Why the new champ select removing Team Builder was a bad decision.
So, I was reading boards and saw this thread:
The TL:DR of it is "people are queuing into new Champ Select and refusing to play their secondary role". And you know? Anyone with a brain stem should've seen that being a rampant, obviously-going-to-happen issue that would arise with this new system.
Obviously the people that do refuse to play their secondary roles are being tools, but they're still right in saying the complete inability to select only 1 role is a flaw with the system, and the "X or feed" Group isn't going to magically go away just because you expect them to.
I, like many cooperative players, usually fill in my groups, every time i'm outside team builder. I run a League club on my college campus where I do the same. In ranked games I've stated a skill level order of my roles in every single game and never whined about not getting my first or second choice.
And the removal of "I want X champion in B role" option is one of the most shortsighted possible moves Riot could have made in designing this system.
If I fill in 99% of my games, I sure as fuckin' hell should be allowed to have that 1% be me saying "No, I'm NOT going to fill this game, I'm going to play X champion in B role, because I only have enough time/interest for 1 game and that's what I want to play."
-I should not be forced to say "X or Feed" and ruin the experience of 4 other players to do that (something I've never done in 5 years for the record). -I should not be forced to play a bot or custom game to do that. -I should not be forced to have a 5-man pre-made team of cooperative people to do that.
Teambuilder DID let me do that, without harming anyone's play experience. If I was willing to sit for a solid 20 minutes waiting for a game so I could play what I wanted against matchmade opponents on a team of people who accepted I was going to play a specific thing, Team Builder allowed me to accomplish that.
Nobody was forced into queuing into Team Builder. Normal Draft (for serious practice or banning OP champs) and Blind Pick (for quick queue times) still existed as alternatives.
I'm not saying new champ select isn't superior to Team Builder (and ESPECIALLY blind/draft pick) in a ton of ways. I think it pretty obviously is. What I'm saying is that forcing players to select 2 roles in a casual queue was a very, very bad choice.
In ranked queues, when this eventually reaches them, the choice to force players into 2 possible roles is a fantastic choice, because everyone in a ranked game should be taking it seriously and cooperating with their team as much as possible to win. Ranked is, and should be, "tryhard" mode and players should be expected to give it 100% from the second they queue for it. If Riot actually vigorously, adamantly, and without remorse bans anyone who refuses to play their secondary role, then the forcing of 2 roles into ranked queues would be a great and long-overdue change.
But for my casual games? The games where I want to play Teemo Jungle or AP Lucian Mid because I think they're fun and it's the only thing I think is fun at the time? Riot has now screwed either me or my teammates over by removing Team Builder. I either.. A) Force my team to accept that I'm playing "X champion in B role" whether they like it or not regardless of what my secondary pick is B) Dodge the room and get penalized for wanting to play what I think is fun in a game I play for fun, or.. C) Concede and spend the next 20-50 minutes of my time, possibly the only recreational time I have, doing something I'm neither excited or happy about.
With Team Builder, if I was patient, I could pick whatever I wanted and KNOW my team was okay with me playing it, because THEY HAD TO ACCEPT ME INTO THE TEAM for me to get into it. No matter what I picked, I never hurt anyone's play experience except maybe my lane opponent when I whupped their ass.
Nobody wins in this new system when someone wants to play a specific thing, which is something that Team Builder resolved (even if a bit clunkily), and is something that Riot should have been actively trying to fix since the day the game released and we're just now getting some progress on.
I'm not saying the people who refuse to play their secondary role are any better than the "Mid or feed" crowd. I'm saying it's a failure by Riot's system that those people exist in the first place, and damned if I don't (to a degree) think that crowd is justified, since Team Builder was removed to force people into a game mode that very well may force them to play something they don't want to actually play, even in a "casual queue", in a game that people play for fun.
THAT is a core failure of this new champ select and should've been painfully apparent and remedied long before it went live.
All Riot needs to do is allow a player to select only one role and position (in "Normals" new champ select). Problem solved. When the new queue hits ranked, players should be forced into selecting 2 roles and punished IMMEDIATELY and HEAVILY for non-compliance, but not in a normals queue where people should be allowed to play what they want.
