This year, we want to provide a longer runway for players to really show off their growth since last season and get the proper liftoff at the start of their climb. Season Reset: The soft resets we did this year might have been a little too soft. We're taking a closer look at what decay does for our players and tweaking the system to ensure even fairer matchmaking over the entire season. However, that clock may be ticking too quickly and pushing players into places where they really don’t belong. In some regions, autofill rates in popular roles like top and mid were brought to almost 0%.Īpex Decay: At high MMRs (Master tier and above), decay rates have long functioned like timers ticking away to keep the best of the best at the edge of their game. We saw autofill reduced to less than 2% of games in almost every region. Time to game (from queue start to match start) stayed the same or improved in every region. Overall match quality improved, with less than one division of skill difference between teams for 99% of games. New accounts were ranked much more evenly and effectively. In October, Cody “Riot Codebear” Germain, Product Lead for Competitive Gameplay on League of Legends, summarized the Season 2021 highlights and what to expect from the next one. That said, we absolutely want to be confident that our duo population, which is fairly significant in size, can still find a competitive environment before making any large changes to the current systems. In order to match player intent and provide the healthiest competitive individual queue possible, we’re re-evaluating our take on Solo/Duo and exploring a world where solo players play in solo queue and premades play in Ranked Flex or Organized 5’s modes. This can cause those matchmaking envelopes to expand to a point where queue times and quality expectations cannot reconcile.Īdditionally, the difficulties making quality matches for our most popular premade size amplify the impact of disruptive actors in the queue like boosters (who queue as duos with their boostee) and account sellers (who queue as solo) such that the queue itself overall becomes unhealthy, especially at the top level. The root cause of this is the high number of 3 person parties that want to play together, with not enough 1s and 2s to fill them out as these solo/duo players can just opt to play a different game mode. The ironic thing here is that the total population in Ranked Flex remains healthy, but the premade distribution and make-up of that population has shifted to a point where it’s difficult to make matches at a quality bar we’d like. On the flip side, we’ve started to see a significant decline in the health of Ranked Flex queue where queue times (~7 min on average for 3 person parties) and match quality (2-4 division discrepancies between teams) have diverged significantly. It causes games with duos of imbalanced MMR to impact our autofill/secondary role rates (sometimes double the chances), queue times (~10 second increase for players per game on average), and most importantly-game quality metrics (upwards of a 10% win-rate spread in both directions). That said, we do see issues with Solo/Duo Queue that consistently point to our accommodation of premade duos–this directly adds quality and population volatility into the matchmaking mix. Lastly, MMR accuracy is strong, where 99% of players are playing with those within a maximum of 2 divisions of their rank with a steady win-prediction accuracy to back it up. Queue times are at a 2 year low in many large regions and hovering firm in our small regions. Solo/Duo queue statusįrom a high level viewpoint, Solo/Duo queue is currently in one of the healthiest states we’ve ever seen.Īutofill is at its lowest ever global rate hovering between 0.5% and 3% of player games. The following info has been shared when discussing the state of competitive in spring 2022 by Cody “ Riot Codebear” Germain, Product Lead for Competitive Gameplay and Behavioral Systems on League of Legends.

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