How to reduce toxicity in Blind pick

Z Statistic·12/29/2016, 8:26:22 PM·1 votes·654 views

First, and ONLY FOR BLIND pick, we add a DotA-style random roll. You know, that thing we had before? Get it back. Then put in the random bonus from DotA. If you random, you get gold equal to 50 + # of champions owned. If you don't like you random, you can give up 50% of the bonus for a reroll or let you free pick for 100% - 50 gold.

How could this possibly reduce toxicity? Well, are YOU going to ADC Soraka? Probably not. You might go AP mid, but here's the thing: because you opt in to the random roll, you are self-selecting yourself. The kind of person who would roll for more gold is someone who is willing to play lots of champions and/or positions. 50 gold is enough for a health pot, and in order to start pushing you over the edge to be able to get better items from lvl 1, you need to own ~70 champions or so.

note: OWN. Not available.

Because 50 gold isn't really that much, the risk of ARAM accounts cheesing is very low. After all, you're randoming into a team that could have all manually picked. Your effectiveness will be lower. The gold scaling per number of champions owned doesn't have to be linear either. I wouldn't mind having +250 gold for randoming while I own all the champions, even if it gets me stuck with fucking Shaco and if you own only 10, then you get a bonus of only +55 gold.

Finally, because you can random, this changes the atmosphere of the pick to be a bit more lax, like ARAM.

Drawbacks:

  • The effectiveness of reducing toxicity is directly proportional to how effective the bonus is perceived
  • While a quadratic scaling would reward players who own more champions, owning only a few might seems meh
  • Beginners might develop a crutch on randoming with bonus gold and be off kilter when reaching lvl 30 and going into draft or ranked with only 500 gold
  • If the frequency of randoming is too high, then game quality might take a critical dip because of composition or player mentality
  • Randoming may kick the can down the road for new players to learn the meta as they may indeed random but still call lanes, jungling as Sona because that's what they called.

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