Thoughts about runes reforged, the honor system and 10 bans

Runes reforged:

Riot is basically taking out masteries and keystones and combining them into one pre game setup that you can change in lobby and adjust on the fly. They are also making these free for everyone so now people don't have to buy runes which is huge.

First of all I want to say that I'm excited for this. The runes and mastery system is honestly pretty archaic and has been in need of changes for a long time. The thing I'm most excited for is the fact that the runes will be free, meaning everyone has the freedom to experiment with all kinds of combinations.

I am skeptical however that they will achieve the type of diversity the rioter was talking about in the video. These are supposed to be more impactful than keystones, and I think this could lead to many abuse cases where a champion will just run certain things in certain ways and that will be that. The ones shown in the video gave me a headache just thinking about how imbalanced champions might be with these new super powered keystones.

Overall I'm hoping for the best with this new system, and I think it will definitely have a net positive impact on the game Overall once all the imbalanced stuff that will come with preseason has been more or less sorted out.

Honor system:

This was nowhere near as exciting as the rune changes, but now riot is going to give rewards to people who are honored and are streamlining how honoring someone works, making honoring someone more I'm your face and noticeable.

I don't think this will really solve the issues with the honor system. Sure it gives rewards and bonuses which does give a point to what was just a number before but I am skeptical whether it will get players to honor each other.

On one hand people will be more aware that the honor system exists and there will be rewards for being honored, but on the other hand honoring another player still doesn't give the person honoring anything, providing no incentive for a player to honor another player. Why not give bonuses based on if people honor each other instead? This is the only way I could see this system actually working as intended.

10 bans:

We all know what the 10 ban system is by now, but for those who don't it's basically where everyone locks in a ban like they would a champ in blind pick, then they select their champs as they would normally I'm draft.

In the video the rioter only really comments on the reduced "friction" that this new system will bring. What I can only assume he meant by less friction is that basically the draft is faster now since all the bans happen at the same time. Now, I don't have the data on what people are asking for, heck maybe they found that a faster draft phase was what people mainly wanted, I don't really know. But when I think of what a ban phase should be and what it should bring to the game, I always thought the purpose of bans was to be strategic with them and ban things that help your team in some way.

This is what I don't like about the 10 ban phase they plan to release right now. It takes any sort of strategy out of ban phase and just throws it away because hey it's soloq and people can't work together. With this system everyone only bans what they don't want to face or what's op right now, which is so primitive that it makes me wonder why we even bother banning in the first place, but then am reminded that it's this necessary evil because of meta champs being better than non meta champs.

But ban phase can be so much more than that. The ban phase in dota 2 and LoL pro games are so much better than both the current ban system and the new ban system for soloq.

But this is where it all comes back to the "friction" of a draft phase. Do people want a longer draft phase that is more meaningful and allows for more strategic choice, or do they want draft phase to be as short as possible to allow them to ban yasuo and get into game with their champ as soon as possible? Personally I would rather have the first option and I would think that the community in general would want that as well but I won't speak for everyone as I have no data on the subject.