The League of Legends Battlegrounds are off to a strong start all across the globe.  As play has begun, we've been hard at work behind the scenes making improvements and listening to your feedback.  

So far, we've seen over 750 matches completed and 5,000 challenges sent.  We are extremely pleased with the state of Battlegrounds and are looking forward to the tournament rounds coming at the end of the season. 

What We're Working On

We are working on numerous things to make Battlegrounds more fun for every one.  We've been listening to a lot of your feedback and have quite a few changes planned for the future, as well as some items that have already been implemented.

• Improving challenging efficiency.  You're pretty much taking a shot in the dark trying to propose times that the other team is avaiable to play.  We are working with several different ideas to make the challenging process more efficient so challenges have a much higher chance of being accepted.  We have our own ideas, but we'd love to hear yours so feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below!




• Improving rating transparency.  We'd like you to have a better idea of your point gain or loss before challenging a team to ensure that you don't waste your time playing a team for a gain of 5 points.  As team ratings get farther and farther apart, this will become more of an issue and we don't want you to waste your time.  In addition, there is currently not a way to see your point gains and losses after a match is reported.  This is being addressed and will be added soon!




• Ringing and Roster Changes.  We have a very difficult job in front of us.  With matches occurring at any time of the day on any day of the week, preventing ringing is a difficult task.  We are implementing several changes in the coming days to improve this situation, including:
  
  
  - Game ID changes will be restricted 8 hours prior to the start of a scheduled match and 2 hours after play concludes.
  
  
  
  
  - Players will be required to wait 24 hours after leaving a roster to join a new one.
   
  
  
  


• Padding team ratings.  We've found a few teams continually playing the same team over and over in order to inflate their score.  We want you to be able to play the same team more than once, but abuse must be addressed.  In the near future, playing a team more than a couple of times in a row will significantly reduce the points gained for the given match.  

Ratings Calculations

Now that play has been underway for around two weeks we've had the opportunity to study and fine-tune our rating algorithms to better represent the skill level of teams across the board.  I thought I'd share with you a bit of what goes into your rating so you can better understand the overall system.

The Battlegrounds reward activity as well as skill.  We want you all to be active, so we provide a point gain just for playing matches, win or lose. We call this your "activity bonus". As you continue to play matches, the activity bonus per match decreases.  The amount gained from your activity bonus will be viewable when we make ratings more transparent as mentioned above.

The largest factor in your rating is, of course, your skill. We maintain an internal "skill rating" separate from your final rating which appears on the standings (soon you will be able to see your skill rating too). After each match, your skill rating is adjusted up or down based on a multitude of factors, such as:

• Your opponent's skill rating 


• Your skill rating


• How many matches your opponent has played 


• How many matches you have played


• Your "win expectancy"

Here are a couple of key points to keep in mind.  The higher your opponent's rating is, the more points there are for you to gain. The more matches you play, the higher our confidence is that you are as good as your rating says you are.  Playing teams with a much lower rating than you will result in significantly less points gained if you win than playing teams closer to your own skill level.

It is also important to note that FFWs and FFLs do not impact any rating in any way.  We've read several concerns over this decision and we continue to discuss this topic regularly.  We are keeping an eye on the number of forfeit wins and losses and could potentially change this in the future.  For now we want your rating to be mainly a reflection of how good you are as a team, and unfortunately forfeit losses and forfeit wins don't tell us anything about either team's actual skill.  You are still awarded ARP for showing up for the match, which can give you other rewards.

Finally, it's very important to note that we are constantly monitoring and fine-tuning our rating algorithms. These changes are NOT being made arbitrarily, but rather are the inevitable result of moving from a relatively small pool of testers into a broad pool of thousands of teams and hundreds of matches. Frankly, scenarios have arisen which were simply not anticipated during implementation and testing. We've made adjustments in order to correct these issues and bring the ratings in line with formula as designed. 

We did make a fairly significant change earlier today which drastically increased some teams' shown ratings and drastically reduced others. This was not a change to the formula, but rather a correction of a previously unknown bug. However, we do feel at this point we've ironed out most if not all of the kinks, so you can feel confident in your current rating.

Your Thoughts

We'd love to hear your thoughts!  If you have any questions, criticisms, or suggestions please feel free to post in the comments section below and let us know what you think.  If you have suggestions for any part of the system, from your match page to the challenging area please let us know.  We'd love to hear your opinions.  Let us know!