Upgrading The Original Queue
From a personal experience and reading many other individual stories about the lobby and queueing up, it seems to me that some people are pleading for some type of upgrade in the direction of a user's experience. When people play league of legends whether it being their first time or their last in PVP, they are most likely to have a terrible experience with a bunch of random strangers- whom of which are often toxic. While prone to this misconception, I do not believe that as a community we can't make this better, of course we can. People can always be better at being human. But no matter how much we grow as a community, there are a few things that I would identify as "getting in the way" or "being problematic". These things seem small, but they really are the hidden experience to what makes up the majority of awful things. The first problem I'd like to point out is Queueing up alone and being paired with a bunch of question marks. As much as I like the idea of lobbying in and queuing up alone, it sets up a rather dark side to communication within champion select.
After finding your match up the usual, 20 seconds to declare your champion, 25 seconds to ban a champion, 30 seconds for every individual player to lock in and 30 seconds to declare your skins, rune page, summoner spells starts a game if no one dodges within that time period. While of course, everyone knows how it works by now, good communication is still rare. The sad part about this is, "exactly who would want to communicate in the first place?" Right? Well given that you have only 11.25 minuets in its longest form, it isn't hard to see why you don't exactly have the chance to communicate upon individual things. To explain properly, you can't quite ask for someone not to ban your champion with good reason even if you are hovering the very player you would like to play. You can't converse as to why someone needs to or wants to ban that champion or speak of how your teammate would make sure to take care of the problem that they are causing for you within the game. The conversation just can't quite take place under the 25 seconds. While yes, it is desired to understand and skillfully play more than 1 champion of the desired field and or lane- it still leaves a bad taste in someone's mouth knowing that they lost or are having a seriously hard time simply because your teammate chose not to help you in any form just so they could get their way.
Nonetheless, I have an answer. Straight from the get go, we typically have the intention of playing a specific champion and banning one that would either counter ours or is in the meta shift during our stay within the lobby. As such, we can choose our primary and our secondary lane, but that is where the usual pairing system starts to change. As we ready check ourselves into a queue, it would be nice to find random people to join the lobby (not from your friends list) so you can communicate, plan with the same intention, and well... use league chat more often rather than a premade of a couple people that you constantly play with. Once the lobby is full and declared their intention with everyone, they could ready sign individually before the queue can officially start. This way in mind, everyone can have a brighter gaming experience and games an be queued even faster than ever before without people the constant dodging for pre-match made games, so people don't ban your champion and so your team can overall strategize their game. Yes, I know this all sounds a bit dubious, but in the long run- blind picks and random pairing would be a thing of the past.
I know this sounds like a large task for Riot to tackle, but like all great tasks, they're hard to take care of. Anyways, this is just an idea as to how to fix the problem presented to us and I was curious as to what you think. Have a good day! :D [slayer-pantheon-thumbs]
