Ranked Inflation Analysis (Effort Post)
I'm going to break this into qualitative arguments I have seen/heard and quantitative data that reflects current state. Feel free to skip to the graph/data below if you don't care about the qualitative arguments.
I am writing this because I have seen a lot of people discussing how elo inflation has hit league hard this season. Comments like "masters is meaningless" or "I was silver and now i'm plat and I don't feel like I really deserve it." I have not seen anyone discussing actual numbers so I figured I would take it upon myself to create some quantitative analysis of the issue. I didn't want to endlessly scrape for data, and I couldn't find reliable season 15 rank distributions so I will be comparing Season 14 Split 3 to Season 16. If someone provides me the season 15 numbers, I'd be happy to update :)
I also did this for NA because I'm in the NA server, but if it is well received I could try for other regions. If you guys help provide me with rank distribution data that would be greatly appreciated :)
Qualitative arguments
- MMR changes have lead to patches where people were essentially getting +30LP -10LP for wins and losses, so if you played on the right patch, your elo would be inflated.
Based on my memory (cause I have no recorded evidence), I remember toward the beginning of the season post-placements I was getting closer to +35 and -7 for wins and losses. Recently I played on a separate account where I saw +30 and -10 still post placements. This would obviously frontload some level of inflation at the beginning of the season and people's ranked journey; however, due to decay, if someone got somewhere they couldn't maintain, they would have ranked back down at the higher end of the ladder. Now if someone got to let's say Masters and was emerald before, if they continue playing, they should trend back down to emerald given enough games. The only way I think this wouldn't happen is if a significant portion of players were inflated enough to essentially artificially maintain the higher elo. It is essentially like transplanting enough of the emerald players into diamond/masters would make it so that game quality decreased to the point where if you were "truly emerald" the higher rank games would still reflect emerald game play so you could maintain that rank.
Assuming there is a league algo that aims to give players 50% wr, any amount of higher LP gains would place you higher and make it easier to maintain. So this could potentially lead to inflation of elo, but if there is not an algorithm that creates teams with 50% wr in mind, they should essentially fall back down after playing enough games.
Double LP with autofill and no lp loss leads to players being at higher elos than they should be. I don't fully understand this one because this should about equally affect all players assuming they have similar fill rates. At masters+ when you start encountering higher fill rates, it may be more inflationary; however, I think realistically if you're at Masters+, the autofill MMR mechanic will not appreciably affect your mmr/lp. I think I have only seen double LP like 2-4 times from diamond to masters personally. Also, if you're getting autofilled to inflate your LP, you're probably getting stomped back down if you're an emerald player that is trending too high. At middle ranks like silver-plat where game quality is relatively similar, it is probably easier to maintain that higher lp after getting artificially inflated by double LP and loss prevention.
I feel like I have seen little discussion outside of the beginning of the season regarding role quests and meta shift. This might benefit specific champions more than others or specific roles more than others due to imbalances in game impact due to role bonuses. Like how we all love seeing 7 item mages in bot lane. Or turbo scalers at level 20 in top lane (like Mel, veigar, brand bot or kayle top). I think this is probably the hardest hitter in terms of elo inflation, but I don't have numbers because that would be a nightmare to tease apart. If someone wants to look at every characters win rate at the last patch of 15 and first patch of 16 and compare which champions/roles benefitted more and see how many of those players specifically reached higher rank, be my guest lol.
Quantitative
The numbers are % of the player base in each rank distribution. If there is a negative in the difference column, this means that rank grew. So for example, in iron the difference is 12.5%. That is a decrease of 12.5% points. For Silver, it is - 0.74 so silver got bigger by 0.74% points.
| Rank | Season 14 S3 (%) | Season 16 ($) | Difference ($) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Iron | 15.04 | 2.55 | 12.49 |
| Bronze | 21.19 | 16.30 | 4.89 |
| Silver | 22.16 | 22.90 | -0.74 |
| Gold | 18.66 | 24.40 | -5.74 |
| Platinum | 12.08 | 18.10 | -6.02 |
| Emerald | 8.14 | 10.80 | -2.66 |
| Diamond | 2.23 | 3.73 | -1.50 |
| Master | 0.42 | 1.10 | -0.68 |
| GM | 0.05 | 0.07 | -0.02 |
| Challenger | 0.02 | 0.03 | -0.01 |
The numbers show the following based on ranked distribution:
Iron: Basically disappeared. 7x smaller from bottom 15% of the players to bottom 2.5% of the players.
Bronze: Got smaller too. From 21% --> 16%.
Silver -->Diamond : Significant increase of these players.
Master went from top 0.4% to top 1.1%.
GM and Challenger relatively untouched.
WHAT DOES THE LEAGUE COMMUNITY WANT?
I think this is an important discussion to be had. Does the community want a larger iron player base? I don't know if anyone really cares about iron as a rank. Do we care if silver -->Plat has way more players? I feel like the narrative has always been that these players are essentially the same and game quality is similar anyway so that seems moot. Does masters really mean nothing? I think this is silly because when it comes to the top 1%, that is still impressive. We talk about the top 1% of people when it is regarding income for a reason, no ;)? I don't think the masters rank is meaningless. Sure it is objectively LESS impressive than previous seasons (although I saw somewhere that one season/split was top 0.86% for masters but maybe people were complaining then too?) Do we want masters to have a fixed number of players like GM or challenger so it is less susceptible to MMR system fluctuations/inflation? Maybe sure. Idk if it is really that important either way. But what do we want from the system before we change it? I think that is the most important part of the discussion and something that needs to be fleshed out. Do we just want to complain? Cause I'm also down for that too tbh.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading. Please be nice with criticisms and limit insults etc, I am also a person smile. :)
If I missed anything, please feel free to let me know and I will add my thoughts on it.
<3 KleanKhemist