Dear Riot employees,

I come here today as not just a gamer, but a passionate activist. What am I an activist for you may ask? A new and improved Elo rating system for the solo/duo que. While the current system is OK, I find that it is majorly flawed. When teams win or lose games they lose or gain an Elo according to the Elo on the other team. Example: Team A has 1300 Elo and Team B has 1200 Elo. When Team A wins they get 6 Elo and if team B wins they get 12-13. If team A loses they lose 12-13 and if team B loses they loses 6 Elo. Or at least that is how it is supposed to work. As of late I find that EVERY game I am loosing or gaining 12-13 Elo regardless of the other team. Either I am so unlucky and just always end up on the team with the lower Elo score when I win/ higher Elo when I lose OR something has gone utterly wrong.

So what might I be getting at with this long and overly formal post on your wonderful forums you may ask. I bring to you a revised Elo system that can better rate players in ranked games. My system will allow better players to redeem themselves on losing teams, and bad players to suffer on winning teams. As well as removing the need to worry about each team’s Elo.

My system employs 10 tiers of Elo Distribution.

Tier 1: Upon winning a game players receive a base 9 Elo and vice versa players who lose a game will drop a base 9 Elo.
Tier 2: Each kill in the game will award the champion with 0.65 Elo.
Tier 3: Each death will drop Elo gained at the end by 0.8 Elo per death
Tier 4: For each assist players will gain 0.4 Elo at the end of the game
Tier 5: Elo gains and losses cap off at 16 Elo.
Tier 6: DCing/Leaving will result in an automatic 16 Elo loss if they have not returned.
Tier 7: Surrendering will result in an automatic loss and result in an additional 1 Elo loss.
Tier 8: For every tower your team downs you will gain 0.2 Elo.
Tier 9: On the losing team the max gain of Elo caps off at -3. On the winning team the max Elo loss caps off at +3.
Tier 10: Baron grants 0.5 additional Elo.

The reason i have broken it into tiers is that i can explain each in a manner that is proper and informative.

The Tiers Explained

Tier 1: I believe that a base gain and loss of 9 Elo will allow players to realize that winning and losing still has a bonus/consequence and thus players will still try to do their best to win every game they are in. With the current system giving and taking 12-13 (on a regular basis) it seems to drag people down too quickly since they are dropping by more than 10 every game.

Tier 2: I believe that giving players Elo based on kills will encourage them to try hard and to award players who are good a better ELO to properly adjust them to an Elo where they will be met with an opponent who is equal to their on playing skill.

Tier 3: I believe that deaths should be viewed as a bad thing and that they should help take trolls who purposely feed, bad players, and those who over extend with big egos down a peg. This way trolls will drop far past what the others on their own team may drop.

Tier 4: I put this tier here because i feel that supports and players who get kills stolen all the time would drop without true markings of theirs skill. I do not believe however that players should receive as much Elo for an assist because all you have to do is basic attack and run, as well as the fact players who take Soraka can just ult and get an assist for doing hardly anything.

Tier 5: I put this tier here because otherwise player will just go rampant and get a bad team and would drop 50 Elo because they get no kills and their team does not help them. Vice versa someone may have a great game and get a huge amount of kills (For example i went 23-1-13 on Fizz) and I feel that they should not be over acknowledged for kills they may have racked up over a game in which they are fed.

Tier 6: I put this here because i feel that it will provoke people to stay in game regardless of how mad they are at their own team, especially if they leave and they were going to win the game!

Tier 7: It was brought to my attention people might give up early because they are doing well and don't want to lose Elo if they are 12-1 and their team is losing. To prevent people from surrendering at 20 minutes in a 25-15 game I put this in to help urge the losing team to keep trying.

Tier 8: As pointed out by some comments, this is a tower game. The more towers you down the better! But i gave the winning team less Elo because it will be assumed that they have more turrets down in general at the end over the loosing team. 9 towers down on the winning and 4 on the losing, given that scenario the winning team would get a bonus of 1.8 Elo and the Loosing team would get 0.8 Elo for trying, because they should be rewarded for trying! I think everyone who tries should be rewarded.

Tier 9: I placed this in here because even if one player has an amazing score, if he does not participate in team fights he is a factor of the loss and should not be given a huge amount of Elo for being a coward. On the flip side if someone on the winning team is carried and does terrible, they should not be overly punished because they may have just been countered and had a bad game.

Tier 10: This tier was added because Baron is usually downed 3 times by the end of a longer game and if stolen a losing team can gain a couple extra Elo for a good steal.

Examples of this system and how it would work out:
Losing team:
An AD carry/top solo:
End of the game the player has a score of "22-4-10" and his team lost. While he may have done amazing and been carrying the team as hard as he could, it wasn't enough. This means he will only lose 3 Elo rather than losing 16 because he did very well and i feel he should be rewarded.
Support:
When his/her team finally loses (s)he comes out with 1-4-30. With this score (s)he would come out a loss of 3 Elo. In many scenarios the support is screwed on a losing team because (s)he can not carry it if a member of the team is bad.
Tank:
When the game wraps up the tank has 6-8-24 with a loss. He will only lose 2 Elo rather then 10 because his team would not engage when he tries to fight.

