A suggested improvement to Ranked Teams (5v5s or 3v3s)

When you're watching professional League of Legends, every now and then, you'll see a game where the commentators will be like, "oh wow, team X got outplayed by team Y in the picks and bans. Their chances of winning this game is slim." Or analysts will say that, "the game was over in picks and bans. Team X's composition was stronger at every point in the game." Basically, picks and bans are fairly critical to competitive League of Legends play.

So over the past 3 years or so of playing Ranked 5s, I've noticed that the player pick order is ALWAYS the same. Why is this a problem? Having the same person banning isn't a problem at all. Bans should be pre-planned and a team decision. But what about the first pick? Say the first and second picks don't own the current flavor of the month champions, because a new patch came in that changed the game completely (think when Maokai became OP, when Cinderhulk came out and Sejuani was considered a god, or when Zilean, Alistar, Maokai, Kassadin, and Yasuo were massive picks and bans). Now, in this case you're forced to change your entire pick/ban strategy to compensate for the fact that the first pick can't contest a high priority pick simply because they don't own it.

On top of not being able to contest a high priority meta pick, consider the order in which you want to pick your champions. Given that you have 5 players who will probably main 5 different roles, the champions they own are likely to be vastly different. This means trading champions across the entire team is less likely to work unless everyone's been playing a lot of games over a long time. (I have friends playing devoutly since S1 and even they still don't own every champion, albeit they are only 1 or 2 champions off of owning all of them.) With this, you're forced to pick according for the player whose turn it is to pick. This creates the problem of either transmitting your team comp, leaving yourself open to lane counterpicks, and/or picking up a team comp with little to no synergy as a result of trying to pick safe lanes everywhere.

So, we've identified a problem in the Pick/Ban system of Ranked Teams. Either you dump hundreds of dollars to own every champion (I've done the math, owning every champion is upwards of $600 if I recall properly, it's an absurd amount for a single game at least), or you settle to not playing a pick/ban game (or settle for playing a pick/ban phase according to your pick handicaps).

So how do we solve the problem? I've considered several measures.

1. Allow the players to somehow pick their pick order before the game. This solves a few problems with the least amount of hassle from Riot, but it is also the least consistent solution.

2. During the pick phase, let the team as a whole pick which player can pick. For example, all 5 players can pick from their champion pools at once, and the team (or team captain) will pick which champion(s)/player(s) they will commit to and those champions will stay with whichever player intends to play/owns the champion.

3. Create a highly intelligent draft filter so that players can actually draft the 5 picks, then distribute the champions to players that own them. So what I mean is, say they draft a champion that only one player owns. Then they can't draft any more champions that are only owned by that player. The problem with this, is it seems really complex at a glance to devise and implement (I could be wrong). Another problem is that players might lose track of who owns what during the draft and screw themselves over in the end. It'd be much easier and cleaner to stick with option 2.

4. Allow players to access any champion that anybody on their team owns similar to how you allow players to play free week champions in Ranked Teams even if they don't own them. This is by far the easiest and most consistent fix.

5. Just give players access to every champion in Ranked Teams even if they don't own them. Similar to above, but allows teams to further develop a wider array of strategies.

Now, this sort of built in handicap we have benefits Riot as it is. Why? It encourages players to play more or spend money in order to unlock both flavor of the month champions and the champion pools of their teammates in order to trade during Picks/Bans. If they do, Riot makes money. If they don't, the players suffer a poor Pick/Ban phase.

So how can we convince Riot that this is okay? Well, for one, this is Ranked Teams, not normals. Ranked 3v3 teams are easy to assemble consistently, but Ranked 5v5 teams tend to struggle more to form and maintain. Players you want on your team have tricky time schedules to work around. Basically, my argument is that it will be very difficult for players to abuse the fact that you're giving them access to every champion (or at least more champions) on a consistent basis. Secondly, even if they could, then they would be spending more time playing the game anyway, which is in your favor. Hell, they might even spend MORE time playing the game since they have so many more champions they can play with.

Also, if they were looking to abuse the system and didn't have a 5s team ready to go, they have to go looking for players. This encourages more players to join and create teams, which leads to more playtime and a better understanding of how to play the game as a team (even if slightly), which still benefits Riot. Not only that, the increased understanding of how to play as a team would GREATLY benefit NA solo queue (it is in desperate need of this). And if you argue that NA's understanding of team play in solo queue is good, then why do junglers in Korean solo queue build Sightstone until they hit 6 items while NA junglers just upgrade their yellow trinket at most? Because the Koreans play as a team so they can go more support-oriented builds, and in NA you have to be prepared to hard carry every damn game so you funnel your money into big items.

I mean, if you're sponsored by a big team or are a LCS player, you have every champion unlocked for you even if you only owned the minimum 16 before getting picked up. This is sort of an unfair benefit that you can only have a high level Pick/Ban phase if you are a LCS player, get backed by a pro team that will pay to unlock every champion for you, spent tons of time playing the game since season 1, or spent an insane amount of money on the game just to unlock champions (as opposed to other content such as rune pages, boosts, skin, and icons).

To be honest, this is just wishful thinking on my part. I'll accept any of the four changes I proposed. I don't expect Riot to implement either of the last two changes for the same reason they didn't have party rewards as a permanent system. Yes, the first time it was a test run, but the second time they had a legit thing going, but it lost them money since it allowed people to unlock content that much faster. The only time I can honestly hope for Riot to unlock the champion pools for a team would be after party rewards becomes a permanent fixture in the game. At that point I'd find the game that much more enticing to play since I could get a group of 5 friends to play a very competitive Ranked 5s team going with while getting party bonuses at the same time to make it easier for me to unlock more champions. (Yeah, I'm not a high level player, but I still want to improve at the game in its entirety since you can't do that in solo queue. Samsung White played a near perfect game at Worlds and inspired me to try and pursue an amateur version of that myself.)