I've been playing a lot of League of Legends recently and have been having a pretty frustrating time with it. I keep ending up in games that aren't actual games. One of the people playing will get frustrated with the game and stop trying. They'll disconnect, or they'll just walk away, or they'll buy 'stupid' items and commit suicide over and over. Maybe we had a chance to win, maybe we didn't... But after they give up we really have no shot.
League of Legends does its matchups by Elo rating. The idea is that you have a rating which represents how good you are and then you get to play with other people at about your same skill level. This should result in even matches. The system was first used in chess, where you actually could predict win-loss records fairly accurately. Chess is entirely skill based and is a 1 on 1 game, after all. People could get better, or worse, over time. They could have good days or bad days. Their rating would change, but it would eventually settle where it 'should'. League of Legends is a 5 on 5 game. Individual skill is certainly important but who your teammates are and how they work together are very important as well.
The problem is, how do you establish what someone's rating should be? In both chess and League of Legends your first few games are actually worth more points. The idea being to ratchet you into proper position quickly and then scale things down to reduce fluctuations from a couple individual games. It makes sense, on the surface, and works quite well for chess. In League of Legends, however, it doesn't seem as useful. The problem is it puts a huge amount of importance on those first couple games. And then you get matched up with people who 'deserve' to have ratings around where you ended up.
For example, last season when I first started playing ranked games I got lucky. I don't remember the specifics behind it but I ended up going 9-1 in my initial placement matches. By default you start at 1200 but with such a great record in the games that really mattered my rating came out around 1450. I went on to finish around .500 (where everyone should end up if they play enough games since eventually you're bound to end up playing against people as good as you) with a rating near 1300 and a max of 1512. I'm not awesome at the game (I make some bad decisions and my ping is mediocre) but I had fun. I don't recall having too many matches with people who just give up at the first sign of a struggle since those people by and large lose more than they win (since they turn some maybe-wins into auto-losses with the way they behave) and just can't sustain a rating that high.
This season things went differently. I'd stopped playing for a couple months and came back right at the rating reset. I didn't get lucky this time and actually started off something like 2-8. Here my rating came out closer to 1100 after the placement matches and has since tumbled to 1001. My win percentage post placement matches this season is actually pretty comparable to last season. A little under .500. But it's been less fun. The problem is I routinely end up in games with people who don't care.
Maybe I'm not good enough at the game and my rating deserves to by this low. I'm actually ok with that. If I was able to have close and fun games with people around my skill level I'd be having fun. But people who just give up isn't fun. Even the games that I win aren't a lot of fun since generally speaking the other team is playing so badly and someone gave up over there instead.
I had one game today where someone 'called' during the draft that he wanted to jungle Warwick. This was after I'd already picked a jungler. Someone else on the team then picked Warwick. So he flat out said in chat he was going to make us lose. He said if someone didn't dodge the game we were all going to lose. (Dodging the game counts as a loss for the person who did it, I think, so no one wants to do so.) Someone did, and I ended up on a team with the same guy. This time I picked a non-jungler since I had an idea how unstable the guy was. He got his Warwick and we ended up winning the game.
He was a decent player and I bet if he'd cared enough to try the first time around we'd have had a good chance of winning that game too. But he was willing to throw away 40 minutes of his life and a chance at a win in order to punish the guy who took Warwick on him.
How can the system accurately get people to their proper ratings when guys like him exist? When he gets his way his team probably wins. When he doesn't it definitely loses. I don't want him on my team or on the enemy team.
I donno what to do. I like playing the game when it's actually a decent game. But at this rating those seem a lot rarer than they did last season when I was 400 points higher. Part of me actually wants to create a new account and level up from scratch just to get another shot at those 10 placement games. (I'd probably need to go 30-0 from here to get to the point I was at after starting 9-1 last season.)
Ugh. This sounds really, really awful. If a game is nearly a coin toss at low levels of skill (which it is if people frequently quit) then once you get there you can't get out.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it is not great. I went around and read some suggestions from people about how to get out and the best advice was probably to not play during the evenings in the US. The idea being that a lot of the people who are going to give up or intentionally be bad are likely to be teenagers who are apt to be playing at that time.
ReplyDeleteAlso there's a big advantage to playing with someone else. (You can join the 'solo queue' as a team of two.) The game assumes that since you know each other you're better than the sum of your parts so it artificially inflates your Elo. This means you expect to play with better players, and it also means you only have 3 shots in 8 of getting the quitter since presumably your friend isn't going to rage quit on you.
Unfortunately neither of those solutions seems very good. Not playing in the evening is pretty tough for someone with a job who wants to play. Queueing with a friend is good if you have a friend, and will increase your win percentage, but it still leaves 8 people who might quit and spoil the game (as you said, you don't enjoy games where you win because your opponent's gave up). Plus, you'll have to win a lot of games before you get out of the quitters bracket.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like there is a big problem with the system, though I can't say that I have a proposition to improve it.
True enough. There are two things I'd consider.
ReplyDeleteOne would be to remove the huge ratings swings from the first few games you play. I don't know how it decays exactly (it might be the first 10 games are doubled) but I won a game with Robb a couple nights ago and he gained over 40 points to my 20.
The other would be to put actual consequences on people who ruin games. The reaction to pretty much everyone when you tell them you're going to report them is that they just don't care. Unfortunately a lot of people seem to be willing to report players for pretty much anything...