League of Legends Devs Exploring "Solo Only" Ranked Mode

League of Legends may eventually get a "Solo Only Mode" within the game's ranked environment, Riot Games said this week. As the name suggests, that kind of ranked queue would make it so that all 10 players in a ranked match on Summoner's Rift would be playing by themselves in the sense that they hadn't partnered up with any of the other players beforehand and should, in theory, be matched with nine other random players. If this new queue is added, those who play in premade groups would instead be placed in either the Ranked Flex or Organized 5s mode.

As a refresher, the current ranked system features a Solo/Duo Queue as one of the most popular options for ranked. This functions the same as the hypothetical solo-only mode mentioned above with one big exception – you can partner up with one other person to form a premade and play with three other random teammates.

That's not a perfect system for a number of reasons which Riot went over in a post about the state of the game's competitive environment. It's worth reading over in full to understand the reasoning behind this solo-only proposition, but one of the issues Riot's identified with the Solo/Duo Queue is how it accommodates premades.

"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," competitive gameplay product manager Cody "Riot Codebear" Germain and and Lilu "Riot Riru" Cebreros from Riot's marketing communications said in the post. "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)."

At the same time, Riot said it's started to see a "significant decline in the health of Ranked Flex queue" where matches take longer to find and aren't as high quality as they could be anyway. The premade issue with Ranked Flex, Riot said, is that lots of people want to play three-person parties in Ranked Flex, but there aren't enough solo and duo players to help fill out the rest of the team because those players are in the Solo/Duo Queue.

Though each queue has its own unique problems, Riot said its "inability to match premades" is hurting queues and calls for "significant change." To that end, the Solo Only Mode is being explored.

"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," Riot said.

This would have a number of advantages, Riot said, including but not limited to lower queue times, less autofill, the eradication of boosting, and better match quality overall across both queues.

Though this is the only option that's been presented so far, Riot said it hasn't settled on a plan yet and will offer more information later.

"We're approaching this topic seriously and with care, and will provide an update further on in the year on if it's an area we can realistically move forward with," Riot said.