State of the solo queue

Disclaimer - This is a partial rant from an annoyed player. Read at your own risk and take what you will out of it.

I am an EUW player who's been playing since season 1 under the ID HaliDe. As much as I want to support Riot's recent changes to improve the ranked queue experience, I for one think this particular move is for the worst, however can easily be improved with a few tweaks.

As a midlaner with little interest/experience/skill in the top/jungle roles, I have been selecting mid/adc or mid/sup as my primary/secondary selections. However for the past eleven queues, four of which I have now dodged, I've had the pleasure of being allocated mid just once - a rate that is shockingly lower than that of season 5 prior to these changes.

My guess is that the high demand for mid and top roles, coupled with above average number of solo queue players opting themselves for top/mid or mid/top, are leading to a crowding out effect of players coupling the midlane role with a role that is less popular - i.e. support. Although I cannot be certain this is the case since I have no access to the statistics, I suspect this is the primary reason for my streak of _"bad luck" _ regarding lane placement. The matchmaking system, as it currently seems to do, gathers ten players using only the two constraints, the standard deviation of MMR and the players' chosen roles. Given that 3 or 4 of these players have chosen mid/top or top/mid as their roles, other players, whose primary role is mid or top with a different secondary role, will almost always be shifted to their secondary roles. Personally, I find this ridiculous. Not only is this frustrating on my behalf, but also frustrating for others on my team, as my secondary roles are most definitely sub-par relative to my primary role and hence my MMR (assuming I have played exclusively mid/adc/sup with the greatest number of games on mid to get to my current MMR - which is nearly true). Consequently I currently find myself rejecting the queue based on the amount of time that has passed since joining the queue to minimise the chance of myself "filling" one of less popular roles which I have selected as my secondary role. This should not be the case, when there are obvious solutions.

In my opinion, there are two ways to resolve this issue.** Firstly**, Riot should include the option to queue for just one role. This will have the obvious negative consequence of longer queue times and/or teams with slightly higher variance on their MMR, However, I am sure players will benefit and be willing to queue for a longer amount to play the role they want. Given that queue time currently stands at around a minute on average, with drafting and game time lasting well over 30 minutes, two/three times the wait will have a negligible impact on the players' happiness and overall enjoyment they receive from playing League of Legends. Secondly, Riot could give different time considerations between primary and secondary roles - i.e. rather than matching a game immediately when the aforementioned two constraints are satisfied and forcing a player to play their secondary role, the matchmaking system can take into consideration the players' primary and secondary roles, wait for other players to queue with the primary role and fill the game using them. Further, the extra time waited can be made to vary accordingly to the current backload on a given role as well as the percentage of times the player in question has been able to play their primary role in the recent past to ensure fairness. Of course striking the right balance between adequate wait time and ratio of primary/secondary role players will be a difficult one, however with the revenue and the manforce of Riot I believe this will be possible.

Currently I feel that the game almost forces some players to fill for majority of their games. If I am to relate this scenario to an MMORPG, or more specifically WoW, this is the dilemma we are in:

A player plays a shadow priest. They queue for a raid/dungeon using the LFG system and are forced by Blizzard to choose a primary and secondary roles which they are willing to play. Given the relative shortage of healers compared to DPS, the player is forced to play heal or leave the queue with a penalty and no guarantee of playing DPS in the next group. The player doesn't mind this for a small number of occasions, however becomes progressively more annoyed as a consequence of the shortage forcing them to play heal 10 out of 11 times with no way of guaranteeing the role of DPS in the future.

I believe this is the equivalent situation in LoL's solo-queue at the moment. Lack of choice.

I believe Riot can really improve on the current system by adopting either/both of the explained suggestions, coupled with incentives to play the less popular role, such as increased XP/IP for playing the role that is in shortage - just like WoW. I hope this post will perhaps catch the interest of a Riot employee and look forward to seeing an improved version of solo-queue in the near future.

C

P.S. I would very much like to know the percentage of games which the players get to play as primary role, broken down into the specific combination (i.e. Primary Jgl, Secondary Sup statistically has 65% chance of playing jgl). If anyone knows whether this data is available, please let me know.