I think it's time to seriously consider reworking how apex tiers work.
Every year, the LP numbers get more inflated, and they shift a bit. It's not that big of a deal from year to year, but eventually, it makes the whole thing meaningless.
I believe everyone agrees that you shouldn't be able to get 30 on 1300 LP account.
I also think "Challenger MMR" shouldn't be a thing. Challenger is a rank you should have to fight for, and only the best should earn it, not primarily challengers from last year. (I legit breezed to chall this year while Vel'Koz is trash in this meta)
Challenger gets jam-packed early season, and people just wanna hover there, stifling competition down the line in the season. No wonder why almost every challenger player has multiple accounts.
Starting to climb and seeing that you have to get 800LP to get promoted from master to gm is insane for newer players.
How to fix:
As I said, there shouldn't be MMR higher than master. Once you reach master you would go and compete on a pure ELO based ladder without hidden MMR.
Everyone who gets to master starts on some arbitrary number like a 1000 elo, and if they fall below, they are poised for demotion. You would play versus people of similar proven skill instead of similar MMR from a year or two, which would increase the rating's accuracy tremendously.
Playing versus lower ranks yields less LP and costs more if lost. System would be fully self regulating and Grandmaster and Challenger ranks can work exactly like before.
Pros:
- More accurate skill rating
- Challenger and GM regain prestige
- ELO is standardised and comparable from year to year
Cons:
- People lose the sense of progress that comes with inflation
I get that inflating LP numbers over the years can be a powerful motivator to keep people grinding even if they are exactly the same rank on the true ladder as before. I believe similar effects can be achieved by adding new ranks or changing some names every couple of years.
Keep in mind that these problems we are seeing are just going to keep growing and accelerating as every ladder inaccuracy gets compounded over time.
Every tiny fix involves a chance of further messing up ranked integrity.
Another possible solution to explore would be a hard ladder reset every 5 or 10 years, which would eliminate these inaccuracies and produce a highly curated ladder for the first few years.
Patch 16.1 Ranked Thoughts
This discussion is mostly focused on Apex players (Masters and their experience)
I misspoke in my tweet earlier and we have pushed a change that disallows duoing up to Grandmaster, including if you have Grandmaster MMR, but we will try to re-enable Challengers duoing with Grandmaster and Grandmasters duoing with Masters as fast as possible.
---------------------------------------------------
There have been a lot of discussions about Matchmaking and LP gains in recent days and I wanted to shed light on a few things. There are a few things that are going on in early Season:
MMR Resets
1. At the start of the year, we do a reasonably hard MMR reset that impacts Apex players more; the game is very different each Season and we want to give opportunities for players express their new skills in a new environment.
There are pros and cons to doing this; Apex players often call for an MMR reset, but there are often a lot of complaints about matchmaking when we do -> comparing previous Season ranks for new Season matchmaking isn't particularly indicative of matchmaking quality as a result at start of Season
Secondly, it's not really a fair race to peak LP if we don't reset MMR's and have people start on a relatively even playing field. I've attached a poll to see what people think here.
(will consider what to do for next season)
Players getting better
2. One thing we observe Season over Season is the best players getting better and better compared to the general population.
This means peak LP goes higher and higher each Season and one of the reasons why 30LP is lasting for so long this Season in certain regions.
Simply, the best players will continue to grow the ladder as they fight for the peak LP spot.
Currently, I'm not seeing anything "wrong", but it will be a bit different from last Season LP benchmarks as a result (generally higher).
Some players are likely to exceed their LP benchmarks from previous Seasons and as the year goes on "early Season GM and Challenger" LP requirements will increase as all of the good players start playing and eventually make their way up the ladder.
Players at start of Season play different amounts of games
3. There's going to be a bit of wonkiness in Matchmaking as people with similar MMR's, but different visual ranks go up against each other in early Season.
Soon, we will be enabling the indicator that signals when a player's actual MMR is a lot higher than their rank to give some additional confidence in Matchmaking in these cases.
Duos and duo restrictions
4. Many players enjoy League as a social game, and one of the most exciting times to play socially is early Season with new content, which is one of the reasons why we wanted to re-enable Duo Queue in Apex ranks and why the first patch has historically allowed duos. It can also be difficult to track when you are/aren't allowed to duo when everyones' ranks are in flux.
However, this Season more than others, we saw a lot of people getting creative with various strategies to take advantage of more permissive duoing and deceive the Matchmaker.
Our intent is to crack down on these behaviors more over time, especially when disallowed behaviors like de-ranking or illicit account sharing are involved and we've already started doing so (and will continue).
We'll revisit our approach to duoing in the starting patch for next Season, but it's a shame that a few bad actors ruin things for everyone.
In the interim, we have pushed a change that disallows duoing up to Grandmaster, including if you have Grandmaster MMR (I misspoke in my tweet earlier), but we will try to re-enable Challengers duoing with Grandmaster and Grandmasters duoing with Masters as fast as possible.
We also increased the duo penalty this Season to be much closer to how much extra power duos get when they duo, so this might make certain matchmaking situations look a bit wonky if for example 2 duos are on one team (that team will probably have lower ranks). Right now, we see duo strength looking pretty balanced against soloing in aggregate, even at the very very high ranks.
But let us know if this isn't your lived experience and we'll take a look.
Autofill Matching
5. As mentioned in the Patch Notes, due to some delays, our changes that were designed to better match autofills in role and autofills per team were delayed a few patches.
We were pushing hard to get this in by the Season Start patch, but the risk to get it in was not worth it. We hope to deploy this change soon.
Overall
Hopefully this sheds more light into some of the early Season things that are going on currently.
We'll use this experience to improve the experience for next Season. This stuff is really complicated, so thank you for being patient with us.