Suggestion ||| DEVS PLEASE READ THIS

My friends and I had a long discussion after this recent Clash event and reminisced about ranked 5s from the older days.

Someone made an off-hand remark "why don't they just do ranked 5s and clash? Just do both."

And after thinking about it for a while I realized this is actually a really good idea on the surface.

        Use the current infrastructure that Clash has, (proper team names, team icons, team [tags] next to your name when in game, etc) and apply it to a ranked 5s queue just like before. The ranked 5s queue would be a place where you and your predesignated 5 man roster can face off against other 5 man rosters and test your team coordination and skill. The team's wins and losses will grant them LP like on the normal ladder and they will climb as a team. When Clash finally rolls around, this will be where the teams finally get to see if their ranked 5s practice payed off. 

       Keep Clash the way it works currently. Lock-in times, scouting, loser's bracket, etc. Clash works great (when it works), and the largest complaint I see people have about Clash is that ITS NOT FREQUENT ENOUGH. I think bringing this new form of Ranked 5s combined with Clash will give people what they want. Ranked 5s will serve as their "scrim" or practice time, and then when Clash rolls around, it will be like a pseudo-tournament. As it stands, if you have a dedicated 5 man roster, you can kick ass in Clash, but then after that weekend is over, your only option to practice as a team is in Flex queue, which is not good practice. Very rarely do you face off against another 5 man team, and when you do the range of ranks often makes the match a stomp in one way or the other. I know there are several amateur tournament scenes and scrim discords, but these communities are still so small and it often takes hours for us (my 5s team) to find scrims. 

        If Riot re-implemented a Ranked 5s queue, instead of waiting around for 3 hours for a scrim, we could wait in a proper queue. And yes this queue would probably be relatively longer than solo queue times because there are less people playing Ranked 5s than soloqueue, just like in the past. But I could still only see this queue being 10-15 minutes at the most, and I don't think it could possibly go anywhere near the 3 hours it takes to find a scrim. 

     Ultimately I think players want to feel like the pros do when they play. I think giving us Ranked 5s back to go along with Clash would be a really good way to get people to feel like a true amateur team. I think this system would do great things for the more competitive side of the League Community. People who really want to grind and try their hardest against other 5 man teams that are doing the same. 

      My friends and I have played since season 1 and honestly, we were all starting to get tired of playing the game. Solo queue was beginning to become unbearable for various reasons, and the only reason we all still play the game to begin with is because of this amateur 5 man team that we have created. And I know that if myself and my friends feel this way, we can't be the only ones, when there are millions of people that play this game. Thank you for taking the time to read this, I will probably revise it and make a reddit post as well to see how the rest of the community feels about this idea.

Also something I should add is that in order to combat smurfs you would just make is so that you have to take the clash team you made into ranked 5s. so it still has to be 5 players with their accounts connected to a cell phone number for verification. So basically, your Clash team doesn't just exist for 3 days when Clash is here and then basically doesn't exist when Clash is gone. Your Clash team still exists after Clash ends, and THAT is the team you will take into ranked 5s when you queue for it.

There might be unforseen problems with this system that I haven't been able to think of yet and i know this stuff isn't simple. I'm a game developer as well so believe me, I get it. But i look forward to having a discusson about it in this thread.

Thank you for taking the time to read my suggestion.