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Pick Order vs. Call Order

Tulare·6/4/2015, 10:44:19 AM·2 votes·511 views

Referring to a post by Riot Socrates from about two years ago.

I recently got into a discussion with a friend over this matter. In a normal game, two of our teammates were picking 4th and 5th (simultaneously) and both wanted to play mid. They did not reach an agreement and when it was their turn to select, 5th pick instalocked Akali. 4th pick asked us to report 5th pick for failure to communicate. My friend agreed to report. I did not. The argument with my friend was over whether or not this is / should be a reportable offense. He linked me to the Riot post above but I still find this matter troubling, despite Riot seemingly having established a clear rule.

My biggest objection is that the tone of the Riot post is ultimately meta enforcing. Let me spin this scenario in a few different ways to illustrate.

  1. Honouring pick order, 5th raises no objection to 4th going mid. Dishonouring the meta, 5th also chooses a mage and elects to duo mid.
  2. Honouring pick order, 5th raises no objection to 4th going mid. 5th also accepts the remaining role (support) but elects to support a lane besides bot.
  3. 5th honours pick order in theory but doesn't understand the meta. His choice of champion and where he goes in game might as well be random.

In any of these scenarios, is 5th guilty of failure to communicate? Does it matter whether the game was normal or ranked?

In the scenarios where a player deliberately bucks the meta to the discomfort of the other players, if you believe that's failure to communicate, how far should it extend? If it's okay to report somebody for not honouring the traditional lane and role assignments:

  • Is it okay to report somebody who accepts a role but chooses an unconventional champ for it?
  • What if they choose a conventional champ for the role but leave a hole in the composition over the objections of their teammates? (for example, choosing a mage support instead of a tank support)
  • What if their teammates believe that literally only a single champion could plug that hole?

How much authority do one's teammates have to force a late-pick player to play in a particular lane with a particular kind of champion? If they have a lot of authority, is that meta-enforcing, and are you okay with that? If they have little authority, does that promote toxicity, and are you okay with that?

7 Comments

Vistha Kai6/4/2015, 11:18:53 AM2 votes

What I think about Pick Order: There is no "1st pick, 2nd pick, 3rd pick, 4th pick, 5th pick". There are 1st picks, 2nd picks and 3rd picks. Depending on the team there is either one 1st pick or one 3rd pick.

But why?

Ultimately that's what PICK order means. It's the order of people being able to pick champions. Every team has at least 2 people who are picking at the same time. It's only logical for them to be called as the same pick, e.g. if you have the same number of points in a competition, you are ex aequo with the next dude and you both get silver medals. It's up to them to decide who goes where, not alphabetic order or some ass-pulled number that has no application and is contradictory to the term "pick order".

zane yalgir6/4/2015, 11:09:53 AM1 votes

{quoted}

Referring to a post by Riot Socrates from about two years ago.

I recently got into a discussion with a friend over this matter. In a normal game, two of our teammates were picking 4th and 5th (simultaneously) and both wanted to play mid. They did not reach an agreement and when it was their turn to select, 5th pick instalocked Akali. 4th pick asked us to report 5th pick for failure to communicate. My friend agreed to report. I did not. The argument with my friend was over whether or not this is / should be a reportable offense. He linked me to the Riot post above but I still find this matter troubling, despite Riot seemingly having established a clear rule.

My biggest objection is that the tone of the Riot post is ultimately meta enforcing. Let me spin this scenario in a few different ways to illustrate.

  1. Honouring pick order, 5th raises no objection to 4th going mid. Dishonouring the meta, 5th also chooses a mage and elects to duo mid.
  2. Honouring pick order, 5th raises no objection to 4th going mid. 5th also accepts the remaining role (support) but elects to support a lane besides bot.
  3. 5th honours pick order in theory but doesn't understand the meta. His choice of champion and where he goes in game might as well be random.

In any of these scenarios, is 5th guilty of failure to communicate? Does it matter whether the game was normal or ranked?

In the scenarios where a player deliberately bucks the meta to the discomfort of the other players, if you believe that's failure to communicate, how far should it extend? If it's okay to report somebody for not honouring the traditional lane and role assignments:

  • Is it okay to report somebody who accepts a role but chooses an unconventional champ for it?
  • What if they choose a conventional champ for the role but leave a hole in the composition over the objections of their teammates? (for example, choosing a mage support instead of a tank support)
  • What if their teammates believe that literally only a single champion could plug that hole?

How much authority do one's teammates have to force a late-pick player to play in a particular lane with a particular kind of champion? If they have a lot of authority, is that meta-enforcing, and are you okay with that? If they have little authority, does that promote toxicity, and are you okay with that?

your freinds stupid....

the problem is basically it causes games like this one

http://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/NA1/1845872449/211846831?tab=overview

i have no doubt annie was better then viktor and woulda been the better mid. annie was gracious and went supp bot

for the record im bronze and i was tilted hard yet still got 5 of the 8 kills my team got..

if annie had been mid i would have not tilted as hard becuase i know annie coulda beat this lux easy based on what i did see hes postiining and methods where jsut that much better then viktor

Tulare6/24/2015, 5:45:13 AM1 votes

A similar situation to my original post occurred tonight. It was on the other team but we heard them kvetching about it in all chat. It seems that one player called mid but the player with pick order priority chose a mid-laner. At the start of the game, both of them were mid lane and their team had only one champ bot lane. As far as I'm concerned, that's a legitimate team composition. Two players on their team chose to go mid and none of them chose to play support. It's probably a bad team composition but that leads back to my original line of questioning.

  • Is somebody guilty of a reportable infraction for that or not?
  • Does it matter whether one or both of the players who chose to go mid wanted it to be a solo lane?
  • What if both players who went mid wanted to duo mid. Do the other three players have due cause to report them?
DrNova6/24/2015, 6:05:16 AM1 votes

Its pick order, only to try to prevent these kind of stupid arguments. Otherwise its all about who can spam what lane they want fastest, tons of arguing and chaos, more trolly picks. Its just silly. Pick order is fair.