I saw this video, and while a lot of people don’t agree with the concept I honestly think it makes sense after watching this. I think everyone should check it out. https://youtu.be/ZE-iFTT3P7w

Basically, the gist of the video is that riot is a company, and like any other company their main goal at the end of the day is to make money. There have been studies done by games like apex legends which have concluded by a land slide that more revenue is obtained by using “engagement based matchmaking”

• basically what this means is that you’re not queued into the most statistically equal lobby, but rather you’re queued into a lobby that is either in favor of you winning or losing according to which outcome will keep you playing longer.

If you win all of your games and go up to your genuine rank immediately the game will become boring, you’ll quit, and in turn you won’t see the new guns they release. That’s a loss of profit. The game can’t just let you have a fair shot of winning all of your games. BUT, the game also can’t just let you lose every game because then you’ll rage quit. There’s an algorithm that is actually used by apex legends (they’ve admitted to it) that purposefully will match you against people you’ll either win or lose to in order to keep you where you are as long as possible, to keep you logging in every day so that you’ll see every gun collection released. Of course this doesn’t apply to Smurfs because an algorithm can’t control the skill of an immortal vs a silver, BUT, in your genuine rank it is definitely an effective algorithm, and again, has been proven to exponentially increase the revenue of a company in comparison to the skill based method.

E-sports is less than 10% of riot’s revenue. They don’t give a shit about competitive integrity as much as they say they do. Just look at league for example, it’s known notoriously for being one of the most addictive games a person can get into. You’d have to be stupid to think the company that engineered an addiction masterpiece isn’t going to apply that to other games aswell. They have psychologists literally employed to keep you playing and spending my friends.

That’s not to say competitive is useless, that your skill doesn’t matter for winning a match, and that you can’t still have fun striving for a rank. It’s just to note that there’s more malicious things underneath the surface going on and that if you’re getting sweeped half the time there’s a good reason to not just call yourself dog shit. Skill still matters, but there definitely is a system and it’s main goal is to keep you where you are, and to keep you grinding everyday so that you can see those sweet, sweet gun bundles.

I’d also like to mention smurfing, to add another layer of logic here. Hard rank resents aren’t a thing to make players prove their rank again. Hard rank resets are a thing to keep you grinding. Again, they don’t want you to hit your preferred rank. If you hit the rank you want and stop playing as often because you finally have that satisfaction that’s less money they’re going to be getting. They need to hard reset you to not only get you back on the game to achieve your placements but to also get you addicted to grinding. If they ACTUALLY cared about people playing in their “deserved” rank, and were doing rank resets for that reason, than smurfing would be bannable. Riot (the company, not the devs) actually loves smurfing because 2 accounts = more likely to spend more money.

This is why you’re going to have teammates who quite literally don’t even know what they’re doing, against players who are going crazy. Is that fair? Obviously not, and the fact that you can get people who are so much less skilled in a game that claims to have “skill based match making” is proof that the algorithm doesn’t really, genuinely want you to have a fair game 100% of the time. If match making was FAIR, Smurf queues would exist as a default due to those accounts clearly outSKILLING their lobbies. A Smurf being in your lobby is proof alone that skill is not a criteria for how you’re sorted into a game, and an equal match is not riot’s main priority

• I’d also like to mention that I’m ascendent, so about top 5-7% of players. I’m definitely not upset at my rank and feel very satisfied with it because I actually started as an iron in the beta and climbed all the way here. The only reason I made this post wasn’t to complain, but to inform everyone on something I found incredibly fascinated regarding how we view the game. It explains a lot of things imo, such as why smurfing is an issue still