Thoughts about Flex Q @RiotSapMagic
[As requested on Twitter, my thoughts in a more readable form.]
(As a preamble, obviously all of this is just my experience. I'm not gonna mention it every time and I'm gonna talk about generalities, but I'm open to hear "actually, that's not what our data says".)
#The problem#
I'm a big proponent of Flex Q in principles, but with the current state of things, it's a generally painful experience. Long story short, people just don't play enough Flex Q, so matchmaking cannot calibrate them properly.
And consequently, most games feel bad with wild skill gaps between the various players in-game. All year long in FlexQ, games feel the same way as games in SoloQ just after the reset, where it's a bit wild and very different players end up in the same game. And that's bad, because it means most of the time you have very little agency on the result of that game. The result is decided by the outliers, the players that are simply not calibrated yet.
(As an aside: That's also true in SoloQ, but in SoloQ, most people are calibrated correctly already, and this happens let's say once every 20 games. But since people play FlexQ much less, there it happens every other game. There are proportionally more "outliers" in Flex than in Solo.)
And let me be clear, this is not a problem to climb. Often as not, you're in the team being carried, just as much as in the team being dumpstered, so in the end it doesn't matter. But it's a big issue to have fun. Feeling like you don't matter in a match is super frustrating.
#A possible direction?? (who knows, I'm not a designer)#
Of course, I don't have a miracle bullet to solve that. But I definitely think you should look into seeding FlexQ more aggressively, and better seeding technology would also be a good thing for the other queues (so it might be a win-win). For instance, I think the decision to seed new accounts in Iron4 this season was good, but what about Smurfs? That's another situation that would benefit from more aggressive seeding and/or quicker convergence.
That's certainly tricky to do though, because you can't go all the way to the other extreme and start people at the same point as their other queue, that would remove the entire point of having two separate queue in the first place.
But some elements should still nudge the starting point. A Diamond player in SoloQ should definitely not start in Iron4 in Flex, and even starting them in Silver is questionable. And I regularly see Plat+ players in mid-silver games.
##Conclusion##
- Is Riot aware of the problem? Or has data that says I'm just an outlier and this problem does not really exist?
- Is there any plan to solve the issue, and if yes on what time scale? (months, years?)
Bonus point: Is there any plan to promote Flex Q, as more than just "the lesser Ranked Q" that people more or less ignore? (And thus avoid the "people don't play enough" issue entirely, and the people that use it as a cheap smurf?)
