So, Normal Draft...

RiotRiot Draggles·11/9/2016, 2:20:03 AM·1 votes·113,434 views

Hey folks,

We want to clear up our plans for Normal Draft queues in various regions around the world. Earlier today we announced that we've turned off Normal Draft in every region except for NA, EUW, and BR. Specifically, this means turning it off in EUNE, LAS, LAN, TR, and KR. This didn't affect other regions, where the queue was already inactive.

We caused confusion by saying that "in an ideal world" we'd retire Normal Draft in NA, EUW, and BR. We have no current plans to do so. Ultimately, we would like to take the best aspects of both normal queues (position preference from Normal Draft and less hardcore gameplay/speedy champion select from Blind Pick) into a single queue.

In the regions where Normal Draft was disabled, it had very low participation. Our concern going into the launch of Flex is that having many similar queue options will result in a lot of low quality experiences rather than a few good quality ones.

In other regions where we've already turned off Normal Draft, we'll keep listening to your feedback through the preseason as we start to see how the new queues perform and evaluate based on how healthy things are looking. In the end, we'll customize each region's queue system to best support its players.

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393 Comments

Johs10711/9/2016, 3:51:02 AM193 votes

I'm a diamond 4 player on EUNE, playing solely draftpick normals when not playing ranked. I play normals with numerous friends in varying group-sizes, and draftpick has always been our go-to queue. While the queue-time is longer, the quality of games is vastly superior, seing as there's no mirror-matchup, there's the added strategy of pick/ban, everyone actually plays the role they're assigned to (90 % of the time) and also, the matchmaking is just straight-up better most of the time, because most people in my elo don't play blind pick.

If the people playing draft-pick are both a significant minority (5-10 %) and are content with the state of normal draft-pick, why not just keep it? I have a very hard time believeing that 5-10 % of the playerbase can significantly negatively impact the queue-times of blindpick (on top of the fact that I've never experienced a blind-pick queue longer than 2 minutes when I ocasionally queue up for it), so it must be that you're fixing a supposed problem with queue-times in normal draft-pick, by removing it ?!

All of the people playing draft-pick, are more than happy to just wait 15 minutes and at least get a quality game, rather than wasting 40 minutes in a blindpick where you didn't get the role you wanted, have malzahar with doran's ring as support and people several divisions below you are flaming each other for no goddamn reason!

You're fixing a problem that doesn't exist, sorry to jump on the riot-hate bandwagon, but it seems you're so caught up in the numbers that you're forgetting that you're actually forcing 10 % of your playerbase to play in a format they despise, under the guise of helping them with queue-times !!!

Margrave Masane11/9/2016, 3:26:25 AM74 votes

I'm almost always on your side, but this is an awful decision. I've not been playing blind pick for multiple seasons because it's terrible(role selection, mirror-matches, no bans), and now you are taking the only mode in which we can train or play with friends? Just because you want us to do that in Flex Queue? I cannot play with most of my friends in Flex, because of elo differences. (And no, playing only in one composition and not leaving the elo of each other isn't a realistic expectation) And even if I could, I would probably not want to, because it's ranked and I want to treat it as such.

Murå Masa11/9/2016, 3:11:31 AM49 votes

How is Normal Draft on EUNE even problematic? it takes like 3mins to find a game and i dont think people had any complains about that ,also many people will prefer longer queue times in normal if they get their position rather than a fast queue with a 20% chance that they will get their role,and also about flex queue do you really want to force us into trying new champs optimaly in a ranked enviroment? cause blind pick is absolutely a garbage queue.

Darth Moth11/9/2016, 3:09:14 AM44 votes

I'm not going to lie. I really do miss Team Builder sometimes

Ostoba Tuk11/9/2016, 8:52:52 AM41 votes

So let me get this clear. You are forcing us into blind pick , cause we had to wait for..let's see...5min? Now you are trying to tell me to transfer to EUW with all of my friends if we still want to play this game. How is that fair? Do you think we will play blind pick, just because you took away normal draft? I don't want to. I don't want mirror match ups, I don't want trolls in champ select and so on...

I'm playing this game since beta and if you check my profile, I'm among the top 500 with my playtime. This playtime is from normal draft and ranked, not blind pick. Now, you tell me, that just because I transferred back from EUW to EUNE, so I can play on my true region server, you will just spit me on the face?

