Why Dynamic Queue Makes LoL Less Fun
tl;dr Another post about Dynamic Queue. Premades vs solo players & boosting alter the game in ways that limit the possibility for fun, exciting games. Riot's current goal seems to be to try and make lower level play more exciting like LCS play, but DQ does the opposite, by mismatching player skill levels and the playing field more generally. This leads to less exciting games, and lower customer satisfaction;;
I have seen a lot of posts on the boards arguing over Dynamic Queue, and I think there is a critical lack of understanding about the Ranked system in general.
The Ranked system does exist so that you can stroke your epeen to your rank. That is one part of it, but only a small part of it. Accolades are important to us as human beings. But accolades in an online game don't mean shit unless you're a Pro Player. I do not believe they are enough, alone, to keep anyone playing the game for any appreciable amount of time.
The more important part, the real purpose, is to create an environment in which all players can have close, challenging matches all the time. There is no question that a close, challenging game is more fun than either winning easy or losing hard. There are certainly some people who just want easy wins, but I consider those people to be not fun to play with, so we'll discount them.
The purpose of games is to have fun. The purpose of a strategy game like LoL is to have fun while having an intellectually stimulating and exciting experience. When the game ceases to be a challenge, there is no stimulation, just button clicking.
So how does that lead to a problem with Dynamic Queue?
I will predicate the rest of this post on the idea that the best part of LoL is the experience of close, challenging matches.
A challenging match consists of a few things:
- A system that is fair, where choices are balanced and have counterplay.
In the case of LoL, it requires that champions be mostly balanced within their role against similar champs, or at least have a decent pool of counterpicks/item builds that counter them. A champion that has one counterpick with only a single item build is clearly toxic to the game. The system should reward creativity so that players can deal with situations as they arise. Objectives should be clear and fairly positioned across the map.
- Players of roughly equal skill on both sides.
This should be obvious, but if there are 9 players of perfectly equal skill and 1 terrible player, the team with the terrible player WILL lose. If they win, then the 9 players were not equal. This is, of course, removing any mitigating factors like team comp - but that speaks to the system and the skill of players.
If a player gets boosted into Platinum, both teams suffer. The team with the bad player cannot, assuming the other 9 players are equally skilled, win the match. The opposing team will not have a challenge, and the game will be mostly boring. Neither of these outcomes are positive for the game. Of course, a team could get 5 players that actually belong in Bronze, or maybe there is an even distribution of misranked players, but not all players are equally skilled. In any of these cases, the experience will be frustrating or boring, depending on what side you're on.
Of course, the bad player thinks they belong because either:
A) They wanted to get boosted because they just want the rank and feel they somehow deserve it, and thus clearly lack the awareness to understand that they do not deserve it because they didn't earn it, and thus lack the awareness to realize that they are actually terrible players.
B) Play with friends a lot, but went solo this time. They expect their team to help them win, and don't understand why everyone else isn't handing them kills and getting them to win.
Player A is probably more toxic than player B, but neither belongs in this rank because they did not earn it on their own. Their team earned it. And so their team should have that rank, but not the player. But that's another discussion.
On the other side, the possibility of boosting gives higher Ranked players more impetus to create smurf games and play in low elo. There is enough of this already, but players being paid to boost or encouraged to help their friends rank up drives more and more high Rank players into low level games, making low Rank less fun to play in.
- Equal access to strategic and tactical advantages.
In a perfect world, everyone would have a super fast computer, perfect internet connection, high quality peripherals, and no personal limitations. Of course, this isn't the case. And unfortunately, there isn't much of a way to correct this. However, there is another disparity that Riot can control, and that's access to communication. In Solo Queue, everyone has access to the same methods of communication: chat and pings. When a premade comes in with voice chat, they immediately gain an advantage over a purely solo team, as voice communication is an inherently superior communication medium to chat and pings. Even two players with voice chat in a bot lane can communicate better than their solo opponents, avoid errors, win the lane, snowball, and make a huge impact on the game(especially with the dominance of Marksmen currently). With 4 players in a premade vs a solo team, now you can make huge, coordinated plays that are difficult or impossible without voice chat. The difference is clear and obvious.
It is clear that Dynamic Queue, or more importantly, matching premade groups of players against solo players, severely diminishes the fairness in an LoL match, and thus limits the likelihood of a close, exciting, challenging game. There are of course other problems that can add to this - smurf accounts, game imbalance, latency/client issues, issues with Rank calculation itself, etc - but even if all those things were fixed, Dynamic Queue would still create deep imbalances in gameplay.
I don't care who has what Rank - your symbol means nothing to me, and mine means nothing to me either. I want the game to be fun and fair every single time, and this is not currently the case.
Thanks for reading.
