Why Solo Q should be purely solo
i've been playing this game for 3 years at a Masters level and these are the reasons why I think soloQ should be purely solo.
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Accurate ELO- while the solo/duo emblems from last season was a good idea, it was only a temporary "hotfix" to the cries of dynamic queue as no one knew who were real Challengers at the game and who got boosted through premades. Currently, it is difficult to tell who climbed to challenger with the only way being to actually play against them and see that they're actually really bad. I've had several of these games and I would always question how they got to Challenger in the first place.
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Eliminate All Other Factors - With the release of flex queue, there is absolutely no need to make duo a part of solo Q. Leaving it in there (I get that it is a tradition to have it be solo/duo) only gives another avenue for those tilted/frustrated players to abuse the system and climb with a slight advantage. This advantage can be made more significant through voice comms, etc. If players want to play with their friends, they should only look to play in flex queue. An example of this would be how EVERY worlds participant of last season had to duo with a teammate to reduce the chances of getting an unreliable teammate (You name it, I've faced them all, and they were indeed all duo queued maybe with the exception of Deft). Players should NOT feel the need to do this. If we know for a fact that there are no duos/voice comms advantages present on either side, we will have less to blame and feel much better going into a game knowing we're both on equal footing. I've recently faced 2.8k MMR teams with a 2.4k MMR team solo queued, now imagine if they had a duo as well. How much more unfair would that be? Well to answer that question, it is traumatizing, extremely unfair, hopeless and a waste of time as the outcome is already determined in champion select. In my promos to diamond 1 yesterday I faced CLG Darshawn and Huhi duo'ed along with 3 other challengers. Although their MMR states 2.5k, it is actually not and would probably be around 3k. My team proceeded to feed in unimaginable ways and I felt completely useless with my 4-0 score as I just got 5 man dove bot 10 minutes in with no answer from my team anywhere on the map.
This is also why I think there are currently 3 riven OTP's in top 10 challenger. I see Riven as the strongest of all high risk high reward champions and if these players duo with someone they can rely on, the risk factor is reduced significantly and they are free to do whatever their Runic blade desires.
In my opinion, let solo queue be the queue that truly reflects who is the best at winning with 4 teammates they don't know and the social factor from duo'ing can perhaps be included through other means which I believe Riot can address separately. Having played 8+ hours daily for the past few years, I find myself to be among the top 3% of players for time spent playing this game over the last 3 years and I can safely say the proportion of good quality to bad quality games is pretty skewed towards the bad. Eliminate as many ways as possible in which players can abuse the ELO ladder and maybe one day players will take Challenger seriously.
I'm tired of people saying "Challenger doesn't mean anything," (they still believe this to be the case) and I think making it purely solo will be a step towards the right direction. If Challengers don't mean anything, what's the point in climbing? Heck, Riot could even support this a step further by rewarding these players for working so well with 4 players they don't know. This is the only way I can see people start to take Challenger seriously for once in their lives.
I tried not to go too much into detail as I'm getting pretty tired, but let me know what you guys think!
TL;dr - With both queues released, let solo queue be the one that truly represents individual skill level and flex queue be the place to go to play with friends/parties of 2+. Duo'ing in solo queue just makes no sense at all when there is already another queue for that. There will be less to blame on matchmaking and more focus around improving one's own gameplay.
P.S. please disregard my name, I typed a random word and stuck with it having no idea it was an actual derogatory word until today.