Yo. I’ve been solo queing for the most part this season, and have encountered numerous issues in doing so, mostly, no, exclusively, in form of matchmaking and how the system treats MMR, in particular players with “high” MMR.
So I’ve been having a weird sleeping pattern lately, and, in a mixture of wanting a break from my studies and plain ol’ boredom, I’ve been queing at night/early morning. In these matches, I’ve typically been getting silver players, while my own rank has been ranging from legendary to plat 2, usually “relatively stable”, and I’ll get to why I include the quotes there, at plat 3. However, if the matchmaking is so generous as to give me a couple gold players, or even a platinum, it ensures i’m punished in some way, and the punishment of choice is to give me bronze players, and more often than not several of them.
The aforementioned of course, can tend to lead to losses due to sheer uncarriability with two or more members of the team not pulling their weight, or even a quarter of it. This is fine; you can generally not expect ques at odd hours to lead to proper matchups, and that goes both ways of course. HOWEVER, when said matchups lead to a rating loss of 26, whereas winning matches like the aforementioned will net me rating ranging from ZERO to 2, that’s where you have to take a step back and think, “is this working as intended?”
In my opinion? No. Having to win an average of 20-25 matches to cover for one unpreventable loss due to bronze players who have yet to discover the dodge button is not how I imagine your rating system is supposed to function. And this brings me to my second topic that I would like to dredge up too – the astronomical difference between two ESL players duo-queing, and every other team that doesn’t have an equally skilled duo. In my opinion, individual skill on the leaderboards is next to impossible to track, because the top 25 is almost exclusively duo que’ers. High ranking matches, and we’re talking peak time ones now, are, just like the night time ques I mentioned, very rarely fair when duo ques are involved.
The matchmaking system doesn’t even recognize that there are games with 5 pugs versus one or two duos – it only looks at MMR, and this is not something that builds up to a pvp scene with an even playing ground. You’ll lose massive rating, even while losing to ESL duos, because the matchmaking thinks that the match was fair. And what is the result? Roughly 75% of high ranking games I play, the outcome is already decided from the get-go, just by looking at the matchups. I’ve even played matches where I’ve gotten 4 pugs on my team versus two top tier ESL duos – how that happened I can’t even comprehend, but it is what it is.
These are a few thoughts and reflections I have surrounding this season, and are only intended as constructive criticism, not an angry rant. I’m eager to hear what others think of these issues as well.
(edited by zalcs.9701)