Former professional mid laner Nemesis called out Riot’s Champion’s Queue in a video, calling it a “failure” after being denied permission to compete on the Champions’ Queue ladder in the lead-up to Worlds 2022.
Champions’ Queue has been one of the most divisive innovations in competitive League of Legends in recent years.
Designed to combat the innumerable issues with NA solo queue as a practice environment, it creates custom lobbies of professional players who have been admitted to the CQ server. These lobbies have full voice communication and low ping, providing players an opportunity to put in meaningful practice in an environment outside scrims.
Or at least, that was the idea.
When champions queue came out I thought it was the best thing that happened to NA in regards to soloqueue and now 2 months later it's completely dead gg
— Jesper "Zven" Svenningsen (@Zven) April 8, 2022
CQ has been plagued with issues — and streamer Tim ‘Nemesis’ Lipovšek recently highlighted these issues in a video posted to his YouTube channel. In the video, he explained that he had planned to travel to NA to compete on the server in the run-up to Worlds, but that Riot had not granted him access to Challenger’s Queue.
Riot’s reasoning and the problem with CQ
According to Nemesis, he wasn’t given an exact reason for his ineligibility for Champion’s Queue.
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However, he explained that he suspected the reasoning was similar to that given to fellow streamer and caster Marc ‘Caedrel’ Lamont. Namely, players traveling to NA “needed to be on an active roster from a Worlds-qualifying league” in order to be eligible for Challengers Queue.
Nemesis called the slight a “missed opportunity” for Riot to promote Champion’s Queue and the current hype surrounding it — a hype which Nemesis suspects will not last.
He also criticized the lack of enforcement of the CQ rules by Riot – showcasing a Rengar one trick who was allowed to participate in Champion’s Queue despite the rules stating that one tricks are not allowed in the server.
He called out Riot’s unfairness in not giving a CQ invite to Jackson ‘Evolved’ Dohan, a Katarina one trick and former Academy player who is currently Rank 1 in North American solo queue – but instead letting much lower elo one tricks get into the server without any issue.
“Right now Champion’s Queue has the hype because of Worlds, but it’s just a matter of time until teams stop playing because the Worlds teams leave, or Korean and Chinese players just don’t like it and they stop playing it. Riot is not trying to do everything to promote and try to keep CQ alive.”
