Mourning My Ranked Teams -- personal story plus POLL re: "/dev: New001 on competition beyond ranked"

-:- Edit-:- Please feel free to vote in the poll without reading my long sob-story, since it probably only would be interesting to a small set of people! Also cleaned up some formatting and basic spelling mistakes.

==Originally posted as a comment to New001 on the dev-blog about various approaches to competitive ranked. I'm thinking nobody will ever see it over there since it's 3-days past OP and it was a lightly-trafficed thread anyway but I have a strong-feeling about this. ==

I really enjoy ranked-teams games because it's easier to focus on tactics when you're on comms, and my group of friends that I used to play premades with was fairly active for a while before ranked-teams were a thing. Eventually many of them got bored with the static scenarios offered by only having a single primary map(this was before the Treeline update years ago).

Everyone was waiting for a new map that offered ranked(with 10-12 people we were hoping for Magma Chamber!) because that was the hope that most of them had for keeping League fresh! As one might imagine given history, most of them slowly drifted away, and while I'm still in-touch with them because we were all originally offline friends, I don't get to interact with them nearly as much as I once did.

When Treeline was updated I managed to put together fairly regular get-togethers for ranked-3's: 5 of us were left and we could usually get 3 of us together to play premade ranked TT at least 2-3 times a week. This went on for a couple of years until this year.

Dominion got canned, Rioters openly questioned in comments whether Treeline was worth keeping around, and ranked 3's got limited in the time-frames it was available. This meant two of my players basically stopped playing League entirely because of those decisions, combined with having other offline interests available as probably better ways to spend their time. Very rarely(once or twice every two weeks) I can now make a 3's team night happen for maybe one or two games.

I think a huge part of the reason that ranked teams has fallen is because of stagnation when it comes to ranked map-selection. Some of us need diversity of options to keep us interested in the game over years and years of play.

I love playing with the same groups of people, but I don't enjoy trying to make new online friends when I barely have time for the ones I have in my everyday life. I brought several friends into the game over the years and was the main person who organized my friends into playing as teams because I wanted to share the game with people, despite not wanting to make new online-only playmates.

What I am saying is, a big part of the issue overall is that getting your IRL friends together online not only goes unrewarded, but also is not supported for long-term interest in people who want to play more than one game-mode ranked. If this is what Riot wants to encourage, then I think that it needs to rethink some of it's fundamental priorities, because what has been happening for the past 3-4 years simply doesn't keep people interested enough in the game to provide that base level of stability that is needed to maintain coherent teams.

Gonna cross-post this on the boards so maybe someone may actually see it.