Do we need more bans?

Not at all would screw competitive up into a draft war instead of playing the game.

It's been suggested many times before but it would be nice for each team to have 5 bans, one per player on the team (on Summoner's Rift).

The main issues would be that:

• Players can be banned out in competitive games (since it can be hard to play multiple champions at high levels)
• Certain roles may be banned out (i.e. All popular junglers)

4 or 5 bans

I don't think we really do. It would turn higher-level play into a ban war rather than an actual game. On the other hand, if there were a much larger number of strong picks, they wouldn't be needed because there would still be many strong picks to choose from.

There needs to be a ban vote, instead of one team captain

With more bans there's 4 general issues:

1. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Making a minor improvement in an established system often causes more irritation than just leaving it as-is.

2. the notion bans are there to deal with "OP" champions. There will always be meta picks. Statistically champions are on a steady gradient in power and the champions the community considers garbage because they're 4th best rather than 3rd best are, like, 0.0001% worse then the meta picks. As such bans can't really deal with OP picks, and if they did - not a good message to send to the balance team or player base.

3. more time. While adding ~10 seconds to each game is no big deal, considering every 10 second increase as no big whoop is how you wind up with an hour wait to get into a game.

4. Biggest issue though:

The potential to completely ban someone out.

The time required to purchase and master champions really hasn't changed. Figuring out what a champion's skills do and how to use their kit so you aren't fighting with the controls only takes ~3 games tops. With 4 skills and an innate you really don't need more than a half-hour to figure out each. The big part that comes with mastering a champion is more about how you fare vs. different champions. What points you're more powerful, what points they're more powerful, how different itemization can effect such match-ups - and all of these things can change based on a few CS. As the game gets older there's the advantage of more skilled players being able to share their knowledge and a more in-depth wiki, but LoL constantly changes from patch to patch so nothing can solidify, and with new champions being released and old ones changing their meta lane: there's even more match-ups to experience.

And champions in LoL are pretty expensive. 6300 IP is a hefty price, and it takes a considerable amount of time to actually get a roster of champions you're comfortable with. Especially if IP is spent on champions a player doesn't really mesh with after 3 games, which, due to the difficulty in testing someone via free-week or getting accepted to the PBE, is not exactly uncommon. In DotA where all the champions are unlocked from the get-go this isn't an issue so at least the iteration cycle in figuring out who you want to play doesn't literally take a year.

For the average player you can only really have so many mains. There are clearly exceptional players out there that are immune to being banned out and are good with just about any champion, but even at the pro level there's usually only 1 of those guys per team. And again - those are exceptional players, not average players or even average pro players.

Combine these factors? And you could easily ban someone out completely by accident or on purpose. At the pro level, especially on purpose. Every game would likely turn into a version of "pick on the sub" where one poor guy is just playing at a gold level.

I'm all for targeted bans for various strategic purposes, but I still want to see a reasonably fair fight - I don't want to see Chuck Norris vs. nameless goon #2 happen in a game because one guy got drawn the short straw.

Anyways - nothing super major against more bans, but I feel it's just enough downsides Riot really isn't thrilled about trying to add more.

No. All giving 10 bans would do is ensure that anything that is even slightly strong never gets picked. Would a devourer jungler ever see play if people got 10 bans to use on them every game? Would we have gotten to play anyone with Cinderhulk if we had 10 bans at the time? Hell, all people would use 10 bans for is to ban out the 10 best junglers every single game (9 best junglers and Riven if that suits your fancy).