League of Legends makes queue times "a bit longer" to chase better matches, and Riot wants your thoughts

We’ve all been there. Waiting for your League of Legends queue to pop can be an agonizing experience, especially if the timer draws out. But I’ve long been a vocal advocate for holding on a bit longer in pursuit of a better match. I’d rather accept the extra downtime than get into a game where the balance is off and one side tears the other to pieces in a result that’s not particularly satisfying for anyone. Riot’s new LoL patch is music to my ears, then, with the developer seeking to do exactly that, though it wants to hear from you.

The new League of Legends patch makes queue times “a bit longer” in masters and above, gameplay lead Matt ‘Phroxzon’ Leung-Harrison explains, “to both make better-quality matches overall and to better balance challenger duos.”

Riot has been tampering with the way duo queue works a fair bit lately in an attempt to stamp out “bad actors,” and a big part of that is ensuring that matchmaking accounts for the inherent advantage that duos get in MOBAs. No matter how good you are, the communication factor is always going to be a big benefit when you go in with a friend.

This update is targeted mainly at the higher ranks, Phroxzon notes. “If challengers are duoing there’s probably a higher likelihood there are lower people on their team (eg. masters) to balance it out this patch and that those queues take slightly longer in large regions, and moderately longer in smaller regions.”

He says Riot is “still working to resolve those games where there are a ton of duos in the game that look really weird,” such as five challengers against five masters/grandmasters, but notes that the fix for this “won’t go out for at least another patch.” It’ll also be targeting better balance for autofill vs autofill and secondary vs secondary.

“We’re really trying to make sure that it’s going to work as we expect and this stuff is really complicated,” Phroxzon cautions. “We’re trying our best to get it out to y’all as fast as possible.” He asks players to “do me a favor and paste any particularly long queue times from this patch (with the lobby screen, or the Riot IDs of who was queuing), or post-match lobbies where the players in the match looked funky.”

Phroxzon adds that Riot is also investigating the current way its scoring system works, and “trying to model mastery around things that ‘actually win the game’ as opposed to scores that people would perceive are winning the game but don’t, to avoid some of the perverse incentives like ‘just farm/play safe if you’re losing just to get a B.'”

He remarks, “I think high ELO in particular is a bit too punishing on certain attributes and across a few specific axes,” but acknowledges that a pursuit for being “very correct” can lead to situations where the scores don’t reflect player sentiment.

Striking the balance is never easy, and you can’t please everyone. For each person like me that’s happy to sit on their phone while matchmaking puts together the perfect game, there are those that just want to get back out there as quickly as possible. For now, be sure to send any notable examples of unusual queue times and scoring outliers Phroxzon’s way.