Riot let slip Team Builder mode last week. Players are now able to choose a role, champion and position pre-game, and the extra time in team composition has already helped uncover the “inherent” good in League of Legends players.
But there’s a problem. A plethora of would-be captains are floating about in the ether, looking in vain for subordinates to order about. As such, Riot have implemented an “experiment” to see if they can reduce the number of single captains in your area.
Players will now need to invite at least one friend to their group via Team Builder to become a Captain.
“Although about 95% of players are having queue times of 5-10 minutes or less (even doing unorthodox or creative comps!), this means that 5% of players are having unacceptable queue times,” wrote Jeffrey Lin, Riot’s lead designer of social systems.
“Right now, we’re seeing way too many Captains–there are already too many trying to find other players to run a non-meta team comp.”
Riot expect the new rule will “greatly improve” the captain-to-solo ratio, and consequently reduce queue times overall in Team Builder.
The worst affected summoners have been those with particularly high or low MMR – i.e. especially experienced or inexperienced players – or those who play during off-peak hours.
“If it doesn’t work it’s a simple switch off and we’ll try something else,” said Lin. “We want to see how this affects queue times and match quality. If this is positive across the board, then we’ll keep this flow. If we see some huge red flags, we’ll go back to the drawing board.
“We expect that the average queue times will go down for every Captain and Solo, so this isn’t just to help the 5%.”
How’ve you lot adapted to a newly Team Builder-enabled LoL so far? Has behaviour and teamwork improved on your end?
Thanks, Reign of Gaming.