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Team Builder Improvements - IP boost for high demand roles.

D4L ScriptDaddy·9/1/2014, 8:24:51 AM·1 votes·1,091 views

So I don't know the actual statistics on team builder, but from my experience I haven't been meeting the goal of "six minutes or less." I love team builder and I hate blind or draft pick because pick order is such a primitive way to decide lanes. The current problem I've encountered with building a team is how long it takes to get certain roles, usually support and ADC. To combat this, I think people should get an adjusted IP boost based upon the demand for the role they queue for. For example, the top of the demand board is almost always support, so next to that it'll say +x% IP bonus. Then they'd get a bonus of a percentage of the IP earned at the end of the game. The percentage would adjust accordingly to how high demand the role is. I think this would be a good way to incentivize players to play a high demand role and balance out the lane queues a bit.

What do you guys think? Have any other ideas to improve Team Builder and cut down on wait times?

4 Comments

Sadistic Cheese9/1/2014, 1:13:09 PM1 votes

This idea kinda reminds me of when people in WoW used to suggest that there should be extra rewards for Tanks and Healers in Dungeon/Raid Finder to help encourage people to queue as those roles and thus reduce wait times.

While those are good ideas in theory, the counter-point to it is that it's kind of a tricky, if not impossible, thing to really achieve.

If you make the reward TOO good, you get people who normally never play those roles playing them solely for the extra reward. Make it not enough of a reward and even the people who do main those roles won't be interested.

As it sits, no one wants to Support and Marksman. Why? I don't really know. To some I know it's supposedly boring even though this isn't past seasons where the Support was just a Wardbot. (protip folks: if you're wardbotting as a Support these days, you're doing it wrong.) Marksman....I'm not sure why people don't do that since at least there you're getting the farm and you have the possibility to carry the game. Honestly I can see why you wouldn't want to Support, but not wanting to Marksman is a bit odd to me. The only thing I can think of is that Marksman item-builds don't have a ton of variation.

Anyway....ultimately to improve Team Builder is not enough I think. I think the goal should be to improve matchmaking and roles in general. So to that end we have to ask ourselves: What is it about mid and top that are so appealing? Is it the diversity of champions and play-styles? Is it the diversity of item builds? Is it being in a solo-lane and thus not having to worry about another person affecting the matchup constantly? Is it the popularity of LCS mid and top players as opposed to supports and ADCs?

If the role can be improved, we can have more natural ADC/Marksman mains, as well as more Support mains. Then not only do we not have to have incentives to go to those roles, but we also have less people being unhappy because they are forced into those roles. There's always going to be personal preference, but for a majority it seems like there's something either missing in the experience or (in the case of supports) not communicated or believed.