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Hey guys,
I wanted to discuss the ever increasing prevalence of Elo Boosting, and the problems it is causing for League of Legends match making system. Ill explain what it is shortly, in-case some don't know already.
What I really want to discuss is whether there is even a way to combat this, as it is a HUGE problem for League of Legends match making system.
Ok, to start off, Elo Boosting, or LoL Boosting, is basically the act of hiring a third party to play your account with the sole purpose of getting higher in a tier or division. Often much higher than the player themselves can actually achieve. A Google search will show many of these such sites, shockingly numerous in fact. I will link one as an example: elogods.com, but you can see for yourself how deeply spread the problem is. Aside from the fact that this is ethically lame, it actually creates a problem for the match making system, as explained in a bit. Now I don't disagree with the coaching services these sites offer, I actually think that's really great. Good for the game, good for eSports. But boosting? :/
I'm a passionate League player myself, and to see this it unsettles me. First, for there to be such a market, it means there is huge demand, which in turn doesn't speak highly of our community. But the real problem here is MMR inflation and, really, corruption.
By that I mean you have a case where you could be playing in a High Silver or Mid Gold setting and you have one or more players who are really bronze players trying to play, and just degrading your experience and possibly their own.
This is not to bash bronze players, of course, everyone has the right to play. What I'm saying is Elo Boosting is putting people where they naturally wouldn't be, and thus short circuiting the match making system and wrecking anything to do with MMR.
As this game grows bigger and bigger, so does every market around it. How would RIOT Games combat this? This is clearly not an easy task. Lets get a discussion going on and see if the community has an answer.
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I'm not trying to endorse ELO boosting and say it's good etc, but I honestly don't feel like it impacts most players at all, even if you truly believe it runs rampant (it's popular but so is this game) the odds will break even that you will play with/against them, to be honest I look at players who are overly concerned about elo boosting as just another way to "explain" why they are in elo hell, sorry.
If you really want to champion the it ruins the system having anything to do with MMR, hiding ELO and going to the league system is the far bigger culprit here.
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Well to address your first paragraph, I'm a high silver player, which isn't good, but I wouldn't say its elo hell.
But to state a point, I think if you have people who paid to be somewhere they shouldn't be, it distorts the game experience. I think you underestimate just how common place this epidemic has become.
RIOT doesn't seem to be able to tackle the problem. How can they really? They made a statement about how they were going to ban players caught in this practice... but how would they enforce this?
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you failed to address my point, which is why should I as a player give a shit if there are elo boosted players in my game? because I don't.
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There have already been harsh punishments handed down for elo boosting for high elo players caught boosting. There's not much else you can ask for.
Also, I do dispute the statement that it is an epidemic. I don't see any evidence for it.
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I don't see how Elo Boosting is any worse than a diamond 1 duo queueing with a silver 3. I don't care about the former, but the latter should be a bannable offense imoimo(go play normals you fucks)
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I'm with Slusher. Over the course of 50 games you'll have the same amount of smurfs / terrible elo boosted noobs on your team and the enemy team.
I dunno, as far as i'm concerned I'd love to play with 100% smurfing players. As a player I want to play against the best players possible.
/shrug.
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Live2Win
United States6657 Posts
The problem with ELO boosting right now is not that actual act of boosting... at least in my opinion.
The bigger problem is the paid service these guys will be able to get eventually. We've already had a huge scandal in Korea (see Monster Gaming scandal) where basically this guy put together a semi-pro team, then whoever got on the team were forced to become employees for their elo-boosting website. The players had to ELO boost as part of their deal to being part of the gaming house, and the owners of that company would reap in sums of money for their work.
I think this general kind of behavior opens up a whole can of worms on what people can do to "extort" money out of LoL.
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Live2Win
United States6657 Posts
what I fear the most is that we may eventually run into gambling scandals such as the one we saw in Korean BW (oh sAviOr...)
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Just remove the ability to duo queue with someone who is more than a league above you, eg gold players can't duo with plat/diam/challenger.
At least then boosters will be forced to account share which gives Riot some evidence that more than one person is using the account.
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On October 30 2013 12:07 miicah wrote:
Just remove the ability to duo queue with someone who is more than a league above you, eg gold players can't duo with plat/diam/challenger.