What do you encourage with this change?

  • To transfer from an already low populated server, to a highly populated one. = That wont solve the queue problems, since who didn't play blind pick, wont play it again.

  • You do encourage toxic behavior. While normal draft had the nice role select, everyone get what they wanted and had the same system as ranked, blind pick was always toxic, pick lock and etc. Now, you are blind pick as an only choice, which will lead to more toxic games.

Everyone who was once on EUW, now should have a free transfer back!

Fat Guy Smough11/9/2016, 2:49:00 AM27 votes

Still can't agree with this, alright that it doesn't have much population on other servers but i still think it is unfair for the people that play draft normals there, bling is grussome for many with close to no similarity to ranked in terms to champ picks, counter and bans, i can't believe you guys would do this without a warning or just throwing the idea out to see the feedback, that should be learned from the dynamic queue i believe, maybe for you it isn't much but for others that don't like the pressure of ranked or blind pick role trolls and same champs every game ( like pre-random urf) it means a lot.

Keep in mind, i'm from EUW and i'm still sad about this for the others.

Dragyen11/9/2016, 10:39:36 AM22 votes

you don't like toxicity yet you leave blind picks where pinnacle of kids, instalockers and flamers are.

well played, you're truly retarded

Juna11/9/2016, 9:32:43 AM21 votes

I can not believe you are actually doing this. Removing normal draft??? Do you really actually expect us to play the worst queue in the game. For many seasons I was thinking that the main reason this game´s playerbase is so toxic is The awful and shitty blind pick. Mirror-matchups, no bans, rolecalling which leads to many "wonderful things" such as AFKs, trolling, duo mid etc. And you are enforcing this to the Normal draft players? I have been playing this game since season 2 and at first I too played the worst queue in the game.I was bronze back then, but as soon as I stopped playing and moved my practising matches to normal draft I drastically improved and got to Diamond in less than 2 seasons.

Normal Draft was my go-to queue and the best thing about this game, and of course you ruin it. I was okay with the Dynamic queue, I was okay with the removal of Team Builder but now you have gone too far. I´m not sure if you´re doing an experiment in how to ruin a very popular game in very short time, but I think this was it. You should have removed Blind Pick instead and that would have been actually good for the game

Get your shit together and realize YOU are the ones harming the game by enforcing us draft players to play the objectively WORST, SHITTY, TOXIC queue in the game.

Bring Draft back ASAP or you will suffer the consequences.

Dark Nephthys11/9/2016, 3:11:18 AM19 votes

I hope it stays this way and not removed in the future. If you removed Normal Draft then you will force players into either playing the super toxic Blind pick, or Ranked. Not everyone wants to play competitive, and shouldn't have to feel like their forced to. If you did remove Draft then you will be killing all your casual players which most likely makes up for a lot of the player base (I'm assuming. I'm sure there is a lot more people playing Normal/Blind than in Ranked).

Also if you did remove Draft, then you would have even more people going into ranked with champions that they aren't comfortable with because it would be the only way to play them (Since Blind pick is very hard to get your role).

So please keep Draft pick in the future as well, unless you have something like Team builder or something in the future.

Best Riven EUNE11/9/2016, 7:19:01 AM19 votes

I would like to get a free transfer to EUW then. Normal Draft was literally the only thing I was playing. Within the removal of Normal Draft, theres nothing for me in LoL anymore. I will keep refusing to play any shape of ranked, and I will refuse to play blind pick.

Deep Terror Nami11/9/2016, 2:32:25 AM18 votes

We have no current plans to do so.

But you want to. This new queue you're interested in that merges the good aspects of Blind and Draft, if it's any different than Ranked I'm not interested. There needs to be a Normal queue that is exactly like Ranked imo.

