Does Team Builder Work?

When Team Builder was first announced, I was excited by the idea of being able to choose my lane without any fights. No longer would people instalock, either because they just got a new champion or a new skin, and no longer would people fight because they didn't understand how lag works. However, I feel like Team Builder got a number of important things wrong, which, all together, have me choosing blind pick instead.

1. Locking in the Champion Because we must choose our champion prior to seeing what everyone else is playing, we can no longer adjust. As someone who mains support, I like to know who my ADC is before I pick my champion. If my team is squishy, I might what to pick a tank. If we have an AD mid, I might want to pick an AP champion. Because of such restrictions, I usually have to leave it up to luck that my champion will synergize with others.

2. No Option to Change Lanes What I mean, is that if I wanted to go mid, but it has taken over 10 minutes to find someone going support, I really wouldn't mind going support instead. I usually fill in whatever roll is left in blind pick, and if no one wants to go jungle, I go jungle, and if no one wants to be a tank, I'll be the tank. Sure, my first preference may be mid or ADC or whatever, but I would be more than happy to go another lane if we cant find, say, a jungler or a support.

3. No Breaking the Meta Most of the time, I stick to a meta build, as do my friends. But occasionally, I might want to play around. Occasionally, I might want to try something weird like Nidalee jungle or Heimerdinger support (which, surprisingly, actually worked really well for a little while). If players can't play around with the meta, then the meta itself won't ever change, which some people may like, but we never know when a different team composition may be more optimal. There was a time before our current meta when people did play around a lot with team compositions, and me being one of those earlier players, I can say that I had a lot of fun doing so.

4. Dividing Up the Player-base I'm aware that League of Legends is the most popular PC game at the moment, but players are already divided up by many servers which they must remain on unless they pay a ridiculous amount of money. If I want to play DotA 2 with my friends in Germany, I can quickly switch servers and play with them. If I want to play LoL with my friends in Germany (which we all enjoy more), I must pay with money that I must already spend on champions. Adding in another queue for Normals on Summoner's Rift just divides the amount of players even further. I would much rather a Dominion or 3v3 queue than another queue for Summoner's Rift.

With the most recent announcement of a ranked queue for Team Builder, Riot has also added that it will allow for a "fill" role, much to my delight. However, this still involves the problem of, "yeah, I would prefer to go top, but if no one wants to be ADC I'll be happy to do it." If Riot is introducing a "fill" role, it might be best that they allow for a preference to be placed first, maybe let us order where we would like to go for a "fill" role, and possibly just even have the option to say that we would like to go anywhere with no preference. However, I have a different solution that may just solve the above problems entirely.

Bring Back Draft Mode I don't know why the OCE staff thought that replacing Draft Mode with Team Builder was a good idea. I was more than happy with draft mode. I go in. I call my preferred lane. If someone higher up in the pick order calls the same lane, they get it and I have to choose a different lane. I still think that we could improve Draft Mode, however. Possibly, we could have a hybrid. Introduce some elements from Team Builder that would work well in Draft Mode. In my opinion, these are:

• Picking Our Roles This is fundamentally the main aspect of Team Builder, but I think that this works best for Draft Mode. After choosing the Normals Draft Mode queue, the player will have three options to choose from, which are, "Choose Your Lane, Choose Your Preferred Lanes (any number of lanes from 2 to 5), or Any Lane." That would be it. No prior commitment to any champions, not team captain to decide who gets to join in, we just pick from those three options, choosing which lane/s we want to be in, and then we get match made into a Draft Mode, with the pick order, the banning, being able to see our opponent's champions and everything else good about Draft Mode.

• Replay Button What I mean, is that after the game, you could have the option to stay within a party consisting of your current teammates, and then just go back back into matchmaking, have the option to change your lane or to invite some friends to fill up the possibly empty spots. This would be similar to other games that already do something similar, for example, Halo 3. After each game, everyone is given the option to stay together. Out of those people, a random party leader is chosen, and he or she may choose to boot players, invite players, go back into matchmaking, go into custom games, go into campaign or select someone else to be the party leader. Personally, I think that this should be implemented across all game types in League of Legends. Like your teammates in Normals Blind Pick? Stay with them and the go play ARAM, or player Normals again or go into Draft Mode or whatever. Many of my friends on XBox Live were people I met through matchmaking who I decided to stay and play more games with. I would love to see this implemented into League of Legends.

If anyone else has any ideas for how to improve or replace Team Builder, reply to this post with your suggestion/s. I just don't see Team Builder becoming a healthy queue for Normals, let alone a ranked queue. Personally, I want to get rid of Team Builder, and replace with a slightly improved version of Draft Mode. But what does everyone else think?