Riot moves to stamp out League of Legends duo queue abuse as "a few bad actors ruin things for everyone"

A new League of Legends update has blocked duo queues for high-ranked players as Riot Games continues to tackle matchmaking frustrations in the MOBA. LoL creative director Matt ‘Phroxzon’ Leung-Harrison addresses how its recent MMR reset has shaken up the early season, and explains why the developer is cracking down on duos in particular with new restrictions and penalties, saying, “it’s a shame that a few bad actors ruin things for everyone.”

Finding a friend to play League of Legends with you (and one you’re able to mostly get along with through those rollercoaster ups and downs) is like brushing off a diamond in a field of muck. “Many players enjoy League as a social game,” Phroxzon acknowledges, “and one of the most exciting times to play socially is early [in a] season with new content, which is one of the reasons why we wanted to re-enable duo queue in apex ranks and why the first patch has historically allowed duos.”

Unfortunately, any time the restrictions are loosened, you’ll encounter people finding ways to take advantage of the system to create deliberate imbalances in matchmaking. It’s a problem Phroxzon says has happened “this season more than others,” adding that Riot wants “to crack down on these behaviors more over time, especially when disallowed behaviors like de-ranking or illicit account sharing are involved, and we’ve already started doing so (and will continue).”

Bigger changes are planned for next season’s starting patch, but for the time being Riot has “pushed a change that disallows duoing up to Grandmaster, including if you have Grandmaster MMR.” Phroxzon notes that this is actually contrary to an earlier message he posted, which he now says was inaccurate. “We will try to re-enable Challengers duoing with Grandmaster and Grandmasters duoing with Masters as fast as possible.” If you’re in Master, you should still be able to pair up with those in Diamond 1.

Riot has also “increased the duo penalty this season to be much closer to how much extra power duos get when they duo.” Working with the same person every time is definitely a major upgrade over always being thrown in with four random players, even if you aren’t necessarily laning together. Phroxzon says the change “might make certain matchmaking situations look a bit wonky,” such as when a team has two duos on it, but says that it’s “looking pretty balanced against soloing in aggregate, even at the very, very high ranks.”

Speaking of high ranks and MMR more generally, Phroxzon shares some thoughts on how MMR resets impact the way matchmaking looks at the beginning of a new season. He says the start-of-year reset is “reasonably hard” to give more opportunities to new players, but can lead to games where the visual ranks on either side look rather imbalanced. “Soon, we will be enabling the indicator that signals when a player’s actual MMR is a lot higher than their rank to give some additional confidence in matchmaking in these cases,” he adds.

Phroxzon also remarks that, with each subsequent season, Riot sees “the best players getting better and better compared to the general population.” This leads to a higher peak LP every time, and is “one of the reasons why +30LP is lasting for so long this season.” He notes that there isn’t anything ‘wrong’ with this, but that it means you can expect seasonal LP benchmarks to be generally higher than last year.

Finally, Phroxzon touches on the delay to Riot’s planned improvements for the autofill matching system (those occasions where you’re put into a role that’s not one of your preferences to speed up queue times). “We were pushing hard to get this in by the season-start patch, but the risk to get it in was not worth it,” he concludes. “We hope to deploy this change soon.” He also calls for players to share thoughts as always, especially if your experience doesn’t match up to the goals Riot has outlined.