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.

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?

I hate to make this post so soon after my “avoid your matchmaking woes” post, but I’ve been in some seriously frustrating matches lately, and it’s worth stating the reason. I think matchmaking prioritizes finding a game within the estimated queue time too highly.

Here’s the deal: I queue up in Arranged Team with two friends, both of whom have less than half my games played. As a long time DotA player, I’m also willing to assume that my ELO from solo queuing is a bit higher than theirs. Because matchmaking can’t find a perfect match for our composition, it instead attempts to account for my high ELO by placing someone with very low ELO on my team. As a for instance, I played a game last night in which my opponents were all around their mid twenties. My friends and I received a level 11 as a teammate. She played Annie. She went 3-14 and cost us the game. Consider also the image I used for this post. This was an actual game I played. The other team didn’t have a player above level 12. In case you’re wondering, I’m “The Wiggin Boy.”

I understand that fast games are better on the whole. Players want to experience the game as quickly as possible, not sit in the lobby waiting to find a match. As ELO improves, though, I think it’s fair to assume that players are more invested in each game, more concerned with winning. To put those players at a disadvantage just because a match couldn’t be found in 60 seconds or less doesn’t make sense. I would gladly sit in queue for 3 minutes before each game if it improved matchmaking results.

For a game that has been downloaded over a million times, LoL has a long way to go before it provides a smooth playing experience.