Draft vs Blind - Pros and Cons

DRAFT PICK Pros

1. In approximately 400 team builder games, I have seen less than 10 players arguing about roles from memory.
2. You are guaranteed a role of your choice (unless you fill), no matter how long it takes.
3. Significantly higher chance of getting players who know what they are doing with the roles they choose.
4. Introduces most ranked mechanics, such as counterpicking, priority picking/banning and constructing an effective team.
5. The new(?) addition of the guaranteed role after playing support/fill makes it a lot more fair for players who are not great at/dislike the role.

Cons

1. Retains the chance of players dodging if they do not get the role they want.
2. Fill is support.
3. Slow champion select.
4. Easy to just pick the role you want regardless of where it puts you. However, this cannot be fixed, as with blind pick.

Fixes needed

1. Fill should take into consideration what you have won with lately, so that you are placed into a role that you are more comfortable with rather than something completely random. Not all players are good at support.
2. Introduce common bans as faded-out icons in the ban phase, so players who don't know what to ban have a better idea.

BLIND PICK Pros

1. Quick and simple.

Cons

1. Players will dodge, argue and/or troll if they don't get the role they want, allowing for toxicity and unnecessary forced losses.
2. No bans means that stronger champions will always be played, limiting individuality and allowing the "OP" meta to be abused.
3. Players with faster computers will always have the edge in what they get to pick, due to fast client loading.
4. There is nothing stopping players from taking other people's picks, leading to con 1.
5. Unrealistic for players transferring from normals to ranked if they start here.

Fixes needed

1. Complete removal. It provokes toxicity, complaining about always getting support, complaining about meta champions even more than usual and sets a terrible view of the game for those who have to put up with it for a long time, like many have.

Conclusion The decision to remove Draft Pick reveals more about Riot than their game. As the official statement goes,

> Our goal is to offer the fewest number of queues that give unique experiences (so we can keep queues healthy) while keeping disruption low... http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/competitive/how-rank-2017-season

If the goal is to remove queues in order to grant a better experience for players, why would the more bare and abuse-driven queue come out on top? Why would the queue furthest away from ranked play be the more advisable choice for new players? Why is the queue that is very clearly more toxic being treated as the better experience for players? Granted, they do have the point that blind pick is more "unique", but uniqueness is not always good. Blind pick is unique in the way that it shows you the bottom of the barrel, the worst and most abusive players the game has to offer, and a very contradictory lack of "uniqueness" after the car crash that is champ select has finished.

What this says about Riot is that they are not thinking about the long term effects on their players. With atrocious decisions coming at a Gatling gun rate, varying from the new jungle to champion balancing, it is becoming increasingly easy to see that they are losing their way altogether. Think about new players who are now forced into going through blind pick games with constant toxicity, on smaller servers which should be getting better treatment in all aspects but simply don't. They do not have the same competitiveness that bigger servers have, and yet they are losing the only thing connecting normals to ranked, so the newly toxic players will now go into ranked with a much worse view of the game. This will limit the competition of ranked to having less toxic players than the other team, something that many in Bronze-Silver across all servers are already familiar with.

But as always, nothing that anyone says about this will matter, because it's done now and the secret statistics that we can't see will tell us that blind pick is actually the best thing in the game for everyone, contrary to every single player's experience with it. Just like how some champions like Syndra and Zyra are "hard to play/hard to master" or that the jungle needs to be made even more difficult. [slayer-pantheon-thumbs]