Is there any point to honor the friends I play with at the end of every League game? It seems like the system would be totally broken if those 'points' counted just the same as those from multiple, random partners. Does the system just discount their worth heavily, or into oblivion?
League-of-legends – Is honoring people in a premade group pointless
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Zileas, design director for LoL, explains:
The system guesses how good you are based on who you beat and who you lose to. It tries to make matches where it thinks you have a 50/50 chance of winning.
It knows pre-made teams are an advantage, so it gives you tougher opponents when you are in a pre-made team. We did fancy math to make the pre-made teams vs solo players matching fair. I even ran it by two math Ph.Ds and they said it made sense!
You can read the full shebang here. Basically, a custom ELO derivative is used to rank players and power the matchmaking system, so that you are paired with similarly ranked teams.
In extreme brief:
- The team will be placed at an average of the individual Elos plus a small bonus. If there are only two people, this means you'll be closer to the higher of the two than the lower. For all other cases, it depends on the various Elos involved.
- Matchmaking will evaluate the team's average Elo and find another team with the same (or close) average.
- Not really; due to the averaging and bonuses, it's difficult to genuinely unbalance the system in a way that's meaningful.
And now, the "TS;DR" version ;-):
Source, from which I paraphrase extensively.
There are three cases worth considering (all other cases are some amalgam of these):
- Everyone's in solo-queue
- Some arbitrary number are in a pre-made team between 2 and 4 players (or only 2 for Twisted Treeline)
- A five-man pre-made team (or, in the case of Twisted Treeline, a 3-man)
The goal of the matchmaking system is to find what is approximately the team's Elo and find a team with a comparable Elo. That translates into having a 50-50 chance of either team winning. The longer you're in queue, the greater the difference between two teams' approximate Elo is allowed, thus the greater difference in your estimated percentage chance to win.
At the root of the question is how that number is determined.
In the root-case of everyone being in solo-queue, in any game type, the system first locates other people approximately your same Elo then loads you all into a team and averages the Elo of each member. Once it has two teams "in queue" with approximately the same team Elo, it will match them into a game.
On the other extreme, if you're a 5-man pre-made team, the same process is followed except the team is already full (so it doesn't need to locate other players for the team), and the team Elo gets a small bonus (described below). In ranked games, you will only be matched against another 5-man pre-made team. In normal games, I believe (and ought be corrected or confirmed with an edit and source citation) that 5-man pre-made teams are preferred but you don't necessarily get matched with one.
In the middle, things are slightly more complicated. Once you enter a queue with teammates, everyone's Elo is adjusted to be the same value. That value is the average of everyone's Elo plus, again, a bonus depending on several factors (again, see below). Once you're all in the pool of active game-seekers, it locates other players who have approximately the same Elo as your adjusted Elo. Obviously, when it examines another player's Elo it could be looking at their adjusted Elo, too, in the case that you have a team of 3 and a team of 2 being put on the same team of 5. Once it has created a full team of five, it does a final averaging of the Elo everyone entered the team time (adjusted or not). That final averaging is your team's Elo. It then locates another team with the same team Elo and BAM: puts you in a game.
The question now is what kind of bonuses you get. Riot won't release the exact values, and there are a number of cases to consider. I'll let the a different source do the talking:
...Riot performed analysis on several hundreds of thousands of games to identify how much of a skill advantage this gives people, and found that a variety of factors influence how much of an advantage being a pre-made is, ranging from the size of the pre-made (2,3,4 or 5 people), to the skills of the players involved, to combinations of pros and newbs, to other more subtle factors that must be used as well. Having found these advantages, it is known how much we need to boost a rating by in a team to make a fair match, and apply the appropriate, mathematically justified adjustment. These results in some cases are very surprising (while still appearing correct in the statistics)
- 5-man pre-mades are only moderately stronger than solo queuers
- Partial pre-mades are only a little bit of an advantage.
- New players don't benefit much from being in a pre-made, while experts benefit a lot.
Finally, with all of that information, we can address the question of "Isn't matchmaking somehow unbalanced?"
"Unbalanced" we can safely take to mean that it grants advantages to one team or person over another. Since virtually any "person" advantage is also a "team" advantage (you don't gain or lose Elo individually; only as a whole team) I think it's safe to say we don't need to cover them individually. One assumption I am making is that Elo is a fair approximation for skill. Disagree all you like, but some assumption of the system's validity needs to be made in order to discuss it.
Riot obviously has gone through significant effort to make sure that the system is difficult to abuse. I also won't speculate on measures we're not fully aware of (Newbie Island and abuse detection). However, two people of inordinate skill differential (say, 0 and 1800) would end up at 900 + some arbitrary bonus if they queue'd together. If you have three people at 0 and one 1800, you would get 450 + some (larger) bonus. An 1800 Elo player can generally be expected to carry a 450 Elo game and a 0 Elo player is unlikely going to be able to throw it. In this sense, the system as presented can be abused.
If we take a more realistic case, however, of an 1800 Elo player helping a 1200 Elo player (let's say their Elo has stabilized; I know you get significant (40+) Elo gains and losses early on), the difference is less pronounced. That would put them at 1500 Elo, plus a bonus, which a 1200 Elo player can certainly throw due to the ability of the 1500 Elo players to take advantage of their mistakes (something that 450 Elo players have a harder time doing). However, the 1800 Elo player is going to have a harder time carrying the game alone.
You can see that, even without extra knowledge of the system, it's hard to make the situation measurably "unbalanced" for the majority of cases.
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Best Answer
Actually it's not pointless and honoring a friend isn't against the rules. "Honor trading" was rampant when the honor system was first added to the game, but not because of friend's honoring each other.
It was rampant because players would trade honor by telling teammates and opponents alike that they would honor them in return for being honored. Regardless of them being good teammates/opponents, being fun to play with, or the player being helpful by offering their knowledge in a constructive way to teammates.
This is what led to many players having the honor badges very early on when they would not have otherwise (trolls/bad players) and many of them were punished by RIOT for this via bans and the loss of the honor they had accumulated up to that point(this included the badges as well).
In regards to the effective weighting of honor from friends vs. players you don't know, it is calculated with a few things.
1) How often the player that is honoring you, honors players in general?
Say that all four of your teammates honor you for the same thing, "Teamwork". Now three of those players consistently honor other players every game, they enjoy playing with people and what have you. But, the fourth guy on your team rarely honors people, and in fact you are the first player they have honored in over a week. The honor you received from that fourth teammate is effectively worth more towards your honor badge then the other 3 combined. This is because the more you honor the less your honor is worth.
2) Is the player that is honoring you a friend or a player you were matched with randomly?
This one is fairly straightforward. As most of us know, playing a game with random players can be a crap shoot, and as such, having a random player enjoy the game they played with you and rewarding you with honor will generally have a heavier weight towards your honor badges than your friends that you play with everyday. It is still possible to get honor from a friend that is worth more than a random player's honor, but this would take into account factors from the first part of the calculation as well.
So in conclusion, honoring your friends is perfectly okay. It is NOT worth it to do it every game you play with them due to the reasons given above, but honoring a friend you haven't played with in a while can still positively increase their honor towards the goal of getting an honor badge(again, after the factors have been calculated).
Even with 58 Teamwork Honor, I have still yet to receive the Teamwork Badge(even though my brother received his with far less honor).