League of Legends: everything you need to know about the Teamfight Tactics ranked queue

Party restrictions

Similar to League of Legends proper, Teamfight Tactics will also have restrictions as to who you can queue up in ranked with. While you can queue up with as many as five friends (cue the flashbacks to Dynamic Queue), if you’re Gold or below, you can only queue up with two friends if you’re Platinum or higher.

Players in Iron, Bronze, and Silver are free to queue up with each other, and their Gold friends, but Iron through Silver players will be unable to queue up with Platinum players, even if there are only two of them in their party. Platinums can queue with Gold friends and Diamond friends in groups of three, but Gold players cannot queue with Diamond players. Above that, though, Diamond players can queue freely with Master, GM, and Challenger players, who can also queue with each other freely.

This is presumably made to prevent higher-ranked friends from boosting their lower-ranked players on smurf accounts (intentionally tanking their games so that their friends will have a better chance of gaining LP), but I don’t think these restrictions are sufficient. For instance, if one Diamond smurf queues on his Gold account with five of his Bronze friends, if he and one other player operate to purely kneecap the other two players (possible by just picking away champions they need for synergies), the rest of the players are essentially guaranteed top-four finishes.

Even more so than Dynamic Queue, where premade groups were at least working with solo players towards a win, in Teamfight Tactics premade groups can easily work collaboratively to destroy the two outsiders, getting themselves a higher chance to gain LP quickly and more efficiently. Hopefully, Riot will provide some safeguards to prevent this situation from coming to fruition.