North America’s Champions Queue will undergo a few changes in its second run, LCS Academy Director and project lead for Champions Queue Zack “Riot Whoopley” Elliot announced on Twitter today.
The Summer season kicks off tomorrow. Instead of fixed LP gains, there is now a backend MMR system that’s tied to LP gains and losses, similar to the ranked queue on the League of Legends live servers.
The design of this new system was developed by Riot Games with the help of Tim Sevenhuysen, Director of Esports Analytics at 100 Thieves and founder of League of Legends data site Oracle’s Elixir.
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Changes for Champions Queue Summer season
Once Summer season starts, MMR balancing will only take effect after a match has been found, Riot Whoopley stated.
“Most of the issues we saw in Spring were around things like five amateur players getting matched against five LCS players,” he explained on the League of Legends subreddit.
“With this change we’re hoping to keep queue times low (since everyone is generally considered high Elo), while preventing lopsided matches.”
These new mechanics mean that the system would attempt to sort players on both teams to try to get the closest-to-even MMR while accounting for roles, Whoopley confirmed.
There will also be a new in-game CQ icon awarded to the top 10 players each season.
Summer season will run from May 30 to September 26, with a US$400,000 total prize pool to be split among the top players.
Evil Geniuses’ mid laner and MSI 2022 3rd-4th place finisher Joseph Joon “jojopyun” Pyun topped Split 1 with 886 LP. Golden Guardians’ support Kim “Olleh” Joo-sung took second place, while Evil Geniuses academy bot laner Muhammed Hasan “Kaori” Şentürk came in third on the leaderboard.
Champions Queue is an invite-only in-house system for pros and amateur players in the LCS, as well as LLA pros. It is a new 2022 initiative by Riot Games to create a low-ping, high quality practice environment for pros on the Tournament Realm.
Read Riot Whoopley’s thread here.
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