What’s the Deal with 2 Queues in League?
Next Tuesday is the 6.24 patch for League of Legends and from what Riot has indicated, that’ll be the first patch for the new season. As with any new season, new rankings are laid out and we get to once again compete to determine our starting positions and how far we need to climb to reach our goals. My goal this season is to make it to the Gold tier. Last season I made it up to Silver I and almost made Gold, but then hit a string of bad matches and fell pretty far. This season, I’m gonna make it over the hump. But first, placements…
Riot is explicit this season – you will be placed lower than you finished last season. Also, they are going to track rank for each of the 2 ladders. Last season, they pissed off a lot of people by getting rid of the Solo/Duo queue and grouped all ranked play into a team queue. This was pretty bad for a number of reasons.
- People of lesser skill were artificially carried to high ranking by their teammates
- Everyone had the wonderful opportunity to have the joy of facing a team of 3,4, or 5 that were coordinated and on comms
- The ladder no longer measured individual ranking, but was some weird mix of team and solo ranking
There were other things as well, but it suffices to say that Riot made a poor decision and they are undoing it this season. There will be a Solo/Duo queue and a ‘Flex’ queue for solo/team play.
I’m not really sure what the deal is with teams of 4, but I guess Riot only wants 1, 2 ,3, or 5s to play together…whatever.
It’ll be interesting to see how many people play one or the other or both queues, and I wonder if Riot will let us in on this information.
The main concern I have with this upcoming season is what appears to be Riot’s plan to get rid of the Normal Draft queue. Having played a bunch of Blind matches lately, I think I can say this is what people think of when they hear how toxic League is. With people racing to choose lanes and arguments starting in champ select, they should get rid of Blind before Draft. At least Draft gets new Summoners accustomed to how things are once they can play ranked.
In any case, with the statement about lower placement to start the season, I figure I’ll be down in Bronze to start off the season. I don’t really mind, but I know that means a long climb if I’m to make it up to Gold. Also, this season, I’m starting with a couple of Summoners that can play in the ranked queue so I can swap between them if I get on a losing streak.
I think that’s one of my biggest failures from last season. If I lost a match or 2, I would get frustrated and keep trying to force a win, not stepping away to regroup. This season, I’m gonna work to avoid stinging losses together. There’s no reason to lose 5, 6, or 10 in a row just because I know I should be winning. And it really doesn’t matter if the losses are from AFKs or trolls – they are still losses and I need to recover and regroup after a loss. I think the replay feature will be a big help here as I can step back and watch the match to see where things went wrong.
In any case, good luck to any of you looking to play ranked this season.