A Look At The Lower Elo's Queue Times From A Consumer Perspective

As of yesterday evening, I am a Silver 4 player (finally) after spending hours upon hours of duo queue-ing with one of my good friends who ended Gold last season and recently dropped out of it into Silver 1. During all this time I spent queue-ing with this friend, our queue times from pressing "Find Match" to the Ready-Check averaged less than one second.

When I was playing during Season 1, I vividly remember the average queue time being between 2:30 to 5:00. I solo-queued a lot, so I wasn't talking to people on voice comms or in a chat very much. Instead of sitting there on a phone or watching videos on Youtube or being active on social media, I read champion's lore and abilities.

There weren't nearly as many champions as there are today, but I frequently came across frustrating situations where I forgot what someone's abilities did or just flat out didn't know. To solve this problem, during queue times I would browse the champions page of the client and just read people's abilities over and over until I remembered. This system worked out pretty well and now it is easy to stay completely caught up on unreleased champions and I can always be on the same level as that champion's new players trying them out for the first time without ever having touched them.

Something I was madly in love with back then, and I still am today, was stories. I loved reading stories set in fantasy universes about these amazing characters who had such exciting and adrenaline-pounding lives or clear-cut paths of justice or destruction to follow. I always appreciated that League made stories for a large amount of champions and reading these stories never got old. Doing this even improved my reading and comprehension speed, as I always wanted to finish these short stories before I found a match. I still try to understand the basic backstory of champions from Riot's videos and such, and as a result my friends always direct their questions about League's lore towards me.

Today I don't have a convenient time-window to read all of the amazing short stories and longer ones that Riot puts out because I always find a match instantly. I really want to have a nice down-time between games to de-tilt, if I got tilted from the last game, and consume the products of the incredibly talented writers working at Riot Games. On these Boards I frequently find myself going into lore-discussion threads and realizing that I have no idea what people are talking about because I never found the time to read the stories being discussed.

Riot, if you won't dial back queue times being rushed on the basis of people's match quality going up, then please do it so that we can all appreciate the work your art teams put into the universe you've created. I don't know how many people this would make happy, but it would definitely make me happy.

Author's note: I posted this is Story, Art, and Sound because this post is talking about lore primarily, but I understand that it's a bit of an amalgam of that and talking about queue times, which would fit more into the Gameplay category. If someone can help me repost this in the correct category, I would be very grateful.