Intro

Before we begin I want to get one thing straight, champion select is vastly improved from what it used to be. With position assignment, and pick hovers, and 1 ban per player (can you believe we used to have only 3 bans per team?!?), etc... things are so much better than before. But there are still problems that I believe could and should be fixed.

First of all, champion select still sets players up for conflict in completely unnecessary ways.

Giving players the option to hover a champ is a great idea, because it enables them to set the expectation for themselves and their team about what they are going to play. But there are situations (both legitimate and illegitimate) where a teammate will want to ban their teammate's hover. And that creates conflict.

1. When the champ is pick or ban and the person hovering it is late in the pick order
2. When the champ is newly reworked or released or when it is notorious as a feeder champ
3. When a player wants to tilt their teammates or force someone else to dodge in their stead
4. etc. (if people have add-ons in the comments I can edit them onto this list)

By no means am I saying we should remove pick hovers. Pick hovers are fantastic and they should most definitely stay. But tweaks could be made to how the system works that could vastly improve player experience in the situations where conflicts over picks and bans occur.

Disclaimer, I'm going to make several suggestions for discussion purposes. A vote for the post is not an endorsement of the ideas. So please if you think this should be discussed, vote based on that, not on whether you like or dislike the ideas.

First idea - Update How "Swaps" Function.

Instead of having to trade champions, players could be given the choice to swap places in the pick order. (This phase would likely be moved from after pick phase to after ban phase, so the order of phases in champ select would go from hover -> ban -> pick -> swap to hover -> ban -> swap -> pick)

Why and how it works:

• No more disappointments where someone asks to trade and discovers that their teammate doesn't have the champ they want.
• A player who gets low pick order but wants a pick/ban champ can be moved up in the pick order instead of someone having to ban it or trade it to them.

Second idea - [edit: removed]

Third idea - Protect Pick Integrity.

The problem:

In competitive modes (like ranked), one of the biggest conflicts we see come up are between people who care differently about ranked. Tryhards and Casuals butt heads hard. When a new champ is released or it's a champ that is notorious as a feeder champ, tryhards feel motivated to ban it so that their team is less likely to lose. Meanwhile the casual (or tryhard that happens to know the champion) will get pissed because their pick - which they feel entitled to - got banned out from under them. Everything goes sour and nobody 'wins' in this situation, even the person who gets what they want is going to have a bitter and uncooperative teammate afterwards.

A possible solution:

I think we could circumvent both problems with an elegant solution. Require someone to get 3-5 wins with any champion in normal queues before they can play it in ranked. Or maybe require mastery level 1 or 2 with any champion before they can play it in ranked. Or some variation thereof.

It solves both problems because people will have to know what they're doing at least a little bit before they pick it in ranked, so they are less likely to ruin matches for their team, and at the same time people will have much less reason to ban someone's hover because in order to hover it that player has to have proven that they could play it at least somewhat competently in normals first.

Outro

Thanks for reading, these are just ideas and they're intended to spark discussion / creative thinking, so please share your thoughts in the comments. Do you think that the conflicts in champion select could or should be reduced or avoided?