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In an even skill matchup, map side advantage can make the difference between a victory and a defeat. The dev team is studying additional filters to improve skill balance between each team’s premades. In 2020, they shipped Premade Parity to balance out premades across teams. The developers are looking into better options for decay rate as currently a Diamond+ player that gets some weeks off is forced to play in a place that doesn’t represent their skill level, creating unsatisfactory and unbalanced games. Main goals: “Improve queue matchmaking quality without compromising queue time or availability” and “Improve progression satisfaction and skill expression in our systems.” In the mid year dev blog published in July 2021, Cody “Riot Codebear” Germain, Product Lead for Competitive Gameplay on League of Legends, talked about the future changes to the matchmaking and ranked systems. We do this by tuning the resets to be stronger, which puts more uncertainty back into the system. This year, we want to provide a longer runway for players to really show off their growth since last season and get the proper liftoff at the start of their climb. Season Reset: The soft resets we did this year might have been a little too soft. We're taking a closer look at what decay does for our players and tweaking the system to ensure even fairer matchmaking over the entire season.
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However, that clock may be ticking too quickly and pushing players into places where they really don’t belong. In some regions, autofill rates in popular roles like top and mid were brought to almost 0%.Īpex Decay: At high MMRs (Master tier and above), decay rates have long functioned like timers ticking away to keep the best of the best at the edge of their game. We saw autofill reduced to less than 2% of games in almost every region. Time to game (from queue start to match start) stayed the same or improved in every region. Overall match quality improved, with less than one division of skill difference between teams for 99% of games. New accounts were ranked much more evenly and effectively. In October, Cody “Riot Codebear” Germain, Product Lead for Competitive Gameplay on League of Legends, summarized the Season 2021 highlights and what to expect from the next one.
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