Why not just make it so when a player doesnt select a champion, instead of randoming a champ they are disconnected, lose 10 elo and queue resets? This'd stop the afks from getting through aswell.

If they havent selected their champion by then, they're not really helping in any way to the team are they? They are minimizing communication and hurting the team's chances.

YES! Seriously, all of the actual matchmaking issues would be so close to fixed by just doing this one thing.


NOT MATCHMAKING:

1) Isn't really matchmaking, more of a disciplinary thing instead. Just kick AFK, or allow vote kicks in champ select.

5) This would be more of the PR dept's job (Phreak, etc). Even so, do people really think that watching a video once would change anything? I'm skeptical.

6) Owning a champion doesn't guarantee experience, just like a champion being free doesn't guarantee inexperience. If you need a criterion, use games won/played w/ the champ. Still isn't really matchmaking.

7) Not sure why this was ever allowed in the first place. Kill it with fire.

11) Any metric you create will be discovered and exploited to get ELO. Wins are wins are wins, I see no reason to introduce other metrics.

ADDRESSED BY TRUE SOLO QUEUE:

2), 4), 9) No longer relevant.

8) Placement matches only contain placement players. Easy to do w/ true solo queue.

10) Only match players from the same rune tiers (0-9, 10-19, 20-29, 30). Easy to do w/ true solo queue.

THE ONE EXCEPTION:

3) Normal ELO should be increased if ranked ELO is higher, but not decreased if ranked ELO is lower. Ranked ELO should stand on its own, but maybe normal ELO helps match you in your placement games.

Right now, it takes players a few hours to drop their Elo to 300 and begin stomping newbies. If they win 100% of their games, they ruin about 100 games before they reach the 1400-1500 range again. Then, they drop their Elo back to 300 and start over.

If players want to drop their Elo to 300 on purpose in the future, they may troll games and intentionally lose; however, each drop in Elo takes a much longer time and they have to actually try their best and play to win every single game (but still end up losing). If they do not try their best and 'hide their intentions' every game, they may be vulnerable to the Tribunal. It will basically be much, much more effort to do the same Elo dropping in the future, and the # of actual games affected by "Elo tankers" will in fact be lower.

I still think that #1 is the first on the list for a reason. AFK in champ select that ends up in a random champ select and / or no bans (in ranked) leads to so many other negative effects in game. Players get mad about no ranks, players get mad because random champ doesn't fit team comp, players get mad because people (might) fail with the random champ and not contribute to team, people dodge losing elo / getting time penalty, while the afk is put back into queue to cause problems for another team of people.

Most of the issues listed cause one or two negative impacts on a game, AFK in champ select / ban, causes a greater number of repercussions.. Thus i think it should be changed / resolved first.

It takes a lot longer than a few hours (or it should) due to ramping requeue timers for repeat dodging and increasing queue times in order to be able to dodge them the lower your elo drops

Or am I missing something here?

Tribunal crits you for two week ban!

It's super effective!

id love the choice to not be put with a duo queue (if its just for normals thats fine)

it sucks when you get three people that all queued up together and reguardless of their performance they scapegoat you or the other solo queuer.

then usually that person gets reported by all three of them.

i personally feel teams are more willing to use TEAMWORK and do whats best for the team when every member is a solo queuer and thats how i would prefer to play.

Afk should be a reason to stop the game. Take a look how Dota2 handles it, when you search for a game and it finally gets ready, it asks you again if you are ready, if you press nothing for too long or press no, you get kicked back to the main menue again.
This would be great in lol too, as I think that a lot of players go afk after they press the search button to do quickly something like going onto the toiled or getting something to eat/drink.
It won't help against all the cases, but it would certainly help against the majority.
Despite this, people who don't pick anything in the queue should get kicked out of the game and the search starting for the other players once again, if he was part of a premade though it should kick all player to main menue without reinitiating search.
In Dota2 such stuff is not a problem, simply because the champion selection is bound into the real client, so if you choose no champion you just stay at the selection screen even though the game started already.



This is a heavy disruption of what ranked should be, and I still can't really understand why Riot put this into the game.
Ranked was meant to be played competitively to find out your own elo and to play with people who want to try the same as well. The ranked Duo-Queue system basically goes into the exact opposite, it doesn't reward individual skill, it tries to put efficient teamwork into a system that was meant to be a calculation for solo players, it should be obvious that such a thing is toxic for every solo player out there and the whole system itself.
I yet doubt you will remove it, probably because people now grow fond of it, and you just can't revert Riot's mistakes without annoying thousands of players who use the Duo-Queue system.
But you can tone it down, and you should.
Ranked is practically anything but what Riot tries to sell it as, and one of the main if not the biggest reasons is the duo-queue system.
If you want to make ranked as a place for competitive play, as it was initially meant to be, there is no way around tuning down the influences of duo-queue, if not totally removing it.



