New Champ Select Update
Hey all,
It’s been two months since we launched the new champ select and dynamic queue. The team has been heads-down addressing issues and we realized it’s past time to update where we are and where we still need to go.
The number of people playing in premades is the highest we’ve seen in League’s history and 98.6% of the time, premades of 4 or 5 teammates are being matched against a premade of the same size (most of the 1.4% with more divergent premade sizes come from very high and very low MMR ranges). Teams made of solos and duos are matched against a premade 4 or premade 5 only 0.21% of the time, and players queueing solo get teamed up with 4 man premades 3% of the time.
Match quality (defined by the average MMR difference between players on one team vs. the opposing team) has improved slightly, giving us closer, fairer games across all tiers of ranked play.
With the introduction of new champ select and dynamic queue to ranked, as players get the roles they want (with some exceptions we’ll talk about below), we’ve seen the frequency at which ranked players encounter language serious enough to result in a chat restriction has dropped by nearly 40%.
Overall, we interpret these numbers to suggest a higher (and more positive) degree of engagement with dynamic queue, but we still have a lot of work to do on a number of fronts.
At the launch of new champion select, dodge rates almost doubled from the old queue because of the new lock-in requirement. We’ve added new sounds and made a few other usability improvements to help correct this. We’re also still pursuing a tricky bug that makes the client not pop to front when it’s your turn as well. The dodge rate is now slightly lower than the previous champ select (even when we include players who dodge by failing to lock in), but there’s still room for improvement.
There are some remaining critical issues with matchmaking. High-skill players above Diamond tier have seen unacceptable queue times lasting as long as an hour. We launched a high-MMR queue time update on March 4. As a result, average queue times for most high MMR players are down to 5 minutes, but some at the highest levels still have much longer waits. That’s still not good enough and fixing it is one of our highest priorities.
When we first launched new champion select, players were getting their primary role about 70% of the time. As selection behavior changed, this number dropped. We expected players would try and game the system, but we may have underestimated the impact on matchmaking, and there are some particularly bad position combos that result in getting secondary position too frequently. Improving and properly calibrating role selection is also high priority for us.
We’ve also been working to fix a lot of critical issues while adding some much needed functionality, such as being able to open your champion grid at any time and not revealing pick intent to opponents when it’s your turn.
A few days after we launched dynamic queue we said we would re-release solo queue within weeks, which we haven’t. The main reason is we've prioritized improving matchmaking and position select first and foremost. It's also clear we underestimated the amount of iterative work necessary to bring dynamic queue up to our standards, and we should have communicated that earlier. That said, as we continue our work, we're concerned about the impact solo queue will have on matchmaking as a whole, and we’re assessing how to best proceed. Once we've fixed match times and position selection, we’ll have a better update on other queues.
Until then, thanks for helping make the new queue and the new season start off so successfully! GLHF, and we’ll see you on the Rift.
Riot Socrates
