LoL: My first experience with the queue dodge penalty

Champion Select screen.The patch a few days back brought along one of the most undesirable things I’ve seen in League of Legends: queue dodge penalties. I’ve written enough about the semantics that you should have a feel for how it works. As a quick overview, your first dodge gets you an advertised 3-minute ban from joining queue. The next dodge is 10 minutes, with a reset 8 hours from the initial ban. Here’s how it really works.

This afternoon I queued up with a friend for a quick game. For whatever reason he didn’t join queue when I did. Instead, he was stuck at the invite screen for Arranged Team. By the time he asked if I was in queue, the game had popped. It showed him at champ select but on his screen he was still at the AT invite screen. He hit cancel and got dumped back to the home page. Instead of staying in queue and forcing him to relog, reconnect, and deal with whatever random hero he got, I dodged.

On relog we tried to queue only to be greeted by the new leaver screen that pops up over the client with a timer that counts down your penalty. Our timer? 5:14. I haven’t take math since my freshman year of college but that seems like slightly more than three minutes. Luckily we didn’t have the same problem, but I will say, I’m fairly annoyed by the fact that this isn’t functioning as advertised and that I was penalized because of a client error over which I had zero control. The more interaction I have with this new system, including the fact that dodging is till extremely common, the harder it is to believe that Riot actually pushed this through. There are so many reasons for a game to fall apart in queue that penalizing the process seems arbitrary and absurd.

I hope to god Riot realizes just how bad this system is and fixes it soon, but my guess is they won’t. It took a poll in the forums about Champ Select AFKers for someone from Riot to take interest in any opinion that doesn’t penalize queue dodging. This could have easily been considered prior to the patch. Now we get to sit back and watch as the company tries to clean up. It’s going to be a rough couple of weeks.

  

LoL: Patch Day

Vandal Jax.It’s patch day again, bringing us a slew of changes to some of the less popular heroes, a much needed (though still lacking) TF nerf, and the new champ, Mordekaiser. The patch also gave us one highly undesirable feature: queue dodge penalties. Overall, though, I’d say I’m pretty happy about this patch.

My favorite part so far has been the Jax remake. I’ve played two games with him and he seems like he’s in a good spot. The extra HP makes a big difference and the Leap Strike change gives him a nice escapability buff. He’ll still struggle at times, as all melee DPS does, but the changes make a significant difference. Also, that Vandal skin is badass.

I’ll be taking a look at the Warwick changes later today. I had a Warwick in one game, but he was awful so I won’t say he’s a good judge of the situation. The mana changes alone should be a boon.

The TF nerf seems good, though it doesn’t address his real problem – map control. I played a game as Jax with Mundo, Ryze, Pantheon and TF in which our Ryze went AFK around level 9. We still stomped them, mostly because our TF held his port for the perfect moment in just about every situation. Sure, he does less damage, but when he’s stunning people consistently and turning even fights into landslides, I can’t help but think they nerfed him for the masses but he’s just as good for skilled players.

Mordekaiser actually looks to be a lot of fun. The fact that you can cast his shield on creeps makes him a bit like Dark Seer from Dota, though it’s only allies. That would be an interesting change if they feel he isn’t laning well. He does seem to harass decently enough, and his ult is pretty cool. I’m not going to spend the RP on him and all my IP has gone into runes recently, so I’ll have to wait for a free week to give a real analysis.

Lastly, the queue dodging penalty. This thing is so stupid I hate to even write about it. Every time you leave during champion select you get a leaver mark on your account. The first leave gives you a three minute queue penalty. The second brings it up to 10 minutes, though that timer does reset 8 hours after your first leave. I can’t understand why they would implement this when there are so many legitimate reasons to leave at champion select and no options to deal with those issues. AFK summoners are just part of the problem. There are also team composition problems, and the fact that matchmaking will still pair you with people on your ignore list. Add to all of this the fact that people are still dodging like mad and it’s pretty clear that a dodge penalty is about the worst solution Riot could have come up with.

You can find complete patch notes in the announcements forum.

  

LoL: Queue dodgers make the dodging even more worth it

Evelyn, the noobmaker.My friends and I have a new rule: no Heimer, no Eve, period. It held guideline status, but there was always some occasion where our team comp looked good, despite the potential for a noob Heimer or Eve and we would let it slide. Every time we made the exception, or so it seemed, we would lose. The player would be just as bad as we expected and our team would fall apart by the 30-minute mark. The same thing happened last night, which is why we’ve taken that guideline and bumped it up to constitutional amendment levels. In the current matchmaking system I will no longer play a game with Eve or Heimer in it.

Say what you will about queue dodging, I value my time in the game too much to spend 25 minutes watching teammates feed, and as experience dictates, Eve and Heimer players are noob players the vast majority of the time. I don’t have fun trying to drag them along behind me, giving encouraging advice that they just won’t heed. Instead, I’m always going to try to convince that player to switch toons or I’ll be dodging the queue.

There are a lot of other people who obviously feel this way. Most games I have to wait through two or three queue cycles before I can play. For the most part, it’s not something I mind, if only because I can understand the mindset. As queue dodging becomes more prevalent, it becomes more beneficial to my sanity to dodge as well. When it takes five to ten minutes to find a game, I want that game to be competitive, not a landslide in either direction. It’s a vicious cycle, but one that’s become almost necessary for my enjoyment of the game.

I would love if this was not the case and there is a simple solution: fix matchmaking. Queue dodging, for me, is a symptom of the poor matchmaking system. I would be totally fine playing with Heimer and Eve if I was confident my teammates were at least decent players and hopefully aware and ready to compensate for their respective champion’s weaknesses. That’s just not the case, though, and until I start to see significantly better players in my queue, I’ll be dodging the champions most prone to noob players.

  

LoL: The community take on queue dodging

Rawr-pendragonThe 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?

  

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