Riot Games are disabling Duo Queue in Solo/Duo ranked play for League of Legends for patch 16.9 when the ranked reset for Apex+ tiers is set to happen. “We are planning to disallow Apex+ duoing for at least the first patch to allow MMR's to settle a bit” said by Riot Matt “Phroxon” Leung-Harrison on X.

This is the first time in League of Legends history Riot Games have done a hard reset for any part of the ranked ladder.

The reason for the ranked reset is because earlier in the year Riot Games made adjustments to both LP gains and the way matchmaking paired up players from different MMR brackets. This led to LP gains being high on certain patches and low on other patches, leading to LP inflation and players feeling that if you didn't play on the correct patch where LP gains were boosted, you just fell behind as a player.

The change targets the top of the ladder (Master+) as below the rank Master, the ranks and MMR will remain the same. In addition to this, the Grandmaster and Challenger rank cutoffs ended up being extremely high compared to other seasons. Currently on EUW Grandmaster is 1467 LP and Challenger 2019 LP.

At the highest level of play, coordination and communication are key to winning games. Duo Queue allows players to remove one part of the randomness of solo queue, making one factor of the environment more consistent, leading to an “easier” climb. Removing the Duo Queue shifts the focus entirely onto the individual skills to climb the ranked ladder and their ability to adapt to 4 new teammates every game. Challenger player Azer "Azzapp" Dugalic, who hit rank 1 on the EUW ladder this year, has made multiple shorts talking about how Duo Queue can destabilize the ladder and give the duo queues an unfair advantage against the majority of solo queue players.

Pro player and challenger support Carl Martin Erik "Rekkles" Larsson, has commented on duo queue being "unbalanced" and “broken”.

A smurf, or a fresh account, is a secondary account that experienced players use to play in lower ranked games than their main. People make smurfs for multiple reasons, some just want to get a fresh start, some make smurf accounts to practice different champions and roles, while some make smurf accounts to sell accounts later or elo-boost other players for money. For the last point Riot Games bans accounts for boosting as it is against Riot’s TOS.

Either way, there will be no benefit to players ranking up a new account to master for the ranked reset. Everyone’s rank and mmr will be equal for the start of the ranked reset. Additionally any smurf accounts with their MMR higher than master 0LP but visual rank Diamond or Emerald will still get their MMR reset to 0LP master while remaining visually in their current rank. This means there is no benefit to going on a fresh or smurf account for patch 16.9.