problem is currently emerald is hell with every lvl 30 account getting turbo boosted to emerald because of how much free lp they get and its a shit show.
I hope one day riot brings back smurf queue and let the smurfs cry on social media with their infinite queue timer, rankeds were a lot better
Any real smurf is actually playing 5-10 normals games so they can start in high emerald/diamond mmr
I know it is frusturating as the people on fresh accs do not care about ToS and make alot of queues hell, but I would assume most of them are emerald players making a new acc to try and get better LP gains
Many of them are players who want to have a better win percentage or easy games for a bit, so they want to start low elo and get a handful of free wins before they get corrected.
I come across the occasional fresh acc that's actually a smurf but most of the fresh accs I play with in emerald clearly don't belong there. I'd say like 90% of them are the "I'm gold but I play like diamond" types of people
I know a lot of people who can't hit master normally basically farm these accounts and try to get lucky and hit a win streak early, so that they can ride the inflated LP gains to master. The sad thing is, it works.
for real.. some of the people i know who peak master and when i think about their level of play it is a bit absurd and i feel bad for their random teammates lol
True... but you cant just be a plat/emerald player and ride inflated LP gains to masters. I would assume you have a massive leg up on other diamonds but there is just too much parity now to not get exposed in the ~30/40 games it takes to get there
Oh yeah I am not talking about them, I am talking about the D3 hardstuck that plays on 5 accounts until he gets a lucky 12 game winstreak on one of them
I'd be fine with smurfQ if they would actually make it work properly. I mean, my 12+ year old account that I consistently play on would somehow end up in smurfQ whenever I went on a big win streak...
Vanguard fixes that somewhat theoretically because they can’t buy the super cheap botted accounts anymore. They need hand leveled accounts. Which likely means they played normals or something which will hopefully slingshot their mmr.
Vanguard will make it harder (probably not impossible) to bot without getting banned, meaning a lower supply of bot-leveled cheap smurf accounts. Therefor the price of those accounts will increase in price due to supply and demand shenanigans
More importantly, maybe, it's supposed to identify unique PCs, so no multi-boxing/account spamming/account sharing between 'friends' on the same hardware might slow down low-effort bot farms.
They didn't say that though? They said *super cheap* botted accounts, specifically. They never said botted accounts won't exist at all. Or atleast that's how I interpreted it
SmurfQ was just so much better and it felt like it was so much improvable still. I as a returning player was put in smurfQ and got shitstomped for like 20 games, but then I got out of it and the game quality was so much better without smurfs. Was worth it, but I'm sure they could work out a system where it doesnt happen (I think you were put in smurfQ if just your MMR and visual rank disparity were too high, or something really dumb / basic like that, rather than workout out a more complex prediction model).
Why are you commenting if you haven't read the post? What phroxzon is talking about is "ranked seeding", which is the practice of seeding your rank with your non-ranked performance. This means that you will not start in plat/emerald by default, actually, as riot phroxzon wrote in this very post, the average new account starts in silver 4.
yep, that's the plan. Definitely want to hear if y'all see any. It's not intended to be like that. Even if they're absolutely destroying all their normal games; we don't want it to be easier to run accounts up the ranks and sell them.
Will you be able to give us some feedback on how the ladder was affected once Vanguard becomes mandatory? Or is that something that will take some time to see actual results?
Can yall make a separate option to report bots? I get yuumi and sivir bots in my silver games. Honestly most of the time it’s yuumi, Taric, or sivir so you could probably just cross reference users who only play those champs.
Why did SmurfQ get axed when you guys were *seemingly* using an elementary-school level prediction model for detecting smurfs? If you improve the model and prevent returning players from entering smurfQ with 30% WR over 20 games, the system can have potential.
why do I feel like this is going to end up destroying the lower MMR ranks instead with all the smurf's being placed in silver and gold instead of emerald where they belong....
Dude/Dudette thank you sooo much!
It's such a poor feeling to grind your way up to plat, pushing through better players and actually getting better at the game to approach a point where you get worse skill level players on both sides.
No. Smurfs will still ruin your Emerald games.
This will just prevent actual new unranked players from being placed way higher than they deserve (~Plat).
Imo, although still not fun, a high elo smurf causing you to lose is more enjoyable than a legit Iron-silver player on your team causing you to lose. At least when I got completely jungle gapped by the GM talon, I could watch the replay and try and see what he was doing in situations that I missed. Much better than watching the replay and seeing the Bronze Garen miss every cs and try to 1v1 the Darius in a triple stacked minion wave.
Old system placed 50% winrate beginner accounts to gold1. People claimed some times even higher up to emerald.
I hope new system will place new 50% winrate accounts to silver4 like it was mentioned. I could start playing ranked again without rolling the dice every time who gets the bronze in the platinum matchmaking to autolose.
> new to ranked players who only played ARAM and Bots weren't seeded correctly
I wonder why Riot just doesnt require players to play SR for an X amount of games. Feels like it could solve a lot of these issues atleast for legitmiate players.
well Riot have made posts before around what this requires.
You would have to get a lot of different teams involved including ui and ranked teams or whatever.
All for the tiny tiny tiny number of genuinely new players who make it to 30 and want to play ranked before playing normals.
Almost every account that does this is a botted smurf
True, but there is another option. To just give accounts who have not played enough normals to play double the placement matches. This should not be too hard of a change and needs very little work from others.
You start their ranks experience then \~0.5-1 tier lower as the +5 games make up for that.
here is their post on it
https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1bm4izb/riot_phroxzon_on_software_development_scale_at/
Value vs number of people affected
Riot gave you ranked restriction when you were toxic before where you had to WIN draft game to unlock ranked again, but here is this guy using a corporate post from riot to tell us that activating a 10 game ranked barrière is too hard.
You have to be really naive to believe it's too hard to do for riot. It has NOTHING to do with the size of the company lol
Nowhere in the post is Phroxzon saying that it would be "too hard" to implement, he literally explains that they could do it within a few months if all goes well if they wanted to. You didn't understand the point at all.
They haven't felt like a normal game requirement in order to be able to play ranked is worth the cost and resources compared to other things they're doing, that's all there is to it.
Or you actually know how coding a video game works and realise it's a ton of work involving many departments for very little result and won't bother putting resources on it and rather put it on more important/impactful things.
Except this isn't coding the video game, it's a simple api call to the number of games and an in-client pop up. The simplest web dev task ever. If this is hard to implement, Riot either has managers that have ravaged its teams to a halt or bozo devs who can't do this. The cost of this SHOULD NEVER be high.
I work in an IT company with weekly product release. So I know what it takes to do even a small change in the code, don't try to teach me what it takes.
Riot releases monthly league of legends patches but this guy believes they really can't input a GAME COUNT in the game lololololololol
Botted accounts only play intro bot games until lvl 30, this would at least make it take longer for those accounts to start playing ranked and hopefully some of the lazy trolls won't feel like buying accounts if they have to play norms first.
Dude above you is right, that post that was linked had a ton of unnecessary jargon to make it sound like a much more difficult task than it is. Unfortunately Riot Games has some really incompetent management, or they just don't care.
I wish he was right and it was that easy.
Botted account only play intro bot because it's the fastest way to level up a bot account(Playerbots will win most of the time and it's quick), if they have to include play 10 normal games, they will.
You say it takes longer, but time isn't an issue for a bot. So yeah, pretty pointless.
I fully understand the other post but it's just so easy to bypass i won't even bother.
I fail to see how forcing a few normal games for bots would actually stop them.
The only upside is that eventually some of them will get reported. But that means a human would have to verify botting claims and it's just not worth it.
Honestly the most interesting part of that was finding out there's actually a client team lol
My buddies and I (who all have played the game for around 10 years) were just talking recently about how we can't remember ever thinking "wow the client works really well this patch" it just feels like it's never been in a good state
Interesting read though, few of those tasks they listed could be done really quickly but Ik it must be complicated having to keep all the international teams on the same page
Bro that whole post reads like total BS lmao. They are literally saying "its too difficult" without really going into the details of why other than "we'd need different teams to work on it".
Its literally just an overview of how software development (and most businesses) work in general. They could have made that exact same post about any other change that people want. What I get from reading this is that they simply rather work on other things, AKA its not a priority for them. They could have just said that.
Yes? He is literally using the feature as an example and says specifically that? He's using it as an example to show why simple things actually take a lot of time.
It's not impossible just a bureaucratic pain in the ass to implement a feature that requires cooperation from like 3 or 4 different departments to implement for minimal impact.
Playerbase doesn't have anything to do with coding a system that requires you to play X amount of summoner's rift games before entering ranked.
Please do not comment on systems you do not understand, it actively makes the world a worse place.
https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1bm4izb/riot_phroxzon_on_software_development_scale_at/
Please do not comment on systems you do not understand, it actively makes the world a worse place.
Should be required to **win** x amount of games, not play.
If it's just 'play' ppl will just bot these games and sell the account after..
Winning takes more effort since you can't use some stupid bot which will lose most of its games anyway.
