For a long time, there has been a rumor among players of League of Legends about the Loser Queue. A player has now examined this rumor through extensive analysis.
What is this rumor? For quite some time, a persistent rumor has held among LoL players: Riot Games deliberately influences the outcome of matches with a Loser Queue
. Even prominent players like NoWay have complained about the matchmaking in the game.
What is the Loser Queue
?
- The matchmaking in LoL is manipulated
- When on a losing streak, players are deliberately placed on a team with worse players
- Players who have a winning streak should win more often
- Both are supposed to bind players more to the game
The user renecotyfanboy
has investigated this rumor by analyzing games and presenting his findings on Reddit. A year ago, he conducted such an analysis to refute this rumor.
178,500 games analyzed
How did the player approach the analysis? To investigate whether there is a Loser Queue
in League of Legends, the user randomly analyzed 178,500 games from 2,100 players across all elos. For evaluation, he used statistical methods, which he explains in more detail on his GitHub.
Furthermore, the user explains that it is not possible to verify whether the games were balanced from the start. For this reason, he focused on examining correlations between the games.
The result, however, shows exactly what many players were probably already aware of.
What is the result of the analysis? In short, it turns out that the existence of a Loser Queue
in League of Legends is very unlikely. In the user’s analysis, it was shown that the strongest correlation always exists only with the previous game. He found that players slightly decrease their win rate after a defeat and slightly increase it after a victory.
If there were a Loser Queue
, one would expect that the change in win rate would be higher and the length of correlation greater, the player said. He himself states that his analysis does not refute the Loser Queue
100% but shows that it either does not exist or is very inefficient.
The result seems not to surprise many players. Thus, the user Wd91
writes on Reddit, that it is obvious that there is no Loser Queue, and he would only convince those who were already aware of this result.
The rumor about the Loser Queue is so persistent among players that Riot itself has already commented on it. They also said that there is no Loser Queue in League of Legends. What Riot specifically says about the rumors can be read here: LoL developers say that the “Loser’s Queue” does not exist – players say: “I refuse to believe that”
