There are too many exploits in positional queue

Ranked queues have been up for a bit over a week now, with North America and Korea getting the first taste of the new positional ranking system. However, the new ranking system is riddled with exploits and bugs that let players climbing abuse the system.

While the system is supposed to support players playing off-role and accommodate the match-ups for when players might be playing outside of their comfort zone, players have found pretty simple ways to exploit the system.

One reddit thread notes that if you swap your lane early in the game, the game will think you role swapped, adjusting how much LP you lose. So if you’re not winning, just go to a different lane to lose less LP. Another thread notes that you can get matched up against lower division opponents if you duo queue and swap roles, while still gaining LP for your main role.

You can be punished for swapping roles too many times, as Riot is seemingly aware of the exploits, but swapping roles with your duo is far from an uncommon practice, even before positional queues launched. Riot addressed this in a /dev diary video and said that they’ll be keeping any eye out for players who role swap too much.

The video also noted that Riot would be monitoring abuse cases and would be able to turn off positional ranks without having players lose any progress.

The system is still being tested, which is why it only launched in two regions. Players so far have been generally happy with the match-ups and games they’ve been put into because of this ranking system, but generally don’t seem to care too much about their off-role ranks.

Riot has yet to respond about what they’re going to do with the buggy positional ranks, but we can probably expect some kind of fix before they launch globally.

Update: Riot SapMagic has been looking into some of these issues and is aware of them, but no fix has been announced yet. He does note that the discrepancies in match-ups should not be happening.

Update 2: SapMagic has taken to the boards to announce that the team has squashed some of the problems positional queue had, including the two issues listed above. Other issues, like ranked data appearing incorrect on third-party websites, has also been corrected.