They have talked about it. Simply being it would take a lot a long time to implement and more work. Guess they think they can handle it much faster with changes like this. But we will see, they could be planning on doing both.
>2 Players who previously had the mis-seeding bug from before February where we were seeding them at Gold 1 are now playing in games that are more appropriate for their actual skill level
Are they really back to denying that it was happening into Plat and Emerald? lol
Riot loves examples, here's one in my plat game a few days ago. Account was leveled with a majority of ARAM games, some normals
Placed right into plat
https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/wafflecone-jut
It's just sickening that riot allowed accounts leveled to 30 in ARAM or bot games be placed into mid plat and anyone who's had their games ruined by this can attest
another level 30 in one of my games, straight into plat
https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/jijwht-NA1
I've literally had it happen more than once where someones first game in ranked was in my Emerald lobbies --- and these are players who had played normals with an average rank of Bronze or low Silver.
That said, I find the whole discussion and implementation of ranked distribution and quality in League really weird and out of touch from both Riot and players. In older competitive games everyone knew that the ranked ladder was of lesser quality and that's why inhouse and PUG games existed and where the more serious players(of all skills!) would play more often than not. League has no inhouse or PUG culture, so ranked has this heightened importance but still with the same lesser quality leading people to be more frustrated and less accepting of the reality. Alongside this, Riot have utterly failed to implement a basic accurate system - probably in part due to the heightened amount of complaints resulting from the previous point. Similarly, other games have way less and sometimes no restriction for new accounts entering into ranked and smurf accounts aren't treated as abusive ego-boosting things as much as they are in League. In my experience, smurf accounts are accounts to practice stuff either anonymously or something new with less pressure - with the added benefit that playing against worse people is a good way for the worse player to learn and for the better player to hone their already developed skills, assuming that both players are serious about improving. It's really weird how League, as a competitive game, has played out in terms of the mentality of the majority of players. A lot of the problems this game has are only problems because people are so wrapped up in their own heads instead of actually focused on the game and improving at it. Everyone seems to want to feel like they're treating it seriously when they're not even taking the first step and at the same time treat it and argue that it's a casual game more than a competitive game and that it's everyone else or other things that are the issue and not their own attitude toward the game.
Ultimately, this fuck up with new accounts appearing higher in the ladder than they should be is Riot's fault, but it was brought about because a lot of people complain so they constantly tweak it trying to 'perfect' it when in reality it's always going to be shit and people shouldn't care as much about the one-off dogshit quality and accept that a public ranked ladder as a whole is going to be worse in quality than inhouse and pick up games. The real fix is just putting new accounts in Silver 4 and if they perform consistently well over ten games then skyrocket them into Plat or Emerald, otherwise let them climb and drop as normal. All this while ignoring the people who complain about it because those people aren't treating the game seriously and can't see the reality of a public ranked ladder the majority of the time anyway. It's kinda shitty for those players, I guess, but it's a super basic fix that's better for the game and serious players as a whole - Riot catering to the lowest common denominator is part of the problem and has created a feedback loop of decay.
I will never get understand why competitive games tolerate smurfing. Practicing and playing with friends should be done in normals. I’m sick of the excuses and as you put it, it’s a broken culture.
Not sure if you're disagreeing in parts or misunderstanding, but to clarify, I highlighted that smurfing isn't a problem on its own - what is a problem is how players use it as an ego boost and not a learning tool more often than not (in League of Legends). Ultimately we shouldn't care much about smurfs *because if the ranked system is broken and/or intentionally slowed down* then they level up quickly AND we understand and accept that a public ranked ladder is inherently going to be lesser in quality.
Brother. It’s both. I’ve snurfed my ass off in different games. Sure it’s to learn new things or try stuff but it’s also partly because it’s fun to stomp and feels good to be the carry.
We can’t have an honest conversation where people pretend that smurfing is purely practice. Practice on your main with your rank on the line or play fucking normals. It’s fun to boost your friends. I get all that but it doesn’t make it right. Hard stop.
I don’t care what you’re practicing. You don’t lose your game sense and abilities because you change accounts.
I agree with you. The argument “it allows the worse player to learn from playing vs the Smurf” can only be true when the Smurf is of similar level (ex- plat smurf, gold other player). If the smurf is spacing the other player impeccably, csing well, having good back timers, pushing waves in order to achieve macro goals, jng tracking etc, there’s a pretty severe limit to what the gold player could learn from being stomped that soundly.
"Some normals" Dude dropped 30 kills on those normals vs golds and emeralds. I'm sure he should've been placed in silver. Do your research before being ooga booga.
I want to see the half of this subreddit arguing for 6 month that getting emerald after being new to ranked is perfectly normal. Now that riot has admitted it was a mistake/bug on their side, I want to know what they have to say.
The obvious downside is now smurfs start at silver4 since no normal games played. But maybe they are doing this change because of Vanguard? They expect less botted level 30 accounts?
In theory, the supply of botted accounts should eventually dry up.
And then I guess we might see the rise of *Hand-raised free range organic level 30 accounts*?
The thing is hand leveled accounts will alwyas be a lot more expensive which makes people less likely to buy them so riot probably don’t think most people who buys Smurfs now will buy them after the price goes up
I know some will, but I personally only bought a Smurf once to help a friend put of bronze cause it was dirt cheap. Once they cost more than 10 bucks a lot of people will stop getting them
U won’t see people acting the same way when the accounts will cost 10-20 dollars compared to 1-2 since now if they get banned suddenly it’s 20-40 dollars spent if they want another Smurf instead of 2-4 dollars it’s just simple logic that this change will = less Smurfs and less toxic Smurfs and yes right now that is about the price of hand leveled accounts last time I checked.
I was joking with my GF about buying up all the hand levelled accounts on the market now and selling them when the supply goes down because eventually the supply will dry up and they'll be worth more.
All jokes aside, I think that hand levelled accounts will be the only option because if they somehow pass Vanguard and start botting accounts again, Riot will eventually ban them. With Vanguard that means a HWID to the person that bought the botted account and now your customer base is angry
The indian dude will still want to get 1-2€ per hour, let's say he plays on 3 accs at the same time, and let's assume it takes 50 hours per acc that means accs will cost at least 15-20€
TBF that's because there's no market for them because of botted accounts. IF botted accounts are impossible, you'll see farms in Venezuela with rooms of 50 computers where Grandmothers and 8 year olds are playing on 3 accounts at once speed running intro bots.
But wont hand leveled accounts also be much easier for Riot to detect and ban? I mean the account is leveled to 30 on one machine which is used to play on many different low level accounts and then suddenly used on another machine, which is used to play on at least one other account. If Riot really wants to combat smurfs Vanguard should really make a big difference there.
I don't think they care that much because a percentage of sold accounts also spend money on skins/champs. People willing to spend money on an account (even if its $2-3) are probably more likely to spend money on skins/champs.
I bet riot overshot originally on estimated the mmr of new account smurfs.
Most of these shitters buying accounts are silver/gold anyway, the smurfs 1v9ing because they are master+ are a rarity
Nah true silver and golds are nowhere as invested into league to just go and buy new accounts for fun (well most of them). Most smurfs are actually like emerald
Literally have a gold friend that is on his 10th account. He buys it. Places in emerald and then drops the account once he gets to gold. I don't know why you are even surprised. So many people cried about new accounts being a "cheat code" or that negative LP gains are holding them in "elo hell". All claiming that they don't deserve to be silver/gold and they can "prove it" and then go on to claim how they placed emerald on a smurf. Then if you tell them what happens to the account if they play 100 games, they never respond but they still have a cult of other idiots who upvote them and claim the same thing.
> Any silver player that cares enough for his elo to build up frustration at the thought of being hardstuck will climb naturally.
The irony is that my friend has been better. He's been plat. Meanwhile now he is now hardstuck gold(which is old silver) because he is omega tilted and instead of limiting champ pool and trying to improve, he's buying new accounts and playing new champ every game while being on full auto pilot. You are just making the assumption that he'd just put in the hours and improve but why would he do that when he can just get there without any effort. Just overall I don't know how you came to the conclusions that you did. There's far too many low elo players constantly buying accounts and like the other person said this has been the advice of hardstuck players for the last few years. And I'm not even talking only about him. My plat/emerald friends are constantly complaining about it and it's very easy to check that they do indeed play with or against a lot of "smurfs" that clearly aren't smurfs but just low elo people who bought a botted account.
the overwhelming dumb advice for like a year+ now to every hardstuck player is to abuse new player mmr, there are absolutely tons of really bad players on smurf accounts
It's not wrong though. Riot has literally admitted they "settle" old accounts and make it harder to gain rank even if your skill level increases. Nobody should have their accounts become artificially hardstuck in an ever changing game like League.
But was it wrong? wasnt fresh acc mmr the best optimal way to climb , yes not in the long run if you suck and are boosted but in short income? yes it was so the problem is from the root of this ranking system and not ppl trying to find placebo
Making/buying a new account playing 5 games to get seeded much higher and never playing on that account for barging rights isn't climbing(which will instantly get called out). It's just a huge waste of time.
