My Team Builder thoughts

With the NA Team Builder beta ending, I wanted to leave some feedback. I've been playing this game for 3+ years, 80+% of that normals with a mix of dom/co-op/ranked/aram in descending order

Team Builder is probably the thing I've been the most excited about in League of Legends. If this, some evolution of it for draft/ranked, and replays were released, I almost wouldn't be able to recognize the game.

I loved Team Builder. I loved being able to skip out on all the champ select whining and disappointment of "last pick, you're support." And support is one of my two best roles. I still don't like being forced into it. I loved being able to say, "I want to play Diana" . . . and then doing it without any complaints in lobby or fighting over pick order/call order or just feeling like somebody got the short end of the pick order stick.

Normally I play around 2 games of League of Legends a day. Over the two days of Team Builder, I played 13 games. I can't promise that would stick long term, but I'd play at least twice as much League if it was Team Builder.

I went 9-4 and queued up for every type at least twice (2-2 top, 1-1 jungle, 3-0 mid, 2-0 ADC, 1-1 support if you must know). If I wanted to play mid, I was more willing to accept champions in other roles that I'm not as fond of (say, Shaco jungle) because I knew it could be awhile before I found another group. When I played support, I was a lot choosier, and it felt good to have the power to choose when and whom I support.

I pretty much stuck to meta champions/compositions. I didn't play anything that was too dicey. Nothing against the innovators/hipsters--I lost to a 3-mid/no jungle team, but I was trying to practice for ranked. I never had a queue longer than 10 minutes, which was on the long side, but worth it.

** Observations:**

-I only had 2 games where somebody was bm. Out of an admittedly small sample size, in-game toxicity was considerably lower. A bigger notice was that people seemed a lot friendlier.

-Teambuilder's matchmaking was worse than normal games. I expected that from the beta, but in one game, there was a team where their worst guy was Plat 5, and we had a bunch of golds/silvers/unranked. Yeah, yeah, normal elo. Just something to work on.

-It'd be nice to be able to let the captain change unfilled roles. I played one game where we had a mid Galio. That's great. I love mid Galio--but I had set the jungle to tank. With a tankier mid, it would have been nice to open that up to fighter or assassin jungle.

-The champion icons on team builder is screen are a little screwy. Lux's creeper eyes still give me nightmares.

-Team Builder is awesome, Rito is awesome for making it, and if you happened to forget to turn it off for NA, I don't think many people would mind.

-I'd largely stop playing Normal Draft and Dominion if Team Builder was live. I never play Normal Blind Pick now and I only use Dom to practice mechanics.

-I did notice more DC's in Team Builder. Not sure if that was due to overall stability issues.

Thanks again! Team Builder was a great experience for me.