Ranked 3's Pro's and Con's and ways the system can be tweaked to provide a more positive experience.

As any ranked 3's player knows, you have 3 kinds of games: A). A game where you get Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street for teammates who just smash their faces on the keyboard and throw the game to all hell, so much for climbing the ladder. B). A game where 1 of the 6 practically instant win champs is not banned, and that champion is automatically chosen, and regardless of which team they end up on, you're going to win unless you're in a game that falls under game type #1. C). A game where people are actually EQUALLY MATCHED. Regardless of the outcome of the game, all players can walk away feeling it was a fair match, both in terms of champion balance, sportsmanship, and team member contribution. (I cannot emphasize the minority of this type of game enough. You're looking at 25% of games TOPS [At least in silver and bronze divisions] where you get both teammates and allies that are actually trying, communicating properly, and are of equal skill level. Bare in mind that I am excluding bad-game performance from this thought process. We all have bad games, I have them often as well.)

A little bit of a QQ thread, but I'm trying to approach this in a semi-productive way. Stick with it, I get to the proposed solutions below.

Here is an expansion of the above 3 points: A). With only 2 teammates to rely on, ranked TT games can be extremely exciting in terms of total team participation in ganks and the taking of objectives, as is often the case in many skirmishes throughout any match. The flip side of that is that if 1 of your teammates just does not have the strategy-strength that is needed to support a smaller, more team-reliant game style, you end up in a 2 on 3 fight where the other 3 are getting an almost endless supply of gold, and you get virtually none. Remember that with only one person per lane, if a teammate is performing poorly, beyond the threshold of just having an off game, the jungler will have to give up their post to either cover, take over their lane, or babysit them and essentially lose their entire purpose and role in the game in terms of being able to roam and help the entire team, not just this one ally.

B). As on summoner's rift, there are certain champions that are nearly always banned, given their kit's ability to fend off foes, use unique takedown combinations, and cooperate with other champions' skills in ways that make the outcome of battles more favorable for them. On summoner's rift you have 4 teammates who are able to assist you in taking down these champions who have attributes that allow them to excel more rapidly than most. In Twisted Treeline, you have 2, meaning that the snowball champ you're now facing has a 40% lower chance of being stopped, statistically speaking. This does not take into account a team's communication, strategy, and abilities in relation to that champion, but it already doesn't look good for the team facing one of these above-average strength champions. These champions include: Illaoi; Her ability to bully opponents is almost unmatched, as most who have played against her can attest. Her kit also allows for unintended gank awareness if tentacles are spawned in jungle gank-paths. Brand; On summoner's rift, his fireballs can be managed due to the sheer size of the map and possible targets for his abilities to hit. On TT, the usable map size is significantly shrunk, along with the number of targets, allowing his abilities an unintended buff. Darius; As with Illaoi, he's just a very good bully with very good sustain. He's nowhere nearly as difficult to handle as Illaoi, but since he is nearly always banned, he was worth mentioning. Maokai; After playing enough games against him, I've begun to understand why he is a power-house on 3's. ADC's are rare on TT, and don't typically have a very high win rate, and thus are not played often. My point being that his passive is fed 100% of the time in fights on 3's. Assuming that there is no ADC in the game, as is quite often, there is often no one who is able to add damage to Maokai without adding stacks to his passive and allowing him to heal much more often during gank situations than he could in 5's where there is at least 1 champ who can just auto attack him, not adding stacks to his passive, to add damage towards him. That combined with his general kit allow for a healing machine whose cc potential ranks very high on the scale. And that's just HIM, not including the other 2 teammates he's got coming for you. Poppy; It's hard to figure out where to begin on this little chick. Passive shield that stacks with Courage of the Colossus; temporary immunity to jumps (which sounds more like an ult ability) WITH a speed boost, meaning that she not only can CATCH UP to enemy champions, but stop them from being able to flee to safety (This is with ZERO skill needed by the way, it's the means of the ability, meaning that even a nutless monkey would be able to take away champs' ability to run with absolutely zero skill necessary, it'd just happen); the ability to throw champions half a lane away, thereby creating a scenario where an enemy can be singled out. Not to mention the buggy interaction her charge has with jump abilities to begin with (If Khazix is mid air while Poppy charges, it takes you back to there the jump BEGAN, regardless of how far you've jumped or even if you're 0.01 seconds away from landing) Look back up to the part where I mentioned that you only have TWO other teammates to work with against a champ like this, and you can see the problem.

The 6th ban is always a wild card. It can be a champion that the lobby leader just lost against in a game, someone they just don't like, or someone they just feel is a bad person to face, but they commonly include . All of these champions are banned for reasons that could be extrapolated by examining their kits and comparing their strength against the number of enemies who can work together to counter said champion.