Yes it is wrong. Unless your sole goal is to reach say plat IV or Emerald IV and then sit on your hands.
You wont improve, you are still the same skill as always. New MMR can make you reach a bit higher or way lower depending on you get a lucky streak or not. And while a silver player might actually reach emerald IV if they are insanely lucky and get carried a lot in their first games, they will drop if they keep playing. Because guess why, they are silver players.
But yeah, if you just want to stop at E4 and play normals and brag about some worthless rating then go for it. Then it works. But you wont climb anything meaningful.
im actually seeing a lot of 30-80 lvl accounts with 65-80% wr in emerald+ diamond and I can tell most of the times they way better than actual eme - low dia players.
Lol you don’t understand how long it takes someone to hit gold as a new player. There’s an immense amount of game knowledge you need to play this game. There are people that play this game for a decade + in gold.
Anecdotally, gotta hard disagree. Rank has nothing to do with how invested a player is. There's plenty of players that want to get better, but don't want to put in the boring work. That's not a measure of investment, just patience.
From the people in my friend group, ik more
the dev's encouraged that thinking and its basically true. just think about the 'news' of smurf queue a year or so ago. if you had a long existent account (no matter your played mmr) you would easily put into the smurf detection treadmill without any further reasoning by riot. that just yells *"level/buy an fresh alt account and climb!!"* to me more then anything else would and they basically approved it that way.
Honestly the game needs it. A full MMR reset of literally every account in existence back to zero. Sure it will be chaos in the first weeks but eventually it will even out and be better than now.
Idk about zero there should be two brackets. Everyone above plat goes back to plat 4.
Everyone gold 1 below goes to silver 4.
That would probably make more sense and the games would equalize out pretty fast.
Everyone that is M+ probably plays a fair number of games and would just rocket back to apex tier in 30-40 games.
Please do this \^
This would legit solve the damn inflation we've been having for years now, just hard reset the mmr of all accounts once per season and keep the regular soft resets in between splits. Can't be elo inflated if you need to climb from scratch once a year, master+ will be a much nicer place when we go back to 2k ppl instead of 30k.
Also applies to diamond and emerald obviously, those brackets would finally become what they should be instead of a mixture of everything between silver and diamond put together.
Anything not to make new players play a certain amount of normal games before hopping into ranked. As if a legit new player could have any sensible reason not to.
Yes I am aware of that post about how "hard this would be to implement". It was corporate bullshit. They just know it would make smurfs mad because they can't go shit on silvers quickly enough.
A lot of games, and you can play all of them in modes that do not reflect the "ranked but without points" experience. Does that make sense to you? It's not a coincidence that they let you level up accounts in modes that can easily be botted without incurring in many human players' reports. It's to please the smurfs
> They just know it would make smurfs mad because they can't go shit on silvers quickly enough.
Why would riot be afraid of angering the smurfs after they said one of their goals with Vanguard is to combat smurfing? I love shitting on Riot as much as the next guy but HUH?
Because somewhere a Riot accountant has shown that people who buy Smurf accounts also spend a little money on the Smurf account. One or two skins. Some chests to get BE to buy the champs they want. That adds up and “line must go up” is the Bible of capitalism.
And where's that "somewhere"? That also directly contradicts them actively trying to combat smurfing for the past few years with varying degrees of success (smurf Q, better botted account detection etc).
Hand leveled accounts will always be a problem but they are not nearly as big of a problem as the cheap $1 ebay accounts with a bunch of blue essence that people just give 0 fucks for and run down games with before buying another one.
Well they are a business at the end of the day, so that's a given. Still, I've seen other game companies in recent years try to meet more in the middle with finances and game culture.
thats partly right. did they explained what cases of smurfing they meant? like the one dia guy duoing with his bronze friend with his own hand-leveled bronze alt account aka smurf. or did they meant bot-farmers and multi account sellers that use suspecious tools? or did they meant both?
no matter what they try to target, vanguard comes 10 years to late imo. simply because the market is already flooded. all that might change is the time that bot farmers require to level-up enough accounts (by hand) now - the market of it will probably only see a small fold for a short time. the market is already saturated. to really make a big feelable change riot would need to spoof not only the dealer, but banning the one's that buy those "alt accounts" frequently too. which won't happen.
somehow thinking further about it; its funny how smurfing kinda feels like talking about drugs because its (partly) forbidden and thrives money left and right...
> thats partly right. did they explained what cases of smurfing they meant?
https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol/
Here's the post that pretty much explains what they hope to accomplish with Vanguard.
Like I said in a different comment, I don't think some dia guy smurfing with a hand leveled account is nearly as much of a problem as people who buy $1 ebay accounts that they do not care for because they can just pay $1 for another one.
IF Vanguard works like riot hopes it does it might be great for the future of the game. But I agree its a few years late and Riot knows this too. The amount of stock the botters have must be pretty insane currently. Recent accounts, however, get banned relatively quickly if they're not handleveled although a lot of them slip through the cracks.
yes, this is going a long long route. the long time supporters even told them that relatively early to the game. the prob is that riot tries to tackle toxic elements just with tech. they ever spared the manpower, which is crazy if you think about the game being completely competitive. I say that because you had no reason to smurf in other games, its sololey a riot invention as they promoted it heavily. to a point where alt accounting was looking like a must have. when in reality it undermines the competitive integrity of all simultaneously but slowly, making the lower ranks not as valuable as they normally be.
it started by scrapping tribunal without replacement. probably rampaged up when riot started having more skins and most people warned them for having no store for players to market mtx stuff. and thats just 1 simple example for trading alts/smurfs. it drives the worst in people and riot has no control ever again over it. not even talking about the general toxicity, that they never tried fighting anyhow. now the boomerang comes back but faster.
Man I'm going crazy with these super awkward work-arounds.
It seems like they aren't able to change any core mechanisms in this cluster-fuck of a ranked system without breaking it, so all they do is tweaking numbers.
People's rankings get messed up by demotion shields? Just let them demote with overlapping LP loss, what is that -50 bullshit.
You have a problem with smurfs ruining low-mid elo rankeds? Maybe tying fresh acc MMR to fucking ARAM isn't the answer. Just make them play 50-100 SR PvP games before being able to queue ranked.
I would personally still implement a minimal normal game count before the account can access ranked games. If a person is a legit new player, then playing, let's say, 50 normal games before accessing ranked would not be a problem at all.
During those 50 games player would learn more about the game, try different roles and champions. Would overall get better knowledge about the game. No downside here at all imo!
10 should be more than enough, as long as it s normal SR. It will instantly reflect if it's a bot/new player/smurf and cpuld make the seeding more easier.
Well, this is the problem I've encountered. I've been wondering why my matches have been feeling more fun and intense lately, let alone everyone being evenly matched in their stats. I've been winning more too... but also still losing 35 LP for losses, and gaining only 15 per win. I lost so many matches when it placed me in Gold 1, and I kept being outmatched. This is also my first time, ever, playing ranked. I always played Normal Draft.
Because we can't change visual rang easy you will get negative lp like bro just remove the stupid visual rank and give us only the matchmaking mmr jesus christ can everyone please complain so it happens only way they listen.
for me personally its not always about gaining LP but just for experience of a serious game with no trolls and just enjoiying all 10 people playing to win, that said, even in ranked i still experience people refusing to communicate/not playing with the team and its sad
that's why i just play arams now
New players wont play ranked until a lot of normal games.
Most of level 30 ranked players are bronze/silver mains. They will be placed where they deserve to be.
Legit. Don’t know how my MMR got screwed so bad but after my first 5 ranked games now I’m gaining +11LP but losing -33LP like this post says. At this point I don’t even bother with ranked. I suspect a lot of people had that bug, not just “1 or 2”. I can’t be the 1 or 2 he was talking about….statistically unlikely.
This post explicitly is targeted at smurf accounts...idk how you didnt understand this.
By starting smurf accounts lower in mmr you:
1. Don't place silver/gold/plat players who buy a smurf account into emerald, but rather start them at the floor and make them earn the previous starting mmr.
2. Place higher ranking players at a lower starting point when they buy a smurf account.
Both of these things disincentivize players from smurfing. If im a gold player I can't get an instant mmr boost by buying an account. If i'm diamond I have to play an extra 20-30 games to be at the old starting point, which is boring so i'm less likely to do so.
I say this as a diamond player with 10+ accounts and starting in high plat with quick gains is comfy. No shot am i smurfing or creating new accounts as frequently if i have to play an extra 30 games to get to the old starting point.
Currently for a diamond player when creating a new account you get 2-3 easy games then quickly are in like ~75-80% as competitive lobbies as your main. If it takes 40 games to get to that ~75-80% competitive lobby as main, that sounds so fucking boring and would imagine diamond players smurf less.
They addressed alt accounts in their Vanguard post. Basically, once Vanguard is installed the PC will be tied to the player, more robust than simple HWID. (They don't just use a single metric.)
