If you’ve played League of Legends at any point over the last few years, chances are you’ve run into some matchmaking problems of various intrusiveness. For some players, it’s the off-role parity being way off, with multiple teammates playing an auto-filled role. For others, it’s the massive LP gap between players in a game, leading to skill imbalance. LoL developers had planned to tackle these issues plus more in the most recent update to the game, but ran into some significant backend issues, leading to them being delayed.
League of Legends has taken on a big project updating ranked requirements and matchmaking. In patch 14.15, Riot Games took aim at “smurfs,” higher-skilled players deliberately playing in low-rated lobbies to stomp out lesser-skilled players.
Then, Riot announced that in patch 14.16, matchmaking would be further updated in the popular MOBA. Specifically, Riot is focusing on how the game balances teams in terms of players being slotted into a role they didn’t queue up for. With the new system, teams should be balanced more often, with both teams having the same number of off-role players to ensure parity.
Beyond that, Riot also revealed they are reducing the size of LP gaps between players in a game and decreasing the red vs. blue side imbalance, specifically in higher MMR lobbies.
However, just before patch 14.16 went live on Wednesday, August 14, Riot’s lead game developer Matt ‘Proxzon’ Leung-Harrison revealed the developers encountered “some issues” that delayed the improvements.
What those issues are remains to be seen. However, League of Legends is quite an old game that needs lots of tinkering on the back end to be brought up to speed to sometimes compete with contemporary games. Phroxzon ensures that the matchmaking updates will hit live servers when the next patch, 14.17, arrives on Wednesday August 28.
Until that next patch finally goes live, you’ll still have to live with the same old imbalanced lobbies.
If you’re interested in LoL cosmetics, here is a list of all the League of Legends skins that are on sale. Alternatively, if you like to grind for the finer things in life, we have a rundown of the current LoL Mythic shop, too.
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