In the latest game update, we rolled out a second beta test of a new matchmaking change that is live in all territories. This change will increase your average queue time by about 30 seconds, but we hope the benefits are worthwhile.

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The matchmaker will now take into account the Number of Wins a player has in every matchmade queue (Normal SR, Normal TT, Ranked Solo/Duo, etc).

This means that for the first few minutes, the matchmaker will attempt to find teammates and opponents that have a relatively similar Number of Wins as you in addition to trying to find teammates and opponents that also have a similar skill rating. However, this does not mean it's impossible to get matched into a game with a large difference in Number of Wins--it's just more rare.

We need your help! Please give us feedback on the changes.

PS - RiotKiddington was the dev that did most of the work.

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UPDATE :::

I'm crunching the data these days and finding some interesting things. I think for the sake of transparency, I'm just going to reveal the numbers I'm seeing.

One, the average game has a much closer win differential than before, so we know the feature is at least doing what it's supposed to. For example, we're seeing ~5% more games in Normal SR where teams only have a 0-49 number of wins difference between teams. In Ranked SR we're seeing ~30% more games with only a 0-49 number of wins difference between teams.

Two, we're seeing that the average game has a similar Elo differential than before, but I think this data point is misleading and we need to deep dive this a bit more. For example, we're seeing lower numbers of games with 20-30 Elo differences between teams which is an unintended effect.

Three, if we define a lopsided game as games with a huge KDA differential or something like 10,000 gold difference, we're not seeing more or less of these games post-patch. It might just be that players who are getting the lopsided matches come and post about it, and the players who are getting fair matches don't.

Taking all three points into account, we believe the Number of Wins feature is a net positive and don't believe it's creating more lopsided games than before. However, we have a few improvements we want to make to the feature--we will most likely increase the weighting for skill rating (Elo) so that skill rating is always much higher priority than number of wins. This will fix Issue #2 I pointed out above, while retaining some of the benefits of adding Number of Wins to the matchmaker.

Constructive Feedback: I love you.

These 15-20 minute Dominion queues are no fun


It might work in more popular queues like summoners rift, but it needs to be dynamically adjusted based on queue popularity at the time, so that there aren't super long queues at off times, or in unpopular queues like dominion draft.

I don't mind waiting slightly longer for a SR game to get a much more evenly matched game, but when the queues get excessive it really isn't worth it IMO.

also, this seems a bit risky to put into ranked. If you're in a way seperating new ranked players and experienced ones, depending on how strict the win based matchmaking is it may be frustrating. New players will have easier matchups, and possibly even fly up hundreds of elo since they are against other new ones. Then when they have a lot of wins and match up with more experienced players, they will drop and do poorly because they got a high rating due to easy opponents.
This might potentially mess up the accuracy of elo rating, as it would be much easier to reach say 1500 on a new smurf, than on an account with 200+ ranked wins.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lyte We'll be taking a look at Dominion during these tests. If it turns out that the queue time increases are not worth the benefit, we can turn it off in Dominion.

Yay Kiddington!

Awesome, I hope it works!!

Need to try this out.

I was wondering about that extra 30 sec queue time.

Awesomeness.

Excellent!