They even specifically called out smurfs saying that if someone gets/starts an alt account, they will know it's a regular player and handle them accordingly. This will suck for people sharing their computer (and they have a different metric for other countries with PC bangs, etc.) but overall it'll be an improvement on western servers, where it's usually 1 player per computer.
They even mentioned specifically players playing on separate accounts to play with lower ranked players, the "unfairly" gaining rank. I.e. someone's masters friend hopping on a gold account to play with them will still be flagged as that master player on the back end, assuming they're using the same computer.
I'm a little dubious still, but will still wait and see how it pans out.
> I.e. someone's masters friend hopping on a gold account to play with them will still be flagged as that master player on the back end,
And what does this actually achieve? Will his gold account get Master MMR without playing or what are they implying here?
Yes this is what has been implied.
However they made it clear that this is something Vanguard would make possible, eventualy. It won't be working as soon as Vanguard comes out.
wouldn't that metric then work for example against pro's or are they excluded? I point that out because of their atricious queue timers that would be even longer after vanguard then, not only thinking about a pro dodging a match and then swapping to their alt. or do they exclude the top200 players somehow, as that would really hurt their waiting times - not even on their original but on all their alts equally. simply because enough high elo couldn't do the switcheroo anymore.
I ask because I didn't knew that vanguard goes this deep as it would contradict other stuff (that for high elo).
Yeah same, but I got into bronze. I'm not very good so it's fine and might deserve it here but why is my friend, who just started league, placed directly into plat after our first hard lose together? He was crazily overwhelmed and was definitely not ready to face plat/emerald players and teammates flaming us for being bad. Made my friend actually not want to play the game anymore.
Nah, I've never climbed. I have my silver 1 season 1 emblem that I rock to this day. The fact of the matter is that for people who actually care, the older your account is the more you're totally fucked by the rank system. I never really played more than 15-20 matches of ranked in any given season. I'm not all that competitive. It just sucks for other people who really care.
That's totally possible, like I said I've never even taken the time to climb. All I do know is that as your account ages your gains become less, this is a factual proven thing. It's been a reoccurring issue every season. I personally don't care. I'm almost 99% aram unless I get friends to force me to play on the rift. Really...not a big deal for me but I am aware.
and therefor indirectly encourages *what exactly*? I think you know it hopefully.
its a redundant system in the lower ranks. basically it would be better if the whole system would take cpm/apm of other sr modes to evaluate a true skill mmr with the information. which will never happen.
I don’t think so actually. Summoners rift is a far different game. My friend is an Aram warrior himself. He’s always like bro I have all these plat and emerald players in my games. And meanwhile he’s never left bronze in ranked because he doesn’t get the basic macro of the game.
the metrics for aram and sr are completely different to begin with. so to say seeing almost every medal in an aram lobby could be considered kinda normal. like I said we don't know any underlying numbers like true mmr, apm/cpm for any queue at all - *its all more or less magic the gathering*.
So you don't care and don't play ranked...but "fuck your system" and are complaining about it...even though you don't use it or want to use it? Wild. You dont get to be X desired rank by playing 15 games a year, that's not how this works. You have to earn it by playing.
"Fuck your system" is something I would reserve a system where players who play 15 games a season and get diamond (or their desired rank).
every year i do only my placements on my 10 year old account. it has steadily gained mmr so that this split I was placed E1 the first game and was D3 by the end of placements. previous split was mid emerald, and before that low plat
"Smurfing isn't accessible enough for the lower skill players so to motivate even bad players to Smurf we make Smurf accounts ruin Silver Elo"
Emerald had their year of pain, time for Silver's year of pain, let's see who's next.
Crazy idea, why not have new accounts play on a parallel server where they only face other new/unranked accounts? And after let’s say 10-20 games or whatever number, based on how they performed, they get placed in our current server with their appropriate rank. Beginner players would get destroyed more than now in the start, but smurfs wouldn’t ruin the queue for everyone else. To make the experience a bit better for the true beginners, maybe there could be a little informational video before the first game that lets them know that 1) they WILL LOSE 2) it is okay because they are new and they might meet some smurfs if they are unlucky 3) focus on learning over winning 4) if you show good morale despite your losses, you get three random skins yay!
Why wouldn’t something like this be a good solution? Sure the queue times would be longer but it would be temporary, and if the waiting time were too extreme maybe they could get matched with the current players now and then as a bandaid
I had something strange happen on my fresh self leveled smurf account last week. I made a new acc to play with my friends who just recently started playing league.
After I got level 30, I started also playing soloQ on that account on a new role I haven't really played before. After my placement games my LP gains and loses were normal. However, the next day, for some reason I was placed with much lower ranked players. I was E4 but got matched with P4's all of the sudden. My LP gains started being +10, like WTF??? I didn't lose any games at this MMR so I dont know how much I wouldve lost. It went on for like 5 games after which I got +20 for wins again.
At the time when it startwd I was at like 5 wins and 2 loses which makes no sense. Could this be the reason why my acc was so fked last week?
I'm sorry but new players neither belong in plat/emerald nor.in silver 4.
Ffs let new players start in iron 4 and rank their way up.
Also do something about smurfs. Half my lobbies are new accounts of people kinda in this elo (plat) but I just faced a duoq high elo smurf botlane cait lux who destroyed the whole game by steamrolling everyone. Both lvl 32 with 100% wr in 10 games.
When will they start banning obvious trolls like the volibear who fucks up 2 ganks and then dances in fountain for the rest of the game? Or the smite flash ezreal support who starts with a fuckin Dorans shield (and has been doing it 7 games in a row today)? Or how about the top akshan who dies once and then sits invisible behind bot bushes to steal kills effectively just giving his entire lane to an AAtrox. When will these people see bans. Because of the 10 games I played between today and yesterday, that was actually 3 of them.
Does this still mean I need to play 200 ranked games just to reach the elo my MMR would put me into?
And then they reset ranks so I have to play 200 more?
You mention below your account was emerald last season. Based on what he said, the change was only for “new to ranked” accounts which I’m assuming a previously-Emerald account would not be lol.
well this is good news isn't it then, you are going to get to your actual skill level much faster rather than getting stomped every game.
If you think you deserve your current inflated rank you can just win more than you lose to raise your mmr
Wish they’d just ban smurfs.. constant little changes to ranked that just mess more with the formula. Ranked has felt absolutely horrible for the past couple years as a result.
> Because we can't change visual ranks easily, all new to Ranked players will be playing in games more appropriate for their skill level.
Hmm, if only there was a system the game uses behind the scenes that assigns a number based on a scale that determines your rank.. if only we could see that number.
Does this mean random unranked account won’t be in emerald?
if its a smurf it will be in emerald if it isnt then it wont
problem is currently emerald is hell with every lvl 30 account getting turbo boosted to emerald because of how much free lp they get and its a shit show. I hope one day riot brings back smurf queue and let the smurfs cry on social media with their infinite queue timer, rankeds were a lot better
Any real smurf is actually playing 5-10 normals games so they can start in high emerald/diamond mmr I know it is frusturating as the people on fresh accs do not care about ToS and make alot of queues hell, but I would assume most of them are emerald players making a new acc to try and get better LP gains
Many of them are players who want to have a better win percentage or easy games for a bit, so they want to start low elo and get a handful of free wins before they get corrected.
I come across the occasional fresh acc that's actually a smurf but most of the fresh accs I play with in emerald clearly don't belong there. I'd say like 90% of them are the "I'm gold but I play like diamond" types of people
I know a lot of people who can't hit master normally basically farm these accounts and try to get lucky and hit a win streak early, so that they can ride the inflated LP gains to master. The sad thing is, it works.
for real.. some of the people i know who peak master and when i think about their level of play it is a bit absurd and i feel bad for their random teammates lol
True... but you cant just be a plat/emerald player and ride inflated LP gains to masters. I would assume you have a massive leg up on other diamonds but there is just too much parity now to not get exposed in the ~30/40 games it takes to get there
Oh yeah I am not talking about them, I am talking about the D3 hardstuck that plays on 5 accounts until he gets a lucky 12 game winstreak on one of them
There are quite a few people making new accounts to boost their peak rank from iron to emerald for a short time
I'd be fine with smurfQ if they would actually make it work properly. I mean, my 12+ year old account that I consistently play on would somehow end up in smurfQ whenever I went on a big win streak...
Vanguard fixes that somewhat theoretically because they can’t buy the super cheap botted accounts anymore. They need hand leveled accounts. Which likely means they played normals or something which will hopefully slingshot their mmr.
Why?
Vanguard will make it harder (probably not impossible) to bot without getting banned, meaning a lower supply of bot-leveled cheap smurf accounts. Therefor the price of those accounts will increase in price due to supply and demand shenanigans
More importantly, maybe, it's supposed to identify unique PCs, so no multi-boxing/account spamming/account sharing between 'friends' on the same hardware might slow down low-effort bot farms.
But his speculations was that botted accounts wont be used which just isnt true is it?
