Greedy Goblin

Saturday, December 3, 2016

Smoking gun on Riot rigging

I expected proving Riot rigging League of Legends to be a complicated data analysis. Instead, I just bumped into a smoking gun:
Yes, I was autofilled into Bot role, despite I picked Jungle and Top and both jungle and top players were glad to do ADC. There is no other explanation for this than the game wanted us to lose and placed everyone purposefully to the wrong lane.

15 comments:

Dàchéng said...

"There is no other explanation"? What about the one I gave you last week?

Here's a link to the comment in your last post on rigged lane-assignment.

Gevlon said...

This "explanation" is borderline trolling. Any dev trying to do that would be fired for total incompetence from a college startup, not a leading company.

Anonymous said...

Are you sure about that Gevlon?

Isnt your other mantra that devs are incompetent.

Your analysis is always fun to read, but, please, for goodness sake, do not get caught in another spiral of seeing conspiracies everywhere

Alessandro said...

If they match-rig I think it would be absurdly dirty of Riot.

I go with the "bad algorithm" theory. Maybe if it takes too long it gives up and fills completely random?

Hanura H'arasch said...

What's wrong with the explanation that both jungle and top simply would rather play bot themselves than see bot feed horribly? Riot's system only let's you choose 2 roles, instead of ordering all 5, so it cannot account for such scenarios very well.

Unknown said...

The other players got their 1st or 2nd pick, possibly also being auto-fill protected. You weren't protected, queued for two popular roles, and both your roles went to 1st or 2nd pick people. You got auto-filled. Bot is second behind support for auto-fill, and happens fairly often.

Sorry that doesn't fit your "CCP Falcon pinged his buddy at Riot to keep me out of Gold V" narrative, but that's just how the queue system works.

Anonymous said...

Well if we think consequences of them doing what Gevlon supposes.
Why do it? It keeps customers happy thus making money.
Is it difficult? I would say it would be extremely easy for them.
What about bad rep if we get caught? Most likely nearly no one will care and they still have plausible deniability.

So why wouldn't they do it? Because of 'sportsmanship'? I think that is more far fetched.

In case they aren't doing it yet as a company they should. And as large company as Riot is there is surely a bunch of people thinking how to increase profit.

Trees said...

Devs are incompetent when it comes to balance and game design because those things don't generate money after a while on these long-lasting multiplayer games. Something like match rigging they are very competent on, because that is what creates the addictive nature that these games rely on to be long-lasting.

Imagine you are trying to please a corporate boss of a MOBA company, do you think that boss cares about champ X or Tank Y being OP? Or do you think he cares about the match making system keeping as many players playing as possible (and eventually buying skins)? Of course the boss is going to want you to focus on the option that generates him more cash.

Smokeman said...

It's tough to say. The easiest solution would be a single pass that fails as demonstrated.

A more complicated algorithm would do multiple passes to prevent anyone from getting autofilled unless they specifically request that in exchange for a bonus reward. And that would be pretty easy. You have 5 players. There are 5 roles. Pass one puts the first player that wants a role into it. Pass two swaps players that would autofill to their first choice if the player in the first choice can be moved to their second. Pass three is like two, but uses the player's second choice and refuses to knock out someone from their first choice. If all three passes fail to fill all 5 roles, autofill is used.

(Disclaimer. I did not test that algorithm. I have no idea if it would really work or be better. It's just what I could grab off my ass at the moment.)

You would hope they would have higher dev standards? But I've seen stupider shit.

All you've really proven here is that their algorithm is shit, not why.

There are many reasons why they won't or can't fix this bug. For example, what if the guy in charge developed the first, buggy algorithm and refuses to assign anyone to fix it?

Provi Miner said...

from what I see I am nearing agreement with gob's on this:

why put a player into an auto fill if you have another player with that as his second option. so either it is intentional or that's the worst form of filling incompetence possible.

Why wouldn't the code move the player who selected ADC as his #2 and move gobs to a position he picked.

I am not saying give gob's preference I am saying if you can fill a team with everyone getting their first or second choice you should be doing that. Clearly here the team builder ignores a players secondary choice once it fills a slot. Either rigging or some really shitty coding.

Gevlon said...

@Hanura, Syncaine: You seem to ignore that the jungler said "ADC is my second position"

Anonymous said...

@Gevlon

There's no way the matchmaker would bother with the sort of behavior you're talking about. It's not doing any sort of complicated calculations to match players together, it's just sequentially pulling players from the front of a queue. It's less like a sorting robot and more like a sausage machine. It pumps players into the package in whatever order they are in the queue it's pulling from, then moves on.

What you're talking about it doing here is complicated, not to mention self-defeating. What's the point of putting you in a slot you don't want if there's someone else in your team that's willing to take that position? If I was going to rig it, I'd make sure that doesn't happen. Also, If I have an algorithm running to make bad teams, I'd also have to run one making good teams. That's a lot of extra drag on the server for something that's not really a good way to rig things.

I mean, why bother with all of that when I can just rig the formulas for matching up teams?

Anonymous said...

So this whole blog entry is about what someone said in the game lobby ?

If anything, people want to win games in the first place and that involves sacrifices such as leaving their favored spot to someone else.

Anonymous said...

Not filling in the roles correctly is not evidence of rigging. It's only rigging if it's done more for one side and the other. Matchmaker is still fair if it autofills both sides equally. Besides giving fair matches riot matchmaker must also give players short queues, that's why they have the autofill in the first place.

In the mean time, I watched some of your replays. You have many things to improve upon. I am wondering if you are going to climb faster if you focus on improving rather than trying manipulate your team. In the replay I saw you barely doing anything, while being carried by one of the teammates. I am going to watch some more of your replays to see if there is a recurring pattern.

Unknown said...

"ADC is my second position" you dont know if he really selected ADC as second.

god, how many users at my work, swear they selected something and the program is wrong and then you see, they "lied" or didnt know or whatever