Starting with Patch 10.15, Riot Games will be changing League of Legends‘ ranked flex queue so that friends can join each other on Summoner’s Rift and battle together no matter what rank they are.
In a recent Quick Gameplay Thoughts blog post, Mark “Scruffy” Yetter said that due to the success of the unrestricted rank system set for Clash, the developer team decided to apply the same system to ranked flex queue.
The system works by taking the weighted average of each player’s rank, while also prioritizing the higher ranked players. As a result, each lobby should be relatively even when it comes to the rank distribution among both teams.
“On the whole, we think this better serves the queue to be more accessible to groups that want to test their skills, even if it creates more games with a wide spread of ranks,” Scruffy said.
Before this update, flex queue had its own separate rank from solo queue. But now, every friend of any rank can hop into a lobby to practice their own team-based skills or to simply fool around as a group of five. This system could also help lower-ranked players improve their own mechanical skills by facing off against better players in lane.
Patch 10.15 will be hitting League‘s live servers on Wednesday, July 22.