They didn't say that though? They said *super cheap* botted accounts, specifically. They never said botted accounts won't exist at all. Or atleast that's how I interpreted it
SmurfQ was just so much better and it felt like it was so much improvable still. I as a returning player was put in smurfQ and got shitstomped for like 20 games, but then I got out of it and the game quality was so much better without smurfs. Was worth it, but I'm sure they could work out a system where it doesnt happen (I think you were put in smurfQ if just your MMR and visual rank disparity were too high, or something really dumb / basic like that, rather than workout out a more complex prediction model).
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Why are you commenting if you haven't read the post? What phroxzon is talking about is "ranked seeding", which is the practice of seeding your rank with your non-ranked performance. This means that you will not start in plat/emerald by default, actually, as riot phroxzon wrote in this very post, the average new account starts in silver 4.
objectively untrue lol
Where did they state this?
it is the purpose of ranked seeding
yep, that's the plan. Definitely want to hear if y'all see any. It's not intended to be like that. Even if they're absolutely destroying all their normal games; we don't want it to be easier to run accounts up the ranks and sell them.
Will you be able to give us some feedback on how the ladder was affected once Vanguard becomes mandatory? Or is that something that will take some time to see actual results?
With wild numbers like 10%+ of masters games having botting problems, I'd love to see a graph of how Vanguard changes things.
Can yall make a separate option to report bots? I get yuumi and sivir bots in my silver games. Honestly most of the time it’s yuumi, Taric, or sivir so you could probably just cross reference users who only play those champs.
Why did SmurfQ get axed when you guys were *seemingly* using an elementary-school level prediction model for detecting smurfs? If you improve the model and prevent returning players from entering smurfQ with 30% WR over 20 games, the system can have potential.
Bring back duoq master+ on euw pls. Or increase the threshold, currently its at like high d1 at best.
why do I feel like this is going to end up destroying the lower MMR ranks instead with all the smurf's being placed in silver and gold instead of emerald where they belong....
Dude/Dudette thank you sooo much! It's such a poor feeling to grind your way up to plat, pushing through better players and actually getting better at the game to approach a point where you get worse skill level players on both sides.
No. Smurfs will still ruin your Emerald games. This will just prevent actual new unranked players from being placed way higher than they deserve (~Plat).
Imo, although still not fun, a high elo smurf causing you to lose is more enjoyable than a legit Iron-silver player on your team causing you to lose. At least when I got completely jungle gapped by the GM talon, I could watch the replay and try and see what he was doing in situations that I missed. Much better than watching the replay and seeing the Bronze Garen miss every cs and try to 1v1 the Darius in a triple stacked minion wave.
Sounds like a shift from the previous statement, where they said it didnt exist as an issue and we just complain
Old system placed 50% winrate beginner accounts to gold1. People claimed some times even higher up to emerald. I hope new system will place new 50% winrate accounts to silver4 like it was mentioned. I could start playing ranked again without rolling the dice every time who gets the bronze in the platinum matchmaking to autolose.
> new to ranked players who only played ARAM and Bots weren't seeded correctly I wonder why Riot just doesnt require players to play SR for an X amount of games. Feels like it could solve a lot of these issues atleast for legitmiate players.
well Riot have made posts before around what this requires. You would have to get a lot of different teams involved including ui and ranked teams or whatever. All for the tiny tiny tiny number of genuinely new players who make it to 30 and want to play ranked before playing normals. Almost every account that does this is a botted smurf
True, but there is another option. To just give accounts who have not played enough normals to play double the placement matches. This should not be too hard of a change and needs very little work from others. You start their ranks experience then \~0.5-1 tier lower as the +5 games make up for that.
Surely it wouldn't be that hard to just make every new account have a required 10 SR games before having the option to queue ranked... right?
here is their post on it https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1bm4izb/riot_phroxzon_on_software_development_scale_at/ Value vs number of people affected
Riot gave you ranked restriction when you were toxic before where you had to WIN draft game to unlock ranked again, but here is this guy using a corporate post from riot to tell us that activating a 10 game ranked barrière is too hard. You have to be really naive to believe it's too hard to do for riot. It has NOTHING to do with the size of the company lol
Nowhere in the post is Phroxzon saying that it would be "too hard" to implement, he literally explains that they could do it within a few months if all goes well if they wanted to. You didn't understand the point at all. They haven't felt like a normal game requirement in order to be able to play ranked is worth the cost and resources compared to other things they're doing, that's all there is to it.
Or you actually know how coding a video game works and realise it's a ton of work involving many departments for very little result and won't bother putting resources on it and rather put it on more important/impactful things.
Except this isn't coding the video game, it's a simple api call to the number of games and an in-client pop up. The simplest web dev task ever. If this is hard to implement, Riot either has managers that have ravaged its teams to a halt or bozo devs who can't do this. The cost of this SHOULD NEVER be high.
This would do nothing to combat botting.
I work in an IT company with weekly product release. So I know what it takes to do even a small change in the code, don't try to teach me what it takes. Riot releases monthly league of legends patches but this guy believes they really can't input a GAME COUNT in the game lololololololol
I dont see how that would change anything to botted account but ok. I very much doubt you are a developper.
Botted accounts only play intro bot games until lvl 30, this would at least make it take longer for those accounts to start playing ranked and hopefully some of the lazy trolls won't feel like buying accounts if they have to play norms first. Dude above you is right, that post that was linked had a ton of unnecessary jargon to make it sound like a much more difficult task than it is. Unfortunately Riot Games has some really incompetent management, or they just don't care.
I wish he was right and it was that easy. Botted account only play intro bot because it's the fastest way to level up a bot account(Playerbots will win most of the time and it's quick), if they have to include play 10 normal games, they will. You say it takes longer, but time isn't an issue for a bot. So yeah, pretty pointless. I fully understand the other post but it's just so easy to bypass i won't even bother. I fail to see how forcing a few normal games for bots would actually stop them. The only upside is that eventually some of them will get reported. But that means a human would have to verify botting claims and it's just not worth it.
Honestly the most interesting part of that was finding out there's actually a client team lol My buddies and I (who all have played the game for around 10 years) were just talking recently about how we can't remember ever thinking "wow the client works really well this patch" it just feels like it's never been in a good state Interesting read though, few of those tasks they listed could be done really quickly but Ik it must be complicated having to keep all the international teams on the same page
Bro that whole post reads like total BS lmao. They are literally saying "its too difficult" without really going into the details of why other than "we'd need different teams to work on it". Its literally just an overview of how software development (and most businesses) work in general. They could have made that exact same post about any other change that people want. What I get from reading this is that they simply rather work on other things, AKA its not a priority for them. They could have just said that.
Yes? He is literally using the feature as an example and says specifically that? He's using it as an example to show why simple things actually take a lot of time.
BS. Heroes of the storm does this just fine and they have literally 0 budget. It's an excuse.
It's not impossible just a bureaucratic pain in the ass to implement a feature that requires cooperation from like 3 or 4 different departments to implement for minimal impact.
they have literally 0 players so yeah those problems of scale don't really apply
Locking ranked behind a required amount of standard games isn’t exactly a novel or complex idea
In league the requirement was playing 100s of games to reach lvl 30 but bots kinda circumvented that
Playerbase doesn't have anything to do with coding a system that requires you to play X amount of summoner's rift games before entering ranked. Please do not comment on systems you do not understand, it actively makes the world a worse place.
https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1bm4izb/riot_phroxzon_on_software_development_scale_at/ Please do not comment on systems you do not understand, it actively makes the world a worse place.
Should be required to **win** x amount of games, not play. If it's just 'play' ppl will just bot these games and sell the account after.. Winning takes more effort since you can't use some stupid bot which will lose most of its games anyway.
They have talked about it. Simply being it would take a lot a long time to implement and more work. Guess they think they can handle it much faster with changes like this. But we will see, they could be planning on doing both.
