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League of Legends developer Riot Games in a recent blog post announced their concerns regarding the current competitive queues, and their consideration to remove Duo queue.
They initially discussed their focus regarding competitive play. The devs pointed out Competitive Integrity which pertains to making sure that players have an even playing field in their competitive matches and that no player has an unfair advantage over their opponents. Progression Opportunities, which means that players always have meaningful goals to reach for, and Team or Organized Play, which is the players' awareness of, and participation in, opportunities to play with others of similar intents and skill.
According to League of Legends devs, they “evaluate these goals by reviewing player sentiment and other metrics such as match availability (time to queue), quality (are matches competitive and fair), and whether or not matches are compelling to participate in (are they satisfying, do they deliver on player intent, and do they offer a sense of progression.”
They tackled several issues with overall competitive matchmaking that they are looking to address in the near future.
First is “Revival MMR”, which is the expected matchmaking ratio of players that have taken a break from the game, regardless of duration. “We’re implementing a more dynamic approach to Revival MMR and MMR decay across all queues that should provide those players with fairer matches in their first 5-10 games back as they rediscover their muscle memory and game knowledge,” they say.
The devs also talked about “boosting” issues, which are low MMR players in a premade Ranked Flex lobby with high MMR players, and the following abuse of the MMR discrepancy and hence boosting the low MMR players to ranks they didn't belong to. Unfortunately, no specific details were shared, but it's nice to know that the dev team is aware of this problem, and they plan to improve the integrity of Ranked Flex queue.
They also mentioned Challenges, and it's expected to go live in Patch 12.9! For more details on Challegnes, check out this article. To sum up, it's a way (besides Rank) to flex your skills, whether it's stealing objectives or hitting Snowballs in ARAM.
Next, they discussed Ranked Queue health. Solo/Duo queue is the healthies it's been, with only 0.5% – 3% Autofill rate. Queue times and MMR accuracy are also in a good state, with 99% of players queueing up and playing games with other players within 2 or less divisions of their rank.
However, it's not all good news. Premade duos with imbalanced MMR impact, and sometimes double the chances, of autofill/secondary role rates. This aside, these premades also experience a 10 second increase in queue time, and an erratic win rate. While Solo/Duo queue is healthy as it can be, Ranked Flex is on the other side of the coin. Queue times are 7 minutes on average for 3 person parties, and they experience bigger division discrepancies between teams.
“The root cause of this is the high number of 3 person parties that want to play together, with not enough 1s and 2s to fill them out as these solo/duo players can just opt to play a different game mode. This can cause those matchmaking envelopes to expand to a point where queue times and quality expectations cannot reconcile.
Additionally, the difficulties making quality matches for our most popular premade size amplify the impact of disruptive actors in the queue like boosters (who queue as duos with their boostee) and account sellers (who queue as solo) such that the queue itself overall becomes unhealthy, especially at the top level.”
To remedy these, the League of Legends dev team are investigating a “Solo Only” mode: In order to match player intent and provide the healthiest competitive individual queue possible, we’re re-evaluating our take on Solo/Duo and exploring a world where solo players play in solo queue and premades play in Ranked Flex or Organized 5’s modes.
They mentioned several pros that a Solo Only mode would offer, such as an even further decrease in autofill and secondary role rates, and a decrease in queue times. Boosting will also become impossible, which would result in less team skill disparities. During peak hours, between-team and within-team MMR for 99% of players can be expected to be within one division of each other.
This would also make Ranked Flex queue more populated, which would decrease queue times and increase match quality. As their parting words, the team said this: “All that said, we absolutely want to be confident that our duo population, which is fairly significant in size, can still find a competitive environment before making any large changes to the current systems. This means re-investing in Ranked Flex queue integrity with our anti-cheat team and finding a natural way for Solo play to connect with Ranked Flex/Clash.”
For more articles you can read with your League of Legends Duo, click here.