BzRazor11/9/2016, 2:30:04 AM18 votes

Lets be honest, you guys want one less gamemode to lessen server cost.

dewil12511/9/2016, 10:52:11 AM16 votes

That is just a really bad move from you guys.... A lot of players will not play league at all because of that. Like really. For example me and my friends. The only mode we played was Draft Pick. We just want the roles we know how to play peacefully and not just ague with people... This move by you is forcing people to play rankeds or pretty toxic blind pick... People dont want to be forced to do something. I guess I am just not gonna play league until the Draft pick is back on EUNE. And I was so hyped for the changes, until I saw this one... It is really s shame. I want to have fun while playing a game. I dont want to be tilted, because someone didnt get his primary role... [zombie-brand-facepalm]

Constantly High11/10/2016, 12:15:42 AM16 votes

Dont wanna waste your time with a long post so I'll keep it short. Suck a dick riot.

Reckzilla11/9/2016, 3:04:57 AM15 votes

Thank you please never remove it, I plan to play this game for as long as it exist let me keep my game mode.

Lunnainn11/9/2016, 10:21:24 AM12 votes

No. Just no.

I played a few ranked games during the end of this season, mostly just to see if I managed to do better than bronze (where I ended up years earlier when I still played ranked - this year I placed Silver 5 and finished Silver 2-almost-promo-to-silver-1) and later to help my friend get Plat (I played 45 games in total, including placements only lost 9 in total, one being a placement), and sometimes I played TT and ARAM, but most of my time spent playing, I was playing NORMAL DRAFT. I've got a combined amount of games in ND of almost 3500+ games in my years in this game, and maybe 2000 in any other game-mode (ranked included). If not for Normal Draft, I wouldnt even have picked this game up. And I'm serious; I would NEVER have started up games, knowing that each and every one of them would affect my ratings, unless I played blindly into the enemy team.

There's no way you can get away with saying that it's "unhealthy", because the reason people actually played ND, was so that they didnt have to play blindly into the enemy team and not being forced to play ranked. You've effectively stripped away any and all reason I had to play this game, and with me, alot of other people.

To us, what you've done is "unhealthy". I dont know the exact numbers in percentages - and I'd sure like to know - but even if it's as low as 2-3%, for those players, ND was the reason we could play the game.

Not everyone wants to play ranked and have the stress of their ratings hanging over their heads. Not everyone wants to play blindly into an enemy team at the same time you fight with your own team to get a certain role - or NOT BEING FORCED INTO A CERTAIN ROLE. This was what ND provided - a way to plan out what champ you could play, and wasnt able to play, due to the enemy team, and a way to get out from under the always present champion of your hate, meanwhile not forcing you to play new champions with the threath of losing ranks, or that promo you sought to win for your fifth time (just to lose, because some dude wanted to learn Sion jungle after never having played him before - and instead of training that champ, they just picked it in YOUR promo).

I'm fairly certain that the percentage of people playing ND isnt actually that low. I honestly believe that you just want to force people into your new queue, the Ranked Flex one, by taking away one of their other choices that would almost certainly impact your new queue negatively. By disabling ND, you take 85-90% of the ND-players and forces them into RF, while the rest either drops the game or play TT/ARAM/BP - which kind of boosts your numbers in RF. I'm quite certain, that if you didnt disable ND, most people would not even touch RF after Solo/Duo Ranked had come, they'd stick to ND or play S/D Ranked.

This decision has GOT to be the dumbest decision ever, it's even dumber than when you brought on Dynamic Queue, it's even dumber than the junglechanges you've made, and it's dumber than the role-updates you've done (ADC-changes, mage-changes, and now assassin-changes). I know alot of people dont like change, especially drastic ones, and that change in itself is causing uproar.

But you're literally telling people to either endure blind picks, where every cancerous champion is going to be present due to no bans, where you can never play in thought-out teamcomps, or risking their rankings because they want to expand their champion-pool. That's got to be the dumbest shit ever thought out by any gaming company - NOT counting those companies that tanked.

Like, really. Drop this idiocy.

NABoardsAccount11/9/2016, 11:02:13 PM12 votes

Stop lying.

I am from LAS, and i have never have to wait more than 5 minutes.

Normal Draft Queue was healthy, with similar queue times than ranked, you are doing this because you want us to move to Flex Queue, but not all of us cant because some of us have friends at different ELO.

And the difference between Draft and Blind is more than role selection, mirror matches suck, not being able to ban the OP champ of the month is another problem, etc.

Stop lying, stop discriminating Latin America (its already bad enough that we cant post here with our real accounts like EU, OCE, TURKEY, etc can).

