Please Bring Back Team Builder

Last night was my group’s first exposure to the new draft system and it was not enjoyable. This new system seems to be great if you are going by yourself, but it is very anti-group play. We normally team up as 3-5 friends playing in Team Builder, but the new system doesn’t support quickly creating games the way team builder did.

We were 4 friends who all chose our two roles and endured the wave after wave of 5th players not accepting. When we finally got a player it was not what we wanted. We needed a top laner, the 4 of us had all chosen mid/support/jungle/adc as our primaries with some variant of that as our secondary. We were instead paired with a mid player, leaving our entire team’s comp idea ruined.

Next we had to go through a long timer of displaying what we wanted (with no lock in option to speed things up?) followed by bans and a slow picking process. We got halfway through choosing champions when someone on the other team dodged. We got paired again a few more times, but each time the same mid was with us, it seemed he was now part of our team much to our chagrin. We could not kick him or work with him as this is not team builder, so we had to work around his desire to run ADC mid and the four of us had to change our plans to revolve around him.

Ultimately we never got to play a round of summoner’s rift. Dodge after dodge left us with having spent 45 minutes trying to play the new mini-game of trying to make it through champ select. Unfortunately we lost this mini-game, and we decided after wasting far too much time to simply play ARAM instead.

If we can’t get something that supports team play with friends other than grouping for ARAM then what is the point of this new system? I keep seeing people say this supports playing with friends but it doesn’t work for us.

Is there any plans for bringing back team builder, or for creating a system to play summoner’s rift with friends in a premade?