I actually think this is not such a big issue.
Normal was initially intended to be training place for ranked, but due to the different direction ranked went, into the casual instead of the competitive side, players can freely switch between each other without having to fear problems awaking.
Once you go level 30, you can basically go ranked or keep playing normals, it doesn't really matter that much, because the mindset or ranked players is in no way better or more competitive orientated than the ones of normal players.
I mainly play normals (well, I did, before the normal draft problem), and my normal elo is actually quite higher than my ranked elo. I never used to play ranked, because when I started it, I met worse players or players had even less competitive mindset than my teammates/opponents in normal games.
The problem is because of the ranked games, there is really no difference between ranked and normals, people screw around at both modi regardless how they were intended.
You should ask better WHY are players that have much higher ranked elo than normal elo suddenly playing normals and play with their competitive mindset.
I don't know it tbh, but I think the reason is because people screw in ranked as much as in normals, if not a lot more.
If you want the high elo ranked players to keep playing ranked, then you need to completely remake ranked games, there is a lot of things you can do and I can see in some of the options that you already try.
The most important thing that lol needs for ranked mode is that it gets more competitive, in nearly every area.



Matching 4 player premades with another 4 player premade and both get a solo player should work out fine, so I can see no reason why this should not be done.



It is horrible.
Like I said above already, ranked is everything but what it should represent.
When I started ranked, I thought that I would enter the fields of competitive play, instead what I found was the fields of dispair.
People screw around in rankeds like no tomorrow, they troll, they try out stuff and they just play with the wrong mindset.
The reason for this is because of how easy it is to get to ranked mode, and players don't get placed regarding their normal experiences.
You place a player who had already 1000 played games but never played ranked with a player who played just his 150 games to get to lvl 30. The differences are extreme.
For sure this would be fine for the placing games, but this is a teamgame, and you can't evaluate an indivduals teamplay on the wins of whole teams.
My suggestion:
At first, make a higher limit to be able to attend ranked games, I don't think about wins or played games, but people should have played at least e.g. 30 normal draft games before they attend the placement matches. Normal draft was intended to be THE training ground for players who want to get into rankeds, well, it was, with the NDPOP it is useless atm. So after you fix the NDPOP make players play a certain amount of normal drafts before they are allowed to attend ranked, simply that they learn what picking orders are, counterpicking and banning and the whole system.
Second, give out more information. Once you reach level 30 there should be some sort of popup that informs you about ranked, or even better, when you click on ranked for the first time it opens a short instruction which gives you basic information. These informations should include helpful tips, like if you can play all roles and a variety of champions, you will have bigger success, and it should create the missing competitive mindset in the minds of the players, tell them these matches are meant that they give their best, and that they need to teamwork with their other teammembers to succeed.
The third, and probably biggest change should be a rework of the placement matches.
Like I said, currently it is flawed because it tries to match you regarding of win of teams instead of individual performances. This is not easy to fix, simply because Lol doesn't treat individual performances well enough to make a conclusion out of it. All that counts is win or loss. My suggestion would be that you get points for acts like placed wards, cs, damage dealt to champions and health healed to allies, your k/d/s ratio compared to the ones of your teammates. In every single one of the 10 placement matches, you get points for not only if you won or lost, but also for your individual ratios. Then after your 10 placement matches you get placed to an elo of 1000 to 1400, depending on your points gained. Also these 10 placement matches should be an OWN queue, meaning you should not get matched with or against players who already succeeded the 10 placement matches. This would GREATLY improve the problem of the ranked 1000-1400 area, as well as ranked itself.

Then, after you made all of this, you need to make several awards for ranked players. I'm not talking about high elo rewards, I'm talking about low elo rewards. Your ranked elo system ranks from 0 to something about 2500, the problem is that under 1000 elo, everyone is treated the same by the community. Also between the 1000 to 1400 area. My suggestion, give out more badges for these areas, the first should already start at 800, another one at 1000, then 1200 and so on. This would greatly increase the competitive mindset of the lower elo ranked players, because they want to get the next badge which isn't even that far away from them. Or don't use badges and give them something else instead.
And for sure ranked itself needs more awards for higher elo players, but that is another story.



Nothing much to say here, it is wrong and needs to be removed, it should have never been implemented in the first place. It is one of the things that hurt ranked and make it everything but what it wants to be, a competitive gaming experience.



Same as 6, this option has nothing to search here. It hurst ranked mode completely and needs to be removed, there's no discussion about this.



