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We need to take a look at Champion Bans for Ranked Twisted Treeline

Tahngarthor·10/21/2018, 2:48:44 AM·3 votes·2,246 views

A recent popular discussion I saw in regards to Bans on SR and how some people think even 10 bans isn't good enough got me thinking about Twisted Treeline's situation, so I wanted to write about it here and see what people think. Now, I know some of you might go "Twisted Tree- stopped reading there", but hear me out on this one!

-_-

Ranked 3v3 is that elephant in the room that isn't talked about much. While there have been improvements in recent years that have legitimized the mode - Moving the mode off of the legacy queue system and making it Flex queue instead of pre-made only, for example -there are a few prevalent problems. I think the ban system is one of them. I'm not going to talk about balance as a whole (I'm not that qualified). but generally speaking, with the huge number of champions that have come out since Ranked 3v3's inception, the current ban system is, I think, insufficient. There are a variety of issues:

  1. The current ban system on SR is designed to allow each player to eliminate the one likely lane opponent they want to play against the least. And while I've seen arguments for more than 10 bans, it does serve that purpose decently. I imagine that Riot left 3v3 with the 3 ban system in part because there are only three players, and so we only need three bans to eliminate our worst counters. The difficulty here is that Twisted Treeline doesn't have the same set of rigidly defined roles that the main game has (And for some of us at least, that's part of the attraction- there are many ways to play TT as a result)/ So we can't simply ban our one counter because the other team might not be using the same role set and you have to adapt. Because of these non-rigid roles, you can't, for example, pick your favorite top laner and ban the top laner that counters it, because you could easily be going up against a different type of champion or a different meta team comp entirely.

(Side note to point 1: There's a few common methods for Twisted Treeline comps: A top-lane champion top + mid-lane bot + jungle; Support+ADC in one lane and mid-laner in the other; and a top-laner with a "utility jungler" that helps in lane a lot but clears jungle camps + a mid-laner bot. There are other methods as well but these are the ones I see the most)

  1. This one is minor, but ranked 3v3 doesn't use the same ban system as SR and it can be confusing for newcomers to the queue at first (As in 3v3, you take turns banning instead of doing all bans at once). Now, the solution might not necessarily be to copy SR exactly, but I thought this was worth mentioning. Having parity where it is reasonable to do so for the champion select system might not be a bad idea. This point is definitely open to debate, however.

  2. With smaller teams, you have to think about even more potential enemy picks that are available- While the current meta does favor certain sorts of champs over others (most notably tanky / semi-tanky ones like Garen DrMundo Jax JarvanIV Illaoi and my main Taric just to name a few),even if you ban a direct counter to your champion, there are a significant number of champions whom you might not often face against as a lane opponent on SR whom you'll have to deal with directly on TT, which leaves you with the difficult choice of banning a direct counter, or banning a god-tier or tier-1 champion that's going to be a problem- a situation that's more unique to TT.

4)The number of champions that have been consistently performing on Treeline is such that despite the huge champion pool (my first reason for thinking more bans are needed), you can't ban them all even between the two team's 6 bans, and if you don't ban one of them, you're almost certain to be seeing them in that game. Because of this, the same handful of champions have a huge ban rate (and pick rate when not banned), even with other really good champion options available. I myself have a short list of champions I use where if the other playerrs don't ban, I'm banning.) This point does highlight TT balance issues. That said though, I neither expect nor even want balance changes just for TT- I think it's important that champions play the same way (or close to it) regardless of the game mode. Looking at the ban system, however, has the potential to alleviate some of the challenges TT faces without making a single balance change. Based on what i've said on this bullet point, I believe that additional bans will widen the pool of viable champions and give room to ban some champions that you don't want to face but usually get trumped by the must-bans.

