TLG

🚨🚨ESSAY ALERT 🚨 🚨 I’ve been thinking more about the (excellent) conversation that @RiotPhroxzon and I had with @Pobelter today, and specifically about our conversation on LP and skill evaluation. I wonder sometimes whether people actually want League to be worse at skill evaluation rather than better. I get that this is a bit of a ragebait-looking opener, so I’ll explain my view. In our conversation today, I asked Pob whether he would want us to put a Challenger player in lobbies if we could do so with high confidence after five games. He said yes, so I asked if he would still want that to hold true across 100 accounts if @hiitsviper (or whoever the rank 1 Challenger is) was the person making and playing all of them. The question created a bit of a conundrum: obviously people don’t want the Challenger ladder to be all accounts made and played by the same person, and of course decay imposes limits on how many accounts one person can logistically maintain in Challenger. But the logic - and the question underneath it - remains: once we can tell that someone is really good, should we put them in fair games as quickly as possible, and should we treat the ability to play in a lobby as a legitimate claim to that rank? Phroxzon touched on this in his answer that LP rewards and reflects consistency, and acts as a smoothing function on outcomes. I saw some people expressing skepticism about that claim, so I want to offer an example about what that means a bit further down. To go back to the skill evaluation question, though: the intuitive answer is that yes, people should want us to get people to the lobbies they are equally-skilled in as quickly as possible. The reason is that people (mostly) want fair games, and so it’s better to have a new account in fair games sooner rather than later. We (the dev team, the folks working on matchmaking) also want fair games for players and do a bunch of work to create them to the very best of our ability. This creates some downsides, though. The most obvious one is when that creates a weird disconnect between your MMR and your rank (as an example; playing in Master games while being visibly Emerald), which Pobelter was highlighting. But if you don’t have to earn your rank by beating people at various skill levels (because everything in this hypothetical is visible MMR), then how can other people accept the Ranked ladder as legitimate? The Ranked ladder is about being better than other players and winning games, not highscoring our MMR algorithm. The MMR algorithm is an input into those games. It shouldn’t be the most important output of them. “Can you win reliably against people at a given level” is the output that matters, and that’s the LP system’s job to reflect. If that weren’t true, then the rank 1 player would just go fresh account, winstreak for 20 games, and log off. Is that actually the best player? What is the value of doing that and getting to claim you’re the best? How much should you have to play against the people you’re allegedly better than in order to maintain that claim? Probably more than 20 games, right? And if we wanted to force people to play to keep their rank, how would we do that - by decaying MMR? All that would ultimately accomplish would be to give the most skilled players overly easy games when they come back (since, again, MMR is still the number we use to put you in appropriately skilled lobbies). The other downside that I continually reflect on is the way that faster skill evaluation may undercut the satisfaction of being really good at the game. Nobody wants to argue for putting Challengers in 20 games of each rank on an alt account climb, but I think part of what Master+ players want to experience when they make an alt account is getting to win more than half their games. And if that’s true, then zooming them to fair lobbies where they’re back to grinding it out against fair opponents - even if they get +30/-10 LP for a long time - isn’t as enjoyable for them as just getting to win all the time on the way up. Of course, the Plat through Diamond players that they would take winrate from wouldn’t like living in that world, and so we do our best to get each player in the lobby best matched to their skill. But when people say things like “kill LP, it’s bullshit”, I wonder if they would actually prefer to have worse (or slower) skill evaluation, but they know it’s a bad look to say that they prefer to have less-fair games.

@RiotH28GEvo 👀 does this means: - 240fps+ support? - mouse polling higher than 1000Hz support? - old engine could handle 9999FPS, what about now? - what’s new engine called? - DX12???? - increasing server tick rate is probably still impossible :[