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Regarding Ranked Teambuilder - Suggestions/Unforseeable Consequences

Drunk Rummate··1 votes·431 views

I would just like to take a moment to point out a potentially hidden factor that Ranked Teambuilder might bring to skew statistics and make people unhappy in the future. Hopefully in pointing these out we can help whoever is in charge of rolling this out to have a cleaner release.

Here's the first thing that jumped to my mind:

Draft, and how pick order relates. ASSUMPTION Now, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here Rito, but I imagine that ranked teambuilder will have players queuing for a position, and once a team is filled with a player for every desired position a typical draft will commence. This seems the most logical approach to a ranked gametype, since nobody will want to be picking blind when LP is on the line, and drafting is a huge part of the strategy in League of Legends.

HOW PICK ORDER CURRENTLY WORKS In current ranked draft, a lot of the time pick order decides your role. As a result you get a fairly random mish mash of position choice. A lot of the time counterpicking is not necessarily taken advantage of until the 3rd, 4th, or even 5th role. This is not a problem if a team can coordinate well, but in soloqueue it's often just ignored. Since this is a complete random ordering it's not controlled in any way and people don't complain about it. Especially since their champion position choices may change based on champions that are picked and banned before their turn. Due to the nature of how draft pick currently is, there is no way for you (Riot) to control which role picks in which order.

THE PROBLEM Once ranked teambuilder ensues, assuming my above assumption is correct, team builder will be placing certain roles higher than others in the draft order for ranked. This may or may not be randomized in your current beta for it, but that's not important. The fact is that some roles will be forced to pick early, when previously players may have had the choice to flex pick or trade with their teammates to get favorable champions and matchups. This is the inherent problem - how do you choose which role picks first? Does blue side mid always get screwed over by the counterpick? Does blue side jungle always get to first pick? What if it's completely randomized and purple side gets 4 counterpicks because of a roll of the dice? How do you solve this issue?

2 Comments

GroundRuleDouble1 votes

Keep in mind that once in the team lobby, you are not tied to your positions if your teammates agree...just like current team-builder.

If I'm queued up as mid and I first pick Heimerdinger, then I see them first pick Syndra, I could as whoever queued up as Top to see if he wants to switch because they picked a hard-counter to Heimer. The teammate can either agree or not. If no, then I play what I queued up for. If he agrees on the switch, then he picks a mid champ, and I go top with Heimer.

Volt Cruelerz1 votes

I think this is less of a concern than what I recently pointed out:

[{quoted}](name=Volt Cruelerz,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=9JLgbkEn,comment-id=0003,timestamp=2015-02-23T21:39:37.731+0000)

I've heard this thrown around as an idea before that they were considering. Nice to know it's actually coming.

There are a couple problems though...

  1. A lot of ranked play is about picks/bans. With teambuilder's static nature, I'm not sure how they'd pull that off. They'd probably just have to abandon it honestly, unless they let the host ban three champions that when it does come time for matchmaking, the system will simply just ignore other parties that have those champions. That's probably the best way. Unfortunately, this still gets rid of counter-picks. For instance, I almost never play Malzahar or Veigar in ranked. I can play both quite well, but I'm just better with other champions under normal circumstances. That said, I am more than comfortable using either as a counter-pick. If you're going an immobile mage and your team can't shut me down too easily, I'm going Veigar. If you first-pick Katarina (as some poor unfortunate soul did last night), I'm picking Malzahar and you're going to hate that game (and they did). These sorts of things would never factor into teambuilder ranked though, so my averaged MMR from teambuilder games, even if I played champions in the same ratio that I do in normal ranked (I wouldn't lol), the result would not be the same because picks and bans would be absent. On top of this, people that are good at a lot of champions for the sake of providing synergy to their team would be hurt in such a ranking system.
  2. MMR could be difficult. It takes 10 games for MMR to hone in on your skill level, and even then, there's some variability. Something I'm concerned with though is that because there's a chance of people getting carried to higher tiers than they belong, there's always the risk in traditional ranked that a Bronze ends up in G5. Unlikely, but it's possible. With the ability to try several champions though, I believe there's a real risk of people hitting higher ranks than they should just by chance. Perhaps it should take 15 games to assign a rank instead. Yes, this is a lot, but you have to remember what teambuilder ranked will primarily be used for: gauging skill with individual champions. Players won't likely do this with every champion, just their mains.
  3. You run the risk of serious redundancy. It's arguable that you could already calculate MMR per champion in existing ranked provided you've played them enough times. I say arguable because you'd definitely end up with something, it's just a question of what. I play (or rather played, as I've only played eight games with him since the nerf) about 70% of my games as Azir. I guarantee you my MMR with him is notably higher than my usual one. If I'm G3 on Azir but S1 overall, you wouldn't be able to accurately know just how good I am with Azir since I won't frequently be matched with people that much higher than myself.
  4. Queue times. Oh my gosh queue times would suck so badly.
  5. Annoying matchups. This partially goes back to 1, but I see a lot of LB in teambuilder right now. If I'm Azir, I'm good, but she's more annoying for Veigar and Xerath. I'd never pick either of them to face her normally (that is, aside from right now because Azir is so bad, so lately I've been picking Xerath into that matchup).

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