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The State of Competitive-Jump 2022

A look at the land of competitive today and thoughts on its hereafter.

With the 2022 seasons of both ranked and Clash underway, we wanted to take some time to talk about the state of competitive play as we see it today.

Goals:

As with every season, we similar to continually review our goals and evaluate how we're tracking towards them. Specifically, for competitive play, we focus heavily on:

• Competitive Integrity : Players accept an even playing field in their competitive matches
• Progression Opportunities: Players have meaningful goals to attain for
• Team or Organized Play : Players are aware of, and can participate in, opportunities to play with others of similar intent and skill
  

We evaluate these goals by reviewing player sentiment and other metrics such every bit match availability (time to queue), quality (are matches competitive and off-white), and whether or not matches are compelling to participate in (are they satisfying, do they deliver on histrion intent, and practise they offering a sense of progression). Ultimately, we want to bring everyone a competitive game filled with opportunities that friction match their individual intent and expectations.

To do this, nosotros attempt to create experiences in the form of different game modes and mechanics that match your play intent and expectations. For example, Solo/Duo Queue is all nearly creating a competitive environment to bear witness your mastery of League at the private level, while Clash is there to examination your mettle as a team. Both experiences have their strengths and weaknesses, but are generally going in the management nosotros've been targeting. Allow's dig in.

What'due south Happening Now?

We have some clear issues with our overall matchmaking and queue health that we want to accost early on in the flavor. These include the post-obit updates:

• Revival MMR:We've found that our current systems aren't as accurate as we'd hoped in maintaining the expected MMR of players that have taken a break from the game, be it a few weeks or a year plus. As such, we're implementing a more than dynamic approach to Revival MMR and MMR decay across all queues that should provide those players with fairer matches in their first 5-10 games back as they rediscover their musculus memory and game knowledge.
• Boosting Evaluation: We addressed some boosting issues late last year, but we're yet not happy with the current state of the game here. Looking at Ranked Flex queue in particular, we saw issues with low MMR and loftier MMR combined premades that abused MMR discrepancy and account sharing to rapidly boost accounts to where they didn't vest. Nosotros addressed this in the short term by restricting the top tier players to only playing with other accounts at similar ranks. Nosotros acknowledge there's a lot more we should do here, and we plan on working direct with our anti-cheat team to place solutions that will hopefully better the integrity of Ranked Flex queue.
• Challenges Launch: We're getting close to the launch of Challenges. Its been a complex project with its own unique challenges (pun definitely intended), just we are happy with how expansive we've been able to make it and are excited to coil it out to players globally. We're currently planning for Challenges to go live in patch 12.9!

That said, the launch of Challenges is merely the beginning. We programme to continually invest in leveling up Challenges so information technology lives up to our vision every bit a robust progression feel for all League players.

Ranked Queue Wellness and the "Premade Problem"

From a loftier level viewpoint, Solo/Duo queue is currently in one of the healthiest states we've ever seen. Autofill is at its lowest always global rate hovering between 0.five% and 3% of player games. Queue times are at a 2 yr low in many large regions and hovering house in our pocket-size regions. Lastly, MMR accuracy is stiff, where 99% of players are playing with those within a maximum of 2 divisions of their rank with a steady win-prediction accuracy to dorsum it upwards.

That said, nosotros exercise see issues with Solo/Duo Queue that consistently point to our adaptation of premade duos–this straight adds quality and population volatility into the matchmaking mix. 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 boilerplate), and nigh importantly-game quality metrics (upwards of a 10% win-charge per unit spread in both directions).

On the flip side, nosotros've started to see a meaning turn down in the wellness 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. The ironic thing here is that the total population in Ranked Flex remains salubrious, but the premade distribution and make-upwards of that population has shifted to a signal where it's difficult to make matches at a quality bar we'd like.

The root crusade of this is the high number of 3 person parties that desire to play together, with non enough 1s and 2s to fill them out as these solo/duo players tin can but opt to play a different game mode. This can cause those matchmaking envelopes to aggrandize to a betoken where queue times and quality expectations cannot reconcile.

