The Problem with Random Dragons

There have been a lot of posts about the new elemental dragons recently, both from people complaining about and defending the random aspects. However, I have not see anybody explaining exactly why the randomness is bad.

The main problem with random dragons stems from the fact that players during champion select effectively won't know what map they are playing on until they get in game, and that different dragons reward different team comps in different ways. While people have rightfully pointed out that all dragon buffs benefit all teamcomps and that any individual buff both helps a playstyle and playing against that playstyle, what they fail to mention is that some teamcomps want to fight dragons while others don't. Combining this with how buffs have different values to different teams means that teams can gain advantages or be punished purely based on luck.

One example where dragons can arbitrarily disadvantage a team is if an early game focused skirmish comp is facing off a mid game based poke comp. The skirmish comp wants to fight early on and gain advantages with which they can snowball. The poke comp wants to stall until their midgame powerspikes and then take objectives with their poke. The skill in this match up which determines the winner comes from if the poke comp can safely stall until then use their power, or if the skirmish comp will be able to force fights and dives to snowball. In the case of Fire, Earth, or Air Dragons, the game will play out like it would currently be expected to. However, if Water Dragons spawn, then the game will be thrown drastically in favor of the skirmish comp. While its true that both teams would greatly benefit from the Water Dragon, with the poke comp gaining extra mana to poke with, and the skirmish comp getting health to withstand poke, the skirmish comp wants to fight early while the poke comp doesn't. Because of this fact, there is a 25% chance that the skirmish comp will be unfairly advantaged as the poke comp is forced into the lose-lose choice of letting their opponent get a high impact buff or taking a fight they will most likely lose. While its true that if the poke comp wins the fight they will get a large advantage, they don't want to fight an early game skirmish comp in the first place, and thus are punished purely because of luck.

A comparable example would be if in bot lane at the 10 minute mark, there is a 25% chance one adc randomly received a free bf sword, and if they get killed in the next minute the sword is transferred to the killer. In this case, while its true that either side can greatly benefit from having the bf sword, whoever starts out with the sword has the large advantage of forcing their opponent to either fight a bf sword down or concede the loss.

I believe that a fair change would be to make it so dragon spawn order is known from champ select. In this case, a larger variety of team compositions and champion picks will be encouraged, and teams will have to adapt to different buffs being present as riot wanted. But, because teams will now be able to draft in react to the dragons, no team will be screwed over by chance because the random dragon spawn conflicted with their already chosen draft.