What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
Riot released a blog post a while back where they were announcing that Season 7 would be
kicking off a month earlier than expected - but they also gave two interesting bits
of information.
Firstly, that they were testing the ability to exclude one role when queuing into ranked,
so you could choose fill with the exception of one role, like support for example.
The second thing they mentioned was the plan to retire Normal Draft mode, which is quite
an interesting topic that we wanted to talk about.
Anyway if you enjoy the video definitely hit that like button because if this video hits,
let’s say ratings, then I’m gonna , and let’s get started.
The initial post from Riot Socrates stated that Normal Draft was going to be retired
during preseason for all regions with the exception of North America, Europe West and
Brazil.
The idea here is that matchmaking is still causing problems, and splitting up players
into so many modes is distributing player numbers too much.
By removing Normal Draft in regions where it had low participation, Riot are hoping
that queues will be healthier in general.
They actually went as far as to say that they would ideally like to disable Normal Draft
in every region, including NA, EUW and Brazil, so they clearly aren’t happy right now with
it taking players away from Flex queue, which has had it’s own share of issues since release.
The removal of normal draft was made because the participation in that queue on the affected
servers was really low, and since they were releasing the new version of dynamic queue,
Flex, they wanted to take away the normal draft since then those players that enjoy
that format will just go play Ranked flex instead.
In turn, that should mean instead of a ton of low quality queues, you’d have one good
quality queue where you wouldn’t have a problem finding well matched games.
This is a server by server solution though, so it’s not set in stone that every server
with have the same queue system - whatever best suits the player base for each server
will decide what kind of queues are available.
Players were pretty surprised to hear that Riot wanted to take normal draft away from
the bigger servers too, since the population across every game mode is fine for those servers
as it is right now so really it would just be like taking the ‘ranked practice’ game
mode away, which would probably have not been well received by most people.
Riot Draggles followed up on the post to clarify that Riot had no plans to disable normal draft
on the more highly populated servers, but he did mention that they would like to take
what they call ‘the best aspects’ of both normal draft and blind pick and merge them
into a single queue.
Riot Ghostcrawler said this new normal queue would probably include the new position selection
from ranked too, so essentially you’d get the best of all the different modes.
That probably means the new normal mode would let you pick a role or fill, and then once
you were in game you’d blind pick your heroes and probably get bans like you would in normal
draft.
Although that does sound like it could be a fair compromise for low population servers,
the reasoning that those regions don’t play normal draft is kinda interesting.
We don’t have the statistics so we can’t say for sure, but it’s generally accepted
that normal draft is a great ranked substitute that you can play without worrying about rank
or with different ranked premades that you couldn’t play flex with, so it’s hard
to say removing it would have a direct effect on queue times.
Queue times in general and probably only really held back by the lack of support players,
but Riot is addressing that issue too at least.
Overall, it just seems Normal Draft itself is a really valuable game mode to have, it’s
awesome for practicing new champions, getting warmed up for ranked games or even just a
way to keep playing in a similar queue while you’ve got ladder anxiety, maybe after a
loss streak.
It’s also worth asking the question of whether it’s actually okay to treat regions differently
due to player base differences.
We’ve seen Riot going this direction in terms of the LCS, where NA is competing with
the Best of 3 format while EU only has Best of 2, meaning some games will be drawn.
Overall that basically means that NA are getting way more practice at a pro level outside of
scrims.
This is an advantage that the Koreans have had going into International tournaments for
a long time, so it’s surprising that Riot would keep using a system like that since
it definitely favors teams that get to play more games.
The same isn’t necessarily true for normal draft, people in different regions likely
aren’t going to be ‘better’ because they can still play it, but it’s pretty
interesting that Riot are taking down normal draft in some regions because the player base
isn’t big enough - when at the same time they are always reassuring the League community
that the playerbase is still growing.
I mean, we’re in Season 7 now, and League has apparently been growing non-stop.
If that’s the case, why would Riot need to start removing queues in order to keep
times down?
You’d think with a massive playerbase like League of Legends, they would easily be able
to support having a few different options like normal draft, blind pick, flex and solo
queue, without having to remove any of them.
It seems like some people could end up getting kinda frustrated that they can’t play the
game the same way in each region, since region-hopping to play with friends isn’t that rare of
an occurrence, but as long as game mode changes are only limited to the unranked queues, it’s
probably not that big of a deal.
We’re not sure what normal draft was even like in those regions, so maybe you guys who
play on the smaller servers could chime in, but for the most part it seemed rare that
you’d be waiting more than 5 minutes for a normal draft game, so as a queue that provided
generally higher quality games than blind queue, it’s kind unexpected to see Riot
removing it.
If you ask most normal draft players about wait times, they are probably not going to
complain about waiting 10 minutes if it guarantees that they aren’t going to have to play an
unbalanced or poor quality game in general for
the next 45 minutes.
If the queue times were over 10 minutes on the servers like EUNE, then it’s definitely
not unreasonable to remove it, but forcing players into blind queue definitely has it’s
drawbacks too.
Blind Pick has a larger population across all servers when compared to normal draft,
because it encapsulates what players enjoy about casual league.
It’s fast to start, and it’s less serious thanks to the lack of bans and the ability
to have mirror matchups.
It does have a lot of drawbacks that you don’t really encounter as much with normal draft
though, such as instalockers, role calling and the lack of a way to deal with really
OP picks that are currently breaking the metagame.
In a normal draft, you get a ton of control over your team composition and you can counterpick
to give yourself a fighting chance before the game begins, but if you’re in blind
pick and against an enemy comp that you have no way to plan for, you could end up standing
no chance, and that’s literally just a coin flip deciding whether you’re going to enjoy
your next 40 minutes of League or not.
This is something that Riot is probably really aware of, the amount of toxicity that comes
out of the blind pick queue is insane, and since it’s the first impression of League
that new players get, it’s surprising they wouldn’t want to put more of a focus on
to teaching people about picks and bans and the ranked experience in general with normal
draft, rather than just letting them loose in blind pick and hoping they stick around.
All in all, you’re way more likely to have a crappy experience in a blind pick game than
you would in normal draft, so as a company that wants people playing ranked,
it’s surprising that they would remove the higher quality mode.
At the end of the day, Riot needs to appeal to it’s player base though, and most players
simply play blind pick over normal.
A new normal game mode might actually not be such a bad idea if it combines the best
things from these modes though - you go blind pick because you want fast games, you go normal
draft because you want higher quality games.
Combine those things to give slightly faster and better quality games in general, while
also including the role selector like you’d get in ranked or from the old Teambuilder,
and you might just end up with a single unranked game mode for Summoner’s Rift that is a
ton of fun.
That being said, any trolls that lurk in one of the queues be forced into one place, so
you can count on players finding a way to ruin the fun.
The likely result of this probably isn’t that the players on servers without normal
draft will start playing blind instead, instead it will probably mean a bunch of them will
go play Flex queue instead to get a similar experience.
Some players really don’t like the competitive nature of ranked, because of ladder anxiety
or bad experiences with players that really hate to lose though, so disabling normal draft
might actually end up making some players quit League entirely.
Different people find different things they like about a game like League, and both the
blind pick and ranked queues have issues that don’t appeal
to
a lot
of more casual players.
Anyway that just about wraps up everything we know about Riot’s decision to disable
normal draft - it’s still limited to the smaller servers for now, but it’s probably
only a matter of time until they are going to start moving towards their ultimate goal
of one unified unranked 5v5 game queue.
And it looks like that’s gonna be it from me, if you enjoyed the video drop a like,
subscribe if you want, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys next time!