Yesterday Riot announced League of Legends will not be getting solo queue and dynamic queue will be the only way to play ranked. Dynamic queue, the new ranked system for season six, allows players to pick two roles and queue up with as many players as they wish. Unfortunately, this system has some major problems: there are no more 5v5 ranked games, queue times tend to be longer (unless you are picking fill or support) and high ELO players have incredibly long queue times.
A roundtable discussion at Riot headquarters was included with the Dynamic queue changes announcement. During the discussion, Scarra says that Dynamic queue is “awful” and that it needs to be changed. Well, Riot did change it, but probably not the way he wanted. Diamond five or higher players can only team up in duos or trios and can’t team up as five-mans anymore. Also, if the queue times are too long the system will just randomly assign you a role. Ranked 5v5s are not coming back for the foreseeable future.
The community has not been taking this well, storming reddit with their anger over never getting the Solo queue they were promised. People on the internet do not like being lied to, and Riot said that Solo queue was coming. Now that it isn’t, we’ve got reddit posts where players are trying to create their own Solo queues and posts where players are threatening to leave .
Here’s what the community is failing to grasp though: Riot is trying. I understand you feel betrayed that the company that makes your favorite game had to go back on its decision, but it isn’t the end of the world. Dynamic queue definitely has its problems, but for lower ELO players they aren’t any different than the older system. I’m in Gold right now and if I pick Mid/Top as my roles I expect a five to seven minute queue time, but if I pick fill the match box pops almost automatically.
The Dynamic queue change really only affects higher ELO players, which statistically you are most likely not. Only the top one percent of players might have to play a different role than what they want. High ELO Dynamic queue in all regions was being dominated by pro League players teaming up with all their team members to climb ranks. Chances are you’ve never run into CLG or SKT in your games.
There’s no doubt Dynamic queue isn’t perfect, but does it really deserve as much hate as the community is giving it? Nearly every reddit post is filled with players claiming that this is the end of League or that as one reddit user put it : “Season 6 for league is like Cataclysm for WoW.” World of Warcraft lost a ton of subscribers after its Cataclysm expansion came out because the fans felt betrayed by Blizzard changing their beloved game. League of Legends is still the same game; complainers just want to jump on the hate bandwagon.
Riot isn’t perfect; it’s a company that still cares about profit above anything else. Still, I doubt the world’s largest video game is going to go under because Riot made one big oopsie. Riot Pwyff wrote a great Twitlonger going into detail about why ranked 5v5s were removed (the community was to tiny in most regions to be sustainable) and why there had to be some “tradeoffs” to get ranked the way Riot wanted it. Pwyff says they are working on a system that will allow college teams and other high-ranking 5v5s team to practice against equal skill opponents as well.
There will never be a perfect ranked system, but Dynamic Queue is far from the worst. Let’s see how these changes affect League of Legends before we all get our pitchforks and torches.
