League of Legends’ Flex queue is about to become a whole lot more flexible.
League game director Andrei “Meddler” van Roon shared thoughts on the future of Clash, discussing the tournament mode in today’s dev blog post. To help teams prepare for Clash without any restrictions, the tier limits on Flex will be removed to allow all players to queue together regardless of rank.
“Since the launch of Clash we’ve also seen the number of premade 5s in Flex queue increase substantially,” Meddler said. “To help Flex be more useful again, we’re going to be removing the tier limits for who you can queue with in Flex to make it easier to get a team together.”
To compensate for the disparity between high and low-ranked players, Riot will “skew a team’s MMR” toward the MMR of the highest-ranked player. This will avoid players trying to abuse the system by teaming up with lower-ranked players.
Clash works similarly, allowing players of any rank to squad up and tackle the competition. But the team will be placed in a bracket based on the MMR of the highest-ranked player.
Meddler also explained that the dev team’s next focus is on smurfing. Though accounts that smurf in Clash are already getting their rewards stripped and being blocked from future tournaments, Riot believes that’s “not enough by itself.”
Meddler didn’t share any other specific ways to counteract smurfing yet, but the dev did inform fans that it’s on Riot’s radar.
