The Dynamic Queue Roundtable breakdown

So I finally listened to the round table discussion. I tend to not listen to these since I've already inferred most of the situation and issues through intuition and simply understanding most of the mechanics without someone having to explain it to me. And good god, people downvoted that video like shit. I wonder how many people actually listened to it or understood what was being said? I know from experience that the linguistic proficiency of the community has cratered to an unbelievably abysmal level, but holy shit. I shudder for the continued existence of humanity if you are even a fraction of its successors.

To summarize, the crisis with the queue system right now can be summarized in one word: supply. Think about how many people go for each role, and then imagine that is just part of a larger equation that the system has to work with, along with factors like your MMR, division, if you are in a premade and possibly your location on this planet, country, state/province and even city (to minimize ping issues). Along with a combination of other factors I might not know about, the system tries to match people up like it's a dating website. This is easy to do at lower divisions (even with the abysmally long wait times), where the pool size of players is relatively large, but as you get higher up, that pool gets smaller and smaller, and as a result, the queue times get longer.

There is literally nothing you can do to deal with a shortage in player supply. It is a resource you ALWAYS have to work with and around, and as Riot admitted in the video (that people like to just ignore), they learned new information ABOUT that supply after they made lofty promises. You can scream and stamp your feet all you want, but them's the breaks, kids. Riot can't alter reality.

Riot explained that the Dynamic Queue has proven to reduce toxicity when it came to champion and role select; I can vouch for this personally. Before the new system, literally every other game would almost require to be nulled because someone decided to sabotage the game because they couldn't go Yasuo mid. Now I haven't seen hide or hair of any of those fuckers.

At the same time, it brought up issues that are arguably even bigger. No one is supporting anymore, especially when you can now avoid being drafted to the role (save for dire circumstances for the system, from what I'm hearing), you have a good chance of being paired up with and against premades, and as was stated earlier, the higher divisions are basically deadlocked with enormously lengthy wait times due to a small pool size.

Solo Queue might be a pipe dream at this point because of the small pool sizes in the LOWER divisions alone because of player preferences (read: no one is the support), let alone the higher divisions. Releasing Solo Queue might actually just make the situation WORSE, as they've heavily implied and explicitly stated at least once in a red post.

The best way to visualize this is like a pyramid. At the bottom is bronze, and at the very top is Master. Now imagine it segmented like a food groups pyramid, one for each major division in the game. now imagine they're all filled with water, and you have buckets to fill up from each segment. You functionally have an infinite amount of buckets, but only a finite amount of water; whatever is in that pyramid.

Now on top of that, each measurable volume of water (1 volume being a person) has an array of tags to it, and you have to match them in buckets with people with similar tags. It's pretty easy at the bottom of the pyramid, where the total volume is massive, but at the top of the pyramid, where it's tiny, you have a much smaller total volume. If you try to treat the top the same as the bottom, you very quickly run into a dead end where not enough people match up to be put in the same bucket (the bucket being a queue).

Now imagine Solo Queue is a thing. Suddenly you have TWO pyramids with the same volume of water shared between them, and you can't combine water from both pyramids. You'll run into that dead end a lot faster, and more than likely a lot further down the pyramid.

From what I understand, the system tries to work around this, which is why people end up getting put in roles they didn't call for, just so there's a game at some point in this lifetime.

Something has to be compromised or sacrificed somewhere. I don't know what solutions to offer, aside from maybe making the system a bit more indiscriminate when it comes to matching players across divisions (after X amount of games in silver, you'll start facing off against players in gold, for example), all of which might already have been attempted already, but the bullshit about this being some money-grubbing conspiracy or a contrived attempt by Riot to kill off their one and only game for something else down the line has to stop.