Pro players in the EMEA region rejoice: Champions Queue is coming to the region. From Jan. 24th, pro players within the region will be able to compete in a special, tailor-made server where they exclusively play solo queue matches against other pros.
The concept of Champions Queue comes from North America. LCS players complained about the lack of competitiveness on the North American solo queue server and requested a different training tool to hone their skills. While such complaints have not been as big of an issue in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, Africa), pros have complained about the removal of duo queue in Master, Grandmaster, and Challenger in 2021.
With Champions Queue EMEA, Riot aims to mitigate this issue. The invite-only server will be home to LEC players, LEC substitutes, former LEC players with at least a Grandmaster rank, and ERL players from accredited leagues (LFL, DACH, SuperLiga, Prime League, TCL, Eastern Europe).
Splits and time slots
Unlike regular solo queue, which is split into two parts this year, Champions Queue has five splits. Split 1 kicks off on Jan. 24th and lasts until Feb. 23rd. Split 2 picks up on Feb. 28th and runs until March 31st. The third split commences after MSI, on May 30th, and ends exactly one month later. The fourth and final split starts on July 4th and concluded on August 11th. The fifth split is a ‘bonus’ split, which runs during MSI, but no dates have been given for it yet.
Access to Champions Queue is even more limited than access to solo queue. During the splits, pros can only search for the high-quality games from 10 PM CET until 2 AM CET. During this four-hour window, Riot admins help the pros set up their games in a special Discord server. Though the time slots seem odd, many pro players have either scrims or official games during the rest of the day.
If the experiment is successful, Riot hopes to expand Champions Queue further in the future.
