I've been playing ranked matches for a while now, and after 150+ matches I've started to get a little frustrated with the game. I'm not trying to say I'm a 2100+ ELO player stuck in the ~1300's bracket that never has a bad game, but there have been numerous matches where I was absolutely dominating; being a team player; placing wards everywhere; and still at least one or two people on my team manage to screw it up and lose the game by feeding or just lacking basic game knowledge.

My proposed solution to this is a MVP voting system at the end of each game where each team votes for an MVP from the opposing team. The player with the majority of votes on either team receives a small bonus that varies based on whether they were a part of the winning team or the losing team. Teams voting for the opposing team would keep it fair, and prevent team disputes from persuading votes away from deserving players; and also possibly even keep trash talking down since people most likely won't vote for you if you throw out "you're trash" after every kill you get.

The bonus for a player on the losing team would be negating the ELO loss for losing the match, or maybe even just cutting it in half; a sort of "you played well, here's your reward" to give players an incentive to try even when the match seems to be going downhill.

The bonus for a player on the winning team could be something small like a +25 or +50 IP bonus (although nothing too large since they already get a win).

Too keep votes from being too spread out you could also implement a +10 IP bonus for players that vote for the winning MVP (similar to the Tribunal voter reward system).

Overall, I see the ELO system as flawed because it doesn't focus on the players skill as much as it does the entire team as an average, which in the lower ELOs can trap alot of quality players and frustrate them beyond belief.

Let's make ELO hell a little less hellish.


Here are some additional ideas from players regarding solutions to this issue (along with pros and cons of each):

Instead of a voting system for the MVP, have each member of the other team rate players from 1-5 (1 being the best, 5 the worst) and scale rating loss based on this system.
- Pros: Prevents carries from being the only ones getting credit for a win as a tank/support that is played well is also able to be recognized even if they weren't getting kills.
- Cons: Similar to the MVP voting system where this could be exploited.

An automatic system that rates your play based on the champion type (tank/support/carry) and stats such as damage taken vs. deaths, tower kills, healing done, etc.
- Pros: Would keep the MVP ratings completely objective as it would be computed solely by how the player did and not affected by player opinions.
- Cons: If a player decided to play a champion differently and did exceptionally well with them; the system would have a hard time recognizing this as it would be focusing on stats that the player is not aiming for.

Yay lets make Elo into a popularity contest.

Hardly a popularity contest. A player would still have to win games to get their rating up; this would just prevent players that actually perform well in games and end up with sub par teammates from being punished for bad matchmaking luck.

bump for good idea.

not so good idea...trolls will always be trolls...there needs to be more restrictions on who can play ranked matches not just any lvl 30 playing a champ they never had on free hero week...think about bringing more quality players into ranked and not inexperienced scrubs...that is all

Too bad opponents can't see that you're a team player or that you're placing wards, etc. etc.

MVP would = carry/ganker every single game.

I had thought about that and could see how that would be an issue. I've seen some tanks that obviously carried the team, but the other team might have seen the MVP more as the carry who got the kill instead of the tank that made the kill possible.

The idea would need to be reworked some before it would be ready for implementation, as it's far from perfect; but I strongly believe there needs to be a solution to the "coin flip" win or lose scenario that is the 1200-1300s ranked bracket.

How about the other team just ranks all the members of your team?
(simple click drag 1-5)

Then there's a scale for lost ELO. #5 loses the most, #1 loses the least.

Just a thought.

A 5v5 randomly sorted team game is always gonna be variations on a coin-flip.

Because you're 1 part of a 5 person team, you have 1/5th of the influence on the outcome. Therefore if your edge 1v1 was 70/30 on the average player on the team, your 20% edge is reduced to 4%, so now the game is 54% in your favour. Let's say you go above and beyond captaining etc. and make it 60%.

You are expected to lose 40% of the time still purely because of factors out of your control, you simply have to play your best.

No idea why people think they're entitled to more free wins than the free losses they receive.

Nothing objectively "wrong" with the system. I see my losses as a chance to improve, you see them as a chance to shift blame away from yourself, who's gonna stay the way they are and who's gonna improve?

How do you know you don't belong in the 1200-1300 bracket? Why do you deserve more than top 25%? If you play another 100 or more games and you're still at that rating, it's where you should be.

@MiCrowAvEz:

I see what you're saying, and I don't expect any "free wins" as you seem to believe. I believe that if I play well and do more than my part to contribute to the team through kills, wards, etc that I should not be punished for some of my team mates playing sub-par for a ranked setting.

I'm not shifting blame from myself either, as I stated in the first part of my post, I'm not saying that I don't have bad games. Everyone has off games and I'm not different. If I performed extremely badly in a game I would expect a loss and would have been responsible for other players that did well to lose ELO.

Here's what I'm saying... I don't expect free handouts of wins to anyone. I think that if a player makes an outstanding contribution to a losing team, then that player shouldn't be punished for the shortcomings of others on his team. This wouldn't even count as a "free win", more like a blank slate for that game.

Also, since you brought up belonging in the 1200-1300 bracket. I looked up your win/loss ratio and both of ours are approximately the same. You're at 52.6% and I'm at 51.7% yet you're over 100 ELO higher than mine. Is this not obviously a flaw in the system? Where two people with similar win ratios can have such a dramatic difference in rating?