Riot Games set out to improve ranked modes in League of Legends after players had expressed disappointment with many aspects of it. The developer has outlined an extensive list of changes coming to the game in an update earlier today.
One of the main aspects is Rank Decay, in which players are are dropping tiers in a matter of weeks, rather than over an extended period of time. The developer wants to "Improve progression satisfaction and skill expression in our systems."
And when it comes to matchmaking Riot wants to "improve queue matchmaking quality without compromising queue time or availability"
- Dynamic Position Popularity & Autofill: Position popularity fluctuates throughout the day, but our current algorithm isn’t performing to the standard we want it to. Early testing indicates that by improving the way we calculate position popularity, we can potentially reduce autofill rates as low as ~0.6% of all games, down from the current ~2-5%. Not only are we expecting to see large autofill gains, we’ve also seen strong signals that this will reduce queue times by up to 10% across all MMRs.
- Premade Skill Balance: In 2020, we shipped Premade Parity to balance out premades across teams. We're looking at adding additional filters to specifically improve skill balance between each team's premades.
- Dynamic Map Side Advantage: In a perfectly even skill matchup, map side advantage could mean that blue side has a very slight advantage due to meta shifts, which matchmaking corrects for by fielding a red side team with slightly different matchmaking filters. The impact of this map advantage can shift, or even reverse, from patch to patch. We're looking to make matchmaking's side correction dynamic as well, so we can automatically adjust as advantages change.
Have you ever thrown an ultimate in the wrong direction without really knowing why? Well, this might be the answer