At least then boosters will be forced to account share which gives Riot some evidence that more than one person is using the account.
They aren't talking about Duo-Queue boosting. They're talking about having a really good player paid to play on a lesser-skilled player's account until they reach a certain point on the ladder.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
it's more of an image problem than anything threatening to the game. i guess when it gets bad higher ranking people will complain but some moderate boosting keeps people interested in the game.
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In the end slusher is right. People hate elo boosters because they are jealous that they are getting something with money that they can't get themselves. In terms of gameplay experience, nothing has changed for anyone at all. Its the same fallacy where if you gave everyone in the world 5 dollars you would be happy but giving you 3 dollars and no one else anything makes you so much happier.
In the end, the elo boosted lose because they wasted money looking cool but how does that affect you? Nothing. Nothing at all.
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On October 30 2013 15:42 ReketSomething wrote:
In the end slusher is right. People hate elo boosters because they are jealous that they are getting something with money that they can't get themselves. In terms of gameplay experience, nothing has changed for anyone at all. Its the same fallacy where if you gave everyone in the world 5 dollars you would be happy but giving you 3 dollars and no one else anything makes you so much happier.
In the end, the elo boosted lose because they wasted money looking cool but how does that affect you? Nothing. Nothing at all.
Well, that's not really true because once the client takes their account back they feed like monsters until their elo returns to it's correct value. I would say that's a pretty weak argument though. After all when somebody smurfs something pretty similar happens (everyone on the opposing team feeds the smurf) and that's not something riot is terribly fond of but all around nobody really cares.
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Despite getting the really blatant elo boosters in some of games, I don't really understand why people pay for this kind of service in the first place. You are basically paying hundreds of dollars for a superficial rank that only lasts for one season, then later turns into a border. Anyone who you play with, it is so obvious to them that you aren't at the rank your profile says you are. A "Diamond" player that truly belongs in silver, you aren't fooling anyone. It is much more satisfying to see improvement through your own effort rather than take the easy shortcut with your wallet.
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Who cares. It's their money, it's RIOT's job to prevent the boosting, but nobody gives a shit, because at the end of the season all you get is a silly border. Nobody should be giving a shit except when people are forced to do it. Certainly ain't pissing me off that some undeserved people gets the same border as me.
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I think that the people who use it are the people who are in bronze/silver who go "I should be in Gold/Plat/Diamond but I'm stuck in ELO hell. If someone better than me played my account and carried me up there, I would be fine, and matchmaking would match me up with people of my skill level! I just can't get out of ELO hell to show how good I am!"
And so people just pay so that they can get to the rank that they 'should be at.'
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I believe elo boosting is one of the dumbest foundations of any system, in SC1/2 or LoL or any other form. The problem for me though is I have actually played strategy games at a high level and other games at a high level, the best way for me to always improve was to play against people who were better than me and stomped the crap out of me.
Though I don't believe in ELO boosting, I wish I could play higher level people so I could improve at a much faster rate, unfortunately, I've ran into daimond elo boosted people in gold elo, who played at BRONZE at best. I just wish there was an option for people who wish to challenge themselves, but nay there is not. Not in any game, or anywhere.
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I just want to share a slightly different story from a personal experience, I am Silver 1-2 and I have a friend who was Bronze 5, he was unable to surface more than Bronze 4 without shortly falling to 5 again. I watched his games and he was doing miserably: 1-7, 4-11 etc. One day I took his account coz I wanted to practice some champs in rank, without jeopardizing my elo and in 3 weeks his account was in silver 5. Then he took over and he easily reached silver 3 and he even went for promotions for silver 2 once. His scores now are 5-2, 7-3, 8-5 etc. of course he has some bad games but overall he is performing much much better. When I asked him how is this possible, he said: Man, here is so much easier, my teams listen when they have to take drakes, they gather for turrets, they dont chase kills in enemy jungle when we are behind 10 kills and 4 turrets, they kind of respect pick order and dont troll pick a lot- things like this, here is so much more organised and so much funnier to play, now I enjoy playing without focusing on reporting/arguing from minute one of the game.
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oh ho ho is this going to turn into an elo hell discussion?
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EPT
