Does KDA Affect MMR In LoL

To better answer this let’s get some definitions out of the way and elaborate on them.

KDA in league is basically your kill to death and assist ratio, while MMR is essentially a hidden number that RIOT uses in League to know how well you are playing the game. Note this is not directly associated with your current ranking ie silver, gold etc but it’s pretty close overall.

Now that we got the definitions out of the way I’ll tell you the simple answer is that KDA does not directly affect your MMR in LOL. However, there’s a catch to this and I’ll explain it below as to why you should take KDA seriously and how it can affect your MMR implicitly.

How does KDA Affect MMR Implicitly

sapmagic riot kda mmr
sapmagic riot kda mmr

So before you jump the gun on me and say you just told us that KDA does not affect the MMR in league and now you seem to be changing the story? Well not exactly I said directly earlier on. This basically means that even if you have a bad KDA ratio you can still win a game. But lets take a few things into account to see why this answer is more complicated than it seems.

After all Sapmagic from Riot confirmed my theory which I’m going to explain below with several reasons.

You Are A Support Player

Support Player KDA MMR Matters
Support Player KDA MMR Matters

Generally speaking support players tend to have a negative KDA simply because they die a lot but offer a lot of assists. So you’d say won’t the assists bring the number up anyway? And my answer is not always! How many times have you seen a thresh support do insane plays only to die and the timer for the assist to expire and other team players getting rewarded for it?

Well I’ve seen this scenario so many times and I can tell you it really sucks for the the support players. In fact I think support players are sometimes those hidden heroes that never get credit for the win but that’s better left for another article so we can stay on topic. In any case I think I demonstrated here how basically you can still have a bad KDA and win the game because you are a support player.

You Are A Last Hit Hero

Katarina Fake Last Hit MMR KDA
Katarina Fake Last Hit MMR KDA

Yes you heard that right and you hidden Katarinas out there don’t try to hide. I know you are all waiting to get this last hit and snowball your ability resets. Essentially what I’m saying here is that the pink elephant in the room mhm mhm which I think it’s pretty much a lot of us still exists. Your KDA can be blown out of proposition without any good reason other than you are sitting there and letting your team mates do all the work while you just last hit and take the kill!

You Are A Tilter

Tilting LoL Affects KDA MMR
Tilting LoL Affects KDA MMR

Again don’t tell me you never done this because I think we have all gone through this motion before. We get upset at some other player or we don’t like how our game is going and we secretly sit there and die over and over. This off course has a negative feedback to our KDA but most importantly the game overall! Not only do you ruin it for the other 9 players but you also set yourself up for failure in the next games as it affects your overall rating. By the way I have a guide which you can find below on how to improve your rating if that’s what you are looking for:

But I also have a guide on how not to tilt which I think is relevant here to keep a cool head and not ruin your KDA.

Your KDA Affects Your Rating

S Rating LoL Affect MMR KDA
S Rating LoL Affect MMR KDA

This one may not be as straight forward as the others but it’s a natural consequence. As you know you get a rating at the end of the game. If you are not aware of how this works check the guide I referenced earlier on how to always max out that rating. That rating is affected by a huge list of reasons but what you need to know one of them is your game performance.

Since your game performance has also a lot of factors into it such as farming, gold it does take into account your KDA too. So if your KDA is bad your rating factor goes down at the end of the game you will end up with something bad. And you would ask me so how does this actually affect my MMR?

While you may not lose any LP you do lose MMR when you perform bad meaning you will be matched with worst players in your next games. So in the bigger picture just think of it this way. Everything you do during the game that affects your performance, including the KDA will affect your overall MMR! So play better and take every game seriously even if you are going to lose. After all Riot does like to balance your win rate to 50% which means even if you do well you can still lose but your MMR will improve since you performed well in the game.

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