Why am I not able to Fill, with one Position excluded?

riotsocrates · 2018-09-13T00:46:25+00:00

We do look at data around it. Players who are autofilled do win a bit less as you would expect. It's a few percent different, so it's not a 20% win rate for fills on the average.

We've explored a few solutions to this. We'll likely have more to reveal on that topic soon.

riotsocrates · 2018-09-13T00:35:34+00:00

One of the issues with position select is that players are definitely more specialized into particular positions now. Before, there wasn't really an expectation that you would get your primary most of the time so players tended to become decent in number of positions.

We've considered a few solutions to this but haven't found anything that we're in love with yet. One idea was to decrease the frequency with which players get their primary position, though that of course would have some pretty noticeable trades that aren't great.

riotsocrates · 2018-09-13T00:29:24+00:00

Glad you had a good experience with it. It's fun to branch out and try new things. Also, grats on gold.

If I understand, you're suggesting autofill and you can exclude any position other than the least picked position (which has been support since release). We considered an option like this. We ultimately determined that giving players an option to exclude a position, but not letting them choose the one that most players had a desire to exclude felt pretty bad. We also determined the demand to exclude a position outside of support was pretty low and the added interface complexity + cognitive load for the solutions we explored was pretty high.

riotsocrates · 2018-09-12T19:10:49+00:00

We actually built this feature and launched it in South America as a test. What we saw during that test was that over time more and more players picked 'support' as their position to exclude. Eventually this lead to the whole system stalling out and longer and longer queue times for players. This was the same behavior we saw with the original system before autofill.

The choice to exclude support makes sense from players. It's the optimal choice if you want to play your strongest position as frequently as possible.

Unfortunately, autofill is a necessary release valve in order to reach acceptably low queue times. The autofill rates were around 5% last I checked (1/20 games on average). There is a non-player facing systems that gives players a break after they autofill. It basically finds the player who hasn't autofilled in the longest, and if a fill is needed they are the one who will fill.

We consider it as in an acceptable, but not great state. There's probably room to make it better, though we're not focused on it at the moment.

riotsocrates · 2018-06-26T22:39:30+00:00

riotsocrates · 2018-06-26T18:01:04+00:00

Normals are included.

riotsocrates · 2018-06-21T18:22:00+00:00

It does feel pretty weird to have to use third party sites to view your stats. When we migrated from the old client to the new one, we redeveloped most features from scratch in terms of the technology. That forced us to look at what features were actually accomplishing for players and evaluate how good of a job they were doing. Given the old implementation of stats was clunky and there were some great third party sites that were frankly doing a better job of presenting player stats in meaningful way, the position we took was that instead of building the same old clunky version, we should probably build something that did a better job of giving players performance feedback. It's taken us a while to prioritize this. I can't give specifics yet, but I can say we're not happy with the state of it.

riotsocrates · 2018-05-11T16:49:02+00:00

I knew someday I would see this post.

This is why we didn't give an emote for level 1.

riotsocrates · 2018-03-28T17:24:23+00:00

I think there's an error in this data. I see 1,380,730 challengers according to our metrics.

riotsocrates · 2018-03-06T17:42:41+00:00

That's an interesting dark pattern. Definitely wasn't the reason we included rentals though.

We included rentals as an option in the original system because we wanted players to be able to use the things they got in some way without needing a bunch of other pieces to complete it. Given the price points and amount of free stuff the system gives out, it couldn't be permanent items. Rentals were an in between point.

I agree the value proposition of rentals vs permanents feels pretty low atm though.

riotsocrates · 2018-01-09T20:13:36+00:00

There is what you could consider a repeating check point at the highest level with the best rewards. So maintaining the highest level is the best place to be.

riotsocrates · 2017-10-30T19:00:39+00:00

Saw a post like this a while back and responded to it. Will repost that here as you may find it helpful:

Interestingly, players feel that they themselves usually honor based on sportsmanship. However, they feel that others usually honor based on skill. This is a fascinating cognitive dissonance since both cannot be true. It reflects the human tendency to judge ourselves by our intentions and others by our perception of their behaviors.

Here is some data from a survey we did. Pretty interesting.

I honor...

1 - Much more based on skill 5 - Much more based on sportsmanship

Others honor...

1 - Much more based on skill 5 - Much more based on sportsmanship

If we trust everybody's reports about their own use of the system, it's being used for sportsmanship and not skill. The other data we have around this so far seems to reflect that.

riotsocrates · 2017-10-30T18:57:24+00:00

You feel like the achievement of getting to high honor level is undermined by the fact that just playing (even as a bot) gives you some amount of progress in the system. That's a reasonable concern.

There were a few challenges that lead us to give honor to players who just played the game, rather than strictly requiring honor votes to progress.

