It's time for a 4th ban in draft

There are currently 131 champions in League of Legends, and it has been four and a half years (Nov. 2011) since our last increase in the number of bans. Frankly, the ability to ban champions is no longer relevant except to weed out the one or two who are severely overpowered in a given patch, or for the pro scene to counter the enemy team via bans.

In solo queue, bans might as well not exist. You have no idea what the enemy might be playing, and aside from the one or two champs who are "pick or ban" in a given iteration of "balance" or rework, the other bans mean next to nothing since there are enough champs redundant in every role to ensure that your opponent can always pick something very similar to what you wanted to ban away.

For the health of solo queue, it is time to implement a fourth ban slot. One might argue "but it's already too hard for low level players to break into draft with the 16 champ requirement!" This is hardly relevant with the number of champs who can be bought cheaply (it only takes 4-6 games to buy a 450 ip champ) but that new players tend to choose not to buy. If their choices are what's keeping them from playing the draft game mode, then why does anything need to be done to correct this? Additionally, hextech crafting increases the speed at which players acquire champions simply through playing the game, so the problem of low level players not having enough champions to play draft has already been addressed.

The only legitimate argument I can see against implementing a fourth ban slot now is that the pro scene would have to diversify their champ pools more. This could be addressed by having a "grace period" during which the pro scene used a specialized version of the champ select client which only allowed for three bans, as they have become accustomed to. I doubt this is actually as much a problem as anyone would claim, however, and I believe that most if not all of the top-level professional players have at least five champs they can play at a competitive level. It's been seen as well, historically, that banning out one player leaves open too many other powerful picks to be a truly viable strategy in most matches.

I can see no reason to stall any longer in implementing a fourth ban slot, or even a fifth (though I won't bother to make the scant arguments that exist for that particular change here - they are largely extensions of the argument for a fourth which must necessarily come first). The time is now.