A prediction for how League of Legends will change over the next two years from a veteran

There is more to keeping league of legends successful than philosophical differences. There are pragmatic differences too. If a significant portion of the most talented solo queue players is culled from dynamic queue because of an incompatible philosophy, games will significantly degrade before the ranking system can compensate, and because of the nature of dynamic queue it will only be able to compensate after a very large number of games have been played. A scar is being created on game quality that will heal extremely slowly.

The quality of games at the upper echelon is already very poor as it stands. In the end, this game will not be able to reach as large a number of players with the dynamic queue system as it could with the solo queue system because dynamic queue mandates team-wide coordination, and that requires interpersonal commitment from many people.

Not everyone plays sports on a team because not everyone can afford to make the large social commitment. There are many more people who are able to practice sports on their own, outside of a team, because there are fewer commitments-- only time, rather than both time and social commitments. With all the disparity between groups and solo players, you are shouting to your player base "We don't cherish players who don't make a social commitment to play League competitively with people they know.". And yet, Dynamic queue cannot fill the gaps in matchmaking without such players.

After the fallout, groups of players will be inclined to be more competitive than solo players because they are provided both with artificial incentives from end of season rewards and real life incentives that come from being a member of a team. Moreover, the exodus of talented solo players will exacerbate the discrepancy. In other words, this is the long term emergent effect of your decision to force dynamic queue:

1. Solo players will on average feel less compelled to be competitive than grouped players because of both lack of agency and lack of drive (since they aren't rewarded as much as they would be in a group, both socially and in terms of end of season prizes).
2. People will develop the perception that solo players are "lesser" than grouped players because of your systematic efforts to make them less valued.
3. The solo players that remain will accept that perception, and the vast majority of games in 2017 that contain a solo player (nearly all of them), will have their perceived quality diminished because of that very reason.
4. There will be a knee jerk reaction to bring back solo players by making them valued equally in terms of season rewards, but the perception will be kept alive because of the real life social rewards that are exclusive to being a member of a team
5. The perception will naturally stay as a constant of the system, acting as a sink that draws solo players out of the game and encourages group players to not play solo.
6. Over time upsetting the balance of player types required for Dynamic Queue to function will cause Dynamic Queue to collapse to a lower steady state, one in which players are predominantly grouped, such that the population of players that league of legends will support is consequently reduced.

In the end it doesn't matter how hard RIOT bleeds its knuckles on making Dynamic queue the best it can be, because this is a matter of perception, not actuality. Dynamic queue can be as good as it would ever be, and still people can have the perception that it is even worse than it currently is, just as champions can be powerful and yet there exist the perception that they are not. The vision RIOT has for League of Legends being a competitive sport where team work is valued more than person skill is fine, but the path from the current state to that state is fraught with hazards that could demolish the player base.

@Ryze, @Tryndamere