The smurfs do not have an easy life, they have to play solo because they can’t do duos anymore.
League of Legends players know the phenomenon of smurfing very well. This is a popular tactic in any matchmaking game based on the level of play.
However, in MOBA from Riot it is so frequent that the creators decided to create a special queue only for such players so that they could compete with each other. Now, in addition, it has been decided to take away the possibility of playing duo if their MMR is too “strong”.
Smurfs don’t have it easy
It’s rather not hard to understand that the community doesn’t quite like playing Smurfs. Losing games are more irritating if you can’t do anything about them, because your opponent is playing on a level that is very different from the rest of the players. However, if such a person is on the same team, winning will not give satisfaction.
However, there are queues in the game specifically for them, which, unfortunately, are also filled by regular players. Especially if they come back to rankeds after a long break and this is not a 100% good solution. Now it was decided to introduce another improvement.
As you can see in the above screenshot, despite having the Diamond IV rank, players cannot enter the queue together and there is a big red triangle on their screen. All because their MMR oscillates above the Master, and in these ranks playing duos is forbidden. Here’s Riot’s official statement on this:
Having a premade duo is a slight advantage, and while current Apex Tier (Masters, Grandmaster, and Challenger) players aren’t able to duo with anyone, the system only works off current rank. With this change, we’re tightening up the Apex Tier restriction to apply to MMR as well.
The goal of this is to prevent climbing smurfs from being able to duo queue into Apex Tier. That said, decayed Apex Tier players and the highest skilled Diamond I players may also be impacted by this change.
Up until now these players could duo and reliably get into Apex Tier games, which isn’t fair when the people they’re playing against can’t duo. If this change works as expected, we’ll evaluate shipping it to the rest of the world with plans to re-evaluate before Season Start.
We first rolled out this change back in patch 12.10 on the NA and KR servers as a trial and the results have been positive, so we’re rolling it out to the rest of the world. From now on, players with an MMR correlating to Master or above will no longer be able to duo queue in Ranked Solo/Duo, even if their rank is not Master or higher.
Although players will still be able to stumble upon them, in the longer term they will be eliminated and there will no longer be a situation where two platinum accounts and 100% WR will play together with Masters or Grandmasters in dozens of matches. This solution may discourage many people from using the tactic to quickly get their alt accounts to high elo.