Side note: I do wish I could give you specifics on ban rates etc. but currently I can't find a resource which provides data specifically for TT. I'm not sure if that's simply an interest thing or if Riot's API doesn't offer data on a map specific basis. having said this, it's mainly pertinent to this one point. But know this- many of the champions I see banned in TT still have high ban rates in SR as well.

-_-

So: What should they do? This is definitely open to debate and I want to hear what people think, but my initial thought is this:

The simultaneous ban system currently employed for ranked SR would be problematic to adapt: There are only three players, so how do you do 5 bans at the same time? I suppose two people on each team could lock two, but which ones? That's kind of messy and I'm sure Riot wouldn't want to deal with those questions. Thus, this is where my mind immediately jumps: Use the pro-play ban system. Each player bans once, same as they do now. 1st player on each team picks. Then two more bans from the 2nd/3rd players. Then they pick. Then two more bans from the last two players and then they pick. Riot has told us previously that they don't use this system for ranked SR because it makes champion select longer; but Twisted Treeline champion select is short by comparison, so I think there's room for this.

So, if any of my fellow Twisted Treeline fans read this board, I want to know what you think. I've tried to cover the major corners, but it's possible I've missed something. Do you think more bans would have a positive impact on the mode? Should it be simultaneous, pro play style, or maybe something else I haven't thought of? Or maybe you don't think it's broken and shouldn't be fixed. I do feel though, that this is a good opportunity for the Ranked 3v3 experience to be polished a bit. Perhaps this thread will even inspire some of you to play a few rounds of it for comparison!

7 Comments

Lovelle II10/21/2018, 4:09:54 PM2 votes

Graves has been unstoppable on 3v3 for literal years, because Riot refuses to give him some real nerfs. Pretty sure he's even god tier on SR right now and they just will not touch him. Better nerf Trundle though.

Of course, they also had to buff Darius, who's practically in his own tier at this point.

3v3 has even more OPs than SR does, so of course there will be more issues when it comes to the ban system. They honestly just need to rework the entire map again.

Aside from the base layout and random camps, the old 3v3 map was much more fair since there was more room to dodge skillshots and play around champs like Darius/Sion/Aatrox, plus we had wards.

It's too easy to catch people out and snowball on the current map, which only really benefits the OPs. When you're behind there is nothing you can do, unless your team also has OPs.

People often give up after first blood, and given how hard some champs snowball from just 1 kill on 3's it's hard to blame them.

Minarde10/22/2018, 12:49:39 AM2 votes

Another possible banning option that I didn't mention in my original reply would be to just do two rounds of simultaneous bans. The ban procedure would thus be familiar to Summoner's Rift players. Plus, the increased number of bans (compared to SR) could be justified by Riot's reduced balancing for TT (again, compared to SR). Main downside is that it might resemble Blind Draft (i.e. Blind with bans), so some players might accidentally ban their intended picks at first.

Tahngarthor10/21/2018, 3:48:11 AM1 votes

Since it was a good post that got lost along with it, here was a reply to the original thread:

{quoted}

I'm not so sure about jumping from the current 6 bans up to 14 bans in the proposed "staggered banning" concept. Maybe remove the last set of bans (for now) to have "ban -> pick -> ban -> pick"? It's still pretty complicated though, which might cause issues. Players familiar with SR's banning system might not realize they're banning again rather than picking.

Personally I'd prefer combining the current system(s) with the old captain system. The captain/first pick of each team gets 2 alternating bans. Afterwards, everyone gets 1 additional ban simultaneously. Compared to TT's current "1 by 1" bans, the length of champ select isn't significantly affected, since it goes from 6 ban phases down to 5. Additionally, even in the event that all the simultaneous bans are duplicated, it's still a slight improvement with 7 unique bans (1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 3). Finally, it minimizes confusion by maintaining the same separation of bans and picks that SR has.

Tahngarthor10/22/2018, 1:01:20 AM1 votes

An interesting proposition. When would the second ban phase be carried out? Right after the first or after some of the picks like pro play?