Riot spent five days explaining what duoing does to your lobby, and above Emerald the answer is that it costs you.
Matt Leung-Harrison put the duo penalty in rank order, Drew Levin defended it for four straight days, and the full 26.17 preview finally named its champions.
Red Post Roundup
August 19 to 23
Issue #4Riot spent five days explaining what duoing does to your lobby, and above Emerald the answer is that it costs you.
Matt Leung-Harrison put the duo penalty in rank order, Drew Levin defended it for four straight days, and the full 26.17 preview finally named its champions.
The short version
No League Classic news landed in this window. Everything below is modern League.
- Below Emerald, duoing carries basically no matchmaking penalty. It starts to bite in Emerald and Diamond, and grows above that.
- Riot won't make duos face only other duos, and the reason it gives is queue times rather than fairness.
- Here is the whole list of what matchmaking weighs: MMR, role preference, autofill, duo status, then team versus team balancing.
- The MMR formula stays private. Riot's argument is that publishing it would make it known, not fair.
- Patch 26.17's full preview: nerfs for Xerath, Vayne and Nasus, a buff for LeBlanc, and a crit nudge for Yasuo and Yone.
- Even if every lane were a coin flip, roughly one game in ninety would still be a stomp. Riot showed the arithmetic.
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Our League of Legends Red Tracker collects everything Riot devs say in public and refreshes every fifteen minutes. This roundup is the weekly read. The tracker is the one you leave open.
Open the Red TrackerThe big one: duoing above Emerald buys you a harder lobby
Modern LeagueThe question that ran all week started on Reddit and got its answer on X. Matt Leung-Harrison broke the duo penalty down by rank, and it turns out not to be one number.
Re: Duo queue matchmaking penalties Saw some discussion about this At lower ranks, ie. below Emerald, there's basically no penalty for duoing. It only starts to kick in in a small way in Emerald/Diamond and higher at higher ranks as duo communication/coordination becomes more impactful It's tuned so that games at all ranks are fair, duo or no duo
Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, Leagueon X
What it means: if you're Silver or Gold, queueing with a friend is free. The system only starts compensating around Emerald, because that's where two people talking to each other reliably turns into wins. The compensation is a slightly harder lobby, not a hidden tax on your LP.
The obvious follow-up is why Riot doesn't just put duos against duos and leave everyone's MMR alone. Drew Levin took that one several times over.
Oh, it's neither - it's "duo is a small % so making a hard and fast rule that duos must match into each other is very warping for matchmaking and queue times"
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
at the expense of queue times, sure. what % of ranked s/d players do you think are duo queueing?
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
What it means: matching every duo into another duo means the queue has to wait for a second duo at your MMR wanting the right roles. Riot's position is that the wait costs everyone more than the MMR adjustment does.
Told repeatedly that the penalty is far too strong, Levin answered with a measurement.
It definitively isn't, we monitor this to within a half a percentage point of winrate expectancy per skill range
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
Riot listed everything matchmaking actually weighs
Modern LeaguePartway through, the argument stopped being about duo queue and became the older one about whether matchmaking is rigged. Told that Riot tampers with lobbies, Levin went after the word first.
what do you mean "tampered with"? we have a team of people who do work to create games that involve following a bunch of rules on how those ten people are picked - what's the distinction between "doing the work of building matchmaking rules" and "tampering"?
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
Then he listed the inputs, which is the most useful sentence of the week.
right, we've been very consistent in saying that it's MMR, role pref, autofill/role order matching, duo, and then team vs team side balancing as considerations
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
What it means: five inputs, with your hidden MMR at the front. Nothing on that list is your win streak, your last game's performance, or a hand on the scale dragging you back toward fifty percent.
The MMR formula stays private, and Riot's reasoning is blunt
Modern LeagueThe last leg of the argument was about transparency. If a duo penalty exists, the thinking went, players should be able to see how big it is, the way they can see a queue timer tick up.
I don't agree with your contention that anything not perfectly transparent and fully explained to players is unfair. Also, even by your own logic, "how much does my queue time go up because I'm duo" is not transparent to players because if it's implemented as a hard constraint, it's not deterministic, so we don't actually know either.
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
We don't perfectly explain our MMR calculation process. People still accept it as fair because it affects everyone equally and sets the conditions of how skill is evaluated and matches are made. It wouldn't become More Fair if we exposed its formula, it would just be More Known.
