I’ve been trying to spend a good bit of time in solo queue over the course of the weekend to see how things feel. There are still a lot of the same problems – bad players have been carried, good players are in brackets well below their skill level, there is so much animosity among teammates that it’s nearly impossible to organize people. My problem is that I want to see the stats that ranked matches provide, but playing the queue as a solo is painful.

I really think Riot should open up the solo queue to allow 3-man premades. There is really no reason not to. Among the queues, solo seems to be taken the least seriously. Even with three people, the chance for your other two players to be atrocious is high enough that it really shouldn’t be much different from the two man system.

I know there are normal games, but the fact that normal stats aren’t being tracked gives players too much flexibility to leave games without consequence. I still want to enjoy a competitive game with my friends on Summoner’s Rift and, unfortunately, the current system doesn’t allow for that.

I don’t think I’ve read better news today (granted, most of my reading to this point has been focused on either games or gadgetry, so it kinda makes sense). I found a thread in which Zileas said he would be adding feeder/carry consideration to the ELO calculations at the end of games.

This. Is. Huge. This is at least a step toward addressing the individual performance in a team setting and the penalties/benefits some players reap as a result. As a for instance, I had a game today in which I played Shaco. I got a slow start, mostly because I was on the phone and not focused on my jungling, so I didn’t gank much early. I did try for one big gank on our 1v2 lane and sent them back to base, so it wasn’t a horrible early game. Well, not to me anyway.

My teammates, on the other hand, would not stop berating me for being a terrible Shaco and a waste of a team slot and on and on. Our Olaf kept insisting I was going to be useless late game because I hadn’t ganked. As it turned out, I went 11-2-15 with two tower kills before the other team surrendered. Regardless of what my team thought was going on, I was largely the reason behind the victory, or at least the very heavy piece of leaden straw that broke the camel’s back. Our Olaf slightly below 1.00 in his K/D ratio and our Mordekaiser was 1-9. For the other team, that can be an extremely frustrating loss. They likely could have beat our team with a different player. My understanding, then, is that their ELO will not be as negatively effected because we had a strong carry. Likewise, my own ELO should receive a slight bonus for carrying.

On the flipside, if Kaiser had somehow lost us the game (which he almost did), we likely wouldn’t be as penalized because we had a heavy feeder on our team. No word on when these changes will come out, but I’m really excited about them.

I am actually astounded it took this long for Riot to make this change, particularly when you consider the kind of data it had available. Granted, these stats were probably taken after the launch of Season One, but it wasn’t exactly uncommon to see players below level 30 matched with those above prior to the Season One launch either.

As Pendragon stated in a post last night, the change was made because players below level 30 tend to leave 4.2 percent of games, versus the 1.1 percent of games from level 30 players. The really interesting stat, though, is that sub-30 players have a staggering 35.2 percent win rate, while those over 30 are seeing an average 52 percent win rate.

Again, I’m shocked it took this long, and the data serves as a pretty embarrassing statement toward Riot’s foresight on this. You should start to see the change today.

I finally got my launcher up and running and popped into a quick solo ranked game to try out the new system. I was so glad to see that the ban system was indeed implemented for solo queue that I said out loud, “oh, thank god.”

My first impression – my god are people tryharding. Bans in my game were a little silly, but the first three picks were Shaco, TF, and Sivir. It’s actually nice to see some well-rounded comps for once, but I have a feeling I’m playing against some pretty low-ELO folks. The other team ended up a mish-mash of toons – TF/Sivir/Kayle/Warwick/Mundo, while my own team looked a bit better at Shaco/Ryze/Xin/Heimer/Kaiser. Not a lot of stunning but there wasn’t much need.

I really like the pick interface. It’s a bit confusing all at once, but the tips were helpful and once I got my brain around all the graphical prettiness it was a smooth system. In game, though, I was experiencing fairly heavy server lag. With a ping of just over 100 I had a full second of delay, in some cases more. I’m guessing this is due to severe server overload but it still sucks. Hopefully things will improve as the night wears on.

UPDATE:This is looking like a sure victory. I’m 8-1 presently and they have a level 7 Warwick while I’m level 13.

Zileas posted to the official forums today, stating that when Season One begins, the 5v5 Solo version of the ranked matches may not get the ban option present in the other two ranks. The reason? He doesn’t want people to argue.

I’ll spare you the nauseating rundown of the entire thread and just say this – I hope to god he changes his mind. As I posted in the thread, there are plenty of things for people to argue about. There are plenty of things people do argue about. I would still rather have the option to ban than not.

It seems so basic in my mind. Give the ban option to either the player with the highest ELO, or make it totally random, but we need an option for removing the things Riot breaks from the game. That sounds snarky, but the recent Ezreal “accident” made me realize again the importance of bans. Mystic was horribly broken, to the point I thought they should remove Ezreal from the game. Remember what Jax was like before the string of nerfs? Whoever had first pick could be virtually guaranteed a win.

I really hope they reconsider this. It would make the 5v5 Solo queue much less enjoyable and much less competitive.