At long last, League of Legends players who are ranked in the Master tier will have the opportunity to play solo queue games with their friends again.
In the second ranked split of League’s 2024 season, Riot is re-implementing the option for players at the Master tier to engage in duo queue, the devs announced today.
Riot removed the functionality of duo queue for Master players back in 2021 but will bring it back in split two to promote collaboration between high-ranked players, in addition to content creators. One of the most community-engaging activities that’s promoted via streaming and content creators is watching two high-ranked players queue up together, and Riot wants to bring those elements back in some regard next split.
“We want to support those who play Ranked League as a social competitive experience,” Riot said in today’s dev update.
To compensate for the change, Riot is moving the cutoff for duo queue up by one tier, making it impossible to duo at Grandmaster and above now instead of Master and above. This means players vying for a spot atop the Challenger leaderboards will still have to fly solo as “it is extremely difficult to find a fair match when Gumayusi and Keria are duoing, while also trying to respect role preferences,” according to Riot.
Although Master tier duo queue will return in some regions at the start of ranked split two, there are going to be a few regions where the ability to duo won’t be making a comeback. Korea and China will be the only two regions across the globe where Master ranked players still won’t be able to duo queue, making it extra ironic that Riot used T1’s Gumayusi and Keria as the players in an example when it comes to protecting ranked integrity.
According to Riot’s metrics, different regions set the bar differently when it comes to the sliding scale of competitive integrity, but the League devs are still open to listening to players in Korea and China when it comes to re-implementing duo queue at the Master tier.
Duo queue will make its comeback to the Master rank in League when ranked split two begins on May 15.
