Recently, we’ve seen a lot of conversation around the health of Champion’s Queue. Pros, teams, media, and fans have all provided feedback on what’s working and what’s not – we appreciate the shared passion! Behind the scenes, we’ve been talking with the LCS Players Association, the Amateur & Academy Committee (made up of owners and GMs from LCS teams), and our internal teams on how to best address the feedback in order to continue to improve CQ.
To start, we broke the most common pain points into four buckets:
- **Split Schedule** - In its original design Champion’s Queue ran independently of the LCS schedule, something our data indicates we need to address
- **Match Quality** - Without a more sophisticated matchmaking system, match quality can vary
- **Limited Players & Role Disparity** - Some roles have more players actively participating in CQ than others which leads to queue bottlenecks for different roles depending on the day
- **Voice Comms** - Some players aren’t in favor of ‘opt-out’ voice comms
When taken together, all of these factors result in players participating in Champion’s Queue less which drives queue times up. While we can’t deploy a fix across the board to address all of these problems immediately, we want to provide some context and our planned next steps.
**Split 3 and Summer Season Timing**
When we initially launched Champion’s Queue, we intended for it to be around throughout the year, even when a player wasn’t actively playing in the LCS, such as between splits or after they’ve been knocked out of the season. In practice, players are looking to those moments as a time to reset and prepare mentally for the next split, and in some cases leaving NA to go home or bootcamp.
This is a healthy and positive behavior we want to encourage so our pros can perform at their best when returning to competition. To do so, we’ve decided to skip Split 3 of the Champion’s Queue Spring Season as it overlaps with the “off-season” between LCS Spring and LCS Summer splits. In addition, we’re going to adjust the CQ Summer Season dates to start May 31 running through August 21, to better align with the start and end of the LCS Summer Split Regular Season.
We anticipate that when we bring Champion’s Queue back in late-May, it will line up with when players start scrimming again to prepare for the LCS Summer Split and will have an ample number of players looking to participate.
**New MMR System**
We hear the pro players call for a more sophisticated MMR system; one that both awards LP based on the skill discrepancy of players in a match, and is used in the matchmaking process to improve match quality. We are continuing to explore the implementation of such a system with our dev team and will share more updates on this feature once we have a better understanding of the timing.
We want to be up front, we do think that this MMR system is going to **increase** average queue time; however, we’ve also heard feedback that players are okay with higher queue times if it means a higher match quality.
**Limited Players & Role Disparity**
One of the most frequently proposed solutions we’ve seen from the community is the suggestion to allow more players into Champion’s Queue in order to reduce queue times. While it seems like a simple and easy solution, it’s actually a bit more nuanced.
Here’s the short answer – we will be adding additional players into Champion’s Queue from the next two Proving Grounds Qualifiers in the Summer Season as long as players meet our new Grandmaster rank threshold.
The longer answer is that we’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons from the queue dynamics associated with the introduction of new players. Simply put, adding in additional players also comes with additional challenges. We’ll pull back the curtain on two of our biggest learnings.
During our Spring Season we introduced new players into Champion’s Queue through our first and second Spring Proving Grounds Qualifiers in an effort to build an aspirational pathway into Champion’s Queue and create more opportunities for highly skilled competitive NA players to gain access. In total, around 125 players gained access to Champion’s Queue in Spring from our Amateur tournaments.
While we ultimately believe that allowing access to players through our Amateur ecosystem is good for Champion’s Queue, it did come with some challenges. Match quality was a concern area that many players expressed to us with the new influx. As a result, [we raised the minimum requirement from Masters to Grandmasters][1] in order to retain access to the server. In total, 20% of our Amateur players that were added were removed from Champion’s Queue after the new rule took effect. We also saw that many of our pro players ended up having to wait longer to find a game given that more non-pro players were queuing for games.
Separately, a consistent problem we’ve seen over time are role bottlenecks. For example, sometimes top laners may be queuing up less frequently at a specific time or day which leads to longer queue times as all other roles wait for players from that role to queue up. We’ve also seen that this role bottleneck is not isolated to a single role and tends to vary day to day, meaning adding in more players from a specific role wouldn’t help address this. To help with this, we added in a “Roles Needed” UI into Champion’s Queue during Spring to help players know when a role bottleneck is happening and what role is needed to generate a new game. Heading into Summer, we’ll be continuing to monitor this issue as new players enter Champion’s Queue.
**Voice Comms**
We think having integrated voice comms directly into Champion’s Queue has been an awesome experience both for players in their ability to get the most out of their games and for fans who have been enjoying hearing the behind the scenes banter among our pros. That said, we’ve also heard that even though voice comms are optional in Champion’s Queue, there’s **a lot** of pressure to win every game due to the prizing as well as pressure in the user experience of Champion’s Queue that makes it very difficult for players to feel comfortable opting out of voice comms.
We are working with our developers to explore a version of Champion’s Queue where voice comms are still automatically generated as part of the experience, but that players have to opt-in to joining instead of opting out. We’re hoping that this change helps players feel more comfortable with engaging with Champion’s Queue in the way that best suits their preferred practice method.
**Conclusion**
Champion’s Queue is designed to be adaptive. The goals and changes listed here are examples of our commitment to our continued investment in Champion’s Queue. This Spring Season has just been the start of us learning how to create the best experience possible for our competitive players and we’re eager to continue working with the Player’s Association and teams to reach that goal. We hope you’ve been enjoying watching and following along with Champion’s Queue and are looking forward to its return in Summer!
[1]: https://twitter.com/PathToLCS/status/1492340181721960450
