Update: PBE Madness

For those who are curious I did not, in fact, have any idea the Season 3 changes would be hitting the PBE last night. My oddly timed post regarding how to prepare for the chaos was a coincidence, and my cryptic twitter message was for a secret personal project the details of which will be revealed in due time.

Now that it's all out there, both reignofgaming.net and surrenderat20.net have good round ups of all the crazy stuff that's on the PBE. You can only sign up for a PBE account at the start of the month, so unfortunately those of you who are without one will have to live vicariously through streams, blogs, and YouTube videos (the queue for the PBE is probably as long as the Great Wall of China anyway).

I'll talk about everything in much greater detail as I have the opportunity to test and digest it all, but for now here are my initial impressions:

• The new jungle is poorly balanced, much in the same way the Season 2 revamp was.
• The new HUD is pretty and clean, but the shop's sounds are unsatisfying.
• Nami is about as "Regal" as Ariel.
• Xypherous wasn't kidding when he said Runaan's Hurricane + Muramasa would drain your mana fast.

From here on I'll be picking out specific topics to discuss. Quite likely the jungle will be the first one, as it's close to my heart and also in the process of being butchered. In the meantime, enjoy your information overload.

Pre-Season 3: Elo Compression

Ranked matches at moment seem to be wildly random, with newbies running into exceptional players at odd Elos. There's a method to this madness, and it's the result of Elo compression combined with the wild swings of placement matches.

It's another case of simple math. Consider the formula used for the Elo reset:

Pre-Season 3 Elo = (Season 2 Elo - 1200) / 2 + 1200

The practical upshot of this formula is that the further you were from 1200 Elo, the greater your gain or loss. At the same time, early placement matches can swing Elo by as much as 50 points. In this situation one victory or loss can is worth the equivalent of 100 Elo at the end of Season 2. It doesn't take a psychic to see where this is going.

Take two hypothetical players, one a 1400 at the end of Season 2 and the other 1800, and they'll be at 1300 and 1500 Elo respectively at the start of Pre-Season 3. All it takes to bridge what was a 400 Elo gap in Season 2 are two lucky wins and two unlucky losses respectively. Given the luck of some players, bad or good, even greater gaps can occur with reasonable regularity. The result are games which are even more random than normal, which feeds into the process and sustains the insanity of it all.

As I've played the past few days I've run into players who were obviously platinum-level down in the 1300 range, as well as players who were obviously lucky to have achieved bronze in the very same game. It's an intriguing time to queue.

Over the next week or so the madness will die down, but for now you at least understand what brought it all about in the first place.