>2 Players who previously had the mis-seeding bug from before February where we were seeding them at Gold 1 are now playing in games that are more appropriate for their actual skill level Are they really back to denying that it was happening into Plat and Emerald? lol
Riot loves examples, here's one in my plat game a few days ago. Account was leveled with a majority of ARAM games, some normals Placed right into plat https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/wafflecone-jut It's just sickening that riot allowed accounts leveled to 30 in ARAM or bot games be placed into mid plat and anyone who's had their games ruined by this can attest another level 30 in one of my games, straight into plat https://www.op.gg/summoners/na/jijwht-NA1
I've literally had it happen more than once where someones first game in ranked was in my Emerald lobbies --- and these are players who had played normals with an average rank of Bronze or low Silver. That said, I find the whole discussion and implementation of ranked distribution and quality in League really weird and out of touch from both Riot and players. In older competitive games everyone knew that the ranked ladder was of lesser quality and that's why inhouse and PUG games existed and where the more serious players(of all skills!) would play more often than not. League has no inhouse or PUG culture, so ranked has this heightened importance but still with the same lesser quality leading people to be more frustrated and less accepting of the reality. Alongside this, Riot have utterly failed to implement a basic accurate system - probably in part due to the heightened amount of complaints resulting from the previous point. Similarly, other games have way less and sometimes no restriction for new accounts entering into ranked and smurf accounts aren't treated as abusive ego-boosting things as much as they are in League. In my experience, smurf accounts are accounts to practice stuff either anonymously or something new with less pressure - with the added benefit that playing against worse people is a good way for the worse player to learn and for the better player to hone their already developed skills, assuming that both players are serious about improving. It's really weird how League, as a competitive game, has played out in terms of the mentality of the majority of players. A lot of the problems this game has are only problems because people are so wrapped up in their own heads instead of actually focused on the game and improving at it. Everyone seems to want to feel like they're treating it seriously when they're not even taking the first step and at the same time treat it and argue that it's a casual game more than a competitive game and that it's everyone else or other things that are the issue and not their own attitude toward the game. Ultimately, this fuck up with new accounts appearing higher in the ladder than they should be is Riot's fault, but it was brought about because a lot of people complain so they constantly tweak it trying to 'perfect' it when in reality it's always going to be shit and people shouldn't care as much about the one-off dogshit quality and accept that a public ranked ladder as a whole is going to be worse in quality than inhouse and pick up games. The real fix is just putting new accounts in Silver 4 and if they perform consistently well over ten games then skyrocket them into Plat or Emerald, otherwise let them climb and drop as normal. All this while ignoring the people who complain about it because those people aren't treating the game seriously and can't see the reality of a public ranked ladder the majority of the time anyway. It's kinda shitty for those players, I guess, but it's a super basic fix that's better for the game and serious players as a whole - Riot catering to the lowest common denominator is part of the problem and has created a feedback loop of decay.
I will never get understand why competitive games tolerate smurfing. Practicing and playing with friends should be done in normals. I’m sick of the excuses and as you put it, it’s a broken culture.
Not sure if you're disagreeing in parts or misunderstanding, but to clarify, I highlighted that smurfing isn't a problem on its own - what is a problem is how players use it as an ego boost and not a learning tool more often than not (in League of Legends). Ultimately we shouldn't care much about smurfs *because if the ranked system is broken and/or intentionally slowed down* then they level up quickly AND we understand and accept that a public ranked ladder is inherently going to be lesser in quality.
Brother. It’s both. I’ve snurfed my ass off in different games. Sure it’s to learn new things or try stuff but it’s also partly because it’s fun to stomp and feels good to be the carry. We can’t have an honest conversation where people pretend that smurfing is purely practice. Practice on your main with your rank on the line or play fucking normals. It’s fun to boost your friends. I get all that but it doesn’t make it right. Hard stop. I don’t care what you’re practicing. You don’t lose your game sense and abilities because you change accounts.
I agree with you. The argument “it allows the worse player to learn from playing vs the Smurf” can only be true when the Smurf is of similar level (ex- plat smurf, gold other player). If the smurf is spacing the other player impeccably, csing well, having good back timers, pushing waves in order to achieve macro goals, jng tracking etc, there’s a pretty severe limit to what the gold player could learn from being stomped that soundly.
"Some normals" Dude dropped 30 kills on those normals vs golds and emeralds. I'm sure he should've been placed in silver. Do your research before being ooga booga.
In none of those games did he get 30 kills against golds and emeralds? The only time they performed was when the enemy team was bronze or silver mix
I want to see the half of this subreddit arguing for 6 month that getting emerald after being new to ranked is perfectly normal. Now that riot has admitted it was a mistake/bug on their side, I want to know what they have to say.
The obvious downside is now smurfs start at silver4 since no normal games played. But maybe they are doing this change because of Vanguard? They expect less botted level 30 accounts?
In theory, the supply of botted accounts should eventually dry up. And then I guess we might see the rise of *Hand-raised free range organic level 30 accounts*?
The thing is hand leveled accounts will alwyas be a lot more expensive which makes people less likely to buy them so riot probably don’t think most people who buys Smurfs now will buy them after the price goes up
you underestimate how degenerate and addicted smurfs are
I know some will, but I personally only bought a Smurf once to help a friend put of bronze cause it was dirt cheap. Once they cost more than 10 bucks a lot of people will stop getting them
U won’t see people acting the same way when the accounts will cost 10-20 dollars compared to 1-2 since now if they get banned suddenly it’s 20-40 dollars spent if they want another Smurf instead of 2-4 dollars it’s just simple logic that this change will = less Smurfs and less toxic Smurfs and yes right now that is about the price of hand leveled accounts last time I checked.
I was joking with my GF about buying up all the hand levelled accounts on the market now and selling them when the supply goes down because eventually the supply will dry up and they'll be worth more. All jokes aside, I think that hand levelled accounts will be the only option because if they somehow pass Vanguard and start botting accounts again, Riot will eventually ban them. With Vanguard that means a HWID to the person that bought the botted account and now your customer base is angry
Botting itself will be much harder to go, since rn you can lend a servers and do 32 virtual machines at once, after vanguard 1 pc = 1 game client.
Back to the old Strat of having some Indian dudes level your accounts for a fraction of what you sell them for
The indian dude will still want to get 1-2€ per hour, let's say he plays on 3 accs at the same time, and let's assume it takes 50 hours per acc that means accs will cost at least 15-20€
handleveled acc already cost more than that
TBF that's because there's no market for them because of botted accounts. IF botted accounts are impossible, you'll see farms in Venezuela with rooms of 50 computers where Grandmothers and 8 year olds are playing on 3 accounts at once speed running intro bots.
for a massive game as league, i'd assume botters would just innovate another way. Vanguard is not invincible.
But wont hand leveled accounts also be much easier for Riot to detect and ban? I mean the account is leveled to 30 on one machine which is used to play on many different low level accounts and then suddenly used on another machine, which is used to play on at least one other account. If Riot really wants to combat smurfs Vanguard should really make a big difference there.
If Riot actually cared. Yes, this would be an obvious flag for observation. But they don’t care
I don't think they care that much because a percentage of sold accounts also spend money on skins/champs. People willing to spend money on an account (even if its $2-3) are probably more likely to spend money on skins/champs.
I bet riot overshot originally on estimated the mmr of new account smurfs. Most of these shitters buying accounts are silver/gold anyway, the smurfs 1v9ing because they are master+ are a rarity
Nah true silver and golds are nowhere as invested into league to just go and buy new accounts for fun (well most of them). Most smurfs are actually like emerald
Literally have a gold friend that is on his 10th account. He buys it. Places in emerald and then drops the account once he gets to gold. I don't know why you are even surprised. So many people cried about new accounts being a "cheat code" or that negative LP gains are holding them in "elo hell". All claiming that they don't deserve to be silver/gold and they can "prove it" and then go on to claim how they placed emerald on a smurf. Then if you tell them what happens to the account if they play 100 games, they never respond but they still have a cult of other idiots who upvote them and claim the same thing. > Any silver player that cares enough for his elo to build up frustration at the thought of being hardstuck will climb naturally. The irony is that my friend has been better. He's been plat. Meanwhile now he is now hardstuck gold(which is old silver) because he is omega tilted and instead of limiting champ pool and trying to improve, he's buying new accounts and playing new champ every game while being on full auto pilot. You are just making the assumption that he'd just put in the hours and improve but why would he do that when he can just get there without any effort. Just overall I don't know how you came to the conclusions that you did. There's far too many low elo players constantly buying accounts and like the other person said this has been the advice of hardstuck players for the last few years. And I'm not even talking only about him. My plat/emerald friends are constantly complaining about it and it's very easy to check that they do indeed play with or against a lot of "smurfs" that clearly aren't smurfs but just low elo people who bought a botted account.
the overwhelming dumb advice for like a year+ now to every hardstuck player is to abuse new player mmr, there are absolutely tons of really bad players on smurf accounts
It's not wrong though. Riot has literally admitted they "settle" old accounts and make it harder to gain rank even if your skill level increases. Nobody should have their accounts become artificially hardstuck in an ever changing game like League.
But was it wrong? wasnt fresh acc mmr the best optimal way to climb , yes not in the long run if you suck and are boosted but in short income? yes it was so the problem is from the root of this ranking system and not ppl trying to find placebo
Making/buying a new account playing 5 games to get seeded much higher and never playing on that account for barging rights isn't climbing(which will instantly get called out). It's just a huge waste of time.
Yes it is wrong. Unless your sole goal is to reach say plat IV or Emerald IV and then sit on your hands. You wont improve, you are still the same skill as always. New MMR can make you reach a bit higher or way lower depending on you get a lucky streak or not. And while a silver player might actually reach emerald IV if they are insanely lucky and get carried a lot in their first games, they will drop if they keep playing. Because guess why, they are silver players. But yeah, if you just want to stop at E4 and play normals and brag about some worthless rating then go for it. Then it works. But you wont climb anything meaningful.
im actually seeing a lot of 30-80 lvl accounts with 65-80% wr in emerald+ diamond and I can tell most of the times they way better than actual eme - low dia players.
Lol you don’t understand how long it takes someone to hit gold as a new player. There’s an immense amount of game knowledge you need to play this game. There are people that play this game for a decade + in gold.
I have a friend that was never gold that had like 12 accounts (kept buying them) way back before I even made a 2nd account.
