Riot Games Announce MMR & Matchmaking Changes Coming In League of Legends Season 14

The League of Legends ranked experience is one that many players struggle to find joy in. Becoming "hard-stuck" or trapped in "ELO hell" are terms used to describe players who find themselves unable to climb due to the terrible net gain of LP they receive after winning a match. 

The amount of LP you receive after winning a match is determined by your hidden MMR rating. And, if this drops too low, you could find yourself gaining a low amount of LP for a single win while losing double that for a single loss (making it almost impossible to climb). 

This has led to many top players creating "Smurf" accounts with fresh MMR to dominate lower-rank players and quickly climb the ranked ladder. 

After a Reddit post outlining the above frustrations gained traction, Riot Iksar responded, stating the following:

"We're going to be making a number of significant changes to matchmaking and ranked over the course of the year --- mostly in the background. Ideally there is no reason to create a new account to get to your 'actual' rank and if you make a new account to smurf --- we can detect that and place you into accurate matches so quickly that creating smurf accounts feels like too much work for the amount of games you get to smash people."

Hopefully, these changes come to the game sooner rather than later and allow players to climb to the ranked ladder.