The key wasn't that people in the WoW system are friends--the point is the same 'pairing' plays together every match which means there is inherently less noise trying to predict their skill rating. Imagine if we had to predict the skill rating of a player when every single game, he was paired with a random player.

Secondly, it only takes about 12 games to hit 1500 Elo since there is a seeding system in play just like in other games.

Third, it's actually much harder to climb out of ~1200 Elo at the start of a season... this is because everyone is clumped at 1200 at the beginning of a season so the vast majority of players are in the wrong bracket and every game is extremely noisy and hard to predict.

Lyte, I have a few questions about matchmaking. First off, when someone has to dodge a ranked que because someone else is trolling, why is that person that dodge being punished with loss of elo AND a 30 min lockout yet the troll who should be getting punished, gets away with it over and over. Riot needs to come up with a way to deal with people like that so those of us who actually are trying to climb in elo don't get screwed over. This is a serious problem and I know I can speak for a large majority of the community when I say, it's getting to a point where playing ranked is more of a headache then it's worth.

My second question is, when is Season 3 going to start so elo's can be reset and those of us who have been screwed by the people mentioned above, can have a fresh start.

I reached 1523 elo with a ranked record of 61 wins and 40 losses. I have since decayed twice (losing exactly 50 elo) since then, if you were to look me up.

At the beginning of the season, I did NOT get a jump start from the 48 elo games - I actually ended up starting almost exactly at 1200.

Just some context for you.

--Pork

I see where you are coming from now. But at 2.2k+ ELO, you tend to see the same "pairings" regardless. Hell the top 20 players in the world right now almost exclusively play Purple side because you guys place Higher ELO on that side. Then there is duo-queueing in Ranked, which of course right now is ****-near the only way to get out of 900-1100 without winning hundreds of games and trying to dodge trolls.

Why does Riot have to "predict" the outcome of games? No other eSport does this in the world. Why do we -have- to have a Matchmaker system determine how much ELO we get because it "think" a game will be a stomp or a close game, or whatever.

Why can't there be a set amount of ELO you get for a win and a loss, and just queue people of similar ELO in together.

In response to your "seeding" statement, you yourself already stated the seeding process can be unfair because people who get lucky and have players who have 300+ wins can be placed TOO high, and players who get a bunch of 1-3 wins can be placed too low. If the latter happens, it is incredibly hard to get out of 900-1100 ELO. You can't deny this. There would't be talk of an "ELO Hell" if it wasn't.

At the start of a season there are far, far less trolls, because it is a fresh start for everyone. I am not saying there are no trolls, or that the troll numbers decrease by 99%, but there are substantially more trolls the longer a season progresses because at some point in someone's LoL career they say "**** it, I am stuck at 900, might as well make everyone's life miserable".

Also, you guys talk that the queue times at 600 ELO are just as high as 2.6k ELO. WoW's system removes the extremely long wait time of the lower rated brackets because you can queue 0-1199 together all in one group, since they will lose 0 rating.

Your comment about the Duo Quing to get out of 900-1100 ELO is 100% correct.

Hi. Not sure if this was ever mentioned before so...

I'm 2k - 2,1k player, my highest is around 2180. But that doesn't really matter...

If I'm right, if there are people duoqing and their Elo differs by a lot (lets say by 600) at the end of the match people wont gain / lose normal amount of Elo (11, 12) but half less (5, 6) which is somehow a compensation(?), clearly a 1k, 1.1k guy can't stand against a 1600 player.

So let's get back to my problem. Recently I've been getting matched up with top players which is fine with me because the skill difference betwen 2000 and 2600 is not even that high meanwhile the skill level difference betwen 1000 and 1600 is huge. I'm pretty competitive and I want to climb the ladders as high as possible but this really slows me down because instead of full Elo gain after a intense match your lobby opens and the display shows 2xxx (+6). That is pretty furstrating, why should I get less Elo and enemy lose less Elo for a match that was completely fair?

Hyper

AFK during selection has always bothered me. maybe if during champion ban selection, if they dont select a champion they get kicked, alternatively i have seen a couple games where they decided not to ban, so maybe add a no ban option? also having to wait for the timer when there is an afk is really annoying, if they get assigned a random somebody is probably going to queue dodge anyway, why not just kick as soon as they don't select anyone when the timer runs out?

A while back, I suggested something (which I'm sure many others have also thought of) to address this.

Basic idea: register duos. My hunch is that most duos play together a lot. I feel like "CupcakeTrap and TMaccius" should have a separate Elo, for maximum accuracy.

Only a "registered" duo may queue in Ranked.

When you form a duo, it gets a separate Elo based on MatchMaker's guess as to the duo's proper Elo. It then adjusts from there.

You could have a separate "duo" queue, but unless I'm missing something, it would work fine if you just treated them as one player and put them in solo queue. You might nonetheless create a separate ranking list for particular duos. You'd also probably want to wait to match a duo-having team with another duo-having team. It seems that the code is already largely in place for this, because Normal deals with arbitrary numbers of players joining queue together: 2, 3, 4, or 5.

I'm not sure about how all of Riot's systems work, but the only thing that occurs to me about "hardware limits" would be storage space. But a "duo" entry would only store two player IDs and an Elo score -- three integers. If LoL has 10 million players, and 3 million play Ranked, I estimate this roughly at 10 million bytes of data (~10 MB) per duo registration allowed. A terabyte hard drive costs about $200 off the rack, and I'm guessing Riot can get them cheaper. Every player could be allowed 200,000 duo registrations for a total storage cost less than the cost of an hour of professional time.

I think you might have a misunderstanding of how matchmaking systems work. Almost every game with a matchmaking system tries to predict which team might be the winner statistically... in fact, I'm not even considering just eSports but many real sport ratings do the exact same thing. Not having set amounts for a Win or Loss is also one of the reasons all the matchmaker systems that do use granular Elo adjustments are more accurate too. For example, if a 0 Rating player beat a 2200 Rating player, should he still get 40? What if a 0 Rating player beats a 1100 Rating player, still gets 40? Or if you want to specifically look at games within a 'bracket,' isn't a 0 Rating player beating a 1199 Rating player more meaningful than a 0 Rating player beating a 400 Rating player?

Also, for a 1500-1800 player, it only takes a dozen games or so to climb out of 900-1100 Elo so I'm not sure where you are coming from about "Elo Hell." I also never said it takes 300 games to get to true Elo because you got players with 1-3 wins during seeding... or that players are placed too high because of players with 300 wins during seeding...

Confused.

Actually, you could use the same logic to say that it's easier to climb at the start of a season, because half the population is fighting teams they'd never otherwise be against, which results in super quick stratification.

For example, a 2200 team can get matched against several sub-1600 teams, which would be practically free wins. By the same token, 900-tier players would lose almost every single match, as opposed to if they were just fighting straight 1100-1200 teams, which would have some opportunities for back-and-forth given the lower relative skill difference.

It goes back to the earlier point about it being a committed, stable team. It'd be different if the 2200 team in question were 3 players with wildly different individual/"real" ratings that just averaged out, but no one ever really made those kinds of teams. In other words, you'd never find two 2400 players who would be willing to hang with a 1800 player on their team because he was a super cool dude.

Not disagreeing with your line of thinking or philosophy about matchmaking, but I think this point in particular worked the opposite way in reality. To the system, things definitely seem noisy, because it's trying to put together even matches. But to the goal of getting people to their ratings quickly, it worked pretty well.