He's hacking like a motherfucker.
FYI there was a bug with the sound that should now be fixed. Enjoy the metallic thunks you were promised.
Hey there! I'm the designer in charge of Ranked, so I can speak pretty directly to this. To start, I totally get the pain you're feeling here - seeing players with really different ranks in your game feels like garbage, even if we tell you that the MMR makes it fair. We want to solve this problem by getting MMR and Rank closer together, something we'll be talking about more over this season. But there are some really good reasons we don't just show MMR:
First, check out this post from a couple years ago where Riot Gortok goes over this question: https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2018/02/dev-matchmaking-real-talk/ . I think that answer holds up pretty well, but I'll also give some of my own reasons. Strap in, this is gonna get long:
MMR is meant to measure your progress, not display it. For MMR to measure skill correctly, it has to do a lot of things that, if you were watching the entire time, feels pretty awful. The easiest example is a new player. When a new player enters the system, we don't have enough info to match them correctly yet, so we put them close to the middle of the pack and move them based on results. But if that new player is worse than average, their MMR starts at one point and then drops. And drops. And drops, until they reach a fair match.
But if you look at how that player is playing, their MMR is not reflecting their story. They're typically getting better from game to game and improving - which is part of why we have Rank start at the bottom and move up, to eventually catch your MMR. And the answer here isn't just to have MMR start at the bottom, because that would just mean that low MMR was a constantly whirlpool of actual low MMR players and higher MMR players moving their way up, generating a ton of unbalanced matches.MMR needs to change quickly, Rank does not. For MMR to work correctly, it needs to be both fluid and responsive to loss and win streaks. This means that if you drop 4 games in a row, even if it was just because you had some bad luck, too bad - you're dropping down. Sure, it'll go back up if you keep playing games, but hitting those troughs hurts a lot. Similarly, you might go on a lucky streak and fly upwards - only to get stomped a couple times and fall back down. It can become very hard to say what your MMR "is" - MMR stabilizes over time, but it jumps around a lot more than Rank does.
With Rank, we can include things like demotion protection and promo series to make your rank more stable. Loss streaks aren't as punishing, and win streaks do less to inflate players' ranks.Showing MMR doesn't address all the concerns with matchmaking. MMR is only one component we have to consider with matchmaking, including who is looking for a game, how long everyone's been waiting, who is grouped with someone else, etc. Showing would give more information, but still not the complete story. Look, I clearly love giving overly long explanations as much as the next guy, but even if we gave full context on why every match was made, people would still disagree with our reasoning, because everyone values things differently. Someone might be OK with waiting in queue for 15 minutes to get their perfect match, and someone else might think that any wait over 30 seconds means it's time to quit and play something else.
Hope this helps explain a bit more, and I just want to emphasize again - we agree that the difference between MMR and Rank is something we can improve. We're going to be making a lot of tune-ups to Ranked over this season and the next, and that is certainly one of the issues at the front of our minds.
It really wasn't that long. But it was pretty smart.
Ah yes I understand.
what
Carry the 3 my friend
Feed me more Aphelios memes my children. Probama hungers.
Lol, nice catch
This is god damned amazing.
In this frame, I also appear. Probama cinematic confirmed!
I live to destroy your productivity.
What if you only added the quotes when it was in the format of a Riot status message. So 99% of the time players wouldn't have to see them.
“Short answer: hard to determine when it’s actually a match to a riot status message.”
Was this really such an issue?
Are there really that many players who get frustrated over something like this?
“Not stupid! When a system in software is trying to tell you something, but can also deliver a personalized message from a user, we call that feature overloaded. It’s actually natural to be confused in certain cases when those things age close in content.”
The saddest part about this is the fact that you surely think you're hilarious and cool by trying to do shitty pr for a shitty change.
“My mom thinks I’m cool.”
“I’m not really doing PR. I’m the designer for this and I knew it would be a thing. Because everything is a thing when enough people see it. So I figured I’d try and talk through it with folks.”
“Sorry you’re not feeling it. Would you say your life is pretty significantly worse after this change?”
“Thanks Probama”
“Thanks TinyySushii”
"Well I guess this month's work is done"
- Riot Employee
“So this was actually my feature and I’d like to take a moment to explain the reasoning behind it!“
“For some players, it was confusing when their friends would put a status that said ‘Summoners Rift (3/5)’ or any other system generated status.”
“This frustrates those players when the game isn’t behaving appropriately based on what they’re seeing. Believe it or not, rito hates frustrated gamers. Crazy right?”
“We initially tried putting the bullhorn status icon from the hover card (the thing you get when you hover a player) in the status message itself, but that took up so much room there wasn’t enough space for your funny memes!”
“So we decided this was the best middle ground between obvious and non-disruptive. It also causes hilarious accidental sarcasm. Here’s a fun example: my bosses’ status is “diamond champion” right now and it cracks me up every time I see it.”
“Thanks for reading!”
Read more“For some players, it was confusing when their friends would put a status that said ‘Summoners Rift (3/5)’ or any other system generated status.”
“This frustrates those players when the game isn’t behaving appropriately based on what they’re seeing. Believe it or not, rito hates frustrated gamers. Crazy right?”
"How dare people have some fun"
“We love fun! But we don’t love when people think open parties are broken.”
“Really important thing to know about design is that it’s all about making trades. I know this is a little bit worse in some ways. But I also know it’s more clear.”
“So I took the trade.”
You're not a real Riot employee...
This response makes too much sense
“Gottem.”
Why couldn't you just put a bullhorn or other signifier in front of the system status message, to keep the distinction but also keep our memes?
“We tried it! It took up way too much space honestly. It took away about 4-5 characters. Quotations only take 2.”
I appreciate the reasoning, and I understand it, but I disagree with it. Statuses have to be shorter now, and the quotes are just kinda annoying. I don't think the tradeoff for clarity in this case is worth it. People just need to git gud and stop getting trolled by fake statuses.
Or, the best solution, if that's the problem you're trying to solve - make it impossible to set statuses that imitate system messages. I know that has to go through localization and it's a big chore, but it's the right way to do it.
Edit for easier, lazier idea: just make them a different color. We have green, blue, and red text. Make something orange or yellow.
“There’s more here to unpack if you want to dig in.”
“What does that experience look like?”
“Do we do some sort of pattern matching so they can’t enter anything like the work ‘Summoner’? I think that might be lame. Do we deny you if you only put exact string matches? So now we need to account for (checks math) all 27 possible status messages including all the ones we might add in the future in every language? YIKES.”
“Your take is totally valid, and I actually thought pretty similarly initially, but there’s a ton of complexity chillin in this little feature.”
I mean, basically yeah.
THIS GUY ARE SCRIPTING