Greedy Goblin

Friday, November 25, 2016

Instead of dodging queue, act stupid

Queue dodging is the main tool of both advancing the ladder and proving that the League of Legends matchmaker is rigged. If the matchmaker was fair, queue dodging would be pointless, as the next game would be just as 50-50 as this one.

However there is something even better than queue dodging: making other players queue dodge by appearing hopelessly dumb. No, not as a troll or offensive. Then people just get mad at you and want to punish you by taking a loss. Or they realize what you are up to and don't queue dodge hoping that you will first. If you want teammates to dodge queue, be nice, friendly and hopelessly stupid. When I'm drafted support, I pick Master Yi and ask "I've never been support before. Is Master Yi good?" That works as a charm. Alternatively you can just not pre-select your champion and when someone bans X, start whining "why did you ban X, I wanted to play it". You can also talk about how drunk or high you are or pick an inappropriate champion and say "whysosrs lets have some fun".

Socials want to punish "evil" and "selfish", but very forgiving with M&S. If you are perceived as one, you can be rewarded by the help you need: other players saving you from a defeat by queue dodge.

Final advice: after you are saved by a social queuedodger, don't accept the AFK check and queue up again. There is a high chance that you'd get the same team back, with a replacement for the dodger if you just accept.

9 comments:

Unknown said...

I have to say that my years of doing IT work has made me less tolerant of morons and slackers so I would just as likely punish one as I would someone being a nuisance. In a competitive match, unless it is low tier/starter where cluelessness is normal. being a moron or slacker is a worse sin.

Anonymous said...

@gevlon - Can I save you a lot of time and effort?

Riot uses a variant of ELO as the basis for it's matchmaking. It's not that the system is rigged as much as it is horribly, horribly flawed. ELO was designed so that you're not being put up against a player that's vastly superior to you in skill. Very skilled players eventually make their way to the top, lower skilled players stay lower and everyone ends up playing people of similar skills. The problem is, climbing up the ladder is a grind. When you go on an incredible win streak, your wins become worth less points and your losses lose you more points. It's designed so that you stagnate around the same place in the ladder, climbing or falling very slowly to keep you from going above or below your skills.

If you want to climb, what you need to do is maintain a ratio. 3 wins, 2 losses or 3-1 for example. You maintain that ratio, you'll slowly climb. If you try to dodge queues or get only ideal match ups, it ends up as wasted effort because wins count for less because you're not losing like the system assumes. You'd be better off taking a dive on a bad team to even out your ratio then to dodge a queue.

One of the problems that you're probably running into is that people don't realize they have to maintain certain Win/lose ratios to advance. There are probably a good deal of people in your bracket who belong in higher tiers, but aren't doing the things they need to do to move them there because they don't understand the matchmaking system. You get matched up against a group of them, and it's certainly going to feel like the game is rigged.

There's reason ELO is losing market share to systems like TrueSkill: its terrible and people hate it. It's not really rigged though. You are getting matched against players who the system thinks are similar in skill, the system for determining that just sucks.

Unknown said...

gevlon you need to watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCClBIsotNY

about riot politics. i just have this video explaining, but i guess there is some reddit things etc also.
a singed support was banned.

Anonymous said...

@Gevlon the dumb thing seems perfect for Silver, but how do I do it in Plat 1?

@Anonymous the system works perfectly and you know it. Merrill himself said it back in 2010 that they "achieved 90% prediction accuracy" (which made me gasp with how much rigging potential it offered), and it's very unlikely that it became worse. Therefore all the tales of people misplaced due to some jumbo and otherwise unexplainable streaks of extremely unbalanced games can't be excused by "system is shit" argument. tl;dr screw off rito fanboy.

Anonymous said...

I'm no game designer, but how the hell can a 1v1 chess ranking system be fairly used in team matchmaking? I highly doubt that perceived fairness can be accomplished that way. a quick look over stackoverflow reveals that it seems hard. hard - meaning a perfect match could take days to be calculated. for example Player rating for game with random teams

I can't find any good algorithms. some solutions try variations of bin-pack algorithms and other stuff. maybe some IT unis have students cracking on these open problems until then devs seem stuck on proprietary stuff like TrueSkill or open stuff like ELO and a hand full other algorithms.

Anonymous said...

@anon#1

Nope, dodges dont reduce your MMR and MMR is the only thing that really matters, if your rank is below your MMR you will gain more and lose less. Also winstreaks increase your MMR faster than your rank.

Anonymous said...

Anon #2 again.

@anon #3:

1v1 chess tanking system is perfectly viable when all players on both team are rated close enough. Provided of course they pick their best champion and do their best to win, which is 95% valid for chess (with 5% room for argument that black and white are different picks, since there are strategies only white or only black can do), but almost entirely invalid for league of legends. Not only there's a shitload of picks (vaguely tied into roles), but also people like me, who are more likely to start a pointless close fight instead of spending 2 minutes positioning into a better one, with full knowledge of how it affects chance to win. Because I want to play, and I want to do it now, and a good close fight decided by skill (which automatically means "no Katarinas allowed") seems a better way to enjoy the game than 40 minute towerhug snorefests decided by who exceeded who in pve by farming a better QWERQWERQWER (which is why I play support, who doesn't need to play stupid mini-games of lasthitting, and is good to go ham right away). And while skin rewards for good performance made me a dime more motivated to not drop my pants down in won games, there is absolutely nothing in the world which is stopping me from throwing the white flag in a game which starts 1-4 - games I hold advantage in, I can affect to be closer by sacrificing it for the sake of a good gameplay, but games enemy overwhelms are just gonna be stomps. How is that system gonna judge me with my best and worst performance being worlds apart (i'm still in plat with this attitude), and never hitting any kind of sensible average it could anchor me to?

Personally I think the breakthrough lies in automatic clusterization of players with in-cluster ranking and clear relationship with other clusters. That would allow to choose between finding challenging matches against a set of superior cluster players, or a complacent gaming experience of giving said challenge to inferior ones. Clustering players would allow some kind of horizontal mobility between leagues as much as vertical one, by separating high apm boxers and low apm chess players into different progressions (while not preventing playing against one another).

Until that breakthrough is achieved, ELO is as good as any other choice.

maxim said...

The core premise of "if matchmaking was perfect, nothind's change" is flawed.
If you only dodge 1 game, sure, next game is the same percentage. If you make it your strategy, though, then you are opting out of playing games that are disadvantageous for social reasons. Which gives you an advantage over everyone else.
Your logic only works if you don't consider social ability a part of the skillset that LoL measures and think that losing games because you couldn't get along with your team is somehow unfair.

Anonymous said...

@Anon 25 November 2016 - 14:58

Riot has recently decided to clarify their position on queue dodging. https://support.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/201751844

By recently, I mean Yesterday. It seems that they're rolling out anti-dodging initiatives.