Riot is considering removing Duo Queue from League of Legends in favour of Solo Only Mode

Riot Games has just now posted an update on the state of competitive play in League of Legends – and is considering removing Duo Queue from the game.

At the moment, Duo Queue allows two players to play ranked together, so long as they are near to one another’s rank. For example, Gold elo players can queue up with Silver and Platinum-ranked players. To compensate, it seems queueing up as a pair will match you against slightly tougher opposition than if you queue up alone.

However, Riot points out that Flex Queue – a ranked mode that allows one to five players to queue up together – has been suffering with longer wait times (seven minutes on average for three-person parties) and two-to-four division discrepancies between teams, due to a lack of solo and duo players queueing up for it.

On top of this, duo queue can be a popular way for higher-ranked players to boost lower-level friends.

To combat this, Riot is proposing a Solo Only Mode.

Riot said in this post on its website, titled ‘the state of competitive Spring 2022’: “We’re 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 Organised 5s modes.

“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.

“We’re approaching this topic seriously and with care, and will provide an update further on in the year on if it’s an area we can realistically move forward with.”

Riot added that a Solo Only Queue could result in a decrease in autofill and secondary role rates. Autofill is at its lowest ever global rate hovering between 0.5% and 3% of player games, Riot said.

The developer also believes a Solo Only Mode would reduce queue times ‘by up to ~5% for 99.9% of players, winrate advantages due to team disparities would vanish completely, boosting would be eradicated and we would expect between-team and within-team MMR for 99% of players to be within one division’s rank of each other during peak hours’.

It added that Ranked Flex would see a rise in queue population, better match quality and a drop in queue times for parties of three.

Revival MMR and smurf queue

Riot also addressed ‘revival MMR’ this in the update.

It said: “We’ve found that our current systems aren’t as accurate as we’d hoped in maintaining the expected MMR of players that have taken a break from the game, be it a few weeks or a year plus.

“As such, 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.”

LoL players on the League of Legends subreddit welcomed this change, with some saying they had to play many games in ‘smurf queue’ to get to the rank they’re supposed to be in.

What do you think of the proposed changes? Would you like a Solo Only Mode? Let us know on Twitter and we’ll update this article with the best comments.

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Dom Sacco

Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.

As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.