In case you missed it, you should definitely check out the Season One Blooper Reel riot has posted to its YouTube channel. Though it’s not quite as funny as Phreak’s Season One commentary video, it’s still pretty good. Short, sweet, and worth a couple laughs. Enjoy!
Tag: season one (Page 3 of 7)
I had a chance to browse the forums today (still not at home, still not totally stable with the internets) and found an interesting post from a summoner hoping to reach 1600 ELO. He, like me, has been hovering around 1550 and set up a few guidelines to help him make his way to the top.
It’s a decent read, which I’ll let you do on the official forums, but more interesting to me were the responses from the community. There were plenty of “your dodge-worthy champions shouldn’t be dodged because of X (it always makes me laugh when someone uses the word “strong” near the word “Teemo”)” but players were also willing to give all kinds of advice for someone striving to reach 1600. The most interesting to me was, “Just play a TON of games, and have a win % > 50. Saw a dude today at 1620 who had a measly winning percent of 52 percent, but had 600 games under his belt.” It made me wonder, how often are top players winning games?
The answer – not much more often than 50 percent. In fact, the top ten players have a collective 57.7 percent win rate. There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part, solo queue win rates are pretty close to 50 percent in most cases. That’s actually reassuring, because it means my own 56 percent win ratio is on par for me to continue climbing the ladder. Granted, I’m probably going to stall out at some point, but I can see that I’m at least winning as often as people who have stalled at the very top.
I don’t know how much time you guys spend on the forums, but I’m there pretty much every day just to keep up with what’s going on in the game, even when I’m out of town or otherwise engaged throughout the day. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed over the past week or so, though, it’s that things seem to have stabilized.
I’ll be the first to admit that Season One brought enough frustrations to warrant a lot of the grief that happened on the forums, on this blog, and even in-game to an extent. Some of those things have been reverted or changed – the level requirement for ranked, some of the matchmaking algorithms – but for the most part it seems people are settling in to the new mechanics around the game. If the biggest thing the community complains about is the price of a rune page (which is expensive, but not totally unreasonable), I think things are definitely calming down.
What has your experience in game been like? Most of my recent games have been pretty tame. There are the random idiots that seem to make the world explode, either by their own rage or encouraging it from others, but even the typical “we lose because of x” has slowed back to what I consider normal levels.
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.
I am actually astounded it took this long for Riot to make this change, particularly when you consider the kind of data it had available. Granted, these stats were probably taken after the launch of Season One, but it wasn’t exactly uncommon to see players below level 30 matched with those above prior to the Season One launch either.
As Pendragon stated in a post last night, the change was made because players below level 30 tend to leave 4.2 percent of games, versus the 1.1 percent of games from level 30 players. The really interesting stat, though, is that sub-30 players have a staggering 35.2 percent win rate, while those over 30 are seeing an average 52 percent win rate.
Again, I’m shocked it took this long, and the data serves as a pretty embarrassing statement toward Riot’s foresight on this. You should start to see the change today.
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