User blog comment:Dracko40/The Angry Illithid: "Will matchmaking ever find true balance?"/@comment-3014924-20110207135018

Today, I take Ranked games as competitive games and normal game=practice.

Actually, there's several issues that can screw up the match-making: 1-Starting ranked at 1200. If you are around that ELO, you will never be sure how good is the new guy coming in with his 0 Wins, 0 Losses. There's no solution about that (in the ELO system, you want to figure out what's the player worth into a small amoung of games. That's why a starting player can gain 50 ELO for a win when another one would win 10). 2-Teamplayers with chat. I play with several mates. We use mumble. Weirdly, with some of them, we've found a gamestyle allowing us to combine very efficiently. With some other of them, we just suck up to the point that I have a better teamplay with anonymous solo-queuers than with those friends. We just don't found a natural leadership hierarchy (e.g. "take a ward for nashor". "No I won't". "Let's take dragon!". "No better come pushing, PUSH PUSH PUSH".....pffffffff). I guess that screw up the "teamplay bonus" RIOT awards to premades (the help given by beeing premade vary too greatly from a team to another). To counter this in Normal games, they should introduce a premade composition bonus (which is, IMO, too complicated). 3-People like me taking normal as practice games: I play ranked, I'll fill a requested role. Need a tank? AP? Jungler? Ranged? I'll do my best to help. I play normal? Well...If I don't feel like it (and especially if the mates are instant-lockers), I take the character I wanna play. For example, I tried Xin yesterday. First match. I'm certainly over-ranked for the character cause I don't know him. I over-evalued his auto-heal passive ability, his 1 on 1 effectiveness, discovered late game that I did not have to hit 3 times the same character to trigger the 3 talon-strike CC effect. Warwick went jungling. We had a gragas and a Nidalee. I asked if someone could solo-top (I know Xin could solo, but I'm no pro with him). They refused cause they were premade. I got killed twice. Each time I died, WW came after ramboed and offered another kill to gangplank. Later, Gragas whined about the fed gangplank. True du***ss, but I asked from the very begining not to solo. Whatever. The fact I train in solo characters I never played before (and free character weeks must make this the norm) screws up the matchmaking. There's no solution about that.