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.