Amazing new solo queue lobby from Riot!

The JigSAW·7/22/2017, 2:34:49 AM·2 votes·302 views

So I just found out about this awesome new way to play 5vs5 normal blind picks. Here's what's coming:

  • The ability to choose your champion and role, guaranteed, either by creating a lobby or by queueing in to join whoever has one open looking for your particular role
  • Ability to set unconventional teams like 3 bot, or 2 top.
  • Kick players in the lobby who have horrible match histories or say they are intending to feed or AFK before the team queues in
  • Set runes, masteries, and skin before launching so you go right into the loading screen
  • Level-up bots could be identified by ensuring they were actually people and if they didn't respond, you could kick them rather than queue in and see them feed 20 times in 15 minutes.

Your champ, guaranteed. Your role, guaranteed. Not one or two or one of three chances, its actually 100% your champion your role all the time.

..Except, we actually had this once. It started in 2013 and it was called Team Builder. Team Builder was created as a better alternative to blind pick, and was a terrific experience. Riot decided in jan 2016 to end this mode and put us back in the same problematic blind pick that they invented Team Builder to solve.

People on the boards now say it had a long queue time - as someone who played it religiously for 3 years, I can tell you the longest queues I ever encountered were about 4-5 minutes and that was rare. Usually, it was a minute or less. People had fun, you played who you wanted and the role you wanted without gambling on "a chance" you'd get the role and champ you are best at.

So, almost two years later, who thinks we need this old mode back again?

3 Comments

Phyuq Yiu7/22/2017, 2:39:14 AM1 votes

Teambuilder was fucking amazing. If all you wanna do is play 1 champ in 1 role, fine. If you want to make a team of random people but you want top to be this role and jg to be that role and mid to be this role. You can have it that way.

ModWulf Helhammer7/22/2017, 2:47:41 AM1 votes

I played teambuilder pretty much exclusively.

It sucked. Queue times of 4-5 mins were not a rarity, they were the norms, or if you found a game quickly, finding the other spots (support or jungler) took that amount of time.

Normal draft rarely has that length of queue times, and 25 mins? Yeah, maybe if you're playing ranked at challenger elo before they introduced autofill.