That is not really a problem with matchmaking but more wrong prejudice from players. They will think that a 30 player is a lot better than a lvl 24 player, which doesn't have to be the cause. I met lvl 24 players who played way better than most lvl30 players.
Suggestion: You can only try to convince people that the player lvl doesn't mean that much, to reach this you could show a players wins AND losses until he reached a certain amount of played games, in my mind it would be something like 200-300 games, only after then the shown losses disappear at the winning screen.
For sure this could invoke some hate and flames into people, this would need to be tested extensively beforehand.



I kind of agree, the main reason why people in ranked surrender very often at 20 mins is because they gain nothing out of playing longer, sure they gain more ip but players who play ranked don't really care that much about ip, if they want ip they play normal games.
But the amount of fluctuating elo points needs to be small, I would suggest for every additional played 15 minutes, the LOOSING team members loose 1 elo less after the game ends.
This would encourage players who really want to climb the ladder to not give up that fast, and the small amount of lesser lost elo will eventually stack up so they need to win one game less out of 16 played games to reach the same elo.
Calculating elo for lopsided matches and for not-lopsided ones is harder, the problem is, as earlier described, that lol doesn't really reward indivdual performances. Thinks like k/d/s ratio compared to teammates, things like placed wards, gained gold, farmed cs, stolen buffs etc doesn't get rewarded, if they would it be easy to determine if a match was lopsided, and the players should loose less elo, or if not and they should loose the same amount as it was a fair match.
If you want to improve such stuff, I think there is no way around improving aftergame statistics and informations.



Endtalk:
Riot has done a lot of bad things in the past, and now they seem to recognize them. So they prayed and them were sent a messiah, with the name of Lyte.
:P So, Riot is a young company, and if they really want to hold up against the coming Moba-storm (with it's biggest one, Dota2) then they need to improve their matchmaking, and their e-sports viability.
Look how many stuff Dota2 does have what would be great in lol, huge game history, replays, games in the game history are connected with replays (that's so awesome!), amazing statistics at the end of the game, individual player rewards player options (e.g. great teamplayer!) and last but no least, an impressive and well funtioning matchmaking system.
If Riot wants to keep their competitive players and be able to compete with other Moba's in terms of e-sports viability, these are points they need to improve on.

And that's why I thank you, Lyte, and all the other guys working with, to finally take the approach to this. I believe in you that you will make ranked and lol in generall a better place to play and a much more enjoyable gaming experience than it is now.
Thanks.

~solidfake

Lyte, could you shed some light on how win ratio plays into the current match making system?

I know the system attempts to match you against players of a similar rating, however, my understanding is that the system also attempts to level your win percentage to near 50%.

Why is it, that at 1700 rating, I can have a better win percentage than a player in the 2000 range?

Unfortunate for me to be just beneath the wall of text

Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait, How are THOSE the biggest issues for mm that people want? If you added another option to your pole that says "The option to pick a role and que up for that specific lane (jungle is a "lane", and there would be 2 options for bottom) when playing solo que" It would most certaintly be the number one choice if there was a re-vote. Seriously, this is what people REALLY want and REALLY need. All those other "fixes" are simple and trivial that don't effect the average player on a consistent basis. Afk's in ranked at champ select who get a random and the game continues? Thats like what....1ce every 100 games? This system would improve every ones games EVERY single game. Mountain, mole hill.

Why isn't the whole "This guy wants to go mid, and this guy wants to go mid and this guy wants to go mid, and all 3 of them suck at all their other roles in comparison" thing being adressed? I deal with this EVERY other game of solo que, and the problems listed i almost never deal with. The BIGGEST issue with matchmaking is the fact that people want to do different roles. We should be able to que up with what lane/jungle we want. (support bot and ad bot would be 2 differntones). This would improve EVERYONES experience in ranked. Seriously, every other game someone gets angry at someone else for taking the role they called, then they either threaten to troll, or play a wacked up support that the ad is specifically saying will HURT him, then they feed bottom and its ALWAYS a catastrophy.

The biggest most wanted fix from ANYONE who players ranked is for you to be able to tell MM what role you want to play, and for it to pair you with people who want to play the other roles, (there would still be an option "w/e role bro".

Long que times? then play a support. instant ques. long que times? do the w/e bro, sometimes get support sometimes not. Want a prefernce and no fighting? wait 3 minites for a game YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO PLAY IN, or 5 or w/e. instead of 1 minite for a game that will end with one team completely frustrated and unorginized. Also, if people not playing support became a real issue, then require one out of every 5 (or w/e number of games you want to set it at) games you play you must que up for support.