I know a lot of players loved the SC2 Challenge System and these are ideas we have been considering. Designers like Brackhar, and researchers like davin have been interested in these types of ideas.

I seem to get horrible matching on a consistent basis

Back in the days when Pendragon made a big thread about player behavior (maybe you weren't at Riot at that time) many people talked about the need of positive measures to encourage good behavior. Bans and punishments are a good tool but they kick in when a bad experience has already occurred. Now you need to find the good type of reward, the right way to deliver it and ensure that it doesn't have some bad side effects. The problem I might see with rewards is that some people will wonder why they didn't get it and get upset. You also have to reward people often enough so no one feels he missed it and no matter how he behaves from now on he will never get it.

PS : Thanks for correcting me on the SC2 ladders, I guess I was misinformed.

Glad to see you are still responding to this thread. I hope you will be able to reply to me as well.

I voted for "3) Skilled Ranked Players in Normal Modes".
Unfortunately I seem to be in the minority regarding this problem. But being in the "minority" does not make this problem "minor".

Just today I have experienced a very bad case of matchmaking.
Please see this picture (or the attached below, same image):

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c2...atchmaking.jpg

I have not censored names because I do not believe I am calling anyone out, and I have permission at least from my team that I queued with. You can look up the names quickly to verify the rankings of each player and see that this was in fact a lopsided match.

I have read a lot about the ELO system so I think I have some idea of how it works. In a nutshell, I can pretty much explain what happened myself in that (1) my normal ELO is considerably higher than my ranked ELO, and (2) my opponent's normal ELOs are considerably lower than their ranked ELOs.

This is not a rare occurrence for me, as even though I am only Silver rating, I find myself consistently being matched against Gold rated players.

If I was playing alone it would be something I would accept - that matchmaking considers me a decent player to pit me against tough opponents. The problem is that I am queued with other people, and I do not believe that they are being given a fair chance. Being the best player in my group, I can guess that the gap in our skill levels is probably very high.

You might have a sense of doubt and think, "if your hidden normal ELO is reflective of your true skill level, then shouldn't you be able to carry your friends if matchmaking gives you a fair match?". Well, the truth is that sometimes I do have blow out games where I do in fact carry them and ending up going like 15-0 or something. However, one issue not talked about and hard to measure is player role on the team. My favorite is the Support role, and their strength of impact on a game is widely debated. I am of the opinion that a traditional Support can not directly "carry" a game. So does that mean I should not play a Support role while queuing with my friends if I want to win? Or does that mean that I should not play with them at all if our skill gap is too great?

These are rough questions and this situation is rarely talked about. Because I know, on the flip side of the coin, it's not fair if I have 1500 level skill and my lane opponent has 1100 level skill. I'm sure this has happened to me a lot and I'm sure this happens to other people all the time. Role choice / lane choice is NOT something matchmaking takes into account.

I have not mailed matchmaking because this thread is a month old and I don't know if you are still collecting the data. If you tell me that it would help you to make changes I will happily do so and send all of the information I have.

If you could at least reply and acknowledge that this game was an extreme case I would be very appreciative to know that you are at least listening and plan to do something. I did hear about this thread when you first opened it a month ago, and I was very excited to see that you are aware of the problem. Unfortunately a month has passed and I am still getting unfair matches like so to this day. This is not the first time I have had a game like this.

Thanks for reading.

Just started reading this forum a bit ago and want to help Lyte with all the people asking about W/L ratio and different values of elo. I'm really tired right now and not sure if someone already explained it already, but here it goes.

Say you have 100 games played and won 80 of them while climbing to your true elo. You will have an 80% win ratio. The reason people have close to 50% is because they continue playing where they belong.

Say you play 400 more games and win half of them because each match should now be a 50/50 chance playing vs equal players. That will put you at 280 wins and 220 loses making your new ratio 56%. The more you play where you belong the closer it gets to 50% no matter what elo you are.

Also that's why if you have a lot of games played you can gain or lose a lot of elo and not notice a huge difference in the %. Like I said I'm really tired, but I think the math is right lol.

I hope they come to fruition I think what'd help the game more than anything else (any balance change to a hero, any item changes/additions, even any matchmaking changes, even if all would be good things) would be to give more tools to help players learn the ins and outs of the game better and have more information more easily accessible to them. At the very least, then they only have themselves to blame if they don't utilize said information.

I'd rather have to deal with that and be able to shut down people like Rammblin who create worthless threads. Bad enough that for a few days his topics were constantly popping up multiple times on the front page. It would only be increasingly frustration if the general community couldn't close his threads and he would just fill up half or more of General Discussion. The phrase "this is why we can't have nice things" comes to mind here.

Well, I tend to queue with 4 people, and then 99 percent of the time, I get somebody who has little to no skill at all.

Either that, or we get a decent player who plays an OP champ like Riven, or Tryndamere and carries.

It would be nice if matchmaking tried to match somebody CLOSE to our skill level, but honestly it seems like it gives us level 1's if we have a premade 4.

The largest issue for me is AFks/leavers in the game. I have been getting a huge rash of these playing ranked. My ELO has tanked into the low 900s because this has been happening to me about 3 out of every 5 games. When the game is 4v5 or especially 3v5, there is nothing I can do to carry hard enough against a decently matched or even, in 3v5, a weaker team, but the loss is not my fault or the fault of anyone who didn't AFK on my team.

Let us vote and kick AFKs in select lobby