MMR and Champion Mastery in League of Legends
By Roger on Oct 19th, 2024, 09:37
In League of Legends, MMR is a hidden number that informs the game’s matchmaking system about your skill level. In this guide, you will learn more about this number and how to increase it by choosing and mastering the right set of champions.
The higher your LoL MMR, the higher the system’s expectations. This means that you’ll be asked to compete against stronger players and get penalized more severely when you lose, especially if the loss occurred against supposedly weaker players.
You cannot see your MMR. Only Riot Games knows it. However, you can estimate it fairly precisely using an MMR calculator or by checking your rank against other players in your game.
The reason why Riot Games doesn’t want players to know their MMR is intuitive. This number likely increases or decreases not just based on whether you won a game or not. Many players also believe it takes your personal performance into account.
This means that it’s not just about winning or losing and it’s also not just about your KD ratio. If you’re a support player, of course, you will have fewer kills and more deaths than the team’s carry, even when you’re doing a great job. The matchmaking system is likely programmed to take this into account and then raise or lower your MMR based on a wide range of variables, such as role.
Despite this, when you use a League of Legends MMR checker or check your teammate's ranks, the number might surprise you as it’s not always in line with your actual rank.
When playing LoL, one thing that you’re expected to do is to choose a role and master it. These are the five options:
New players tend to pick one of the first two roles because they’re the most interesting. The other three require a certain amount of selflessness and much more precise map movements. They also impose economic limitations on the player. When you have less gold to work with, your understanding of item builds must be much deeper. Otherwise, you’ll make poor decisions.
These problems make the Top, Jungle, and Support roles harder to play, with the Jungle role being the most challenging. Support players need the greatest amount of patience and selflessness, which is the main reason why good Support players are difficult to find, especially in the lower-rank divisions.
After you’ve decided what your role is going to be, it’s time to pick a set of champions and master them. You don’t want to be too limited in your options because you’ll often have the perfect opportunity to pick a champion that heavily counters that of an opponent. But if you don’t know how to play that champion well, you will choose a different one.
On the other hand, you don’t want to expand your champion pool too much because each of them requires hundreds of games to master. If you play 10 champions, you’d need around 2000 – 3000 games to become competent with all of them. But if you play 25, it becomes much harder to learn all of them.
One thing to keep in mind, however, is that League of Legends is an ever-changing game. Regular patches nerf or buff certain champions and items, making them less or more viable in the current meta.
When the game changes significantly, your champion and item choices must change as well. The bigger your champion pool, the more viable options you will have left.
Out of all the champions you’ve mastered, a certain number will always be banned, picked by the other team, or weak in the current meta. Your objective is to ensure that whatever is left gives you enough good options to take advantage of your team’s synergies and your opponent’s weaknesses.
If you only play three champions, one of them might get heavily nerfed by a patch, another one might get picked by the other team, and the third might get banned. But if you play 10, you can be certain that at least one of them will be available and work well.
