Many of us have experienced high queue times in League of Legends. The experience is pretty tame, it has us looking at the queue timer that just keeps increasing, we might even start to suspect that it’s bugged, but what’s really going on?
Well, in this article, we are gonna illuminate the cause of long queue times and give some solutions relating to this issue!
What is Causing Long Queue Times in League of Legends
Low Amounts of Active Players in a Rank
To begin explaining what causes long queue times in League of Legends it’s first important to familiarize ourselves with how Riot matches players. The matching is based on a hidden player rating called MMR. The MMR is essentially a score that measures where a player stands amongst the other competitors on the ladder.
The more net wins a person has, the higher background score they have (MMR). Now, if we imagine players across all ranks as individuals grouped in different rooms, we would see that some rooms are more empty than others. This is simply due to the nature of competitive distribution. The challenger room would have only 250 players inside, while a gold room might have hundreds of thousands of players (it would be quite a big room I guess).
Now let’s say you are a master tier player wanting to play a game at 3 AM. The pool of available players will be so small that Riot will simply need more time to match you. A similar thing would happen if you were ranked super low too. Since the game does not have many beginners playing ranked, finding equally matched opponents takes more time.
Too Many Players Queueing for the Same Role
Now, another thing that might slow down the time required to find the game is the number of people queueing for a role. Let’s say you are playing mid lane, the most popular role in the game, and you have autofill protection enabled. The game will not be able to autofill you in order to reduce the wait time, instead the game would make you wait longer for your designed role.
How to Lower Queue Time
Now that we have established what causes long queue times in League of Legends, you might be wondering how to actually lower the queue times. Well, the answer to this is not that complicated.
In order to lower queue time, we will have to put ourselves in a position where it’s easier for the game to find us a match. This would require either changing the role, inviting some new team mates or changing the mode we are playing.
Changing the role to one that’s in lesser demand would help the game find us a proper game much more easily. When it comes to making a full team, this might help us get matched with other teams who have been waiting for a long time, as Riot prefers premades of 5 to play against premades of 5. Finally, if nothing else works, and the estimated queue times are too long, the most reasonable option might be just straight-up switching the mode we are playing to something else.
Final Thoughts
Low queue times are simply a symptom of low number of players at a given time. Riot always strives to give us balanced games, and therefore, they increase the queue time for the sake of more enjoyable games. Now, if you want to save time when queuing, it’s newer wise to restart the queue, as it will literally just put you at the end of the virtual queue that riot matchmaking is creating.