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Treating Ranked like a Competetive Sport

Itzon·1/21/2015, 6:38:14 PM·3 votes·1,371 views

We've seen Riot time and time again saying they want League treated like a competitive sport and have made League into a major e-sport event each year.

But then why not implement more sportsmen like/competitive gameplay rules for modes intended for it like ranked?

Here are my suggestions and using football and basketball as an analogy and only apply to Ranked Queues:

Get rid of Surrender. When you watch a NFL or NBA game, even if the score is 32-0 or 98-27, you do not see pros surrendering at half time. Why even give this option? Look at what happened with the Seattle Seahawks during the last game. They were way down, and still came back and won. If you're not giving it your all, why play competitively? Play normals. It encourages poor sportsmanship and treats League games like a number game, this one's done, move onto the next. It causes toxicity. Sports on every level try to avoid surrendering, from JV league in high school to pros. When you surrender, you look bad and your team looks bad and you should be ashamed of it.

Designated Team Leader When you enter a ranked queue, there should be a system in place that designates one person as the shot caller for the team. That person gets to mark the map for objectives that is more prominent than others and stays on the mini map. Wether it's calling for dragon, going back to normal lanes, group mid, defend turrets, etc. It's a bit of a stretch but it helps people work as a team. It kind of breaks down the system because you have to relearn how to work as a team but any sort of sports team has an organic leader such as a Quarterback. You can't have a team and expect teamwork when everyone thinks they're the quarterback. Even in the LCS, you either have a coach or some leader calling the shots. Why is this not encouraged in ranked? It's a team game after all.

Substitutions for AFKs Everyone hates AFKs. Sometimes it's unavoidable. Why not have a queue for stand ins? Say a player DCs for ~3-5 mins. A poll pops up for your team mates: Player XX is ready to take over for Player B. Accept or no. If voted yes, then a new player takes on the already in game picked champion that has been afked. The kicked player will then get a penalty equal to a loss game. The queue would work better if/when Riot initiates a ranked team builder mode where the player can select a role to fill with a prompt that says game is in progress, do you wish to join, warning LP loss/gains will be as if you joined a new game. Sports have player substitutions all the time when players get hurt. Why not ranked? The idea is a risk/reward. The risk is it's harder for you to win going into a game that's already started. The reward is maybe extra LP because you helped a team win.

The ability to turn chat off completely Sometimes, people telling you how bad you're doing is just causing you to tilt and very distracting, have the ability to let us turn chat off completely and just communicate via pings or objective designations coordinated by a team leader.

More to come...

5 Comments

Miku Lv991/21/2015, 6:49:42 PM1 votes

You can just mute everyone to effectively turn off chat completely.

In real sports your opponents may be better than you but they still don't get so fed like in this game to the point where it really does become much more hopeless than most sports can even possibly get. And this game can have AFKs which ruin the game whereas in that football the Seahawks were still using 11 players. Imagine a football game where a bunch of your players AFK and you have 5 men on the field? You want to give up?

Substitutes seem like they could be a good idea but could also be a huge failure. There'd need to be some reward for doing it because almost no one would want to join a game partway through, probably way behind, with an especially far behind champion, without getting to choose your champion, summoner's, runes, masteries, etc., and just overall completely worse than starting your own game in almost every way.

I like the shot caller idea but I kinda with each team could have a 6th player that is the coach or shot caller for the game and doesn't even play. That'd make it more like a real sport.

RogueWill1/21/2015, 7:11:03 PM1 votes

The surrender button exist because people don't want to play a game they think they will lose, they see it as a waste of time. If you remove the surrender button what will happen is players will start to sit on fountain so game will finish faster which will solve nothing.

The team leader would be a good idea if League of legends sportsmanship weren't so bad. Truth is most players believe they are better than what they actually are (ELO Hell and such) and they would refuse to take directions/orders from a "worse" player. In other sport teams, captains works because players trust him/her and his/her judgment. I don't see that happening on league of Legends any time soon.

Who on his/her right mind would sit on queue to play a game that already started, you are most likely behind, you can't pick your champion and you won't even know for how long you will be sitting, will it be 10 min, will it be and hour? I'll rather just start a new game.

Just mute everyone, it takes 2-3 seconds to do it and you can still see pings and objectives taking and such.