Tag: mm

      Captain, there’s an anomaly in the system!

      May 7, 2011 /

      My attempt to get a ranked win with all 75 champions is going well, at least for what I expected. I’ve managed to pick up a few first-attempt wins, which feels really good. Karthus was a one shot, as were Eve and Rumble. I expected the latter two to be easy, but the Karthus win was a pleasant surprise.

      Ryze and Alistar continue to give me trouble. I’ve had solid starts with both champions in several games, but my teammates just can’t find a way to work with another. It’s painful.

      I also had one extremely frustrating game last night in which I was paired with an unranked Malphite, even though he hadn’t duo queued with anyone. You can see the teams in the screenshot above. My own team’s rankings, in order from top to bottom, is as follows:

      1324
      1321
      1337
      1320
      Unranked

      The enemy team, again from top to bottom, was:

      1356
      1353
      1350
      1376
      1315

      The last two players on the enemy team also duo queued together, which I’ve always seen as an advantage, especially when the two players are so close in ELO. This sort of thing just shouldn’t happen in the matchmaking system. Even if that unranked player was lying for some reason and actually did duo with another player, we were outmatched as far as ELO is concerned. I know ELO isn’t a very good gauge of player skill, but when a player is dumped into a match 120 points above his ELO, against higher-rated duo queue to boot, well, I expect about the outcome I got. He bought Ninja Tabi against a very limited physical team and “initiated” by ulting one of the enemy players at a time, most often Xin Zhao. It was a mess.

      Like I said, though, this is going better than expected. I just lost another with Ryze, bringing my total attempts with him to three. We’ll see if I have more tim this afternoon to try again.

      Champions, league of legends

      Should ranked games have free champions?

      August 2, 2010 /

      Champion splash.

      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

      Season One hasn’t fixed matchmaking

      July 20, 2010 /

      No excuse for this.

      I played a few solo 5v5 ranked games today. That’s been my method of late. A few. Not four. Sometimes not even three. Just one or two in a go, and they rarely last longer than 30 minutes anymore. It’s a strange way to play the game, kinda like taking a step back more than six months to when my ELO was fresh and I was just learning to play.

      The one game that stuck out today, though, was a game in which the other team didn’t ban Shaco and I got to have a little fun. It started in their woods when I polished off Warwick at level two. I ganked him again as soon as he respawned and made it out of base, netting him three deaths in the first six or seven minutes of the game. My opponent’s other lanes were struggling as well – one because Sion was incredibly over-confident. I wondered what was going on (why we were winning so easily) until I got to the lobby. That Sion? He had one win. One solitary win, and his ELO was more than 150 points below most of my team.

      I will say, most of my games have been with players of similar ELO, with a tolerance of maybe 100 points in the worst case. I can live with that. But when my queues are no longer than 25 seconds, it seems like the MM algorithm should be doing a better job than this. As more games are played, there will be an increasing gap between 1200 ELO players and 1450 ELO players. Why matchmaking would ever put those two together, particularly in solo queue, is completely beyond me.

      league of legends

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

      April 28, 2010 /

      Is matchmaking still dodge worthy?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

      LoL: Matchmaking or Solomid

      March 14, 2010 /

      SoloMid logo.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

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