The New Champ Select: A Report
Honestly, I think the new champ select is a big improvement over the previous system. With that said, there seem to be some things that just seem... I don't know, like this system was rushed to implementation with some things that weren't totally thought through.
-- It's completely inexcusable that I can't select my chroma pack during champ select the way I would any other skin. How on Earth do you let something like this go to release without even an attempt at this very basic function of champ select? There's absolutely no excuse and I'm pretty floored by this. How on Earth do you excuse not letting certain skins be selectable during champ select? Imagine if a player got to champ select and they couldn't select their 1850 legendary skin! A chroma pack is still a skin.
The system is so laughably, embarrassingly bad that you can't even tell if you have a chroma pack selected by some other method! I can't even see if maybe I select a skin that I have chroma pack unlocked for if I can at least get the chroma skin I used in the last match before this half-assed system got implemented. And yes, while the idea behind the system is a welcome change and a step in the right direction, "half-assed" is the exact term that describes this implementation. Sorry if that hurts any feelings.
-- You can't pick ward skins either?!? I can at least see this (I guess): we went without being able to select ward skins in champ select for a long time (for some reason) so I guess we can go back to the dark ages and live with this for a little while. It's kind of annoying for people who put the money into having coordinated Champ/Ward skins though. Like... that was literally the entire point of purchasing that ward skin. I would point out that we managed (eventually) to have a way to select ward skins in the old champ select, so it's clearly not a matter of "well, we just don't know." It's laziness.
-- The lock-in system is absolutely obnoxious from both sides of the equation, both as a person who has had to wade through half an hour's worth of failed lobbies to finally get one where everyone is on it, and as a person who has wanted to make a last-second change to the champion I am selecting only to be a half-second too slow to hit the lock-in button and now I'm hit with a half-hour queue penalty. It wasn't very realistic to expect that one lone noob tooltip to cut it for people. I suspect a lot of people dismissed that without even reading it. Honestly, the queue dodge penalties needed to be tweaked to be more forgiving to players who are trying to get used to this fangled-new system. It will be too late to implement that tweak by the next patch. If this tweak can't be hotfixed into the current patch within the next day or two, then this will simply be another opportunity that was just missed, and that will be that.
The obnoxiousness of this third point is compounded by the gameplay changes introduced in recent patches that have made games a lot shorter and a lot more susceptible to tilting. I am neither here nor there on the gameplay changes, but it's really obnoxious that it takes me longer to get a game going than it does to actually play a game, and that bad feeling is compounded to an infinite degree when you get absolutely stomped and lose 15 minutes into the game after spending half an hour just trying to get in.
How is it that we waited until the start of the season to introduce these changes? We had an ENTIRE PRESEASON available to us to get used to this sort of major change. Literally, that is what the preseason is supposed to be for! Instead, it kinda seems like we spent the entire preseason durdling around in business as usual and then waited until it was over to throw a major change like this at us. I would understand if you guys threw this change at us during the preseason and it was buggy. It's preseason, ironing out kinks is what that's for. I would understand if you held off on releasing it during the preseason because it was just THAT FAR from being ready, but now that it's out it's super-polished and ready to rock and the only challenge is the players getting used to the system. But we didn't seem to get either one -- we literally got the worst of both worlds here.
The sloppiness of this implementation is embodied by the text on the banner of the champ select lobby: go look at that. It literally says "Champ Select" in a banner right at the top. That kind of shorthand belongs in posts on the internet (such as this one) or within the confines of in-game chat. But when ?I see the actual game's graphics refer to it in this shorthand manner, I have to wonder: what, is "ion" where Riot's budget finally ran out? You guys really need to have more respect for your own product.
Like I said, the ideas behind the changes were positive ones. I like the direction it's going in. The implementation was woefully off the mark. A lot of incredibly basic functionality seems to have been ignored.
Now, with that rather scathing review out of the way, I would suggest one improvement (AFTER you fix the functionality though for real):
It would be nice if I could select "fill" between four positions rather than all 5. Like, if I'm good with anything EXCEPT top or mid or support or whatever, I could pick that. My suggestion would be: if a person selects "fill" as their first option, their secondary option would be the position that they DON'T want to get put in.
Thanks for reading!