NOW! This doesn't mean that there are unstoppable champions! Every single one of those champions can be defeated, can have bad games, or could have bad teammates. It takes a much higher level of cooperation, communication, and skill level to accomplish than is necessary against teams where these champions are not included in the gameplay. Look back up to my assumed percentage of games where communication, cooperation, and all-around skill level are balanced (the number was derived from experience and observation, not just opinion), and the likelihood of being able to competently deal with these champions shrinks significantly.

C). There is high percentage of games (at least in silver division and in my experience) where it is a make-or-break type of game. Meaning that a good amount of games end with scores either looking like this [Team totals 42-5-20] or this [Team totals 5-40-5]. The snowball effect in 3's is compounded by both the speed of the games and the lack of more teammates to assist in fights. There ARE games where the scores are relatively balanced, and both teams can walk away feeling good with the flow and outcome of the game, win or lose.

OKAY, got that over with, now I'd like to look at some possible ways in which the flow of games, the strength of individual champions can be managed, and the snowball effect can be mitigated.

A). Perhaps the easiest method; Lower the gold attained for consecutive kills against champions that have not gained either kills or assists since their last death (not including executions). Make champions who get killed consecutive times worth only 50 gold until they gain either a kill, an assist, or a turret kill. This will do 2 things for the flow of gameplay: -1 This will deter junglers from constantly camping a single lane. You could be having a great game against your opponent; you're up in farm, you're able to trade successfully, you're watching for ganks, communicating with the team, and then the enemy jungler shows up and you die. Not a big deal, that's how the game works. You get back to lane, happens again. Meanwhile, your jungler is nowhere to be found while you are helplessly caught in a cycle which, if your teammates are of no help to you, will just compound. MANY junglers are tanky enough on 3's to start targeting you from BEHIND your own turret, and working with your lane opponent, take away the 'safe' method of gameplay until you've been pushed back to your base turret. By this time, more often than not, the enemies will have amassed enough power to just continue pushing and killing. It all depends on your champion and your ability with this champion. [My logic may seem to jump around on the above point, but it's drawn out and following the habit of junglers to target 1 lane and just keep plowing them down.] -2 It will lower the aggressor's ability to snowball by lowering the overall amount of gold they've attained. The lowered shutdown bonus gold is a very good idea on TT, now if we can just adjust the amount for consecutive kills we may be able to slow down this snowball rolling down the hill.

B). Examine individual champion kits and balance them to be more proportionate on a map where there are only 3 champions instead of 5. I feel like this would be the most effective method, but would require a lot of work for the programmers. TT isn't the featured map on this, and as so it doesn't receive nearly as much attention as SR, so without insinuating insult, I won't hold my breath for this option.

C). Group summoners by performance ranking with champions, win rate, the number of games they've played, and rough division ranks. These three metrics are a relatively accurate way of matching people. If someone has, for example, achieved S rankings with 15 different champions on ranked TT, has 200 ranked TT games played, and is in Gold 2 with a 60% win rate, you can relatively reliably assume that the summoner is of a good caliber. Teaming them with someone who has earned no S rankings on ranked TT, has played 60 games, and is Silver 4 with a 35% win rate, is almost punitive. Group people with a low # of games played and a low win rate together and let them have a group face-to-keyboard smash party for themselves. However, it seems like these two kinds of summoners are matched together all of the time simply because -insert some stupid reason here-. Refer to my very first point above with Bert and Ernie.

I know the system can keep track of how well people have done with champions, and while the system probably can't differentiate between an S+ ranking on a champ in a game where the opponents were intentionally feeding from a game with an S+ rating where the summoner just played extraordinarily well, but it's a statistic worth using to match people in games. Win rate and number of games played is also another important statistic to use to match games. It shows a summoner's level of determination and dedication to truly improving their skills and rankings. Please don't tell me that all this information is currently being used to it's full capacity to match summoners; every single summoner who's stepped foot in a ranked TT game can call BS on that in 0.0001 sec.

D). Don't match a group of 3 random people against a team of 3 people from the same clan. There's enough people playing Flex 3's right now to have the system @ least require a team of 2 people to face a team of 3. Having 1 random person against a familiarized team may not be all that bad. But having 3 completely random summoners, knowing nothing of each other's playstyles, performance, strengths, and weaknesses going up against a team of coordinated opponents is often just a slaughter game.

I've put a lot of time and thought into this, so I hope that I was able to analyze my points and thoughts in a usable fashion for anyone to want to listen or possibly add any thoughts of their own.

Toodles, Rags