League of Legends - Page 9

Skip to the dotted line if you're familiar with the current anti-smurfing mechanic.

BASICS:

ELO: When you queue for a normal game, you have an invisible rating called your Elo. When you win this goes up, when you lose it goes down. It is a rough approximation of your LoL skill, should be roughly accurate after a couple dozen games, and will slowly rise as you improve (or not).

The matchmaker looks for people of similar Elo as you when you queue for a game. That is the only thing it currently matches you on.

When you queue in a premade, your Elos are averaged, and then you receive a boost to the final result. The boost is larger the more people that are in the premade (from virtually nothing for a 2 man premade to a very significant boost for a 5 man premade. The magnitude of the boost depends on the original Elo, and was calculated from tens of thousands of games).

SMURFING:
Smurfing is when an experienced player creates a new account, resetting his Elo. This has several disadvantages: he has a level 1 summoner, and does not receive IP/XP on his main account. However, it has advantages as well. Some players get their kicks from destroying newbs. Unfortunately, this is unavoidable at this time. More significantly: If a premade wants to face easier opponents, one of their members can 'smurf', and drastically lower their combined Elo. This obviously hurts matchmaking.

The CURRENT anti-smurfing mechanic:
Each person's Elo has a 'smurf range' built into it. For argument[s sake let's say it is 500. This means that if a 2000 Elo player queues with someone with an Elo less than 1500, the matchmaker ASSUMES he is smurfing, and artificially boosts his Elo DRASTICALLY (several hundred points). This is to prevent smurf abuse, and generally works very very well at preventing smurfing.

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The problem lies when a player tries to queue with a legitimate new player. Even high Elo players sometimes have friends they'd like to introduce to the game, who are obviously not as skilled as them (they are -not- smurfs). The matchmaker has not been designed to handle this occurrence, and the teacher/student pair gets hit HARD by the anti-smurfing mechanic.

This is obviously detrimental to introducing new players to LoL, which Riot has recently expressed a large interest in with the Refer a Friend program.

The only current viable option for this pair is practice games. This is fine. However, the teacher likely only receives XP/IP for 4 games per day, and each of them receives various other penalties (reduced XP/IP in general for practice games, plus not generally equal opponents. At some point, a new player wishes to queue, and at the current time it's pretty impossible to queue with an established player.

I made this thread hoping you guys could help me brainstorm mechanics with which we could make the anti-smurfing mechanic hurt this pair less, while not hurting the experience of others.



Possible ideas:

Provide the teacher the option of temporarily 'nuking' his account (on a pergame basis) while teaching the new player. This will bar him from using any runes or masteries for that game, effectively making him a level 1 account. Your elo has a slight adjustment to it based on your level, so this would remove that adjustment.

Allow an even -more- severe nuking of his account: in effect, an ingame handicap. This could come in the form of reduced ingame xp, gold gain, or champion stats. Even a pro will have difficulty dominating newer players with half the hp or gold gain (just an example). This would obviously severely reduce the player's elo.

There may be others as well, those are just the ones occurring to me immediately upon reflection of this topic.



Possible countermeasures:
To prevent abuse of this system, I'd recommend not allowing the option of doing this with more than X people in the premade. Maybe just 2 to allow a single teacher/student pair, or 3 to allow for more friends. I'm sure Riot would also track this system and adjust the coefficients on the elo rating. If they found the system was too forgiving (the teacher/student pair still dominated too much) they could reduce the benefit/increase the handicap. Other measures could be implemented.



A final thought on this system: This would allow high elo players to interact in lower elo games in a MUCH fairer environment. I feel this would be good for the game in general. When I'm teaching one of my friends, I find myself far more likely to also be dispensing advice to other players in the game, even on the other team. Having a higher elo player giving advice on strategy, hero comp, itemization, and metagame would be pretty revolutionary.


Sorry for the wall of text, this is all pretty brainstormy. I'll try to edit the original post with feedback received.