Quickplay Mode

Hey everyone, we’re Tara “Riot Sailormoon” Chen and Jason “CrabDust” Cohen, the Product and Design Leads of Quickplay here with an update! That’s right, we haven’t forgotten about it since Riot Auberaun initiated this project months ago. It’s coming this year!

A few months back Pu “Riot Pupulasers” Liu, our Game Director, mentioned that we were looking to solve some issues that we were seeing with Blind Pick by replacing it with a new format called Quickplay. Today we want to dig into that a little more and tell you why we’re making this change, how it works, and when it’s coming out.

What is Quickplay?

Quickplay is a new queue that will replace Blind Pick and give you faster access to the game, with a faster process that asks players to make their choices up-front and then goes directly from the lobby to the game. Meaning, there is no champ select in this mode.

Moving champion and position choices to the lobby gets you in game faster, with higher agency over what (and who) you play, and cutting out some of the collisions, toxicity, and complexity that comes with Blind Pick.

So if you only have time for one game, you can queue up with confidence knowing that when the queue pops, it’s game on!

What’s wrong with Blind Pick?

BP = Blood Pressure?

Blind Pick was designed and optimized for fast queue times. It pushes player choice into champ select, which makes the queue pop quickly. But, there are only so many lanes. Asking players to negotiate a functional team comp with strangers, against the clock, and with limited communication tools is a recipe for friction.

This is fine for players with an auto-fill mindset, but imagine: You get home from work and just want to try out the new champ, or maybe you’re getting back into League after a long break and want to ease back in on a comfort pick. For a queue with no bans, it’s tough to play what you want in Blind Pick.

Some players bypass the negotiation altogether by locking in first. This gives an unfair advantage to those with the fastest fingers and it forces everyone else to fill in what’s left or leave.

Trust

Experimental players and folks who just want to practice have multiple hurdles to overcome in Blind Pick. Say they want to try out Warwick mid—not only do they need to get lucky in champ select with both position and champion choices, but they also risk queue dodges for their unorthodox pick. Get right onto the Rift and show `em who’s a good boy.

Not-so-welcome to Summoner’s Rift

Players who are newer to the game have an even harder time with this setup. They have limited champion pools and narrow positional flexibility. If they get forced into jungle because their teammates lock in everything else, we can't be too surprised when they end up in lane because they don’t know where to go.

Another one

Last but not least, when the game is clearly over and you just want to go next before the tilt sets in, the current surrender rules make it tough to get out and play another match.

All that said, we think the original promise of getting into a game of SR at light speed is still valid and valuable. That's what we want to deliver... minus the bad stuff. Now, let’s get into the details.

How does Quickplay work?

In the lobby, players will choose Primary and Secondary champions and positions. Spells and loadouts can be changed from here as well by using a new menu.

In order to keep the queue popping quickly, one of your position choices must be a “Priority” position. These are positions that are most needed by the current matchmaking pool (the UI will tell you which is needed).

The intent is that you get your first choice most of the time, but there will be times when you have to play in a Priority position. This is something we will keep a close eye on numbers-wise and tune accordingly.

Here are the specific rules for different party sizes:

To address being stuck in a lopsided match, we have lowered the surrender requirements a bit. The first surrender vote will be available at 10 minutes, down from 15, but still requires 4 of the 5 players to vote yes. Once the game hits 20 minutes, surrender will only require 3 of the 5 players to vote yes.

While this may mean that stomps won’t get to play out fully as often, that’s probably a good thing for an unranked queue. The flip side is, games that go the distance will likely be closer and worth your time!

This tuning is also something we’ll be keeping an eye on to make sure match times are healthy and most games don’t end at 10 minutes.

What are we hoping to see?

We want you to feel like this queue is a fast and easy way to enjoy SR gameplay, without the extra pre-game time.

In Quickplay, you should get to play what you want and be on the Rift shortly after hitting the Find Match button. You should feel like you can queue up with friends of different skill levels and, if the game goes sideways in a hurry, you aren’t trapped—just go next and queue up again.

The Beta Test Mindset

Quickplay’s core loop is ready to go, but at launch it will be missing some features like chroma selection and you may run into small hitches or visual bugs. Rather than hold Quickplay’s release for an extended period of time, we want to get it to you early, validate what we’ve got, and work with you to improve it over time.

Here’s the timeline:

• Quickplay hits PBE in 13.21 dev cycle for core functionality.
• Quickplay release to live in the following patches after 13.21, in a staggered way, from region to region.

As always we are eager to hear your feedback. Cheers and see you on the Rift!