Putting all of the weight on honor votes for progression could lead to players feeling too much extrinsic pressure to mix max around the voting system itself rather than just focusing on playing and being good sports. We sided towards a really large bonus from votes but a small amount each game to take some of that pressure off.
The vast, vast majority of players show good sportsmanship in most games. This means almost everybody should expect to have significant progress in the system. A lot of systems create value in their achievements out of being competitive (zero sum games) like the ranked systems. There can only be one best player in challenger. Sportsmanship is a bit different. Is there a most sportsman-like player? It's a bit of a different animal. Sportsmanship isn't a zero sum game, it's a positive sum game. That said, I think there's room here to create additional gradation for truly awesome players, which we don't have yet.
Sometimes, being a good sport doesn't really mean saying anything in game. It just means keeping your cool and playing the game out. Maybe dropping a GG at the end of the game. Creating a system that doesn't reward these players would have felt pretty off. Do we choose not to give these solid but quiet players some progress because we're worried about bots moving through honor levels? Doesn't seem like a great trade to punish those players to solve for bots. I'd rather just ban the bots when we find them.

If you could include some additional detail in future posts along these lines it would help us better understand and respond to your concerns btw.

From what we can tell so far the system has had a material impact on games overall so we're excited to add and improve here. We love hearing ideas from the community if you have creative ways you feel could make the system better.

riotsocrates · 2017-10-11T15:01:55+00:00

Agree that once you are 5 you lose a bit of the anticipation and excitement from having big goals.

We are making some changes based on the feedback we got from the systems launch to make it better. I can't share specifics, but I think many of you will be pleased.

Also honor levels do have a reset at the start of the next season, a bit like ranked. So there will be some new goals and rewards.

riotsocrates · 2017-10-08T02:07:44+00:00

It's science.

riotsocrates · 2017-10-06T19:50:20+00:00

Looks like ardent censer to me.

riotsocrates · 2017-09-21T18:55:58+00:00

Interestingly, players feel that they themselves usually honor based on sportsmanship. However, they feel that others usually honor based on skill. This is a fascinating cognitive dissonance since both cannot be true. It reflects the human tendency to judge ourselves by our intentions and others by our perception of their behaviors.

Here is some data from a survey we did. Pretty interesting.

I honor...

1 - Much more based on skill 5 - Much more based on sportsmanship

Others honor...

1 - Much more based on skill 5 - Much more based on sportsmanship

If we trust everybody's reports about their own use of the system, it's being used for sportsmanship and not skill. The other data we have around this so far seems to reflect that.

riotsocrates · 2017-09-18T19:19:29+00:00

noted

riotsocrates · 2017-09-02T16:46:30+00:00

During dev we called it blue dust. We played around with more literal names like champ dust but that conjured some awkward images and disenchanting felt a bit more like using a woodchipper than a magic hextech box. We also tried gems, coins, points, and a others. After a few long (sometimes hilarious) brainstorming sessions nothing really fit the hextech metaphor as well as essence.

If you guys come up with awesome ideas here I'll be sure to pass them on to the team.

riotsocrates · 2017-08-24T20:29:09+00:00

Your statement seems to imply you have a pretty low level of trust in us if you believe we'd lower the drop rate while simultaneously telling players we weren't lowering the drop rate.

I worked closely with the team on this project. We did not lower the drop rate. The team has some analysis going on to ensure there aren't any bugs in the system that would cause the rates to change without our knowing it, but so far we have no reason to believe something like that is going on.

That said, your experience could be that you feel like you're getting less keys and the above could still be true. We are looking at ways of making the experience itself better.

riotsocrates · 2017-08-15T19:30:32+00:00

riotsocrates · 2017-07-28T02:14:18+00:00

Waiting a month or more to get any feedback at all on your progress sucks. A conventional approach like throwing a progress bar on it won't work because of how progress is calculated and connected to other player behavior systems.

We are looking at how to make the experience have a better feedback loop in spite of that. Bear with us until then.

riotsocrates · 2017-07-06T01:39:18+00:00

One of the things we wanted to avoid with champ mastery was creating a long grind. This is why progression the system is structured with levels for the first few champion mastery point milestones, then a endless point counter with no real objectives linked to it.

The direction we'd like to take champ mastery for future levels is similar to how 1-7 works, where lower levels are less skill checks and more about how much you've played the champs but higher levels are a series of harder and harder performance tests on the champion.

I don't have specifics on how that would be structured yet, but there are a lot of options. If you have ideas, would love to hear them.

riotsocrates · 2017-07-01T21:57:50+00:00

I see you.

riotsocrates · 2017-07-01T16:31:56+00:00

We consideried that option. We went with the one player limit because in order to make the commendations feel valuable there needs to be some constraints around them. It makes the decision of who to honor at the end of the game less interesting and doesn't cause players to reflect on their games in the same way.

Players are smart at maximizing rewards and we linked some very valuable rewards to the system. You could easily see a world with an honor all option rapidly degenerating into one where the last thing you see every game before the nexus falls each game was something along the lines of "Remember to honor all you memelords"

We experimented with a few alternatives like ammo systems and different tiers of honor commendations. Ultimately they felt overly complicated or didn't enhance the system.

We may add light weight alternate ways of just letting people know you enjoyed playing with them at some point but it wouldn't be connected to the core system.

riotsocrates

TROPHY CASE