One Rioter did almost all of the talking this week, and he spent it telling players that losers queue isn't real.
Fifty red posts in five days. Matchmaking got explained, a gold bug got patched, and the people abusing it got suspended.
Red Post Roundup
Week of August 10 to 14
Issue #2One Rioter did almost all of the talking this week, and he spent it telling players that losers queue isn't real.
Fifty red posts in five days. Matchmaking got explained, a gold bug got patched, and the people abusing it got suspended.
The short version
- Modern League: your winrate isn't an input to matchmaking, and neither is your honor level or your ban history.
- Modern League: a bug let players farm gold on the death screen. It's fixed, and abusers are getting suspended.
- Modern League: hand-leveling a smurf is allowed. Throwing your placements or boosting a duo isn't.
- Modern League: Riot won't hand you the rank your MMR says you have, and there's a reason for it.
- Modern League: 26.16 shipped with mage nerfs bot lane, jungle pet buffs and Faerie Court skins.
- Classic: the ninjas arrived, Akali included.
Want these as they happen?
Our League of Legends Red Tracker collects everything Riot devs say in public and refreshes every fifteen minutes. This roundup is the weekly read. The tracker is the one you leave open.
Open the Red TrackerThe big one: there's no losers queue
Modern LeagueDrew Levin runs product and strategy on League, which in practice means he owns matchmaking and player behavior. He spent most of this week in replies, and the same argument kept arriving: the game notices you're winning and stacks your next team against you.
incorrect, winrates are not a part of our matchmaking logic if you win a lot that feeds into the MMR system's best guess about how good you are (and thus what your MMR score is), but that's it
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
Then the version where the punishment is for being reported rather than for winning.
Honor level, penalty history, chat restrictions etc etc etc everything like that are all not factors in matchmaking today. Their distribution in any given lobby is random.
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
What it means: one number decides your lobby, and that's MMR. Winning raises it, losing lowers it, and nothing else in your account history gets a vote. The toxic player on your team isn't there because you both got reported.
He was less patient with the name itself.
if "losers q" is somehow "doing skill based matchmaking" then I genuinely don't know what the fuck any phrase means anymore
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
The point underneath the swearing is real, though. Matching you against people at your level means you'll lose roughly half of them by design. That's what a fair game is. Someone reading a normal losing streak as a hidden penalty is describing the system working.
He also put money on one specific claim that goes around a lot, that ranked runs on Microsoft's TrueSkill2 rating model.
One million dollars if you can point to any statement we've made that says we're using TS2 in ranked SR don't spend too much time on this one btw
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
A gold bug got patched, and the abusers got suspended
Modern LeagueA player flagged a bug where clicking during the death timer handed out free gold, fast enough to buy a completed item in the first minute. Riot shipped a fix and went after the people who'd been using it.
This has been patched. If you were one of the people executing several hundred clicks per gray screen to clearly abuse a bugged interaction not afforded by the game rules, please enjoy your impending vacation from the game.
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
Someone asked why speedrunners get celebrated for exploiting bugs while League players get banned for it.
the thing that makes a game meaningful is shared rules of engagement. speedrunning is commonly about identifying and exploiting the software logic. SR has clear rules about how gold acquisition works. bug abuse to buy a completed item at minute 1 is not afforded by those rules.
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
What it means: the difference is who agreed to what. Everyone in a speedrun knows the rules include the glitches. The nine other people in your ranked game didn't sign up for that.
Smurfing is allowed. Boosting is what gets you banned.
Modern LeagueA Challenger player asked whether leveling a fresh account and climbing it again would get them banned. The line turned out to be narrower than most people assume.
no, putting you in the right lobbies is our job, conditional on you not doing shit to try to trick our matchmaking system like inting your placements or whatever if you duo someone when you spawn in plat or emerald and boost them to master you'll get hit though
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
What it means: a new account climbing honestly is the system doing its job, and it should reach your real level in a handful of games. Deliberately losing to stay in easier lobbies is the part that gets actioned, because that's you breaking the rating rather than the rating being slow.
Where he had no patience at all was players who wanted the easy lobbies and said so.
I appreciate when people are honest enough to just own that they smurf because they want to play in lobbies they don't belong in. We're still gonna ban em, to be clear. But I do appreciate the honesty.
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
Asked why Riot won't just cap how many accounts one person can hold, he pointed at the practical problem rather than the principle.
not values-level against limiting accounts but the logistics are pretty egregious. like what are we going to do, demand that people scan government ID every time they sign in? VOIP numbers and burners beat one-time 2FA, emails are free, etc etc
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
Why your rank lags behind your MMR on purpose
Modern LeagueAfter a stream appearance with Matt Leung-Harrison and a pro player, Drew posted a long piece on the thing high elo players complain about most: you can be playing in Master lobbies while the client still says Emerald, and the LP grind between those two points feels like busywork.
