The forums have been riddled with posts about queue dodging for as long as I can remember. Riot has made official that it will be penalizing queue dodgers with a time limit between joining games. As someone who admits to queue dodging, albeit rarely (the queue dodging, not the admission), I can’t think of a worse thing for the game. The matchmaking system is so far from providing reasonable results that the player has to have some option for managing his/her teammates. I’ve included my own post below but be sure to keep up with the thread.
My problem with the queue dodge penalty is that it prioritizes finding a game over quality of gameplay. The simple fact is that matchmaking is not accurate enough to ignore player discretion when it comes to team composition. Why should players be encouraged to play games with teammates who have a clear misunderstanding of the game.
Case in point – I joined a lobby the other day in which my team was a bad mix of casters, including a Heimerdinger (sorry Heimer players, the vast majority I see are poor players) and a Katarina (with rally, which, unless she specced for it, won’t help this team). I mentioned our need for a tank and offered to play one if we could switch someone out for ranged physical DPS. Katarina insisted that she was both physical DPS and a tank. I tried to reason with her and explain the mechanics and was met with, “Do you even see my character?!?!?”
As others in this thread have mentioned, the time wasted by queue dodging is regrettable, but the time spent playing a game with severely under-skilled players is typically at least 25 minutes for all players involved. I’d much rather spend 10 minutes finding a decent game that might last 35-45 minutes than 3 minutes finding a game I will not enjoy.
As for the “artificial ELO inflation,” you have to realize it’s a two-way street. As matchmaking functions now, I would guess that my ELO is artificially seesawing, based on the skill level of my teammates. One game everyone plays as I would expect and at least attempts to coordinate. The next I watch as a player on my team dies 3 times in 8 minutes – this is someone with a fundamental misunderstanding of the game mechanics. My only assumption can be that a similar player is on the opposite team for some sort of balance, in which case my loss (if my team happens to feed more than the other) unfairly penalizes my ELO because I was “beaten” by a player with a much lower ELO than my own. I’m then bumped down to playing both with and against players who are below my skill range, hoping my team manages to die less and we pull out a victory, which will likely not award the same amount of ELO I’ve lost to get to this point.
My solution is that we leave queue-dodging and reevaluate the lobby system. I realize this is something you have probably already discussed and others have obviously mentioned. Really, though, as the game grows it seems it would get easier to fill that one spot than drop all players and restart the search. In many cases I’m seeing the same 2-4 people in my lobby queue dodge after queue dodge. Wouldn’t it be easier if we just never left?