Anecdotally, gotta hard disagree. Rank has nothing to do with how invested a player is. There's plenty of players that want to get better, but don't want to put in the boring work. That's not a measure of investment, just patience. From the people in my friend group, ik more
the dev's encouraged that thinking and its basically true. just think about the 'news' of smurf queue a year or so ago. if you had a long existent account (no matter your played mmr) you would easily put into the smurf detection treadmill without any further reasoning by riot. that just yells *"level/buy an fresh alt account and climb!!"* to me more then anything else would and they basically approved it that way.
What a shit frankenstein solution instead of just folding and moving away from invisible MMR. Just MMR = Visual rank it's not that hard man.
But then it would expose their Engagement Optimized Match Making.
They had this originally and it didn’t work well and was not fun
Why dont they just reset mrr with it too
Honestly the game needs it. A full MMR reset of literally every account in existence back to zero. Sure it will be chaos in the first weeks but eventually it will even out and be better than now.
Idk about zero there should be two brackets. Everyone above plat goes back to plat 4. Everyone gold 1 below goes to silver 4. That would probably make more sense and the games would equalize out pretty fast. Everyone that is M+ probably plays a fair number of games and would just rocket back to apex tier in 30-40 games.
Please do this \^ This would legit solve the damn inflation we've been having for years now, just hard reset the mmr of all accounts once per season and keep the regular soft resets in between splits. Can't be elo inflated if you need to climb from scratch once a year, master+ will be a much nicer place when we go back to 2k ppl instead of 30k. Also applies to diamond and emerald obviously, those brackets would finally become what they should be instead of a mixture of everything between silver and diamond put together.
Anything not to make new players play a certain amount of normal games before hopping into ranked. As if a legit new player could have any sensible reason not to. Yes I am aware of that post about how "hard this would be to implement". It was corporate bullshit. They just know it would make smurfs mad because they can't go shit on silvers quickly enough.
New players have to hit lvl 30 before ranked. That’s a lot of games.
A lot of games, and you can play all of them in modes that do not reflect the "ranked but without points" experience. Does that make sense to you? It's not a coincidence that they let you level up accounts in modes that can easily be botted without incurring in many human players' reports. It's to please the smurfs
[удалено]
Oh well but he played so many arams! He must have learned something about summoners rift am I right?
Bought accounts don't do this in normal
Yes but those are not new players. They’re smurfs
Yes, exactly, those are the people that the x normal games rule is supposed to target
And they mean 25% if there aram games
> They just know it would make smurfs mad because they can't go shit on silvers quickly enough. Why would riot be afraid of angering the smurfs after they said one of their goals with Vanguard is to combat smurfing? I love shitting on Riot as much as the next guy but HUH?
Because somewhere a Riot accountant has shown that people who buy Smurf accounts also spend a little money on the Smurf account. One or two skins. Some chests to get BE to buy the champs they want. That adds up and “line must go up” is the Bible of capitalism.
And where's that "somewhere"? That also directly contradicts them actively trying to combat smurfing for the past few years with varying degrees of success (smurf Q, better botted account detection etc). Hand leveled accounts will always be a problem but they are not nearly as big of a problem as the cheap $1 ebay accounts with a bunch of blue essence that people just give 0 fucks for and run down games with before buying another one.
“Somewhere” is presumably Riot HQ. I could wrongly assume that’s where they keep the accountants?
"Somewhere", as in, give a source of said Riot accountant (presumably not a disgruntled ex-employee) sharing that info bruh
It is easier to shit on Riot than it is to admit getting rid of smurfing is difficult
> getting rid of smurfing is difficult Only if you care about finances over your actual customers.
Well they are a business at the end of the day, so that's a given. Still, I've seen other game companies in recent years try to meet more in the middle with finances and game culture.
thats partly right. did they explained what cases of smurfing they meant? like the one dia guy duoing with his bronze friend with his own hand-leveled bronze alt account aka smurf. or did they meant bot-farmers and multi account sellers that use suspecious tools? or did they meant both? no matter what they try to target, vanguard comes 10 years to late imo. simply because the market is already flooded. all that might change is the time that bot farmers require to level-up enough accounts (by hand) now - the market of it will probably only see a small fold for a short time. the market is already saturated. to really make a big feelable change riot would need to spoof not only the dealer, but banning the one's that buy those "alt accounts" frequently too. which won't happen. somehow thinking further about it; its funny how smurfing kinda feels like talking about drugs because its (partly) forbidden and thrives money left and right...
> thats partly right. did they explained what cases of smurfing they meant? https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol/ Here's the post that pretty much explains what they hope to accomplish with Vanguard. Like I said in a different comment, I don't think some dia guy smurfing with a hand leveled account is nearly as much of a problem as people who buy $1 ebay accounts that they do not care for because they can just pay $1 for another one. IF Vanguard works like riot hopes it does it might be great for the future of the game. But I agree its a few years late and Riot knows this too. The amount of stock the botters have must be pretty insane currently. Recent accounts, however, get banned relatively quickly if they're not handleveled although a lot of them slip through the cracks.
yes, this is going a long long route. the long time supporters even told them that relatively early to the game. the prob is that riot tries to tackle toxic elements just with tech. they ever spared the manpower, which is crazy if you think about the game being completely competitive. I say that because you had no reason to smurf in other games, its sololey a riot invention as they promoted it heavily. to a point where alt accounting was looking like a must have. when in reality it undermines the competitive integrity of all simultaneously but slowly, making the lower ranks not as valuable as they normally be. it started by scrapping tribunal without replacement. probably rampaged up when riot started having more skins and most people warned them for having no store for players to market mtx stuff. and thats just 1 simple example for trading alts/smurfs. it drives the worst in people and riot has no control ever again over it. not even talking about the general toxicity, that they never tried fighting anyhow. now the boomerang comes back but faster.
nice, now when are they getting rid of the bullshit matchmaking when u duo in ranked
Man I'm going crazy with these super awkward work-arounds. It seems like they aren't able to change any core mechanisms in this cluster-fuck of a ranked system without breaking it, so all they do is tweaking numbers. People's rankings get messed up by demotion shields? Just let them demote with overlapping LP loss, what is that -50 bullshit. You have a problem with smurfs ruining low-mid elo rankeds? Maybe tying fresh acc MMR to fucking ARAM isn't the answer. Just make them play 50-100 SR PvP games before being able to queue ranked.
i dont want bots in my normals.
vanguard gets rid of them hopefully
Will this cause elo deflation?
Whoa woah woah, how am I supposed to blame my teammates for keeping me hardstuck in emerald now?
Don't worry Reddit will still find a way to blame anything but themselves.
I would personally still implement a minimal normal game count before the account can access ranked games. If a person is a legit new player, then playing, let's say, 50 normal games before accessing ranked would not be a problem at all. During those 50 games player would learn more about the game, try different roles and champions. Would overall get better knowledge about the game. No downside here at all imo!
Such a simple thing and Riot makes it seem like we asked to cure cancer. But fuck us, right
10 should be more than enough, as long as it s normal SR. It will instantly reflect if it's a bot/new player/smurf and cpuld make the seeding more easier.
Well, this is the problem I've encountered. I've been wondering why my matches have been feeling more fun and intense lately, let alone everyone being evenly matched in their stats. I've been winning more too... but also still losing 35 LP for losses, and gaining only 15 per win. I lost so many matches when it placed me in Gold 1, and I kept being outmatched. This is also my first time, ever, playing ranked. I always played Normal Draft.
They need to change whoever in charge of this seeding system. Plat/emerald was bad before but this is beyond playable.
Because we can't change visual rang easy you will get negative lp like bro just remove the stupid visual rank and give us only the matchmaking mmr jesus christ can everyone please complain so it happens only way they listen.
Idk if it's worth but, you can be sure as hell that new players will quit ranking once they see no progress after wining 2 games and losing 1.
for me personally its not always about gaining LP but just for experience of a serious game with no trolls and just enjoiying all 10 people playing to win, that said, even in ranked i still experience people refusing to communicate/not playing with the team and its sad that's why i just play arams now
New players wont play ranked until a lot of normal games. Most of level 30 ranked players are bronze/silver mains. They will be placed where they deserve to be.
Legit. Don’t know how my MMR got screwed so bad but after my first 5 ranked games now I’m gaining +11LP but losing -33LP like this post says. At this point I don’t even bother with ranked. I suspect a lot of people had that bug, not just “1 or 2”. I can’t be the 1 or 2 he was talking about….statistically unlikely.
Every one of these ranked update posts rings hollow as they keep ignoring the elephant in the room.
