toroth

Alright, so it could have been some edge case (I try to question him about this specific match, but he is sleeping atm, it's a middle of night here! :P), anyway there are a lot of friends on eune and euw complaining about ranked experience this season, but can't put a finger exactly on what's wrong besides huge skill difference of the players (they even compare normal games with gold/plat players around to be harder than ranked high mmr games with diamond~ players mostly and apparently I kinda think so too, I mean I have more often tougher games on normals haha).

Also just one more quick question - is flex and soloq algorithms different? Besides taking maybe extra factor of different size of a premade team?

Flex ratings differ from solo queue ratings - they're informed by some of the same stuff, but not the same. The algorithms are almost exactly the same, but the base info is different. It's something we're looking into changing in the future!

toroth

How does it look like on EUNE? I was wondering, since I felt like the matchmaking felt as awful unbalanced as in EUW, in essence friend of mine just recently played with a team where there was like gold team vs gold players + bronze~ with 20% wr and some diamond (I know it's not example from higher mmr, but it also happens in there and I feel like something is awfully wrong on low/mid-mmr). Anyway, I have strong feeling there is the same issue going on with EUNE, as in EUW did.

Definitely not seeing the same stuff on EUNE, and this would only be affecting the very top of the ladder.

Tentacula

Will this impact the ARAM queue as well?

The change we made would not impact ARAM, I believe.

GarryGarryson

Ah okay thank you! Is MMR closeness the indicator of match quality? Are there post match analysis of the quality dependent on the result? I only casually understand league and matchmaking processes.

So defining the "quality" of a match is something we approach from a lot of different angles, but for the purposes of "is the matchmaking system working correctly," we generally care about how close teammates are to one another, and how close teams are to one another by MMR.

For post-match analyses dependent on the result, we also do that - getting matches with close MMR differences only works if the rating is correlating properly with actual skill/wins. Loosely speaking, for any given match, we can assume that the team with the higher MMR is predicted to win - and the difference gives us a level of confidence in our predictions. We're aiming to keep matches as close to 50/50 as possible, so when a match is close, the prediction is less confident because both teams could very easily win. We then check that prediction against the actual results to make sure the system is predicting correctly, and especially so in cases where it has strong confidence.

Silenceu

When will this fix go live?

It actually did before I finished writing that post - the change itself is pretty simple.

GarryGarryson

by the metrics we actually use to make games

What are those?

We have a matchmaking rating (MMR) that we use as a current estimation of your skill. When we make a game, we try to find players with similar MMR, but also account for factors like how long they've been waiting, if they're in a premade, etc.

Interesting analysis! I have some more detailed takeaways, but here is a quick TL;DR:
EUW did have a configuration difference that was optimizing for faster matches at higher MMR for a little looser matchmaking. The actual Match Quality is way closer when measuring by the metrics we actually use to make games (not LP), but there's some room for improvement so we're going to shift it to be closer in line to other regions.

- First, cool idea and thanks for bringing this stuff up!
- So as you know, we don't match on LP, we match on MMR. The two numbers correlate pretty well up at the top of the ladder, but there's a lot of ways it can differ from region to region. So while the numbers can look pretty jarring here, they're much closer in reality. For example, looking at only players with Master or higher MMR, the 90th percentile of worst games still had both teams within ~1 win's MMR of each other in all regions. Differences between teammates were also extremely similar across all regi...

xVinjo

/u/RiotIamWalrus

Posted above! Thanks for flagging me

ShrayerHS

Will this apply retroactively to trophies we've already earned? It would really suck to see my demacia cup throphy go away

It should apply retroactively.

Huehnchenkaempfer

Do you have any info on when clash comes again?

We are scheduling the next set of tournaments today, so you should see the dates in the Clash Tab soon.

MrDexter120

Also do sth about performance pls. 130 ms locked during clash games both days not only me but many other players.

We're looking into it!

Definitely something we're working on! We don't want your trophies to drift off into nothingness either.

CodeLight

I'm curious how many of those dodges are due to technical issues with computers / internet, and how many dodges are due to trolls holding champ select hostage, rather than specifically dodging a bad team comp (or other intelligent dodges.)

I think you might have a point about the win-trading, but aren't win-traders already communicating anyways? They know that they have their friend in the same lobby because they can just compare pick/bans.

I'd hate to see intelligent dodging get punished, because I really value competitive matches, even over winning. It's such a bad feeling to lose, then find out your Lee Sin has a 30% winrate over 50+ games, or the enemy Master Yi has an 80% winrate over 50+ games.

We have a separate category for most technical issues. Obviously some stuff can fall into the wrong category, depending on the error, but that percentage is primarily intentional dodges.

