More Bans needed for ranked and pro?

TRav19·Oct 16, 2014·4 votes·1,022 views

Not sure if this post is somewhere else as i couldn't see anything. (Unless i was looking in the wrong place) But what do people think of more bans being available for ranked and pro games? As i'm currently in the midst of watching worlds and with the teams only being able to ban 6 champions it still allows for some op champs to go through. And the way i see it if there was 4 champs banned per team or each player being able to ban one champion each then it might open up some more player diversity as there as now over 100 champions in the game and banning only 6 isn't enough.

Love to hear people opinions on this and also if someone from Riot could respond with their opinions on the matter that would be cool to see.

5 Comments

BearRunOct 16, 20143 votes

Honestly I have been reading these boards for awhile now and haven't been able to find many posts about increasing the ban number. I honestly can not see a reason not to increase the ban number. I read awhile back that someone from Riot said that the reason they are not increasing the ban number is because it would hurt the people that play 2-3 champions exclusively in pro scenes. Alright, I can understand that. BUT. How can you possibly call yourself a pro if you can only play 2-3 champions exclusively? Coming from a Diamond player I find this absolutely inexcusable.

With 121 champions out right now, you can not even ban 1/20th, of all the champions. With the way the meta is now, and with the "Tier 1" champions being the way they are, why in the world would Riot not increase the ban number? There are far too many champions being completely overlooked because of "OP Tier 1" champions. Not to mention, on the pro scene, teams go into games with 1 or 2 strategies for pick/ban phases because that is all they need! They are guaranteed their OP champions because there are only so many that can be blocked out.

With the bans as they are now, it is rather simple to get to Diamond or higher if you just spam an OP champ in ranked que. Higher ranked play is dominated by tons of One Trick Ponies because they can. There are not nearly enough bans for the way League of Legends is right now, and with Riot releasing more and more champions, its just going to continually get worse.

12talesOct 18, 20141 votes

Honestly I have been reading these boards for awhile now and haven't been able to find many posts about increasing the ban number.

They pop up every month or so. I think I've seen around a dozen since I started frequenting the boards.

How can you possibly call yourself a pro if you can only play 2-3 champions exclusively? Coming from a Diamond player I find this absolutely inexcusable.

It doesn't matter how many champions you can play if there are only 2-3 good ones. Amazing can play Volibear and Xin Zhao, no question. He's going to get roflstomped if he does it against a pre-nerf Evelynn, tho.

Pick and ban is a lot less forgiving in competitive play than it is in soloq - an advantageous jungle matchup might not be the end of the world in Diamond, but if the jungler with the advantage is Dandy or KaKAO, you're gonna get fucked pretty hard.

I see a lot of people arguing that more bans would force players to have wider and more versatile champion pools. I disagree - I think that it would have a homogenizing effect, and here's why:

Let's say that you're a jungler playing in a pretty bad meta for junglers - Evelynn, Elise, Lee Sin and Kha'Zix are all pretty OP, while Vi and Jarvan are semi-viable picks. If there is a single champion in that list that you cannot play, and the enemy team has four bans, they can ban any four of those champions and first pick whichever of the remaining two you can play. The only way you can prevent that from happening is by spending at least two of your own bans on junglers. And in so doing, have only two bans total for the OPs, and be forced to hand over the 3rd strongest champion in the game to your opponent.

As you can see, as bans increase, the risk associated with not playing even a single meta champion does as well. With three bans, a jungler in that meta could comfortably not play one of the perceived OPs without putting his team at risk - with four bans, that jungler had better learn Kha'Zix whether he likes it or not.

Counter intuitively, the fewer bans there are, the more freedom pros have to differentiate their champion pools from one another. Which I see as a very compelling reason to avoid increasing bans in competitive play.

xBombeRxOct 18, 20142 votes

I'd love to see a very high amount of bans. With 6 total bans, its pretty much ban out the OP champs, and then maybe one or two other champs. In professional gameplay, they focus those against a particular player, but in queues you don't know who plays what.

I'd like to see 5 bans per team, totaling 10 bans. I think they should keep 3 bans for each team at the start. Then each team picks 3 champions, and then the remaining 4 bans occur. This allows for more strategy in champ select. You could see what type of comp that the other team was aiming for and try to ban out what they were hoping to finish it with. Or if they haven't gotten a jungler yet, but there is only a couple of top junglers left, you could ban them out and put them on a weaker jungler because they failed to get one early enough.

SinatraZOct 16, 20141 votes

Yes I would agree to have more bans for Pro players only. Another rule that I would like to be added is to increase the champion pool selection at Worlds. Don't you find it wierd that all pro players take the same top, same mid, same adc, same junglers all the time ?