Winning Team:
AD carry/top solo:
The nexus destroyed and the player has 13-5-8. With this score the player would gain 16 for doing well.
Tank:
They played terribly and had 1-8-9 as their score at the end. (s)he would only gain 6.8 Elo (rounded up to 7).
Support:
They tried their hardest but the enemies focused them and they came out at 0-10-14. Their score would have been cut to 6.6 (rounded up to 7). It is not their fault for being focused, but they could have built to prevent instant death.

So all in all i feel that this system is very balanced and will provide good players with better boosts and bad players with bigger losses. It will also allow for a good player who is on the loosing team not to be dragged down because of it. On top of that it may cause people to stop rage quitting because of a bad team.

I still agree that players should be pitted against people in the same Elo range (1100-1200, 1200-1300, ETC) because that is where they will either do well or badly.

Sincerely,
EndofDeepsleep

P.S. Feedback from the community would be great! Just leave a post and i will reply as soon as i can!
P.P.S. Riot i hope you read this and that it may give you good ideas for a similar or better system! Happy hunting!
P.P.P.S. I put this post here because it did not fit into the feedback forums...

Edits:
Raised support Elo gain from 0.3 to 0.4 to reduce assists needed per death from 2 to 0.8
Added tiers 7 and 8
Raised Base Elo to 9
Cap dropped from 17 to 16
Surrendering no longer drops you 4 more Elo but now drops you 1 Elo instead.
Both teams now gain 0.2 per tower rather than giving the losing team more.
Added examples and approximate scores.
Added tier 9.
Changed caps for minimum and max on winning and losing teams from 5 / -5 to -3 (losing game) and +3 (winning game) This also fixes higher Elo problems of players never losing Elo.
Added tier 10

Why did you need to bump this less than one minute after posting?

Why is your comment about a bump and not the post itself?
I was saving space for a new post, if you must know.

The only problem I see is that supports REALLY get screwed on this one, especially tanky supports. They're the ones who're most like to die bot lane (either to ensure a double kill for their carry or to sacrifice himself to save his carry) and they get the least amount of kills simply because of the role they're playing.

With your suggestions you're losing 0.8 ELO per death and only gaining 0.35 for assists. That means for every death you're having to average 2-3 assists (or land a kill) just to break even every time you die. And supports have a slightly higher than average death rate simply because of their lack of items. This will encourage supports KSing people whenever they can as well as making even less people want to play support because even if you win you're going to get less ELO than if you were the AD carry, etc.

I do agree with you on your second post though. There really do need to be more limits on who can play ranked games. I have an RL buddy who absolutely sucks at the game. He hit level 30 through almost only bot games. Literally he only had 15 regular games played and he only won 6 of those (the ones I carried him through when he was like level 14 or something). There is no way he should be allowed to join the ranked queue when he hits 30. He's simply not ready and any team he gets put on will lose or have to play through a SEVERE handicap to even hope to win.

I agree with this method but I also agree with Zachyveng's idea revolving around support's thus they need to add somthing to revolve around the change"if it we're to happen" with support's.Other than that this will make and break the idiot's that just log in to destroy your elo that are 13 and say they're #1 ETC. The bad's will get killed into elo hell depth's and the better average player's sitting around 1100-1300 will probably go higher in rating.

With the kill-death-assist ratios, there was mentioned a way to measure a player's skill in "dominance factor". A kill is worth 3 points, a death is worth -2 points, and an assist is worth 1 point. So a player with 1 kill, 1 death, and 1 assist would have a dominance factor of 2; a feeder with a score of 1/11/5 would have a dominance factor of -14. This could be implemented to increase/decrease ELO gains/losses. It may or may not encourage kill-stealing, that could be a problem, but generally it would be a positive change.

The thing is if they are a good support they will be getting 3 assists every death! when i play taric, alistar, soraka, and blitz (my main supports) i usually end the game with something like 1-7-20 which is enough to counter out the deaths, Originally i was going to do 0.4 per assist but then it would be unfair because carries who go 20-3-12 would get a ton of ELO losing or not and the point to my system is to motivate people to avoid deaths but not feel the need to ditch team mates. I will think about lowering / raising the point system so that it is a little softer on supports. Thank you for the feed back!

Thank you for the feed back! But i think that a kill shouldn't be worth a full death or more because it would end up with more kill stealing for that extra ELO as well as the cap helps keep the KSing in control, especially in a loosing game...

I agree, but as always a good support will come out on top and be able to save both (and maybe get a kill outta it!) Thank you for the feed back!

This is a tower defense game and all that actually matters is winning that battle. Champion kills, minions and items are all just ways to assist you on the way. That is all I have to say, your idea doesn't support the fundamentals of the game and there is no point discussing in any serious manner.