I totally get what you mean about valuing competitive matches, and I think that's a problem that's on us to solve through better detection and faster adjustment of accounts. But unfortunately, dodging slows down matching for the entire system, leading to longer waits, worse matches, and potentially more autofill (as when players wait longer, the system will do more to ensure a match).

We wouldn't eliminate dodging entirely as things stand today (as others have mentioned, there's situations where a dodge can feel like your best choice). But the current state of affairs is creating dodging more often than is healthy.

CodeLight

Do you have any data on what percentage of players dodge frequently? My gut says it's incredibly rare for the vast majority of the player base to ever dodge.

Also, how would you feel about displaying Enemy Player's names in champion select? (after their champion is locked in to prevent target bans) This would allow people who care about fair matches to dodge when they see a smurf.

Depends on the region, but on the whole, about 10-15% of lobbies end in a dodge (instead of a game). That number doubles at higher ranks. EDIT: Should have mentioned, that's just Solo/Duo Queue.

Introducing enemy player names in champ select would lead to more dodges, but also probably increased win trading in certain regions/skill levels where it's more prominent.

Hey, we're looking into this as we speak, but this isn't the intended behavior of dodge penalties. We still intend for dodging multiple games to incur an additional penalty.

celigodtko

Dont tell me this was just now realized????? I came back to play in last September and didnt worked at that time too. (Even reported in game and to the support)

We've been aware of the issues with the stats tab (hence why we've been refactoring it). Just making sure that there aren't any additional issues.

From what we can tell, this is related to the game backlog that has built up in EUW, and was exacerbated a bit by other recent issues. It's in the process of being corrected, but that's taking some time.

We'll take a look at this today - we're refactoring a bunch of the backing systems for the Stats tab this year. It seems to be more stable in most regions, but in some places where there are a lot of games to process (such as EUW) it may still be getting backed up. Thanks for the bug report!

Rojo176

Do you have plans for people who are unintentionally smurfing because they have only completed placements? I don't have the time or energy to climb ranked nowadays but I enjoy playing with my friends. I finished my flex placements so I could get a rank and be eligible for clash, but that rank is very clearly not as good as the rank I finished in last season.

We're still matching you based on MMR rather than your visible rank - so for people operating normally with a limited number of games, you'll usually be rated fairly.

lynxbird

So Tier I teams from the bottom portion of Tier I will be more likely to play other Tier I teams from the bottom of Tier I, rather than the Challenger/GM teams at the top.

And this makes it even worse, you are punishing the good players in the same tier by giving them harder opponents just because they are good, while keeping the same rewards in the tier. As it is now, if you have a smurf, there is no good reason to not use it.

And smurfs are often not just the bought accounts, often they are accounts borrowed from friends just for the clash tournament so that the best ranked player does not pull remaining of a team up to next tier, smurfing is a requirement at the moment.

I have a solution tho

LoL successfully copied and improved ELO ranking from chess.

Why you do not use chess Swiss system for the clash tournament.

With 12 rounds you can cover up to 4096 unique teams to find a winner and rank them all. With 14 rounds you can cover 16,384‬ teams per server.

That would be a real tournament and smurfing would be useless, better you are, you rank higher.

Totally get your concern on matching teams of similar skill together, but we think the benefits of competitive games outweigh the min/max potential. Most of Clash's rewards are just for bragging rights anyway, so shifting rewards around to try and deter smurfing is not going to have as much impact. In the case you're describing, where someone smurfs to pull up their friends, they're not getting any rewards on their main account anyway - so making the rewards they're not getting better or worse probably won't change anything.

Definitely not trying to say smurfing isn't a problem - we have a lot more tools at our disposal that we haven't implemented yet, but this is going to be a continuing fight.

Swiss tournaments are pretty good for large groups, but they are very inefficient time-wise. Since you need to wait for a round to complete entirely before moving to the next, if a game runs long it tends to drag out the whole experience, and it also results in too many game starts happe...

Thanks for the feedback! Some thoughts:

- Scouting bug - something we are working on literally as I type. Hoping to have that ironed out soon.

- Copy/Paste Names - We got this feedback about the copy/paste thing for names in scouting a couple times, so I'll start digging into what that would take. It wasn't something we had planned, but it sounds reasonable!

- Leaderboards - definitely something we're considering in some capacity. In general, we think Clash is doing a decent job now of getting a simple, one weekend tournament system into place, but there's a LOT we could do for team legacy and recognition. We really haven't scratched the surface of the cool stuff we can do in that space.

- Subs - we probably won't bring subs back for this structure of Clash. We want your team to stay the same once you get into a bracket (partly because we want scouting to stay limited to just 5 players, and partly because we think it feels less like a team event if people are jumping arou...