Additionally, the difficulties making quality matches for our virtually popular premade size amplify the bear on of disruptive actors in the queue similar boosters (who queue equally duos with their boostee) and account sellers (who queue as solo) such that the queue itself overall becomes unhealthy, especially at the tiptop level.

To put it simply, our inability to friction match premades in a uniform fashion is a detriment to the system that doesn't have a path to get back to being good for you without significant change.

In the past when nosotros saw this, nosotros attempted to resolve these issues past merging both queues together dynamically. With learnings from Dynamic Queue (which nosotros won't exist revisiting) and a deeper agreement of player intent at present, we know that's not going to work. And then what do we do?

What we're investigating:

• Solo Only Mode: In social club to lucifer player intent and provide the healthiest competitive individual queue possible, nosotros're re-evaluating our take on Solo/Duo and exploring a globe where solo players play in solo queue and premades play in Ranked Flex or Organized five's modes.

On paper, the system health and quality indicators look really good. For instance in Solo Only Queue:

• We would expect an even further subtract in autofill and secondary rates
• Queue times could decrease by upwardly to ~5% for 99.9% of players
• Winrate advantages due to team disparities would vanish completely
• Boosting would exist eradicated
• We would expect between-squad and within-team MMR for 99% of players to exist inside 1 division'due south rank of each other during top hours

In addition, we would probable see the following for our Ranked Flex queue:

• An increase in queue population
• Drastic improvements to match quality
• Meaning decrease in queue times for parties of 3
• Increment in overall match quality and competitiveness
• Increased opportunity for grouping/organized play

All that said, we absolutely want to be confident that our duo population, which is fairly pregnant in size, tin still observe a competitive environment before making any large changes to the electric current systems. This means re-investing in Ranked Flex queue integrity with our anti-crook team and finding a natural way for Solo play to connect with Ranked Flex/Clash.

We're budgeted this topic seriously and with care, and will provide an update further on in the year on if it'due south an area nosotros tin can realistically motion forward with.

Boosted areas of focus include:

• Re-evaluating our queue portfolio: We believe a healthy competitive system is more than just ranked modes. It also includes the other game modes like normals and ARAM. This means that in order to keep the game healthy, it's also important to continually re-visit your other game modes on a regular basis.

We become to enquire ourselves "what do changes that make our non-ranked queues every bit healthy as possible look like?"

Opportunities like:

• What does blind pick wait similar if we guarantee you can get the Champion you lot desire to play and not have to fight for information technology in Champ Select?
• How exercise the compelling and strategic aspects of Clash aggrandize to something that'due south readily bachelor and accessible for all players, nevertheless nonetheless engaging for those that like to play with a premade 5s team?
• How can we better connect esports with the general public's play aspirations? How can efforts like Champions Queue be integrated into the core game for the larger player base in the future?
  

• Farther Expanding Progression: With the launch of Challenges coming soon, nosotros're hoping to take stock of the health of our overall progression systems. The intent here is to evaluate the impact of how a broader progression arrangement affects the health of the game. Our expectation is that players who experience that they have meaningful progression options exterior of ranked won't be forced to accept office in competitive queues when they otherwise don't want to. If we detect that play patterns for players include more diversity for the majority of players, then nosotros tin start to focus more on perfecting heady new features for specific subsets of players that creates a stronger and more unified prepare of game systems long term.

  What you might wait to meet are progression options that span into rotating game modes, exciting annual events, and potentially even other core games similar Teamfight Tactics.

Nosotros're excited to take a deeper look into our League systems and queues to provide the healthiest long-term version of League that is both competitive and engaging.

Equally always, see y'all on the Rift.

Riot Codebear

Competitive Gameplay Product Managing director ― Cody Germain

Riot Codebear is the Product Lead for Competitive Gameplay. He swears that this is the year that Diamond is not only a dream.

Riot Riru

Marketing Communications ― Lilu Cabreros

League of Legends patch notes person and pun enthusiast. Marksmen player currently on a quest to hitting Gold between long naps.

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Source: https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-pl/news/dev/the-state-of-competitive-spring-2022/

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