeline. Most games I see are landslides in either direction, even if they take 30-40 minutes to finish. It’s a problem I think will be hard to balance if only because 3v3 is much less forgiving to players prone to making mistakes. In the next game my opponents weren’t nearly careful enough with me early game. Only one had cleanse and the others were short on CC.

You can see the results in the screenshot I posted. Take a look at Fiddle’s farm compared to my own. He was so far behind by the time I had 4 kills that there was just no coming back.

Development, league of legends

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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.