How convenient that you do this at the same time you launch Flex, while you havent launch Solo Q yet, clearly because you want us to play Flex instead of Normal Draft and Solo Q.

You are doing the same mistake you did in S6, you havent learned from your biggest mistake in LoL history, listen to us this time, dont play dead on this one.

Leave Normal Draft alone, it costs you nothing, and there are millons of people using it in the servers you are shutting down.

Why do you keep insisting on telling us how to play by limiting our options instead of letting us decide?

leafrek11/9/2016, 10:54:02 AM11 votes

Would you just retire Blind Pick and keep Normal Draft? Blind Pick creates way more toxicity and you often don't get your roles....oh those mirror matches....Please Riot don't disable Normal Draft on EUNE.

Rhach11/10/2016, 7:18:17 AM10 votes

The thing you seem to be missing is how stressful the blind pick is. In blind, we get 80 seconds to pick roles. 30 of them are wasted arguing on who said mid first. 30 more are wasted bargaining with the 2, or sometimes even more, people that didn't got the role/champion they wanted and are threatening to troll the hell out of us. We got 20 seconds left to decide what we want to play, taking in consideration what the rest of our team has picked and fix our runes and masteries.

Every time I get into blind pick, I get so stressed from the picks phase, that I barely have the will to play.

And that is the best case scenario. Sometimes, someone will instalock something and go completely afk, leaving the rest of us wandering where he is going to. And once in the game, he will most likely flame and spam if someone goes to "his" lane, like we are supposed to know what he was thinking or something.

So we went for draft. And we had a great time doing so. Not only our teamates were nicer, but also our opponents. We were all there to either have fun or practice and were pretty happy with it. Even if we faced a otp diamond elo Diana that got 15 kills in 20 minutes, we would just try to play from behind. Most of the times, none would flame. Most of the times, none would troll.

In the end, draft was so much better and so much healthier than blind, that we would go for draft pick every single time, even if we were a 5 man premade.

So, what now? My friends are silver/bronze so I can't play with them into ranked due to elo difference. Leveling a smurf and getting the champions we want to practice is too much of a fuzz. Transferring to EUW, is not an option, since we will lose the friends that are not willing to follow.

Seems like ARAM is the name of the game from now on. Make The Howling Abyss Great Again.

Rock411/9/2016, 9:48:24 AM9 votes

ofc rito, you like to f*** up EUNE writing posts on NA boards. GJ. better delete EUNE...

PRlDE11/9/2016, 10:35:56 PM9 votes

So this is the very first time that I've logged in to post my opinion on these dev corners because this is beyond me what are you doing and how are you justify it. I'm a diamond 2 player and this is my 3rd account I ever made after losing my other accounts. I've been playing your game for 6 years by now and for a VERY long time the draft mode was the best go-to mode for me when I was playing solo or with friends because everyone could get their role most of the time and even if they got autofilled they would get the immunity from being forced to play other roles and you were even encouraging chosing the fill option because it was giving the immunity as well. Now you decided to remove the draft mode because of something you called:

[{quoted}](name=Riot Draggles,realm=NA,application-id=A7LBtoKc,discussion-id=iqcQYuBZ,comment-id=,timestamp=2016-11-09T02:20:03.496+0000) very low participation

I think everyone would like to see the numbers of people queuing for draft and blind picks because I don't believe you in that at all, and is just mind blowing to me since the only time I would get a +10 minute queue was when I was choosing mid or top at some crazy dead hour like 5 am and even then it wasn't so bad since at least I knew that I can get the roles and also I had a fair warning of getting autofilled. Now there is no way of me being sure that I'll get my role when playing alone because of people instalocking champions as they wish. This is another step towards punishing players like me who enjoy playing without friends, alongside the IP boosts when playing in a premade group or higher chances of getting keys. I get it that you want to make people enjoy league together but even my friends sometimes complain that it's hard for them to play normal games with me since they end up getting crushed because they are not on the same level as me. Then there are mirror matches which bring nothing but frustation for one of the sides because it's not a contest of "who is better at X" because it doesn't show off your knowledge about a certain matchup because both of you have the same possibilities, and the lane will be decided by one of the 2 things:

  1. Which jungler will pull out a successful gank
  2. Who will do the first mistake in the lane

That's what you want? That's the "healthy and fun gameplay environment" you want? Have you even played your own game? Because you sound like someone who barely experienced the game. Just like one of the players stated:

How can you make queue more healthier by leaving the most toxic type of champion pick as the only option for playing normal 5x5?

