PrincessEli

If you could magically identify smurfs, you could just put them at the level they should be or ban them without putting them in a match

That's what league does. If it detects early on that you're probably a smurf, you get tossed into smurf queue where you'll face other experienced players, and it's pretty reliable. Both times I've made new accounts, I've almost immediately gotten placed with experienced players, usually before the account graduates beyond bot games

Yeah, league has separate mmr for ranked and normals, so you always get sbmm no matter what. Main difference is that in ranked, you're locked in regards to who you can queue with so there isn't too wide a gap in mmr, whereas norms let's anyone queue together.

League also doesn't do ranks directly based on mmr, but rather indirectly through an elo system, where your mmr decides who you play against do it's always a close to even team, and then the mmr decides how much a win/loss effects your elo. If you're a high rank player skill wise, your mmr will put you against similarly skilled players, even if you're still a lower rank, and it will just give you more upwards ranking.

Bub, I'm not the one throwing a fit like a toddler because online games can be competitive

Yeah, figures you're just incapable of having a decent discussion

For one, things like cloud storage are obviously not particularly viable to have the customer host themselves, on premise.

Secondly, some things can be extremely intensive to process, and thus performed on specialized, high end hardware rather than over hours on whatever shit phone the customer is using

For one, lots of software just flat out isn't open source. And plenty of it is far from short lived

I know with certainty it's extremely hard to do in heavily team based sports like football and basketball, because that I do pay attention to. Maybe MoBAs are closer to baseball where even though it's a "team" sport, you actually can isolate out parts reliably enough to measure effectively, but I don't play them to know for sure.

At least for league, I'd say it's definitely the former. Team play and strategy is a huge component and is extremely difficult to measure. There's no hard tracking for things like "knew when to run the opposite way so the enemy couldn't get multiple kills" or "blocked an important spell so the carry didn't die". Individual skill is so closely intertwined with team results that separating out the two is only possible in the extreme cases.

I'd personally like to see changes like not having the ranking system torpedo your evaluation because of a single underperforming team-mate.

At least in terms of league, that isn't the case. Yeah, everyone complains about losing due to bad teams, but like, yeah? In a match of 10 people, any given person inherently has a minority of the impact on any given match. But statistically, that balances out over time. Better players will have greater positive impacts, and thus win more game and climb. There's an argument to be made that the old promotion system leaned towards bad games having an outsized impact, but that was kinda the point. They prevented lucky streaks from impacting rank as much and favored consistency. And trust me, I've mained adc since season 5. I know the impact of shitty teams first hand.

The mmr system also more or less completely prevents a bad game or two from tanking your rank. As long as your mmr is higher than your rank, you can climb even with like 40% wins since a win will grant more than a loss takes away.

The opposite, people who think about how to make things better, even if their ideas are bad, are the ones who have gotten into things deep enough to start seeing the cracks.

I disagree. Complaints like those in the initial comment I responded to are the most surface level "I saw people complaining about something once" type suggestions possible that entirely miss the whole reason people play one game as opposed to others. Games like league and Dota are, first and foremost, competitive experiences. To suggest that these games would be improved by rubber banding harder than Mario kart demonstrates a significant lack of either understanding or interest in the genre.

If anything, it's just a prime example of the dunning kreuger effect. He's not in deep enough to know how much he doesn't know about the games. It's like the bronze players complaining that yi has no counterplay. It says more about their lack of understanding than it does about the game.

That you and me are able to do it, is not a reason to refrain from helping those who can't.

Not everything needs to be shaved at the edges to cater to the lowest common denominator. Shave off the ranked system and general competitive nature, and a lot of players (such as myself) are going to start going to different games that do offer it. Hell, I know at least a dozen people who already moved from league to Dota entirely because of the increasing casualization and focus on making it simpler and easier for bad players.

I mean yeah, there are always going to be people with problems. But the guy I was responding to was leveling complaints like "playing badly shouldn't impact the outcome", "it's bad that a team loses", and "people should be free to afk whenever". Like at that point, just play different games, these aren't your cup of tea.

And for what it's worth, I personally quite like the stricter competitive nature of many games. I like playing ranked games where everyone is solidly playing to win and competing on skill. Just because some people have a ego problem because of ranks, it doesn't mean the system should be scrapped.

I love some of these games, but I only learned to maximise my enjoyment of them once I began playing them casually. And its such a pity that my friends who haven't learned the trick of not taking it so seriously,

There's a pretty wide gap between playing casually, and grinding to the point of burnout. It's plenty possible to take the game seriously, such that you care about doing your best and continually improving, without just dedicating your entire life to the grind.

Sounds like you just hate the idea of competitive games

You're... Confused why software can require server side features?