Why i think the removal of Normal Draft without compensation is a step backwards.

>I originally posted this on EUNE but i usually get more comments here so i thought i'd post it here as well<

Today when trying to queue up i realised that there is no option to start a Normal Draft on EUNE and after a little bit of reading i have found the official announcment about removing the game mode permanently. (Link at the bottom)

Regarding the removal Riot has written the following: Normal Draft will be retired at the start of preseason for all regions except North America, Europe West, and Brazil. Our goal is to offer the fewest number of queues that give unique experiences (so we can keep queues healthy) while keeping disruption low, and in all regions except NA/EUW/BR, normal draft had very low participation. In an ideal world, we’d like to retire normal draft in all regions.

I believe that removing Normal Draft and leaving players with nothing else but Blind Pick as a casual Summoner's rift option is a terrible decision. Blind pick puts the player in a toxic environment (I know the word gets tossed around a lot but hear me out)

-It creates a lobby which is advantageous for people that don't give a single fuck about call order which is supposed to be the main rule to follow as the client doesn't control the order of picking and positions on the map. While you are trying to push down m+i+d+Enter faster than a Katarina combo and are waiting to see if anyone has done it faster there can easily be someone that just straight up instalocks mid without even looking at chat -Even if everyone respects call order it gives a huge disadvantage to players that have a less well-built PC or a slower conection to the Internet. Basically if the Client runs a little slower on your PC you have little chance of getting the more popular positions and if you have a client that connects to the lobby really slowly you are doomed to be a support for most of your games. I have a friend who literally can't play mid for almost all of his blind picks simply because his PC is slow to load the lobby. There should be no advantages/disadvantage connected to the quality of gear or the regional connection issues considering picking champions/roles. -Blind Pick lobby is likely to often have people who simply can't help but argue about who called first and who plays who/what thus creating a stressful atmosphere before the game even starts. -If someone has written into chat before an other player even got connected to the lobby the player who is late to arrive simply won't see the messages that had been sent to chat before his connection to said lobby. This will create more arguements. And as far as average english speaking abilities go in EUNE it won't be easy to explain this to anyone. -Not able to ban champions is probably going to hurt champion diversity. Popular champions or flavour of the month champions will be spammed. I literally started playing Normal Draft after several days of having Yasuo in every single game.

This move is throwing people that have found "shelter" in Normal Draft out into the wild for no reason. We play draft because we pick quality games over the quantity which we can play. This step is choosing mass quantity with a lot of quality falling off.

Enforcing the mass use of Blind Pick will definitely result in shorter queue times but that doesn't make the game mode healthy. It is not even close to it.

If you want to rid the client of Normal Draft Create a game mode that can put up for it. Merge the two maybe?

http://euw.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/competitive/how-rank-2017-season