[Client] 5-man premade parties have been broken since months. Pick order cannot be changed.

There has been an issue since months now when playing as a group of 5 players in draft pick.

I found multiple threads ( 1, 2, 3 )) talking about it here so it's at least 6 months old. This issue has either been ignored or unseen by Riot, as it was never commented on. A board user speculated it's happening since the runes update.

How it should be (and used to be) :

The player making the party is the party leader, then the pick order is determined by the order in which the other players were invited (not accepted the invitation). Many people still think it works like this.

How it is right now :

There is a hidden a value for each player that determines the pick order. There is no way to change it or play around it. Whoever has the bigger (or smaller) value in a premade 5 will get first pick.

I'm playing with almost the same group of players recently and we noticed that one of us is always first picking, which is annoying since she mostly plays midlane and doesn't have a lot of champs. No matter who makes the party or the order of invitations, we found no way to change that. I myself noticed that i'm always either 4th or 5th pick. Very once in a while, someone we don't play often with would come first pick ahead of her (which means he has a bigger hidden value). I'm calling it hidden because we couldn't determine what makes the order. It's not alphabetical, by rank or by level.

Why does it matter ?

Many people, especially those who do not play in 5-man parties or have all champs could have this reaction. I will try to explain why it does :

1. New player experience. New players who hardly own a big portion of champions in league are directly penalized by this bug. And they can't do much about it. They will most of the time be forced to pick for themselves even when it's not appropriate. See my exemple above.

2. New/reworked champion releases. Any time a new champion comes to league everyone wants to try it out once. A direct consequence of this is that it is often first picked in the first days following release. Which mean that if your 1st pick stuck premade who doesn't own the champion and prefers to save his BE to widen his champion pool will not be able to pick it for you. An potential answer to this would be "Just queue up alone ?", but this would mean a champion select bug is preventing you from playing with your friends, which is something Riot Games encouraged a lot to do in the recent years.

3. Ranked Flex. Despite how a lot of players view it, it is still an official ranked queue that gives ranked rewards. Also many players use it as a replacement for Ranekd 5 that doesn't exist anymore. If your midlaner is a new player maining Kassadin who is forced to blind pick it always, it's not an ideal situation. If your toplaner wants to play Irelia but is always last pick, good luck picking her.

I'm not directly affected by this most of the time as i'm 3rd/4th pick usually within my group, but i saw it create a lot of uneeded frustration and I hope to see it fixed soon.