I’m sure you’ve been in plenty of games with players saying things like, “report this Shaco for sucking,” or “report Eve for being a moron.” Of course you wouldn’t report them. After all, isn’t matchmaking supposed to weed out the unskilled, matching them against similarly unskilled players? Well, Riot wants you to give matchmaking a hand by reporting the unskilled just like you report the trolls.

I’m going to put this in italics because I don’t want anyone to miss it: The “unskilled player” offense is NOT bannable. No one will be catching a ban because they aren’t as good at this game as someone else. In fact, Tamat said the expected impact is small at best but “worth implementing all the same.” My question is, how?

I’m trying to think of the ways that Riot can pull valuable data from this metric and I’m coming up short. For starters, the kinds of players that typically want to be able to report unskilled players tend to be unskilled themselves, just searching for external reasons a game is going poorly. As an example, I recently played a game with an Udyr who was calling for reports on his team’s Shaco, who ended the game something like 4-12. Thing is, Udyr himself was 4-13, picking up his kills late in the game. To top things off, their team actually beat us (they had a solid Amumu/Kat/Corki and we had no tank). I know that examples don’t prove anything, but this is exactly the situation I see skill based reports being asked for most. Even if decent players are using this feature, there’s going to be a LOT of unreliable data, and that’s not good for anything.

Isn’t the real issue here that matchmaking and ELO simply don’t work well for assessing a team game. Solo queue is a nightmare to balance simply by its nature. There’s not a reliable statistical method for evaluating player performance as it relates to game outcome when you’re matching 10 random players. There just isn’t. The best we’ll get is an approximation. Throwing a set of unreliable data at the problem won’t do us any good.