Riot addresses some MMR and Matchmaking changes in Lol patch 14.2
One of the most difficult things in League of Legends for Riot to balance has been ensuring the balance of ranked matchmaking. The ELO rating Lol uses is usually used in games like Chess, with 2 players. In such games, the individual player is responsible for their result.
But in a 5v5 MOBA like LoL, there are a lot of factors that go into the outcome of the match. This is mostly because the other 4 members, when combined, have more impact on the game than one single individual, even if you play to your fullest.
It is a frequent point of pain for the Lol-ranked players when they lose a match despite doing very well individually. The current system smooths out this issue over a long period of time. The idea is, given a long enough sample size of matches played, your performance will eventually stand out since the probability of getting a bad team is equal to getting a good team in the long run. So, ultimately your rank will eventually reflect your skills.
However, this process is often gruesome, and the number of matches where you feel like the universe is plotting against you is too many. Because of this, Riot has promised to ensure matchmaking quality gets improved to lessen the pain of the player base.
Earlier, they declared that we would be noticing improvements in matchmaking from the beginning of season 2024. This has been in action since patch 14.1, where we have seen LP loss and gains being adjusted for Emerald and above tiers.
Later this year, a new MMR tool called TrueSkill 2 might be implemented as well. But that’s for the future. Right now, Riot will be fixing some other, more immediate issues. For example, Diamond 1 players experiencing negative LP gains.
In this article, I will update you on all the prevalent issues and how Riot is addressing them.
Read More: Top 5 Mid Lane Champions In Patch 14.1
Lol Patch 14.2 MMR and Matchmaking Changes
- Reducing the amount of games of demotion protection from tier boundaries (eg. Gold to Silver). This should only affect people who seed/promote into the bottom of a rank tier (eg. Gold 4) and then lose many games in a row. It will make no difference if you’ve been in the rank for a while.
- Fixed a bug where a small number of Diamond 1 players would sometimes receive negative LP gains (losing more LP on losses than gaining on wins). Unfortunately, while we cannot immediately resolve this issue for existing accounts, the problem will resolve itself with some games.
- Fixed a bug where players who would be seeded into Iron IV were seeded into Iron II with negative LP gains.
These are the changes from the official patch notes. These are mostly bugs and issues with the current system, not an improvement on the matchmaking itself.
However, Diamond 1 players, at least some of them, will notice positive LP gains (given that their win rate is normal) upon 1 win and 1 defeat once the patch rolls out. Note that they will still need to play a few games to see this effect.
Basically, that’s all the MMR and matchmaking changes in patch 14.2. But you can expect bigger changes in the upcoming patches.
Patch 14.2 Release Date
Patch 14.2 has started to roll out on all the live servers already as it’s 24 January.