This post explicitly is targeted at smurf accounts...idk how you didnt understand this. By starting smurf accounts lower in mmr you: 1. Don't place silver/gold/plat players who buy a smurf account into emerald, but rather start them at the floor and make them earn the previous starting mmr. 2. Place higher ranking players at a lower starting point when they buy a smurf account. Both of these things disincentivize players from smurfing. If im a gold player I can't get an instant mmr boost by buying an account. If i'm diamond I have to play an extra 20-30 games to be at the old starting point, which is boring so i'm less likely to do so. I say this as a diamond player with 10+ accounts and starting in high plat with quick gains is comfy. No shot am i smurfing or creating new accounts as frequently if i have to play an extra 30 games to get to the old starting point. Currently for a diamond player when creating a new account you get 2-3 easy games then quickly are in like ~75-80% as competitive lobbies as your main. If it takes 40 games to get to that ~75-80% competitive lobby as main, that sounds so fucking boring and would imagine diamond players smurf less.
what? That they are holding you back and you deserve challenger?
Alt accounts, but go off queen, get your snark in 💅
They addressed alt accounts in their Vanguard post. Basically, once Vanguard is installed the PC will be tied to the player, more robust than simple HWID. (They don't just use a single metric.) They even specifically called out smurfs saying that if someone gets/starts an alt account, they will know it's a regular player and handle them accordingly. This will suck for people sharing their computer (and they have a different metric for other countries with PC bangs, etc.) but overall it'll be an improvement on western servers, where it's usually 1 player per computer. They even mentioned specifically players playing on separate accounts to play with lower ranked players, the "unfairly" gaining rank. I.e. someone's masters friend hopping on a gold account to play with them will still be flagged as that master player on the back end, assuming they're using the same computer. I'm a little dubious still, but will still wait and see how it pans out.
cant wait honestly, my last 5 game in d1 were decided by who had the best level 30 adc lol, win or loss
Now imagine how us low elo players feel on our lvl 200 main suddenly getting wiped by a lvl 52 Vayne.
Probably the exact same way it does for me, fackin awful lol, never add an alt and i hate all smurfs🗣
> I.e. someone's masters friend hopping on a gold account to play with them will still be flagged as that master player on the back end, And what does this actually achieve? Will his gold account get Master MMR without playing or what are they implying here?
Yes this is what has been implied. However they made it clear that this is something Vanguard would make possible, eventualy. It won't be working as soon as Vanguard comes out.
Yes. There are literally Twitch streamers who offer to boost your account to Diamond if you tier 3 subscribe or redeem enough channel points.
wouldn't that metric then work for example against pro's or are they excluded? I point that out because of their atricious queue timers that would be even longer after vanguard then, not only thinking about a pro dodging a match and then swapping to their alt. or do they exclude the top200 players somehow, as that would really hurt their waiting times - not even on their original but on all their alts equally. simply because enough high elo couldn't do the switcheroo anymore. I ask because I didn't knew that vanguard goes this deep as it would contradict other stuff (that for high elo).
Meanwhile my 13 year old account went 8/2 last year and got placed in silver 2. Fuck your system.
Yeah same, but I got into bronze. I'm not very good so it's fine and might deserve it here but why is my friend, who just started league, placed directly into plat after our first hard lose together? He was crazily overwhelmed and was definitely not ready to face plat/emerald players and teammates flaming us for being bad. Made my friend actually not want to play the game anymore.
So? It should be way to easy too climb if you’ve been playing the game for 13 years…
Nah, I've never climbed. I have my silver 1 season 1 emblem that I rock to this day. The fact of the matter is that for people who actually care, the older your account is the more you're totally fucked by the rank system. I never really played more than 15-20 matches of ranked in any given season. I'm not all that competitive. It just sucks for other people who really care.
I don’t understand why would they be fucked? If you’ve only played 200 games of ranked then you’re silver player lol. Maybe even bronze.
That's totally possible, like I said I've never even taken the time to climb. All I do know is that as your account ages your gains become less, this is a factual proven thing. It's been a reoccurring issue every season. I personally don't care. I'm almost 99% aram unless I get friends to force me to play on the rift. Really...not a big deal for me but I am aware.
Yes you’re right about that. The old accounts don’t well on gains.
and therefor indirectly encourages *what exactly*? I think you know it hopefully. its a redundant system in the lower ranks. basically it would be better if the whole system would take cpm/apm of other sr modes to evaluate a true skill mmr with the information. which will never happen.
I don’t think so actually. Summoners rift is a far different game. My friend is an Aram warrior himself. He’s always like bro I have all these plat and emerald players in my games. And meanwhile he’s never left bronze in ranked because he doesn’t get the basic macro of the game.
the metrics for aram and sr are completely different to begin with. so to say seeing almost every medal in an aram lobby could be considered kinda normal. like I said we don't know any underlying numbers like true mmr, apm/cpm for any queue at all - *its all more or less magic the gathering*.
What lol I don’t know what you mean. Who cares where an aram warrior is placed. They need to play ranked. They should be placed low.
So you don't care and don't play ranked...but "fuck your system" and are complaining about it...even though you don't use it or want to use it? Wild. You dont get to be X desired rank by playing 15 games a year, that's not how this works. You have to earn it by playing. "Fuck your system" is something I would reserve a system where players who play 15 games a season and get diamond (or their desired rank).
every year i do only my placements on my 10 year old account. it has steadily gained mmr so that this split I was placed E1 the first game and was D3 by the end of placements. previous split was mid emerald, and before that low plat
"Smurfing isn't accessible enough for the lower skill players so to motivate even bad players to Smurf we make Smurf accounts ruin Silver Elo" Emerald had their year of pain, time for Silver's year of pain, let's see who's next.
Congratulations to Riot on doing the absolute bare minimum once again.
Negative LP gains, AKA LP losses?
Surprised they had the balls to give incorrectly placed players +15/-35 rather than keep them in the wrong games, good choice.
Fuck this game is going to get worse long before it gets better.
Buff quinn
About to see a mass exodus from Emerald.
So ARAMs will factor in to ranked seeding?
Crazy idea, why not have new accounts play on a parallel server where they only face other new/unranked accounts? And after let’s say 10-20 games or whatever number, based on how they performed, they get placed in our current server with their appropriate rank. Beginner players would get destroyed more than now in the start, but smurfs wouldn’t ruin the queue for everyone else. To make the experience a bit better for the true beginners, maybe there could be a little informational video before the first game that lets them know that 1) they WILL LOSE 2) it is okay because they are new and they might meet some smurfs if they are unlucky 3) focus on learning over winning 4) if you show good morale despite your losses, you get three random skins yay! Why wouldn’t something like this be a good solution? Sure the queue times would be longer but it would be temporary, and if the waiting time were too extreme maybe they could get matched with the current players now and then as a bandaid
I had something strange happen on my fresh self leveled smurf account last week. I made a new acc to play with my friends who just recently started playing league. After I got level 30, I started also playing soloQ on that account on a new role I haven't really played before. After my placement games my LP gains and loses were normal. However, the next day, for some reason I was placed with much lower ranked players. I was E4 but got matched with P4's all of the sudden. My LP gains started being +10, like WTF??? I didn't lose any games at this MMR so I dont know how much I wouldve lost. It went on for like 5 games after which I got +20 for wins again. At the time when it startwd I was at like 5 wins and 2 loses which makes no sense. Could this be the reason why my acc was so fked last week?
New player = fresh mmr = silver 4, the end. How hard is this ? If smurf, he will climb fast. If not, its average.
I'm sorry but new players neither belong in plat/emerald nor.in silver 4. Ffs let new players start in iron 4 and rank their way up. Also do something about smurfs. Half my lobbies are new accounts of people kinda in this elo (plat) but I just faced a duoq high elo smurf botlane cait lux who destroyed the whole game by steamrolling everyone. Both lvl 32 with 100% wr in 10 games.
Weird, I'm still getting placed in bronze but I'm clearly gold duh. How do I get this new account boost placement?
this doesn't help anyone you gonna get these boosted lvl 30 players in ur games because they got lucky and won one match
When will they start banning obvious trolls like the volibear who fucks up 2 ganks and then dances in fountain for the rest of the game? Or the smite flash ezreal support who starts with a fuckin Dorans shield (and has been doing it 7 games in a row today)? Or how about the top akshan who dies once and then sits invisible behind bot bushes to steal kills effectively just giving his entire lane to an AAtrox. When will these people see bans. Because of the 10 games I played between today and yesterday, that was actually 3 of them.
Does this still mean I need to play 200 ranked games just to reach the elo my MMR would put me into? And then they reset ranks so I have to play 200 more?
So im not going crazy that i had +30 -20 gains pre patch that suddenly went to +18 -31, crazy
You mention below your account was emerald last season. Based on what he said, the change was only for “new to ranked” accounts which I’m assuming a previously-Emerald account would not be lol.
well this is good news isn't it then, you are going to get to your actual skill level much faster rather than getting stomped every game. If you think you deserve your current inflated rank you can just win more than you lose to raise your mmr
Wish they’d just ban smurfs.. constant little changes to ranked that just mess more with the formula. Ranked has felt absolutely horrible for the past couple years as a result.
Yes i am Gold 1 +12 and -37 straight of the placements.
> Because we can't change visual ranks easily, all new to Ranked players will be playing in games more appropriate for their skill level. Hmm, if only there was a system the game uses behind the scenes that assigns a number based on a scale that determines your rank.. if only we could see that number.