League of Legends: 7 Ways Riot Can Improve High Elo Solo Queue
By Josh Tyler
Many high elo players of League of Legends are upset about the quality of their solo queue games. Here are 10 things Riot could do to improve game quality in high elo.
If you listen to the opinion of the most prominent high elo players, streamers, and professionals, League of Legends has never been in a worse state than it is in Season 10. From Tarzaned to IWDominate to Voyboy, high elo players have complained about issues from AFKers, intentional feeders, soft feeding, dodging, queue times, and unbalanced teams. This prompted a very smart, in-depth article by former LCS player and current LCS commentator Alberto “Crumbz” Rengifo.
Crumbz has a lot of good suggestions for steps Riot can take to better police ranked League of Legends, specifically aimed at those players in high elo (which we’re going to define, as he does, Diamond II and above, the top 0.4% of the NA player base). While Riot will surely take some of these on before Season 11 (as they already teased), here are 10 suggestions we have to improve high elo solo queue.
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1. Harsher Rules
The first suggestion I would make to Riot about high elo solo queue is that you have to think about it and its problems separately from those of the general population. Because of the high skill level, low player count, and the increased scrutiny these players are under, behavior that might be acceptable in say, Bronze elo, would be game-breaking in high Diamond and above.
As a result, I would suggest that Riot intensify their existing rules for players in this high elo and add additional ones. For instance, the definition of “intentional feeding” should be much harsher in high elo than in low elo. A player going 0/10 in Silver is very different than a player going 0/10 in Challenger and it shouldn’t just be brushed off as “having a bad day.” Bad days happen to everyone, yes, but players in this high of a skill bracket should be better prepared to avoid huge losses.
I would also leave it up to those players in high elo to make the determination of what behaviors they would consider to be “soft inting” and making that a punishable offense. Riot should do a poll of players in Diamond and above, laying out actions that could be considered soft inting like playing a champion you have a low win rate on or splitpushing while you’re 0/5. In any case, the players in this elo should have a larger say as to what behavior is acceptable or not.