A wonderful day of Ranked

[v8mark]

PocketCullbeetle OP

[Lurker]

Closer in spirit to "hot hand" theory in basketball shooting.

If your true skill level is fixed, then it doesn't matter when you play. Likewise, if your true skill level varies so quickly that trial N can give you no useful information about trial N+1, it doesn't matter when you play.

But if true skill level varies slowly enough, then Bayes theory tells you that a win streak means that the odds are better than normal that you are near the top of your range (so you should keep playing), where a losing streak gives you the opposite information.

I wouldn't expect the effect to be very large: maybe you win 51% of your games when you are hot, and 49% when you are cold. And there's the additional problem that as your elo goes up, the competition gets stronger.

As far as I know, studies looking for evidence of a hot hand have not found supporting evidence. Pascal's wager applies -- if playing when in luck is probably break even but might be favorable, that's still a better return than the certainty of breaking even.

"Luck isn't logical, but that's no reason not to be logical about luck."

I've actually found one valid use for the "hot streak" strategy: In World of Warcraft -

Ok, so this isn't very useful because the best possible advice re: WoW is "don't play WoW", but perhaps you'll find it interesting on a theoretical level.

In WoW, the main form of PvP is "battlegrounds", which pits equal numbers of players against each other on an isolated map with specific objectives. The battlegrounds solo queue ranks players solely by how much gear they have farmed, not by how much they actually win. Imagine if you will LoL solo queue with no ELO sorting, and 25 players per team instead of 5.

Oh and instead of picking from the entire player pool for both teams, it's always Horde vs Alliance, so I suppose the analogy would be if you had to sign up as either Noxian or Ionian when you created your account, and only ever got matched with players who chose the same, against people who chose the other.

One of the battlegrounds is called Isle of Conquest, an interesting mashup of "king of the hill" and "storm the fort", with various objectives in contested territory giving different siege equipment to whichever side controls them. The specifics are not very important, the important thing is that there are several different strategies you can pursue, let's call them "rock", "paper" and "scissors" ("lizard", "spock", "mushroom", etc).

Sorry, did I say strategy? What you get in solo queue is an amorhpous blob of ELO hell shouting things like "omg noob everyone knows u always play scissors!" at itself.

So, let's say the prevailing culture of the Alliance is "scissors or gtfo". You log in as Alliance and play one game.

If the prevailing culture of the Horde is "paper > all, u stupid fag", you win: Keep playing.

If the prevailing culture of the Horde is "rock=win, scissorz/paper=sux", you lose: Stop playing.

Over the course of several days other somewhat smart (they are playing WoW solo queue voluntarily, so they can't be all that bright) people more idealistic and/or patient than you will log in, play and try to explain to people that if they only tried paper, they would actually win. At first they will be shouted down and called all manner of names, but gradually more and more people will try out these new ideas, and eventually they will realize how the game works: "play paper or diaf, u fail at life".

You log in for another trial game, and presto, you're winning again! Until the Horde goes through their own cultural shift to scissors, that is...

[Tyrmith]

Some days I really like Riot employees. Little kid wines at being banned "for no reason" for trolling ranked games and gets awesomely shut down.

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/show...st29484587

[spellman]

How come my Tribunal reports are never that easy...

[Speaker]

Some days I really like Riot employees. Little kid wines at being banned "for no reason" for trolling ranked games and gets awesomely shut down.

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/show...st29484587

That red post was amazing.

[Dantski]

Awesome Riot post

Did that complainer post again protesting his innocence or did he just call the Riot guy names?

[Tyrmith]

Debilina continues on apparently oblivious a couple pages later:

All of the reports you've posted were in fact over my non-standard champion and role choices. Thank you for taking your time to respond and thank you for showing for everyone to see that people do in fact get banned for not playing the accepted meta.

I do encourage everyone to go read these reports that this kind person wrote. Filled with rage and accusations stemming merely from not playing standard roles.

I refuse to stop playing non standard roles.

Read the reports, they're all about not picking and playing the meta. Every single one. Non-meta bans, non-meta champion choices, non-meta roaming.

[Deceptus]

Debil = "idiot" in Polish, "weak" in Spanish, apparently. Real name.