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
What it means: the claim is that a rule everybody is subject to is already fair, and that publishing it mostly rewards whoever reads it hardest. Buy it or don't, but that's the position, stated about as plainly as it gets.
Even perfect matchmaking would still hand you stomps
Modern LeagueA separate thread pushed on the idea that a fair match should feel close. Levin did the arithmetic in public instead of arguing about vibes.
also even if every lane were also 50/50 (which would be a much more demanding level of matchmaking closeness that trades off against others), let's say you win/lose/go even in lane 33% of the time each. there are, basically, four lanes. .33^4 =1.1% of games will be onesided
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
What it means: four lanes, each one going well, badly or evenly about a third of the time. Riot's number for all four breaking the same way is 1.1%, or roughly one game in ninety. A stomp on its own is not evidence that anything is broken.
Patch 26.17's full preview names six champions
Modern LeagueLast week's roundup had the direction. On Wednesday morning Matt Leung-Harrison posted the full version, with the champion list attached.
Patch 26.17 Full Preview! [...] Xerath - As stated in previous posts/videos, while Xerath bot is a large part of the AP bot meta, we still think AP bots add to good long term variety and add a healthy frustration to the role - That said, Xerath is performing well in both Mid and Bot, especially for average play and is receiving a generic nerf across the board Vayne - Vayne top has been a strong champion in higher levels of play and also is a bit over the edge in terms of what we'd consider healthy types of available counterplay in many matchups [...] Nasus - [...] we're reducing some of the net total sustain he gets in Top lane to make hitting those high stack counts a bit more challenging (incidentally, this lever doesn't affect Jungle as much)
Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, Leagueon X
The 26.17 numbers are already on the PBE
Riot's preview names the champions and the direction. Our PBE Changes page has the values, read out of the game files on the test server and diffed against live, with every entry marked as announced by Riot or found on the PBE only. Riot tunes those numbers right up until the patch ships, so this is where 26.17 stops being a direction and turns into a number.
See what's on the PBEThe Vayne entry drew the most argument, mostly from players reading it as a win rate correction. Levin said that's the wrong read.
I think you're talking past the actual rationale here. I read Matt and the team's rationale on Vayne changes as "the shape of her laning phase is undesirable in X ways", not "her winrate is too high".
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
What it means: Vayne top isn't being cut for winning too much. A ranged top with Experimental Hexplate gets to be tanky, win lane and scale, and Riot wants the lane to be the part that gives. Her opponent should have a little more health left when your jungler walks up.
Everything else Riot cleared up
LeBlanc gets an old nerf reversed
Modern LeagueHer attack speed ratio was cut back when Statikk Shiv was, in Riot's words, "an extremely good one stop shop waveclear item". Shiv later moved to on-hit and the ratio never came back. 26.17 restores it, plus a small buff.
on X
Yasuo and Yone get pushed back toward crit
Modern League26.17 improves the incentive to buy crit first, over Botrk and Kraken. Riot still calls their crit options an itemization hole "that needs to be filled long term", so this is a nudge rather than a fix.
on XA rank manipulation ban got answered in public
Modern LeagueA player disputed their ban, saying they had played all their own ranked games. Levin's reply: "except for the two days where your account was played by a Peruvian booster, I agree that you played all the ranked games yourself".
on XScammers are working the spectator API
Modern LeagueAn account messaging players to pull them onto Discord turned out to be running on LLMs plus Riot's own spectator API. Levin, on the account: "should be banned in a short while".
on XDodge penalties after a position swap are being looked at
Modern LeagueA player reported eating the dodge timer after the teammate who swapped positions with them dodged. Levin asked them to pin down the exact case, which is how a bug like this gets filed.
on X4v4 is coming to TFT Compete
TFTRiot announced a four-player team ladder for Teamfight Tactics, with drafting, on Wednesday. Tactician's Superbrawl arrives in November.
on Riot's siteNext week
26.17 goes live Tuesday, August 25, so Xerath, Vayne and Nasus stop being a preview. The duo queue argument is the one no patch settles: Riot has now explained its position at length while the numbers underneath it stay private, and that gap is what the whole week was fought over. Levin also promised to check on MMR refunding after a wrongful ban. Until then, our PBE Changes page is where 26.17's values turn up first.
Don't wait a week
The Red Tracker carries every one of these within minutes of Riot posting it, plus everything that didn't make the cut here. Filter by subject, search the archive, check it whenever a patch drops.
Open the Red Tracker
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