If anybody out there is looking to increase their rating and decrease the feeling of lottery, here’s some insight to help you reduce those potential feelings or shed some light from a different perspective than is commonly around.
Having an odd work schedule has allowed me to enjoy the pros (but mostly cons) of PvPing in multiple time zones. Focusing on certain TZs has revealed a few things to help debunk the RNG/Luck/gambling aspect of PvP. (to a minor degree)
When focusing on EU TZ, elo climbing was a thing. Allies were able to hold their own weight, reliably getting the same players at times, there was a degree of consistency. Even with the existence of going on that randomly unlucky 10 game losing streak with the Bronze5 League of Legends drop outs, overall win rate is definitely over 50% and steadily climbing up. (as confirmed by games played/games won)
Now enter OCX TZ with the 1600 rating from EU climbing. You wait 5+minutes for a game, get into it and consistently have the allies that go mid and die instantly. This isn’t the “allies are noobs rant.” This is consistently just flat out just instantly dead people constantly. The enemy team is usually consistently not instantly dead while yours is. Run in first and tank the entire enemy team? One enemy breaks off and your team’s ranger/thief/guardian is dead. After a 15 game losing streak filled with lovely events like…….
-Naked players. Yep, no armor+berserker stats/ect. Literally worse than AFKers.
-Whisper harassed for hours because you Shadowstep stomped a Guardian that your ally had “dibs” on (because they got knocked back by the 2)
-Whisper harassed for running variant builds that perform well in solo/duo queues rather than tournament meta builds, based around coordinated team play.
-Allies just die on engagement. Win a point? Thief goes far immediately… sure fair enough, sees an enemy, attacks them and dies instantly. I’ve literally gotten to the point where sometimes I’ll just say “Hey guys, if you don’t die immediately at the mid fight, then I’ll be happy.” and it just still doesn’t happen. Or I’ll say “Alright, they have a Necro and an Ele, please go for the Necro instead of the Ele.” Ele gets targeted and people die in 2 seconds. I can’t tell if this is foresight, self-fulfilling prophecy or just being trolled.
Regardless of TZ, I notice that if the actual queue wait is ~2:30-3:00 or higher, the MM tends to greatly increase the chances of a terribly dispersed team. With a lower pop density of OCX/SEA times compared to EU/NA times, this means the team disparities will have a higher occurrence.
The MM appears to match with highs+lows vs middles, rather than lows+med+highs vs low+med+highs, this may be the most cognitively biased observation though. If true, the higher rated players ARE expected to carry these players. (With more even matchups being actual RNG….)
In the end, TZ disparity results are too consistent to be an RNG lottery. Maybe it’s the population/rating disparity and the MM is overcompensating the rating disparities in relation to the enemies. Due to the population density, I have to PvP on EU TZ to be able to get rating so I can just lose almost every game in OCX. Comparing OCX/SEA TZ to a lottery, I feel more like a babysitter than a gambler. On the days off I get to PvP during NA TZ, it feels a lot like EU TZ as far as results go.