Dynamic Queue: Why It's Harder to Climb

With the advent of dynamic queue, most of us saw the changes and originally thought it would be an easy climb now that we can get our preferred roles more often.

However, other than for people that have genuinely improved over time, overall divisions have fallen for many players. Why is this? Let's take a look at some of the potential causation factors:

Introduction

With the advent of dynamic queue, most of us saw the changes and originally thought it would be an easy climb now that we can get our preferred roles more often.

However, other than for people that have genuinely improved over time, overall divisions have fallen for many players. Why is this? Let's take a look at some of the potential causation factors:

1. Longer Queue Times

With longer queue times, players spend slightly more time waiting for a game, resulting in lower LP changes over time.

Additionally, the higher queue times may also be moving more casual players over to ARAM and blind pick mode. This creates a smaller "pool" of LP to draw from, resulting in overall division deflation.

2. Higher Specialization of Roles

Before you were forced to pick a role prior to entering into ranked, many players still "called" their roles. However, if you were a top/mid player, you generally got your preferred role much less than say, a support main, who could specialize very hard and almost always get their role.

This means that if you main support or jungle, you're likely to be slightly worse off in comparison to the previous queue.

3. Lower Number of AFKs

There's an old adage that says if you're not a troll, then the chances of a troll on your team is 4/9, and the chances of a troll being on the enemy team is 5/9.

Providing you're not an AFKer, this means that every time there's an AFK in your game, he's a little more likely to be on the enemy. This generally results in a few more free wins for anybody who doesn't AFK.

Because the new dynamic queue automatically boots AFK players early on in the draft process, this occurs less often to result in LP gains. Although it isn't necessarily a bad thing, this means your overall "free LP pool" is a bit lower.

4. More People Playing Their "Best"

The new queue pushes players to decide early on in the process what role and champion they want to play. This means that less players are making multiple last second decisions if their team is oddly quiet. 

As a result, they tend to have more time to plan. This means that for people that used to plan ahead and always played their best, this advantage is no longer a major factor in gaining LP.

Conclusions

There's a game called Rush Poker that I used to play, and it involved a large pool of players playing with a different group every hand. This meant that for anybody that wasn't betting the blind, mucking anything low was ideal, even if in a normal game, it could have been a decent hand. The reason for this is that everyone who was willing to play was likely holding very good cards with the thought that everyone else was doing the same strategy.

The new Dynamic Queue is similar. Where the old queue might have a guy holding a pair of fours or panicking last minute and betting with a bad hand, you can be sure that everyone's aiming to hold at minimum some royal cards.

What do you think about Dynamic Queue now that it's shown some age? Like it? Hate it? Comment below! Also let me know if that poker analogy was a little too vague...