Many people believe that duo queueing in Hero League provides an unfair advantage to the players who do it and now, Blizzard is considering addressing it in future seasons.

It was talked about on stream by a HOTS system designer, and it is now a big topic on Reddit.

Is it as big of an issue as people believe it is? I think the honest answer is, in some instances this provides an obvious advantage and in other cases, it's not so clear.  

Certainly, it appears to be an issue at the Grandmaster level.  This is because when multiple Grand Masters queue together, it is hard for the system to find equivalent players to match them against, which can create unbalanced matches in their favor.  

Another issue occurs when players of significantly varying skill party together.  In that case, the high skill partner will get to control the bans and likely use their superior game knowledge over the corresponding ban person on the other team to get the entire team an advantage in draft. There's also the not insignificant issue that the higher skill player could just straight up carry his or her team to a win by crushing the lower skill players on the other team.  In addition, people often complain that duo queuers use voice comms like Skype to coordinate their actions, which solo queue players on the other side will not be able to replicate.  ?

The truth is that this does not apply to all duo queuers, only some of them.  However, removing the opportunity for some to abuse the system, and in the process potentially increasing the playability of Team League, are huge pluses.  This probably outweighs the minuses of people of similar skill duo queueing together without voice comms being unable to queue in HL, and 2 mans and 3 mans being matched against 5 mans.  After all, Blizzard data suggests that there is no statistical difference in win rate by being on a bigger team.

Follow us on Twitter @GosuGamersHotS and on Facebook for more competitive Heroes of the Storm news and coverage from around the world.