[...] once we can tell that someone is really good, should we put them in fair games as quickly as possible, and should we treat the ability to play in a lobby as a legitimate claim to that rank? [...] The Ranked ladder is about being better than other players and winning games, not highscoring our MMR algorithm. The MMR algorithm is an input into those games. It shouldn't be the most important output of them.
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
What it means: MMR gets you into the right games fast, and LP makes you prove you can win them. Delete LP and the rank 1 player could win twenty games on a new account and log off holding the title. The grind is the part that makes the rank mean something.
The other half of it is blunter, and it's about what smurfs are really buying.
[...] I think part of what Master+ players want to experience when they make an alt account is getting to win more than half their games. [...] when people say things like "kill LP, it's bullshit", I wonder if they would actually prefer to have worse (or slower) skill evaluation, but they know it's a bad look to say that they prefer to have less-fair games.
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
26.16 shipped, and the fast start got defended
Modern LeaguePatch 26.16 went live on Wednesday. Mages got pulled back in bot lane, jungle pets scale better for AP and tank junglers, and Faerie Court came to Bel'Veth, Gwen and Lulu.
The louder conversation was about laning phase. Matt Leung-Harrison, who leads gameplay design, had explained why the game now rushes you out of base and into lane, and longtime players pushed back hard. He came back with the part that usually gets left out.
I wanted to add a quick clarification that we tested these homeguard and game start speed up changes extensively with our existing players prior to shipping them and they were perceived positively by that audience, which led to the decision to ship them. Existing SR players are the priority audience for our season start changes and a lot of them don't say anything on socials. [...]
Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, Leagueon X
What it means: the changes weren't aimed at new players over you. They tested well with existing players who don't post about it. He does grant that the split is real at the top of the ladder, where a faster start compresses the laning phase people play for.
Classic got its ninjas
League ClassicAkali, Kennen and Shen landed in League Classic in the same patch, running their original kits. We flagged these as the ones to watch in last week's roundup, and old Akali is still the one to watch.
Everything else Riot cleared up
Reports work, but not every one lands
Modern LeaguePlayer support takes millions of negative-gameplay reports a month, so review is filtered rather than manual. His summary of the gap: "reports do things" =/= "all of my reports will get actioned".
on XPerma bans aren't getting a five year review
Modern LeagueThree reasons given: it guts the deterrent, the staff time is worth more elsewhere, and most banned accounts reoffend. Bans from years ago won't be relooked at either.
on XA month ban, itemized in public
Modern LeagueAsked why a suspension was unfair, he listed the account's nine previous penalties for inting and griefing going back to 2025, then noted the next one is likely permanent.
on XDuo restrictions aren't going away
Modern LeagueRiot doesn't think a fair match exists when a duo has a big skill gap, so wide-gap pairs get Flex, Norms, ARAM and the rotating modes instead of solo queue.
on X
Ocean Song and Heartsong hit 26.17
Modern LeagueJinx and Soraka get Ocean Song, Seraphine gets Heartsong. From August 26 to September 23, Riot puts all of its Heartsong Seraphine proceeds plus a 2x match into its Social Impact Fund.
on X
A support invading a fed Quinn isn't a balance bug
Modern LeagueTwo players brought clips of supports bullying them in the jungle. He read both as skill gap rather than tuning, with a flat "very serious balance concern here,,,," for the second.
on XLate game frame drops are the effects, not your CPU
Modern LeagueMidgame fights pile every champion's effects onto one screen, which is where the frames go. He expects the same in ARAM Mayhem, where everyone's on screen from minute one.
on XTFT and Wild Rift both patched
Modern LeagueTFT 17.9 is the last dedicated Space Gods patch before Enchanted Wilds, and its PBE check-in covers bug fixes and MacOS support. Wild Rift 7.2c buffed Dragons.
on Riot's siteNext week
26.17 lands with the Ocean Song and Heartsong skins, and the mage changes from 26.16 will have enough games behind them to judge. Whether Drew keeps answering at this volume is the other thing worth watching.
Don't wait a week
The Red Tracker carries every one of these within minutes of Riot posting it, plus everything that didn't make the cut here. Filter by subject, search the archive, check it whenever a patch drops.
Open the Red Tracker
No comments:
Post a Comment
Feel free to comment or leave a message :)