Riot Games recently dropped a rather small dev update video showcasing new features coming to League of Legends, as well as discussing current pain points, and highlight future plans for the game both for casual and competitive play.
With the video, a couple of dev blogs were also posted detailing what the devs are working on, so we will go ahead and examine their thoughts on the current matchmaking system and shed more light on the issues players are facing.
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Matchmaking Hell
It is no secret that many players have complained about the existence of so-called 'Negative LP Accounts' causing unintended rank fluctuations and unnecessary turmoil further upsetting the community. League of Legends has been plagued with matchmaking issues, and with players losing more LP than gaining, it is no surprise that the constant barrage of complaints has finally reached the devs.
Luckily, Riot Games implemented fixes, narrowing down the amount of incidents causing miscalculated ELO estimation. It seems that the company has also made some changes to the Blue and Red Side selections, making the game more balanced especially in high MMR queues. Another great addition is the new requirement of completing 10 normal games before queuing up for ranked.
Autofills have also been a hot topic for quite some time, prompting discussions around high-ELO matchmaking being plagued by autofilled players thus deciding the outcome of the match in champ select. There are simply too few players to satisfy a sufficient amount of roles so autofills although unavoidable, should now be much less punishing with either 0:0 or 1:1 games, with some cases of 1:0 and 2:1 still possible to avoid long queue times.
Autofill is one of our greatest challenges. It’s a necessity because the reality is some roles are more popular than others especially in different regions, but if everyone always got their primary role queue times would be much longer.
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Matchmaking Future Plans
Although Riot has made some drastic changes in Season 14, it seems that it is still working on further improving and optimizing matchmaking in League of Legends to further benefit every caliber of player. Match balance has always been a high priority for the devs, so it is only natural to see further adjustments to how the system evaluates the individual skill level of every player.
One area we’re looking at is how we’re matching players based on the role they queued up for and their lane opponent’s skill level. Imagine a world where each player is close in skill level to the opponent they’ll be playing against most within a game.
A constant pain point has been seeding smurfs appropriately, and with the new 10-normal games requirement, it seems that the system better calibrates players of a higher skill level. The devs are also working on improving smurf detection for higher-skill MMR by adding a new evaluation system called TrueSkill2.
It seems that Riot Games will also add more consistency throughout all types of queues to ensure that the games are more balanced, and not only prioritize ranked play. Autofills will certainly remain as long queue times are also a big problem for high-ELO players so they will look into improving the system.
For more information, you can check out the official League of Legends blog, here.
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