How are you going to answer this? Because you want the queue timers to be lower? News flash! Your playerbase doesn't have anything against longer queue timers, you should've known that after the autofill was announced. The only thing you are doing is just making other server visibly worse than others that will still be able to use the draft pick which is just unfair to your playerbase. You even said:

Nah, man. We want what you want: healthy queues that make players happy.

Scroll throught the posts below and tell me: do you see anyone that is happy about this?

SlyTactician 11/9/2016, 3:01:44 AM9 votes

However, the thing that worries some of us is whether or not this remains true in the near future.

Dominion fell under the same story where it was a permanent mode in certain regions until it later was made into a temporary rotation mode this year. What if normal draft ends up in the same boat or even worse - flat out removed like Team Builder?

We appreciate the response, but I just hope Normal Draft is to stay until perhaps blind is given changes or even team builder returns. Not all of us like the stressed environment of ranked especially when coming home from work/studies - while normal draft provided a mode where we can have the ranked structure; yet, not lose anything in exchange for learning new champs/lanes.

Cpt BearFacé11/10/2016, 9:36:59 AM8 votes

I understand this doesn't impact me but now but there are still really huge problems with this:

A) It didn't sound like you had any plans to remove Normal Draft for any region until you did it. This sounds like you still really want to remove Normal Draft in all regions and with the sudden switch to remove it on other regions without warning, all regions that care for Normal Draft should join in with this discussion to deal with the issue immediately.

B) You actually don't KNOW the impact on queue times it will have. Flex Q is meant to incorporate ranked 5's, replacing the ranked 5's Q meaning the queue shouldn't actually be much different than it was last season. Before removing you should have monitored, analysed and received feedback, communicating with the regions on action to take. As many have said, they wouldn't even mind playing blind if they maintained some control.

C) Normal Draft helped prepare players for ranked. By removing this queue people are beginning to flood Flex Q instead. This ruins the integrity of Flex Q and honestly makes it a pointless Q to keep. People already have stated they will use this to mess about it and won't take it seriously (specifically heard from Wings of Death) where they do still have Normal Draft, but removing Normal Draft in other regions is going to increase this. If you want Flex Q to succeed then please bring back Normal Draft in all regions and monitor with it present, giving Flex Q at least a chance to be relevant.

I hope you read this and take this into account as failing to do so is going to create larger issues down the line.

Biotic Fire11/9/2016, 3:23:20 AM7 votes

Do you guys have plans to let us choose roles on Blind pick? I'm completely fine with mirror matches of Blind picks, I think that's good and not knowing who you're against is the beauty of blind picks. But Fighting over roles through your teammates is just really frustrating to deal with, and some people will troll you if they don't get their role. I really don't think having a race in chat "mid" "top" "jung" is healthy at all, sometimes you don't get your role at all, and I really think that ruins Blind pick. I think it would be awesome if Blind pick lets you select your 2 roles like Draft pick. What do you guys think?

kezeslabas11/9/2016, 9:34:49 AM6 votes

I'm realy sad about Normal Draft. I don't like the Blind, becuse i can't see, what we play against and i can't choose between my runes and masteries perfectly. I love the Draft Pick, it's the main aspect of the game for me. I don't want to play ranked all the time, but i want to play Draft all the time.

Modekk11/9/2016, 2:49:23 PM6 votes

I think, this is the worst decision i've ever seen. Normal draft is the **best **queue for normals. There, you dont have to fight for you line because someone who's backed 10 sec before champion's select end is writing that he's going mid and completly ruin your game :/

The Sane11/9/2016, 9:56:41 AM6 votes

I almost exclusively played normal draft with my friends. I won't be changing servers, I'd rather change games.

