Disappointments with 2019 Ranked Season

I have no illusions I'm the next upcoming LEC star or even a Diamond. My goal was low Platinum. I was Gold in 2018, and I finished 2019 as Gold 2.

I am a tank main. As I'm in my 40's I'm the oldest League player I've met. I'm not here to play twitch speed champions, I'm here to enable and win team fights and take objectives.

I have large amounts of mastery on my main champions. Unfortunately in the current damage heavy meta I understand I'm playing from behind, so the climb has been very difficult.

Earlier this year I was in the top 500 Maokai players on EUW, and top 1000 on EUW for Tahm Kench according to League of Graphs! Quite the honor!

Given my difficulties climbing with tanks, I started playing more support and I picked up a damage AP support (Swain). I've adapted and worked on improving my skills.

In a support role I can play tanks and some damage and be a better multiplier to my teams' effectiveness. Unfortunately that means we have to have some effectiveness in the team or I have no agency to influence the outcome.

Ranked season 2018 was a complete waste of time. I don't care for the attitude of players in Solo Queue and so decided I would play Flex. After about 700 matches in Flex I was very upset with the high variability in the matchmaking. It was horrible. There was rarely an even game, it was always a horrible stomp for one side or the other.

Doing more research, I came across comments that explain Riot has a separate MMR for Flex vs Solo queues. This meant that often in Flex we would get a team of Flex ranked Silvers who were really Solo Queue Platinum's. Clearly that's poor matchmaking, and so I stopped playing Flex.

I did about 700 matches in Solo Queue in 2018 and got Gold.

I'm very disappointed that Riot is placing unranked players, both smurfs and newbies, into Gold level matches in Solo Queue. This is incredibly unfair to all Gold level players, who should be able to expect a fair game against players at their level.

Unfortunately my analysis here shows that it is not an isolated or rare incident. Unranked players plague a large number of matches and punish players with consistent losses.

The topic of smurfs in Solo Queue is a hotly contested topic on many of the forums I read. I have a simple set of assertions:

• One player, One ranked account

Riot has already admitted they have a smurfing problem, because they have implemented various methods for Clash to prevent smurfing. This includes requiring accounts with honor level 2 or higher, and SMS validation.

I sincerely hope that Riot implements these same protections to Solo Queue so that we can have more consistent and fair matchmaking for everyone.

I encountered a very frustrating phenomenon during my games.

• Losses snowball

If I lost several games in a row, I was going to lose the next ten games. Something about the matchmaking seemed to group people with recent losses together.

This was incredibly frustrating, in that several times I made Gold 2 and then after a few legitimate losses, I would have a loss streak that took me back to Gold 4 with 0 LP and have to start my climb all over again. Those games would be some of the worst I experienced, with stomp after stomp and teams that made no sense.

I can't explain this behavior. A few losses should reduce your MMR, but not catastrophically. It shouldn't exclusively group you with others that had loss streaks.

One of the major frustrations is that Riot has chosen to withhold useful ranked data from the players and external developers. There is no record in the API of LP gained or lost, a timeline of division gains, etc.

This makes analyzing matches difficult, and prevents you from gaining insight into your LP patterns.

Riot has been frequently criticized on the forums I read for not publishing information regarding the matchmaking algorithms. While I understand they feel that keeping that information private prevents abuse, I counter that a proper algorithm wouldn't need to be hidden.

Given Riot doesn't publish LP values, I'm graphing my total number of wins below. Starting at 0 wins, each win adds 1 to the count, and each loss subtracts 1. Wins and losses are color coded to show when all the players in my game were ranked, or when they were unranked.

The increase in unranked players in the second half is clearly visible.

Several of the loss streaks that I referred to above are also clearly visible, however I do not believe at this time that the losses directly correlated to the number of unranked players. I still think there is a "Losers Island" effect.