Make players unable to duo queue for promo series

I think I may have just figured out a way to prevent a lot of the "bronze trolls" issues, etc... in league.

Title: Make players unable to duo queue for promo series (i.e. if you're in promos for ranked, you can only queue for ranked solo).

Why is this relevant?

Well, I just got in to a promo series and got to thinking: All matches are supposed to be balanced around your MMR. Outside of promos, if you have a better team on average and win, you earn less than 20LP (and if you lose, you lose more than 20LP). If you have a worse team on average and win, you get more than 20LP. Except this doesn't happen in promos - you only care about wins and losses. So getting a 'bad' team in promos doesn't have that cushion of getting more LP if you pull off the tough win and losing less if you get beat. Similarly, there's no penalty to having a good team in promos, it doesn't matter if the match is only +15LP for a win, in promos a win is a win! It's partially why promos feel so luck based versus straight climbing.

So, if I'm high silver MMR I'm allowed to duo queue with someone in low Bronze MMR. Our average MMR will be high bronze in all likelihood. So we'll get put in a match with a bunch of high bronze players. He'll know he's weaker than them, and will play a high utility champion (e.g. a tank with lots of CC) and play a really safe laning phase. I'll know I'm stronger and will play a really snowbally champion and an aggressive laning phase. Our enemies won't know there's this major skill difference (particularly, his lane opponent won't know he's a free meal and my lane opponent won't know I'm a whole tier higher than him). I'll get fed, he won't feed, I'll win my promos easily!

Thinking this, I decided to look up to see if anyone else had this idea before. Sure enough, they have. Plenty of them. Except everyone else seemed so much more devious than I was.

Rather than just queuing up with a weaker friend who's just going to play not to feed and let them carry, they suggested going the next step. Grouping up with a few friends to make an account that was purposely kept at trashy MMR (e.g. 400 elo bronze 5) and they could hop on to it whenever a friend got in to promos. Now, on top of this factor of having extra knowledge and being able to let the high silver player carry his promos against B1/S5 players they actually have TWO high silver players that are playing in a high bronze / low silver elo match for one person's promos.

And this doesn't just apply to silver and bronze. A group of gold players can make a silver 5 account. A group of diamond players can make a plat 5 account. The protection from decaying a tier makes the account able to get quite low MMR relative to the players actual skill level. Basically, it nets out to a really high likelihood of winning your promos series, and the cost is that you have to go on that account and purposely lose a bunch of games to bring it back down in MMR after it gets all these promo series wins against teams at a much higher MMR than it (as it'll be gaining something like 30LP per win in bronze 1 when it's bronze 5). Which might actually explain why you get outright trolls on your team for no apparent reason - I've never understood why anyone would actually want to lose a game before their teammates even had a chance to do something to make them mad, but this would actually be a potential reason!

So, where I started - this isn't really a problem in your regular ranked matches. Sure, it's still an abuse in the latter case (the former is perfectly fine though) but in those matches you're going to have a really high win rate but only gain around 10LP for a win and lose around 30LP for a loss. It's okay overall. In promos though, you ONLY care about winning 2 of 3 or 3 of 5. This is REALLY abusable. At least if you prevent people from Duo-queuing in promotional series it means that anyone abusing this would still have to win the series on their own merit to move upwards (which they shouldn't be able to do if they don't actually deserve it). Ultimately, it's more fair to everyone and also has the added bonus of potentially stopping the existence of accounts that lose games to get low MMR for this purpose (which would explain why so many people think there is an elo hell or why people feed, etc... - PLEASE don't make this an elo hell argument, stay on topic!).