AlistarMilking11/10/2016, 1:47:14 AM6 votes

We never asked for flex. I don't give a shit iif flex works or not, I just want my draft normals

Brother Martin11/10/2016, 9:33:54 AM6 votes

I am a casual player mostly and I enjoy playing normal mode more than ranked mode. The thing that I liked in season 6 was the normal draft when I saw the news about the release of the new champions select it made me happy, I said to my self no more "mid or feed" no more duo top lane and no more frustration from all that blind pick offered. If riot decide to remove the normal draft I will consider too removing the game from my computer.

TomiMan711/13/2016, 2:46:41 PM6 votes

Since Rito disabled normal draft my friend list is so inactive.. 90% of my friends are playing other games because blind pick is just so fustrating. You have to fight for a role and in the end you end up playing in a role that you dont want or you simply cant play that well. Blind is full of trolls, you cant ban, you cant counterpick, you cant use a correct rune page, cos you dont know who you will lane against.. OR your team wont even have and adc or a support...or you will end up with an azir adc with yasuo support... I like that you would like to make LoL a better game with quality gameplay, but blind pick is everything but quality gameplay...its just bad and fustrating.

I'd wait 10minutes if I had to just to get my role and play in a FULL and PERFECT team(top mid jungle adc support) then to figth for a role and end up with instalockers and 2 top laners 2 mid laners and 1 jungler...

RITO you just killed the game for me with the removal of normal draft pick, and Im pretty sure that im not alone with this..:/

Scuttle11/9/2016, 3:10:24 AM6 votes

Ultimately, we would like to take the best aspects of both normal queues (position preference from Normal Draft and less hardcore gameplay/speedy champion select from Blind Pick) into a single queue.

Ok this is where I don't agree. The best part of draft pick is EVERYTHING. I need bans. I need no mirror matchups. I just want my draft queue forever ;_;

tumat11/9/2016, 9:59:19 AM5 votes

ok i really accepted like every change riot did so far, but if they remove normal draft (which i played like 95% of the time) imma be pissed... I rly hope they don't fck it up

Koziolke11/9/2016, 1:22:07 PM5 votes

http://www.strawpoll.me/11606841/r

look at this. I understand that Drafts maybe did not have a lot of players, got it, but still, now I see no point of playing normal games because of trolls or "mid or feed" kids.

DayLight V11/10/2016, 8:06:36 PM4 votes

Riot, please tell me what you think of my proposal...

TLDR: Introduce a system in blind pick where the players are placed semi randomly in positions 1-5 (1 being top first player and 5th being bottom) and have players pick a champion in that order but still blind to any enemy champion picks.

this will Reduce Toxicity and Welcome Draft Pick Players Without Speed Compromised

see more below

http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/gameplay-balance/jbtard0b-blind-pick-improvents-to-reduce-toxicity-and-welcome-draft-pick-players-without-speed-compromised

IIIDerMetzgerIII11/10/2016, 7:13:11 AM4 votes

So basically I just have to buy an account to practice new champions and roles, while in the process, ruining other people's ranked experience. Why are these changes going through? I thought you learned from last year.

baguettebaron11/10/2016, 2:31:10 PM4 votes

Look at these stats, dear Riot. http://www.strawpoll.me/11606841/r As you can see majority of players wants draft back. Could you PLEASE please our wills, and make LoL Great again!

aNACÓNDa12/3/2016, 3:36:14 AM4 votes

PLEASE Bring back Draft Normals on EUNE, P L E A S E

Blak Leaf1/24/2017, 8:36:57 PM3 votes

When normal draft came out i was sooooo happy!! i could finally play the game they way i wanted without worrying about Elos, LP and stuff like that!! also no mirrors, i could actually take the champion i wanted without worrying that someone else might pick the lane or hearing some idiots flaming!! and here is the best part!! after the first games i realised that the ppl that played normal draft were more eager to just play the game and have fun cause they played the way they wanted, they wouldnt flame, they wouldnt judge and all of this led to the best experience i had with this game!! so many easy games, so many hard games, so many comebacks, so many loses that we wouldnt give a damn that we lost cause we just had so much fun!! pls give it back to us!! if some ppl want to play the game this way without worrying about their elo let them have it!! if most ppl want to play blind its ok cause i never saw any difference in queue times!! 30 secs faster its nothing!! i dont see why u would destroy the game for some ppl while it was actually perfect the way it was!! normal queue times for draft and fast queue times for blind!! u took away the best thing u have ever done.....give it back i beg you!!