Before I open anybody's games I ask two things. What role do you play, and who do you queue with.

The second one throws people. They answer it quickly, move on, and then look slightly confused about why I bothered writing it down. But when somebody tells me they play most of their ranked games with the same person, I already know roughly half of what I am going to find in their replays, and I have been right about that often enough now that I stopped treating it as a hunch.

I keep writing friend here. In practice it is a fair number of siblings and partners too, which makes the whole conversation harder rather than easier.

This is not a post telling you to ditch anybody. Some duos are genuinely good for both players and I will get to those. Most of the ones I see are not, and almost nobody has looked closely enough to know which kind they are in.

Start with the number, because it settles most of the argument

Open your match history and split your solo games from your duo games, then work out your win rate in each.

Hardly anybody has done this, and most people are quite confident they know the answer before they check. They are wrong about half the time, in both directions. I have had clients find that their duo games are eight or nine points better, which ended that conversation immediately and turned into a different one about why. I have also had clients find a gap in the other direction and go very quiet.

One sample of fifty games is small and streaks distort it, so I would not build your whole season on it. It is still a fact about your own account that took you four minutes to find, and you did not have it this morning.

What actually changes when he is in the lobby

The win rate is only the surface of it. The more useful question is which of your decisions move when there is a second person in your queue.

You take fights you would not take alone. Usually not reckless ones, just slightly worse ones, because the play looks more possible with him there and because saying no to something your friend has already started walking towards carries a small social cost that you pay in half a second without thinking about it.

You also stop leaving, and this one does more damage than people expect. On your own you would have closed the client after the third loss. With somebody waiting in the lobby, leaving means being the person who quits on the night, so you play the fourth and the fifth. Those are the games where the LP actually goes.

You end up with a permanent explanation for bad games as well. His jungler was useless, he got autofilled, he had a bad day at work. Some of that is completely true. The problem is that it is available every single game, so the honest review you might have done on your own never quite happens.

Then there is the one nobody says out loud. If the two of you play the same lane together, you have been learning a two person version of that lane for a year, and the first time you queue alone it feels strange in a way you cannot quite put your finger on.

There are duos that work, and I would rather say so

A bot lane pair with real communication is stronger than two strangers, and it is not close. Playing with somebody meaningfully better than you is one of the fastest ways to improve that exists, as long as you are watching what he does instead of following him around the map. And having one person to talk about your games with is worth more than most people credit, especially if you have been grinding alone for years with nobody to think out loud at.

What those have in common is that the partnership is doing a specific job. The ones that quietly cost you tend to be the ones where you queue together out of habit, because you always have, and neither of you has asked in about eighteen months whether it still makes sense.

The part that makes this genuinely hard

This is a friendship rather than a gameplay habit, and you cannot run a clean experiment on a friendship without feeling like a bad person for doing it.

I have had this conversation many times and the opening is nearly always the same. The client already suspects something and has done for months. He has not said it to anybody, because the one person he would naturally say it to is the person it is about, and he does not want to start something over a video game.

That is an uncomfortable place to sit, and I think the discomfort is the actual reason most people never open their match history and check.

For what it is worth, the answer is almost never that you should stop playing with him. It is usually smaller than that. Solo queue the games you are climbing in, keep the duo games for evenings where you are playing to enjoy yourself rather than to gain LP, and say that out loud to him rather than quietly drifting. Most people find that conversation much easier than they had built it up to be.

If you want to think about this somewhere before you raise it with the person involved, the server is a reasonable place for it. It is at https://discord.gg/9TvZvQgMPU and this comes up more often than you would guess.

What I do with it in a session

When a client duos, I ask for five games with his partner and five without, from the same week.

Then I look at identical things in both sets. What minute his first death lands on. How often he joins a fight he did not start. Whether he leaves his lane at all. How many games the session ran to. The differences are usually not subtle, and the useful part is that none of it is my opinion. It is his own two sets of games sitting next to each other.

After that we work out what the duo is actually for. Some clients keep it exactly as it is once they can see the cost, and I think that is a perfectly reasonable answer, because this is a game and enjoying it is a real thing to want. Others split their queueing and climb inside a month without changing a single thing about how they play.

Add me on Discord at shelbion, or come into the server at https://discord.gg/9TvZvQgMPU and message me with your role and your rank, and tell me who you queue with.

If you already have a feeling about what your split is going to look like before you check it, that feeling is information too. Go and check it anyway.